Al-Jazeera takes down Israel-critical article by Joseph Massad

Al Jazeera-English has taken the unusual step of taking an article from its site shortly after its appearance. In it Joseph Massad describes the parallels between zionism and anti-semitism and the cooperation that (occasionally?) took place bewteen zionists and nazis. The article surely was controversial and - as so often when something critical is said about zionism or Israel - it was called ´antisemitic´ and worse by the pro-Israeli ´hasbara-claque´. Luckily it was copied and pasted by the site Jews Without Frontiers, from which is took the following paragraphs. Massad, who often ruffles feathers here and there, teaches Modern Arab Politics and Intellectual History at Columbia University in New York.

Joseph Massad

 

 

The last of the Semites

Jewish opponents of Zionism understood the movement since its early age as one that shared the precepts of anti-Semitism in its diagnosis of what gentile Europeans called the "Jewish Question". What galled anti-Zionist Jews the most, however, was that Zionism also shared the "solution" to the Jewish Question that anti-Semites had always advocated, namely the expulsion of Jews from Europe.

It was the Protestant Reformation with its revival of the Hebrew Bible that would link the modern Jews of Europe to the ancient Hebrews of Palestine, a link that the philologists of the 18th century would solidify through their discovery of the family of "Semitic" languages, including Hebrew and Arabic. Whereas Millenarian Protestants insisted that contemporary Jews, as descendants of the ancient Hebrews, must leave Europe to Palestine to expedite the second coming of Christ, philological discoveries led to the labelling of contemporary Jews as "Semites". The leap that the biological sciences of race and heredity would make in the 19th century of considering contemporary European Jews racial descendants of the ancient Hebrews would, as a result, not be a giant one. 

Basing themselves on the connections made by anti-Jewish Protestant Millenarians, secular European figures saw the political potential of "restoring" Jews to Palestine abounded in the 19th century. Less interested in expediting the second coming of Christ as were the Millenarians, these secular politicians, from Napoleon Bonaparte to British foreign secretary Lord Palmerston (1785-1865) to Ernest Laharanne, the private secretary of Napoleon III in the 1860s, sought to expel the Jews of Europe to Palestine in order to set them up as agents of European imperialism in Asia. Their call would be espoused by many "anti-Semites", a new label chosen by European anti-Jewish racists after its invention in 1879 by a minor Viennese journalist by the name of Wilhelm Marr, who issued a political programme titled The Victory of Judaism over Germanism. Marr was careful to decouple anti-Semitism from the history of Christian hatred of Jews on the basis of religion, emphasising, in line with Semitic philology and racial theories of the 19th century, that the distinction to be made between Jews and Aryans was strictly racial.

The whole article can be found here.


Al-Jazeera rectified its decision after lots of criticism, anmong them Glenn Greenwald in The Guardian. His artcile is interestingan can be found here.   
Massad's article, now republished by Al-Jazeera accopmpanied by an editorial nota, can be found here.