I grew up with a deep love for Israel, the redemptive, out-of the-ashes, kibbutz-loving, feisty little country that could do no wrong, fighting for its life in a sea of hateful Arabs and Jew-haters. I learned that Jews were a people dedicated to worship and the study of Torah and this identity kept us alive during the centuries of antisemitism in Europe. If I was not able to dedicate myself to the religiosity of my davening grandfather, tfillin and all, I understood that as a people, we were deeply committed to healing the world and working for social justice, an equally virtuous and inherently Jewish task. After all, we were naturally good, or as my mother explained, Jews bore the responsibility of being chosen for a uniquely positive role in this world.
As the decades passed, this mythology shattered against the hard rocks of reality. One of the most difficult contradictions I now face is understanding the perverse relationship between Zionism and antisemitism. I was sold the story that political Zionism developed as a response to antisemitism and as a modern, liberating movement in the backward Middle East. But in 1897 as modern Zionism was born, it adopted the trope of the diaspora Jew as a pale, flaccid, yeshiva bocher, a parasite, an eternal alien, a nebbish. That Zionism embraced the idea that this pathetic weakling (who was often to be blamed for antisemitism) needed to be Aryanized into the bronzed, muscular Hebrew farmer/warrior tilling the soil in the Galilee is a chilling realization. The evolution of Jews as a people who lived by Torah and its commandments into a biological race with distinct characteristics, (the money Jew, the ghetto Jew, the swarthy, hook-nosed Jew) mirrors the worst canards of antisemites, European fascists, and white supremacists.
This story is complicated by the relegation of European Jewish communities to limited and disreputable professions and the societal resentment towards the “parasitic,” “non-productive” money lenders and peddler/merchant class. As modern capitalism developed, even socialist Zionists worried that there was some kind of an economic deficiency within the Jewish people which led to antisemitism that could only be cured by working the land of Palestine.
It should then not come as a surprise that the founder of modern Zionism, Theodore Herzl, looked at antisemites as “‘friends and allies’ of his movement.” Zionists and antisemitism shared a common goal: One group wanted all the Jews to emigrate to Palestine to establish an ethnically pure Jewish nation-state and the other group wanted to get rid of all their Jewish countrymen. Emigration was indeed a splendid solution to the eternal Jewish problem. As Professor Joseph Massad wrote:
“[Herzl] would declare in his foundational pamphlet that ‘the Governments of all countries scourged by Anti-Semitism will be keenly interested in assisting us to obtain [the] sovereignty we want’; and indeed that not ‘only poor Jews’ would contribute to an immigration fund for European Jews, ‘but also Christians who wanted to get rid of them.'”
Was this political solidarity related to class, whiteness, a form of self-hatred, ingesting the institutional racism of the day as one’s own? Was this was a marriage of convenience, distasteful but necessary, or a long-term strategy?
Delving deeper, I was not that surprised to learn that the assimilated, secular Herzl chose to leave his son uncircumcised, that he initially entertained the idea that mass conversion to Catholicism would be a good solution to the Jewish problem, that he celebrated Christmas with a tree no less. He reportedly said, “An excellent idea enters my mind — to attract outright anti-Semites and make them destroyers of Jewish wealth.” The Israeli peace activist Uri Avnery described Herzl’s writings as having, “in places, ‘a strongly antisemitic odour.’”
Leon Rosselson, a British singer, songwriter, and children’s book author, wrote in an essay in Medium,
“In his book, Der Judenstaat, published in 1896, he [Herzl] explains why: ‘The Jewish question exists wherever Jews live in perceptible numbers. Where it (i.e. antisemitism) does not exist, it is carried by Jews in the course of their migration. We naturally move to those places where we are not persecuted and there our presence produces persecution…. The unfortunate Jews are now carrying the seeds of Anti-Semitism into England; they have already introduced it into America.’
In a later chapter, he argues that the immediate cause of antisemitism is ‘our excessive production of mediocre intellects, who cannot find an outlet downwards or upwards — that is to say, no wholesome outlet in either direction. When we sink, we become a revolutionary proletariat, the subordinate officers of all revolutionary parties; and at the same time, when we rise, there rises also our terrible power of the purse.'”
When Herzl considered the language of the new state, he wrote of Yiddish: “We shall give up using those miserable stunted jargons, those Ghetto languages which we still employ, for these were the stealthy tongues of prisoners.” He had a similar disdain for the Jewish religion. “We shall keep our priests within the confines of their temples…. They must not interfere in the administration of the state…,” and envisioned a state without Jewish holidays or Jewish symbols. There is indeed a strong sense of self-loathing in these statements.
Another damning piece of evidence is the 1912 comment by Chaim Weizman, later president of the World Zionist Organization and first president of Israel: “Each country can absorb only a limited number of Jews, if she doesn’t want disorders in her stomach. Germany already has too many Jews.”
Or Israel’s founding father and first prime minister, Ben Gurion’s statement in 1922: “We are not Yeshiva students debating the fine points of self-improvement. We are conquerors of the land facing a wall of iron and we have to break through it.” He noted of diaspora Jews: “They have no roots. They are rootless cosmopolitans — there can be nothing worse than that.’” Ben Gurion was famously elitist and racist. He described diaspora Jews as “human dust, whose particles try to cling to each other,” and he called Mizrahim, (Jews from Arab and/or Muslim countries), backward and primitive, with Orientalist characteristics that would threaten the nascent state of Israel. Portraying Yemeni immigrants, he wrote:
“[Yemini culture is] two thousand years behind us, perhaps even more. It lacks the most basic and primary concepts of civilization (as distinct from culture). Its attitude toward women and children is primate. Its physical condition is poor. For thousands of years it lived in one of the most benighted and impoverished lands, under a rule even more backward than an ordinary feudal and theocratic regime. The passage from there to Israel has been a profound human revolution, not a superficial, political one. All its human values need to be changed from the ground up.”
Vladimir (Ze’ev) Jabotinsky, the founder of Revisionist Zionism which was the forerunner of today’s Likud Party, was even more upfront in his reactionary affiliations. He supported the settler colonial and militaristic core of Zionism, openly talked about the need to fight the indigenous Palestinian population, and called on Jews to mobilize for “war, revolt and sacrifice.”
In 1923 he wrote Revisionism’s Bible, an article, “The Iron Wall (We and the Arabs)”:
“Every native population in the world resists colonists as long as it has the slightest hope of being able to rid itself of the danger of being colonized. That is what the Arabs in Palestine are doing, and what they will persist in doing as long as there remains a solitary spark of hope that they will be able to prevent the transformation of “Palestine” into the “Land of Israel.”…. Zionist colonization must either stop, or else proceed regardless of the native population. This means that it can proceed and develop only under the protection of a power that is independent of the native population –- behind an iron wall, which the native population cannot breach.”
At the same time, his antisemitism was profound:
“Our starting point is to take the typical Yid of today and to imagine his diametrical opposite … Because the Yid is ugly, sickly, and lacks decorum, we shall endow the ideal image of the Hebrew with masculine beauty. The Yid is trodden upon and easily frightened and, therefore, the Hebrew ought to be proud and independent. The Yid is despised by all and, therefore, the Hebrew ought to charm all. The Yid has accepted submission and, therefore, the Hebrew ought to learn how to command. The Yid wants to conceal his identity from strangers and, therefore, the Hebrew should look the world straight in the eye and declare: ‘I am a Hebrew!'”
Jabotinsky flirted with the ideology of Benito Mussolini who praised him as a “Jewish Fascist” and was happy not only to work with Nazis but to espouse their totalitarian ideology. He established the New Zionist Organization and his Palestine representative ran his Yomen shel Fascisti (Diary of a Fascist) in their paper. Von Weisl, NZO’s Financial Director, told a newspaper that “He [Jabotinsky] personally was a supporter of Fascism, and he rejoiced at the victory of Fascist Italy in Abyssinia as a triumph of the White races against the Black.” Mussolini allowed the rightwing Revisionist Zionist youth movement, Betar, to have a squadron at his maritime academy.
When Mussolini decided to join forces with Hitler, he expelled Jews from the party. The Revisionists responded:
“For years we have warned the Jews not to insult the fascist regime in Italy. Let us be frank before we accuse others of the recent anti-Jewish laws in Italy; why not first accuse our own radical groups who are responsible for what happened.”
According to Lenni Brenner, author of “Zionism in the Age of Dictators,” by March 1933, Jabotinsky called for an anti-Nazi boycott and subsequently, Revisionists assassinated the Labor Zionist who had negotiated the Ha’Avara Agreement, (see below). But the relationship between the Revisionists and the Nazis remained torturous.
In 1939, a week before Hitler invaded Poland, Jabotinsky insisted that “There is not the remotest chance of war.” He planned to invade Palestine, landing a boatload of Betarim on Tel Aviv’s beach while the Irgun seized Government House in Jerusalem, and a provisional Jewish government was proclaimed abroad. After his capture or death, it would operate as a government-in-exile.
The Irgun, the Zionist paramilitary organization active in Mandate Palestine, was inspired and led by Jabotinsky until his death in 1940. After the war, the following document was found in Germany’s Turkish embassy: Proposal of the National Military Organization (Irgun Zvai Leumi) Concerning the Solution of the Jewish Question in Europe and the Participation of the NMO in the War on the side of Germany. It read:
“The establishment of the historical Jewish state on a national and totalitarian basis, and bound by a treaty with the German Reich, would be in the interest of a maintained and strengthened future German position of power in the Near East.
Proceeding from these considerations, the NMO in Palestine, under the condition the above-mentioned national aspirations of the Israeli freedom movement are recognized on the side of the German Reich, offers to actively take part in the war on Germany’s side.”
While Jews both inside and outside of Germany understood the grave dangers posed by the Nazi ascent to power, some Zionists viewed this as an opportunity to further their aims of colonizing Palestine. Despite an international boycott of Nazi Germany, in 1933 Labor Zionists signed the Transfer “Ha’avara” Agreement which ultimately resulted in the rescue of 20,000 Jews. Nazi Germany agreed to compensate those German Jews who left for Palestine after the liquidation of their property by exporting German goods of equal value to the country. The emigrants then received some of the proceeds from the sale of the goods. This led to an end of the boycott of Germany and a financial boost for their economy which was still mired in WWI reparations and the Great Depression. As Leon Rosselson wrote:
“Between 1933 and 1939, 60 percent of all capital invested in Jewish Palestine came from German Jewish money through the Transfer Agreement. Thus, Nazism was a boon to Zionism throughout the 1930s.
In 1935, the German Zionist branch was the only political force that supported the Nazi Nuremberg Laws in the country, and was the only party still allowed to publish its own newspaper the Rundschau until after Kristallnacht in 1938.”
The Nuremberg Laws excluded German Jews from German citizenship and prohibited them from marrying or having sexual relations with anyone of “German or related” blood. The laws disenfranchised Jews and removed most of their political rights. A Jew was defined as anyone with three or four Jewish grandparents, regardless of that person’s personal identification.
The German Zionist Federation, the Zionistische Vereinigung fur Deutschland, wrote an appeal to the Nazis in 1933:
“May we therefore be permitted to present our views, which, in our opinion, make possible a solution in keeping with the principles of the new German State of National Awakening….because we, too, are against mixed marriage and are for maintaining the purity of the Jewish group….
For its practical aims, Zionism hopes to be able to win the collaboration even of a government fundamentally hostile to Jews…. Boycott propaganda – such as is currently being carried on against Germany in many ways – is in essence un-Zionist, because Zionism wants not to do battle but to convince and to build.”
Another piece of evidence regarding the Nazi’s relationship to Jews and their plans for deportation (prior to their decision in 1942 to proceed with total extermination), was written by the SS chief, Reinhard Heydrich. In 1935 he published a statement in an SS publication. Francis Nicosia quoted it in his 1985 book, “The Third Reich and the Palestine Question”:
“National Socialism has no intention of attacking the Jewish people in any way. On the contrary, the recognition of Jewry as a racial community based on blood, and not as a religious one, leads the German government to guarantee the racial separateness of this community without any limitations. The government finds itself in complete agreement with the great spiritual movement within Jewry itself, the so-called Zionism, with its recognition of the solidarity of Jewry throughout the world and the rejection of all assimilationist ideas. On this basis, Germany undertakes measures that will surely play a significant role in the future in the handling of the Jewish problem around the world.”
Interestingly, in 1937 Adolf Eichmann, along with his supervisor in the Nazi party’s intelligence agency, traveled to Mandate Palestine, disguised as a German journalist, to investigate the feasibility of German Jewish deportation to the region and the functions of the Zionist organizations within Palestine. Eichmann also secretly met with Feivel Polkes, a representative of the Haganah (which became the Israel Defense Force) to discuss this plan. It is important to remember that Eichmann’s interest was in deporting Jews as efficiently as possible, not in supporting the development of a strong Jewish state that might threaten the economic fortunes of Nazi Germany.
In this New York Times review of “In Memory’s Kitchen: A Legacy From the Women of Terezin,” Lore Dickstein quotes the memory of a Terezin survivor who met Eichmann:
“Anny Stern was one of the lucky ones. In 1939, after months of hassle with the Nazi bureaucracy, the occupying German Army at her heels, she fled Czechoslovakia with her young son and emigrated to Palestine. At the time of Anny’s departure, Nazi policy encouraged emigration. ‘Are you a Zionist?’ Adolph Eichmann, Hitler’s specialist on Jewish affairs, asked her. ‘Jawohl,’ she replied. ‘Good,’ he said, ‘I am a Zionist, too. I want every Jew to leave for Palestine.'”
Covering Eichmann’s trial in 1963 in Jerusalem, Hannah Arendt reported Eichmann boasted of his esteem for Zionists,
“Eichmann’s first personal contacts with Jewish functionaries, all of them well-known Zionists of long standing, were thoroughly satisfactory. The reason he became so fascinated by the ‘Jewish question,’ he explained, was his own ‘idealism;’ these Jews, unlike the Assimilationists, whom he always despised, and unlike the Orthodox Jews, who bored him, were ‘idealists,’ like him.”
After the founding of the State of Israel in 1948, Albert Einstein wrote a letter to the New York Times regarding the visit to the U.S. by Menachem Begin, a leader of the Irgun, head of the right-wing nationalist Herut Party (which morphed into Likud), and later the sixth Israeli prime minister:
“Among the most disturbing political phenomena of our time is the emergence in the newly created state of Israel of the ‘Freedom Party’ (Tnuat HaHerut), a political party closely akin in its organization, methods, political philosophy and social appeal to the Nazi and Fascist parties….They have preached an admixture of ultranationalism, religious mysticism and racial superiority… it is imperative that the truth about Mr Begin and his movement be made known in this country.”
Amy Kaplan in her remarkable 2018 book, “Our American Israel,” noted that after the war ended, even non-Jews thought that the children of the Eastern European Jewish race were magically transformed, Anglicized, by the experience of being born in Palestine. Bartley Crum was a San Francisco born, liberal Catholic, civil rights attorney who was part of the Anglo-American Committee charged with determining the future of Displaced Persons languishing in camps post-war. Kaplan noted:
“Crum found evidence for this transformation of eastern European Jews in a ‘strange phenomenon’ that made their offspring raised in Palestine not only stronger from working the land, but also whiter and more Western than their parents:
Many of the Jewish children I saw were blond and blue-eyed, a mass mutation that, I was told, is yet to be adequately explained. It is the more remarkable because the majority of the Jews of Palestine are of east European stock, traditionally dark-haired and dark-eyed. One might almost assert that a new Jewish folk is being created in Palestine: the vast majority almost a head taller than their parents, a sturdy people more a throwback to the farmers and fishermen of Jesus’ day than products of the sons and daughters of the cities of eastern and central Europe.” [p. 31]
Another member of the Anglo-American Committee, James McDonald, visited a synagogue in Jerusalem and:
“…he was ‘struck once more by the variety of the faces of the boys. Had I not know where I was, or heard the Hebrew words, I would have sworn that most of them were of Irish, Scandinavian or Scotch stock, or at any rate of the ordinary mixture of the American middle west. Only here and there was there a face even remotely resembling the ‘Jewish type.’ He concluded that ‘Israel’s young Jews had no distinctive ‘racial type.’” [p. 32]
In 1951, Kenneth Bilby, journalist, noted while observing children from a kibbutz:
“They were even featured, sturdy, bleached by the sun. I would have defied any anthropologist to mix these children with a crowd of British, American, German and Scandinavian youngsters and then weed out the Jews.’ He viewed them as becoming less like “their Semitic cousin in the Arab world.” In the eyes of these visitors, as European Jews in Palestine became whiter – and more civilized- the Arabs among whom they settled appeared darker and more primitive.” [p. 32]
In Israel there has always been a hierarchy of racism grounded in white, Euro-centric supremacy. Ashkenazim discriminated against Mizrahim and Jews of color, and Palestinians faced the most bigotry followed only recently by African asylum seekers. Reactionary religious leaders have also espoused racist attitudes. A prime example of that is Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, the spiritual leader of the Shas party, who has compared Arabs to “snakes” and called for their “annihilation.” These kinds of attitudes have been prevalent in the more rightwing settler movements like Gush Emunim, Tehiya, National Union, and Mafdal which feature a militant Jewish messianism merged with hatred and disdain for the indigenous Palestinians
So why is it important to explore this messy and uncomfortable history? I would argue that first, in this era where the epithet of antisemite is hurled quite loosely at anyone with critical attitudes towards Israel, we must be honest about the foundations of Zionism and its relationship to real antisemitism. It appears that the early Zionists, both on the socialist left as well as the fascist right, held attitudes that were clearly antisemitic. This may have been cynical or amoral, but I think it goes well beyond a marriage of expediency.
If we have an understanding of the roots of the Israeli leadership, we can better understand the attitudes and policies of subsequent Israeli governments leading us to the current regimes. While the Irgun remained in the minority and did not take control until 1977 with Menachem Begin followed by Yitzhak Shamir, it was a powerful force in pre-1948 Palestine, assassinating British leaders and international negotiators like Count Bernadotte and inflicting terrorist attacks on indigenous Palestinians such as the Deir Yassin massacre.
The Haganah and Palmach, (who later became the core of the Israel Defense Force), were also paramilitary groups active in pre-1948 Palestine. I think of the famous quote by Moshe Dayan who joined the Haganah at the age of fourteen and became a celebrated military leader and politician:
“We are a generation of settlers, and without the steel helmet and gun barrel, we shall not be able to plant a tree or build a house… . Let us not be afraid to see the hatred that accompanies and consumes the lives of hundreds of thousands of Arabs who sit all around us and wait for the moment when their hands will be able to reach our blood.” [From Ronen Bergman’s “Rise and Kill First” p. 128-129].
This is the combative voice of the new Jew, the Hebrew reborn in the fight to colonize and create Israel from Palestine. It is not a voice interested in negotiation, tolerance, democracy, or respect for other narratives or backgrounds. Political history creates the social and cultural norms we see today. The U.S. is facing a national conversation about the contradictions between our mythology – the American dream of justice, equality, and freedom for all – and the fact that our national heroes were slaveholders and actually only had dreams for white, landholding men. Their lived experience and attitudes were the foundations for the cultural norms that characterized the most shameful aspects of U.S. history: destroying native peoples, enslaving Africans, owning their children, Jim Crow, redlining, discrimination in opportunities from the GI Bill to employment, anti-miscegenation laws, white nationalism, and the persistent bigotry and institutional racism that is still a major challenge in the 21st century. This kind of honest, painful discourse is critical if we are to turn our so-called democracy in a more positive direction. I would suggest that Israelis need to be having their own national origin conversation and mostly, they are not. This does not bode well.
The Jabotinsky strain of politics which is repressive, anti-democratic, and at some level, deeply self-hating and othering, is a kind of national toxic masculinity. It is also an ideology that is the foundation of modern Zionism, a blend of bunker mentality, Islamophobia, and social Darwinism. This kind of politics gives the Ashkenazi Jewish racism towards Jews of color, Mizrahi, Palestinians, and African asylum seekers a historical context. This kind of politics makes an aggressive and dehumanizing occupation and settler movement possible, where the willingness to kill, main, and incarcerate Palestinians and their children is seen as unapologetically necessary for survival, where attacking “the other” as cockroaches and subhumans is tolerated and applauded by political leaders, where periodically bombing and strangling two million Gazans, creating an impossible humanitarian catastrophe, is just part of “mowing the grass.”
This latter expression refers to a cynical Israeli military strategy seen in the last three wars on Gaza and the Second Lebanon War that involves repeated large-scale but limited military operations as well as smaller assaults aimed at crushing the opponent, degrading the leadership and infrastructure and building deterrence. This attrition warfare has no clear endpoint; it is a foreign policy in itself characterized by the use of extreme force to weaken Hamas and Hezbollah, with minimal risk to Israeli soldiers, but without the total elimination of the enemy who is needed to control more extreme players in the region.
Just as I now know that the displacement and occupation that started in 1967 and continues to this day is a continuation of a process that started long before 1948 – the Nakba, or catastrophe, is ongoing – the fascistic policies of the Israeli government are grounded in the history of the creation of the state. Likewise, the post-1967 Israeli embrace of Christian evangelicals, (whose plans for Jews are conversion or a fiery death), mirrors the warm relationship that Zionists had with antisemitic leaders in Germany and Italy. And in a similar fashion, Israel’s embrace of Christian Zionists and repressive regimes from white South Africa to Saudi Arabia–as well as the Israeli love for our own dog-whistling, antisemitic president–is part of the same old pattern of joining forces with racist, authoritarian governments.
As it is often said, if we don’t know our history, we are destined and doomed to repeat it.
ALICE ROTHCHILD- “As it is often said, if we don’t know our history, we are destined and doomed to repeat it.”
Yes, but it is difficult to know our history when we have been marinated in group myth-history, particularly when there is no desire to confront reality in defiance of group solidarity. A lot of ugly reality is condensed in this article, the comments should prove interesting.
I’d like to remind readers of the work done on this theme by the sociologist Georges Tamarin. See: https://mondoweiss.mystagingwebsite.com/2015/12/forgotten-society-psychologist/
RE: “Menahem Begin (R) with Vladimir Jabotinsky (C) in Pinsk, December 12, 1933” ~ photo caption (from above)
MY COMMENT: In the photo, young Begin is apparently wearing his Betar uniform.
Quite chilling!
FROM “The Hidden History of Zionism”, Chapter 6, by Ralph Schoenman:
SOURCE – http://www.marxists.de/middleast/schoenman/ch06.htm
The exploitation of antisemitism to further the aims of Zionism is well illustrated by events in America about three years ago. In early 2017, Jewish Community Centers (JCCs) suffered a barrage of bomb-threat calls, which were often interpreted as reflecting a Trump-inspired rise in American antisemitism. Most of the calls originated from a computer in Ashkelon, Israel. The alleged perpetrator, who was officially un-named in Israel, was identified as Jewish and described as an autistic, irresponsible Israeli-American youth with a brain tumor, no formal education, no military experience, and no friends.
We are told through press releases that, in a period of six months (roughly September 2016 – February 2017) this isolated, irresponsible, uneducated youth made about 2,000 threat calls (including those to the JCCs in 2017) from his room, keeping full records of the calls and their effects, all in complete secrecy even from his parents, who lived in the same apartment. These activities were reported to have earned him bitcoins (from customers?) worth, at that time, a quarter of a million dollars. I am disinclined to believe that tale.
The calls were delivered to the victims through SPOOF telephones in America, one of which belonged to a Chabad and another to a Scientology functionary. I don’t believe that an irresponsible youth would be entrusted with those phone numbers. What’s going on?
Is the irresponsible youth (IY) for real?
When a real person is described in the media, disagreement about salient facts and vital statistics rarely occur. For instance, we expect newspapers describing Donald Trump to agree that his birthplace was NYC, that he is married and that he has children. However, we would not be the least surprised if news media reporting on Sasquatch (the Abominable Snowman of the Pacific Northwest) disagreed with each other and even with themselves. So, how well did the media do with IY? Here are some samples: IY was 18 at the time of indictment in Israel (The Guardian) while, a month earlier, he was 19 (The Guardian). He was born in the USA (Jewish Telegraph Agency) and in Israel (New York Times), in both Tel Aviv (Times of Israel) and Ashkelon (Times of Israel). He spent his early years in New Jersey and California (Times of Israel) and has never lived in the United States (USA Today). He is a genius (Times of Israel) and has a low IQ (Jewish Telegraph Agency). IY, like Sasquatch, is a fiction.
Despite its implausibility, the IY-explanation for the threat calls has persisted, apparently because none of the Main-Stream Media has publicly questioned it.
A Kadar Cover-up?
On April 21, 2017, the DOJ filed criminal complaints against IY in Georgia and Florida, identifying him only as Michael Ron David Kadar — no age, no address. On April 26, the registered, and sole, occupant of the apartment from which the calls were made, a female, was identified by blogger Richard Silverstein (Tikun Olam) as Tamar Kadar, chemical warfare scientist at the Mossad-operated Israeli Institute for Biological Research (IIBR). Within a day, Silverstein’s posting disappeared from the web without explanation (but, until recently, survived in the Google cache). Photos of Tamar largely disappeared from the web, including her listing as an employee at IIBR and at the website of a research service company where she was a consultant.
The disappearance of data always suggests a cover-up. Is the IY fable actually a cover-up of a Mossad false-flag operation? As explained below, the “cover up” hypothesis offers an unexpected bonus: it explains a most perplexing feature in the time-line of events leading to IY’s arrest.
A perplexing feature
In early March, 2017, the FBI notified the Israeli police that the threat calls originated from a single computer at a known location in Ashkelon. The calls stopped, but days passed without an arrest and without any explanation from the Israelis. Trump sent a team of FBI agents to Israel to stir things up. Finally, on March 23, IY was apprehended and quickly indicted. His father, who was at the apartment with him, was taken into custody briefly. His mother was apparently not in the apartment when the raid was made. Why did it take two weeks for the Israeli police to make the arrest?
The search leads westward
With “Michael Ron David Kadar“ as the Google input, people-search websites pointed to court records in Illinois, about 13 hours west of Israel by air.
In 2004, 14-year old Michael R Kadar of 240 E. Circle Dr., New Lenox, Illinois, appeared in Will County Court for the first of 20 minor charges sprinkled over the next 12 years. In summer 2016 he was jailed for felonious drug possession, convicted on January 30, 2017, and imprisoned until he was released on March 18, 2017 (BINGO!) on two-year probation. The usual conditions, restricted travel and meetings with the probation officer, were explicitly suspended (DOUBLE BINGO) by the court for six months starting January 30.
Upon Michael’s release from prison on March 18, his Facebook page enjoyed a three-day burst of activity and then went totally silent for three months. Why silent? Where was he?
Michael broke his Facebook silence at the end of June, posting a photo of himself and his friend Amber in a setting with orange trees and white, high-rise apartments in the background. Two weeks later, in mid-July, Amber posted a photo of herself with Michael at Chicago’s O’Hare airport, and the records of the Will County Court imply that Michael did, indeed, show up for the subsequent required visits with his probation officer. Soon thereafter, both Michael’s and Amber’s Facebook pages were butchered, removing all trace of their acquaintance, their travels, and of Kadar-family members. More cover-up.
A strong inference from the facts above is that, almost as soon as he was sprung on March 18, Michael and his father (Robert A. Kadar of 240 E. Circle Dr.) flew to Israel where, on March 23, Michael was presented to the public as the perpetrator, 18-year-old IY. In the one published photo of IY that shows some face, the similarity to Facebook photos of Michael is notable. His physique, as well, appears to agree with the 6 ft, 160 lbs recorded by the Will County Court (since deleted).
The unavoidable interpretation of these facts is that 27-year old Michael R. Kadar (date of birth March 27, 1990) was rushed to Israel to play patsy for his Mossad mother, the presumptive threat- caller. The ploy of subtracting nine years from his age and describing him as autistic appears to have been inspired by a two-year-old news report of an autistic British youth who made threatening calls to American schools. Despite the seriousness of his crime, the British youth escaped incarceration on the basis of his age and condition. The perplexing foot dragging by the Israeli police was apparently the result of committing to a plan of bringing Michael to Ashkelon to play patsy but then having to wait almost two weeks for Will County to turn him loose and for Michael to pack his bag and say his farewells.
Why the threat calls and other antisemitic hate crimes of 2017?
The picture laid out above is tenable only if at least one governmental motive for the crimes can be found. Events surrounding Trump’s 2016 campaign and 2017 inauguration provide one.
Prime Minister Netanyahu, had a motive for increasing the level of antisemitic threats early in Donald Trump’s presidency. During the 2016 campaign, Trump promised reductions in foreign aid, including Israel’s. Trump had to be stopped. A conspicuous increase in apparent antisemitic activity in America would license American Zionists to cite Trump as “Antisemite in-Chief”, personally responsible for the rise. The resulting outrage could invoke second thoughts about cutting aid to Israel.
In the event, on March 9, 2017, the threatening phone calls stopped. On March 16, Trump’s State Department announced a Foreign Aid budget that reduced all aid except Israel’s. On March 23, Michael, freshly out on probation from an Illinois prison, was presented in Ashkelon as a young, irresponsible perpetrator of the JCC threat calls.
On July 1, 2017 Times of Israel reported, “The director of Israeli human rights group B’Tselem told a conference at the UN in New York on Friday that Israel was sabotaging efforts to combat anti-Semitism in order to retain control of the West Bank… The Israeli government is prepared to undermine the real fight against anti-Semitism in order to preserve the occupation with minimal repercussions from the international community,’ he charged.”
False-flag antisemitism, historically associated with the Zionist movement, apparently does achieve political gains but, while doing so, risks aggravating the scourge of prejudice against Jews at large.
Michael back home
Several months after his July return to Illinois, Michael flunked a urinalysis and skipped subsequent meetings with his probation officer. A warrant was issued, and he was recaptured and briefly jailed. Despite failing to fulfill the conditions of his parole, he was released early from custody of the Will County court on January 16, 2019 to enjoy an estimated one million dollars-worth of bitcoin compensation for his troubles.
Early in 2019, Michael R Kadar of Illinois changed his Facebook name to Sway Zee, and commercial people-finder sites began referring to him as Michael Robert Kadar. Jean Kadar (Robert’s current wife) put the patio furniture up for sale on Facebook, and it’s no longer certain that any of the Kadar family are living at 240 E. Circle Dr. The Google maps, which previously denied view of 240 E. Circle Drive, now allow full viewing, and real estate websites now show street views, which they previously declared unavailable.
A lesson learned
Pending further investigation, Americans should face the possibility that, in 2017, they suffered from Mossad-directed false-flag hate crimes of which the JCC threat calls were a part. This possibility is strengthened by the revelation on June 12, 2019 (Haaretz, Times of Israel) that the Mossad has been active in combatting BDS, which is perceived by many Zionists as threatening the nationalist vision of Israel.
Back story
Shortly after we surmised that Michael R Kadar was the un-named (in Israel) IY, we sent our view (anonymously via a lawyer) to the FBI and to DOJ lawyers.
This view made the strong, testable prediction that Michael and his father flew from O’Hare to Ben Gurion on or about March 20, 2017. A few weeks later, the lawyer received a call from an FBI agent in Seattle, Instead of writing us off as kooks, as he would have done if he failed to find the predicted TSA evidence, the agent asked the lawyer to seek our permission to be identified.
We agreed to being identified if the FBI would tell us whether our prediction was verified. By phone, FBI assured us that the search had been thorough, but declined to reveal the outcome on the grounds that they could not comment on the travel of American citizens.
For further evidence and references, contact fstahl@uoregon.edu.
It is possible for Z and anti-S to agree that the difference between those of Jewish and those of other backgrounds will always provoke harmful tensions, though it is unlikely that they will agree about who has major responsibility. They may well agree, though not all will, that a Jewish majority state is the solution – what then of the nom-Jewish minority? Herzl’s Altneuland reply was that in this case the problem could be minimised by offering them economic development, Jabotinsky’s – more consistently – that they would have to leave and be iron-walled off, though with a hope or hint of economic development on both sides of the wall. This is not surprising. Z and anti-S are logical allies against the liberal claim that everything’s fine in liberal society and that Jews can settle down to being a respected religious minority – indeed they both find this claim maddening. But that degree of logical fit does not stop them from detesting each other at least while the liberal assimilationist societies still force them into living together. Herzl wanted to fight a duel – a deeply Austrian response – with Lueger, the openly anti-Semitic Mayor of Venice, but no doubt thought that Lueger might be ready to help if a practical plan emerged for the move of all the Vienna Jews to Jerusalem. Freud, who rather despised Christianity but seems to have thought that the Jews were failing to examine their consciences, is an interesting case too.