Activist: Zionists Antisemitic Because Israel Didn’t Bomb Auschwitz

Anachronistic framing by anti-Zionists and other antisemites has a venerable history.

New York, September 22 – The leader of a pro-Palestinian group at the City University of New York leveled a new charge at the people he accuses of oppressing and dispossessing Palestinians, arguing that those people cannot, as they claim, serve as an answer to the Holocaust, because during the Holocaust itself they neglected or refused to send aircraft it they would not possess for years to destroy the extermination camps in Poland, or even the railroad tracks leading to those camps.

Watda Fuq, a junior at the City College of New York, challenged Zionists to explain their movement as pursuing Jewish rights and protection, when that same movement sent exactly zero long-range bombers to disrupt the mass murder taking place at Auschwitz-Birkenau, Treblinka, Majdanek, Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibor, or any of the other sites where Nazis and their local collaborators gassed, starved, shot, asphyxiated, crushed, burned, hanged, or otherwise tortured, maimed and killed six million Jews between 1939 and 1945. Israel achieved statehood and established an air force in 1948; the death camps of Poland and the killing sites elsewhere in Eastern Europe still lie beyond the strike range of the IAF today.

“It’s not just that the Zionists pursued an alliance with the Nazis,” he charged, mischaracterizing a desperate attempt by the Jewish Agency to negotiate with the Third Reich for the rescue of thousands of Jews. “It’s that their other actions belie their contention that the movement cares for Jews, as opposed to seizing control over Palestine and displacing its native population.” Fuq’s latter statement evinced a second willful mischaracterization, in that the “dispossession” occurred entirely in the context of Arab opposition to Jewish property ownership and self-governance in the ancestral Jewish homeland, though the Zionists-as-imperialists trope has exhibited considerable staying power in antisemitic circles.

Anachronistic framing by anti-Zionists and other antisemites has a venerable history, explained Stacy Facepalm, Professor of Jewish History at the University of Pennsylvania. “The very use of the term ‘Palestine’ serves as a perfect example,” she observed. “Arabs seldom, if ever, referred to the land by that name; it was foreign. Before 1948, ‘Palestinian’ without the word ‘Arab’ after it meant ‘Jew.’ Somehow, today’s Palestinians and their allies seem to be under the impression that ‘the Palestinian people’ was a thing until the 1960’s, at the earliest, and that some Palestinian Arab political entity was undone by Zionism.”

Fuq has also accused Zionists of refusing to fight Nazis in general, dismissing Palestinian Jewish soldiers in the British forces that defeated Rommel in North Africa as “warwashing.”

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