WHAT MY NEUROLOGIST TOLD ME ABOUT TRUMP AND A FEW THOUGHTS ABOUT NAZIFIED ZIONISM
WHAT MY NEUROLOGIST TOLD ME ABOUT TRUMP AND A FEW THOUGHTS ABOUT NAZIFIED ZIONISM
By
David Gottfried
Today, I had an appointment with my neurologist. For some perverse reason, he felt compelled to tell me, apropos of nothing, that Trump was good for the Jews.
Yes, Trump has made some very fervently Zionist noises and some of his policies seem to have been lifted from the Likud party platform. However, just what sort of Zionism does Trump and his friends in Israel represent?
Within a few days of his election in 2016, Trump supporters gathered in a hotel in Washington and shouted Heil Trump, not hail Trump. In Charlottesville, far right activists, in a torchlight parade, shouted, “The Jews will not replace us.” One of the people scheduled to speak at the Republican convention of 2020 was a woman who had re tweeted material from the notoriously anti Semitic “Protocols of the Elders of Zion.”
Although Nazism and Zionism might seem like antithetical, or at least mutually exclusive, ideologies, we should remember that some Nazis were, in the early years, Zionists of a sort. In the beginning, some Nazis held that mass murder was quite unnecessary. They argued that strict segregation would suffice. To make the segregation of the Jews complete, they proposed shipping the Jews to Mozambique, an island off the Southeast coast of Africa. If I recall correctly, some Nazis were willing to endorse of form of Zionism which would deport all Jews to Mandatory Palestine. This was a form of Zionism, or involuntary Zionism.
In any event, Israel has become something that would make the socialist founders of Israel turn in their graves. Some political allies of Netanyahu have proposed criminal penalties in the event a Jew and a Muslim intermarry. Now don’t get me wrong. I realize that intermarriage poses a threat to the cohesion of the Jewish community, and as a Jew, I am all for Jews marrying Jews. However, when the state criminalizes marriage on the basis of religious affiliation, it has crossed a Rubicon of sorts and it has performed a reverse exodus if you will; it has taken us into the land of fascist bondage. The word fascist is not too strong. After all, Nazi Germany, in the Nuremberg Laws, criminalized relations between Jews and “Aryans.” As I said, I am all for Jewish identity, but it is grotesque when it is forced along the lines of the Inquisition enforcing Catholic conformity.
In addition, Israel has changed dramatically economically. It was founded by socialists. The most influential Zionists came from the Kibbutzim, or the Zionist socialist collectives of Israel. The Zionists subscribed to what may be a cliché but was nevertheless a very beautiful cliché: All for one and one for all. They were the bold and gallant antithesis of Trump. They believed in sacrifice and they knew what it was to love.
(Abba Eban, in one of his always erudite and brilliant works, relates that he used to invite a leading Soviet diplomat – I think it was Gromyko -- to his New York home to view videos of the Kibbutzim. These videos gave both men the hope that socialism could still prevail.)
For several decades Israel has been trying to ape America and has, consequently, trashed socialism.
With the trashing of socialism and the increasing exaltation of Capitalistic greed, Israel has become a meaner place to live. Several years ago, I read an article in Haaretz which noted that what were termed economic suicides were skyrocketing in Israel. These were cases in which Jews, drowning in a sea of Capitalistic bitchiness, were ending their lives.
Nowadays, the Kibbutzim have faded in importance. Nowadays, scientific research on increasing crop yields is mundane and passe. Nowadays, the au currant thing consists of developing a new computer program which will amplify robotization, depersonalization, and the degradation of our privacy and political and social freedom. (Of course, this is a sin common to nerdish computer geeks the world over)
As they learn to become chic computer a holes, Israelis may forget about the land and flock to Tel Aviv. Only in a congested city can they spread their wings and become an urban and urbane butterfly. Of course, to become even more Americanized, they may move to America. And in the event several Arab states come together to destroy Zion, they, like true Trumpians who believe that soldiers are losers and suckers, will cling to their swimming pools in Scarsdale and let Zion die.