ZIONISM AND ANTI-SEMITISM
SIR,—The Spectator should be congratulated for Ian Gilmour's sober analysis of Zionist policy, and one could also fully endorse Erskine Childers's article of July 22, but both articles omit what Zionist policy has done to those whom it pretends to have saved.
Mr. Ben-Gurion's remark as quoted in the Kimche book, 'that a good deal of the intellectual luggage and traditions of World Jewry should be lost,' rings not unlike Marshal Goering's 'when I hear the word culture I reach for my gun.' Zionist ideology is indeed not a practical application of the ethical teachings of the early Hebrew prophets,' whose universal humanitarian ideas stirred great democratic movements, but rather a Jewish version of the reactionary German school of thinking of the nine- teenth century, with all the retrogressive elements, which found its culmination in Nazism in our own time: Zioni'sm as the by-product of Nazism developed an ideology complementary to, never opposed to, Nazism.
When Mr. Kimche pleads that 'Hitler's barbarism gave . Zionism a moral argument,' he is wrong.
Zionism never liberated the Jews. The Jews, exactly like all other victims of Nazi tyranny, were liberated through the combined military effort of the demo- cratic forces of the world. and both in the We'st and the East they enjoy a better life than in Israel. I judge societies by the opportunities they give to the individual to develop his innate intellectual abilities, and by the extent to which these abilities are used for the benefit of mankind. In the present set-up in Israel the teaching profession receives far less prestige and financial support than the military, and like German youth under th:: Nazis, Israeli youth gets more chauvinist indoctrination than universal educa- tion.
Israeli leaders may quote 'inter arma silent muses,'
and that the small island in the hostile Arab sea must be ready to 'defend' itself twenty-four hours a day year in year out. To what extent the hostility of her neighbours is the result of her Realpolitik against the Arabs is never mentioned in the glamor- ous propaganda brochures handed out at 'fund- raising dinners' over hers.
Resistance to the military and chauvinist outrages
is unfortunately weak but not, as Mr. Erskine Childers says, entirely absent. Amongst many lesser known, two Israeli writers, Nathan Altman and Shabtai Tevet, have given strong expression to their abhorrence of the discriminatory and terroristic policy against the Arab population. Such efforts never remained unrecognised 1,3 the Arabs, and even my own feeble contributions have brought me letters from all parts of the Arab world emphasising again and again that they want peace, and that they. true to the tradition of their great past, do not profess indiscriminate hatred for all Jews.—Yours faithfully,
Flat 8, 29 A bercorn Place. NW8
GERTRUDE ELIAS
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