Eli Valley’s Cartoon Highlights How Today’s Christian Fascists, neo-Nazis
and Zionists have no sense of irony

The insult ‘kapo’ was first popularised
by Trump’s Ambassador to Israel, David Friedman. In fact he used it, not
against Jewish anti-Zionists but against the liberal American Zionist group, J-Street.

Yesterday I was sent a brilliant cartoon from Jewish Currents, a paper of the
American Jewish left in which he satirises those who shout ‘kapo’ whilst
separating children from their parents in Trump’s concentration camps on the border.  Referring to those Jews who serve Trump
faithfully, like arch-Zionist Sheldon Adelson and Stephen Miller, he observed
that “kapo” doesn’t begin to plumb the
depths of their betrayal.’

Zionists, like most racists, don’t do
irony because if they did they would suffer the self-destruction of their own identity
as they began to appreciate that if anyone approximates to collaborators, which
is the essence of the charge, it is they.

I don’t mean by that just the trade
agreement between Nazi Germany and the Zionist movement in 1933, Ha’avara, which
broke the International Jewish Boycott of Nazi Germany.

Nor do I mean the betrayal of half a
million Hungarian Jews in 1944 by  the
representative of Hungarian Zionism Rudolph Kasztner,
whereby the Auschwitz
Protocols, which revealed the existence and purpose of Auschwitz, were
deliberately suppressed in order to preserve an agreement between the Zionist leaders
and Eichmann.

After all Zionist collaboration with anti-Semitism
was explained by the founder of political Zionism, Theodor Herzl when, at the
height of the Dreyfus Affair he confided to his Diaries that:

In Paris… I achieved a freer attitude towards
anti-Semitism, which I now began to understand historically and to pardon.
Above all, I recognise the emptiness and futility of trying to ‘combat’
anti-Semitism.

Zionism ‘pardoned’ anti-Semitism because
it agreed that Jews don’t belong in non-Jewish society.  Zionism believes that Jews, all Jews, should emigrate
to Israel, their ‘real home’. In the wake of the Pittsburgh massacre, Avi
Gabbay, leader of the Israeli Labour Party told
the Jews of America that their place was in Israel, which is what their
murderer Robert Burstow also believed.

Back in 1933, as Jews prepared to
campaign against the newly installed Nazi government Berl Katznelson, Ben
Gurion’s deputy, founder of Mapai and editor of Davar, saw the rise of Hitler
as “an opportunity to build and flourish
like none we have ever had or ever will have”. [Zionism and Nazi Germany,
Francis Nicosia, p.91]

Zionism opposed ‘refugeeism’ the
saving of Jews for its own sake. Their ‘logic’ was that there was no point in Jews
going to any country other than Palestine because that would merely stimulate
fresh anti-Semitism. Hence why Ben Gurion and the Jewish Agency opposed the
Kindertransport which saved 10,000 Jewish children in the wake of Kristalnacht:  Ben Gurion told Mapai that

If I knew that it would be possible to save all the
children in Germany by bringing them over to England, and only half of them by
transporting them to Eretz Yisrael, then I would opt for the second
alternative. For we must weigh not only the life of these children, but also
the history of the People of Israel. [Shabtai
Teveth, the Burning Ground, p.855]

I mentioned irony.  What could be more ironic than those who belong
to a movement that collaborated with Nazis and anti-Semites calling their
opponents collaborators?

The kapos were themselves prisoners who
were destined for extermination. They had no control over their situation and
their collaboration, if that is what it was, was forced. Who knows what any of
us would do in such a situation? The Jewish Agency was under no such compulsion
yet it willingly collaborated lobbying the Gestapo not to allow Jewish emigration
to countries other than Palestine.

Being called a kapo by Zionists reminds
me of Britain First holding a demonstration
outside Didsbury mosque and chanting ‘racist
scum off our streets.’ Today we have the spectacle of racists calling their
opponents collaborators with racism. Of course it makes no sense when the
racists portray themselves as anti-racists however the National Front and BNP
used to try and portray themselves as defending Whites against Black racism.

One of the ironies of the
Zionist use of ‘kapos’ is that it is a frequent occurrence for Zionists
to desire that their Jewish
opponents had perished in the Holocaust. Aurora Levins Morales, a Black Jewish
woman in New York, speaks of ‘The Jews who write to tell me that I
should have died in a Nazi concentration camp before living to denounce the
crimes of Israel.’ [On Anti-semitism, JVP, p.107, Haymarket Books,
2017]

I mention this because a particularly
vile Christian Zionist, James Dyer, who is part of the EDL loving Sussex Friends
of Israel, which is attempting
to disrupt Brighton PSC stall, accused me of being a kap. My retort was
that if I was a kapo be must be a Nazi! I suspect he didn’t understand why.

Dyer is part of the fundamentalist Christian
support for Zionism which is based on the ‘End Times’,
which is the belief that Christians will be summoned to Heaven by Christ at the
Rapture. This
occurs before a “Great Tribulation” prophesied in Matthew 24–25; Mark
13 and Luke 21. The Tribulation is described in the book of Revelation.  

As part of this scenario those Jews who
don’t convert to Christianity will be die at the battle of Armageddon as part of the
second coming. The most famous advocate of this is President of Christians
United for Israel, John Hagee, who also believes
that Hitler was an agent of God sent to drive the Jews to Israel! This led John
McCain when standing against Obama to turn down Hagee’s sponsorship.
Hagee was nonetheless one of two 
Protestant Pastors invited
to preside over the  opening of the
American embassy in Jerusalem.  Who
better to have than someone who believes that Hitler did god’s work.

Indeed they were more than ironic
given the history of Christian anti-Semitism. In Germany itself the German
Evangelical Church installed in 1933 the pro-Nazi Bishop Ludwig Muller as
Reich Bishop. In Slovakia it was the Catholic priest Father Tiso who presided
over the first deportations to Auschwitz.

It is therefore no surprise that
today the successors of Muller and Tiso are to be found supporting the Zionists
and decrying any notion of Palestinian rights. It is even less of a surprise
that they assuage their consciences with the taunt of ‘Kapo’.