Last December 5, the United States House of Representatives, in another spectacularly successful attempt to prove to everyone that it doesn’t know anything about anything which it openly debates, passed a nonbinding resolution that equates anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism. The vote was 311 in favor, 14 against, and 92 members voting “present.” In its practical effect, if one criticizes the present ongoing genocide being perpetrated by Israel against its Palestinian population, one is anti-Semitic. Though ancestrally the term “Semite” encompassed both Arabs and Jews (among others) living in the Middle East, it has come now to refer specifically to only the Jewish people.

Where does one begin when attacking such utter nonsense? Legislators who passed this resolution neglected a few pertinent facts so as to be able to turn history on its head. One is that the early Zionists in the beginning decades of the 20th century “partnered with a rabidly anti-Semitic British ruling class to secure funding for their colonial project in Palestine.” (Sarah Levy).

More to the point, in literature that has been somehow erased from even Internet sites, the leading Zionists of the 1930s teamed up with Germany’s Nazis for the first five of Adolf Hitler’s Thousand-year Reich (which eventually fell short of its moniker by 987 years and nine months). Yes, it was well documented back then that Zionism and Nazism had a fairly comfortable working relationship, since they shared the major common goal of getting European Jews to emigrate. The Zionists wanted Jews to move to Palestine. The Nazis didn’t care where, as long as they were expelled from Germany and Europe. Places as disparate as Canada and Madagascar were discussed in Nazi circles to rid themselves of its Jewish population.

Today, MICMAC media has led people to believe that Jews were historically united in the Palestine project. Nothing could be further from the truth. Karl Kraus, an Austrian Jew who three times (1926, 1928, 1930) was a Nobel Prize nominee for literature, in fact stated that anti-Semitism was “the essence” of the Zionist movement.

The Nazis and Zionists shared another strong bond — anti assimilationism. Anyone who has read even a little Nazi history knows of Hitler’s master race theory and that pure-blooded “Aryans” were superior to inferior Jews, Poles, other Slavs and Blacks. What is much less well known is that Zionists felt the same way about themselves vis-à-vis non-Jews (and even non-Zionist Jews).

Today, MICMAC media has led people to believe that Jews were historically united in the Palestine project. Nothing could be further from the truth. Karl Kraus, an Austrian Jew who three times (1926, 1928, 1930) was a Nobel Prize nominee for literature, in fact stated that anti-Semitism was “the essence” of the Zionist movement.

Kraus would be a member of what the Bibi Netanyahu crowd calls the “self-hating Jew.” This list of individuals, because they courageously seek truth wherever it leads them, includes such contemporary luminaries as Norman Finklestein, Jeffrey Sachs and Naomi Klein, all of whom are critics of Israel. Historically, figures like Hannah Arrendt, Rabbi Jessurun Cardozo and Albert Einstein, who each, along with 24 other leading Jewish intellectuals in a December 1948 letter to the New York Times (months after Israel’s creation), warned Americans that Israel’s state project was merely the “latest manifestation of fascism.” Despite this letter, Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben Gurian, offered Einstein the Israeli presidency in 1952 (upon the death of its first president, Chaim Weismann). Einstein said he was “at once saddened and ashamed” to decline the offer. (Note: Albert Einstein was, for still subscribing readers of the Detroit News, a German born scientist who, in a 1999 poll of 130 leading worldwide physicists, was voted the greatest physicist of all time.)

The well-known American rabbi Harry Waton wrote in his book A Program for the Jews (published March 28, 1939 — a mere 13 days after the Nazis began to occupy Czechoslovakia), “Nazism is an imitation of Judaism, Nazism adopted the principles and ideas of Judaism with which to destroy Judaism and the Jews.” Thus, Rene Girard’s mimetic theory was demonstrated in its most terrible and tragic fruition.

“Hitler’s declaration that the Jewish consciousness is poison to the Aryan races is the deepest insight that the western world has yet achieved in its own nature; his capacity to realize this is the proof of his genius as well as the secret of his power and of the curious fascination which his personality exerts,” Waton added. “It is not the practical power or wealth of the Jews that he fears, but the character of the Jewish mind. It is the hidden penetration of the Jewish spirit into the Gentile mind that is the danger, and it is a danger because the Aryan mind cannot resist it, but must succumb.” Mimetic theory states that mimetic desire is at the origin of culture and leads to mimetic rivalry and then to what Girard termed the scapegoat mechanism.

As previously noted, Hitler’s Nazis and Ben Gurian’s Jewish Agency cooperated quite well for a spell, even after the infamous Kristallnacht pogrom against Jews throughout Germany in November 1938. If one supposes Ben Gurian an outlier, consider Yitzhak Shamir, leading member of the Stern gang, who in January 1941 (16 months after Germany began World War II) stated “the evacuation of the Jewish masses from Europe is a precondition for solving the Jewish question”, and he offered to “actively take part in the war on Germany’s side.” He didn’t have much chance; the British authorities in Palestine arrested him for “terrorism and collaboration with the Nazi enemy.” Shamir, in the 1980s and early 1990s, would go on to become Israel’s seventh prime minister.

– Mark J. Plawecki is chief judge of the 20th District Court in Dearborn Heights. His book Notes from the Outside the Truman Show explains in greater detail the sacrificial crisis now tearing apart American democracy.