Firstly, it needs to be understood that ‘religious Zionism’ and ‘political Zionism’ are two entirely different beliefs: the former is integral to an ancient and respected religion whilst the latter is a political movement. The issue here is political Zionism: the movement in Israel and the US that forms the agenda of the right­-wing Likud Party of Binyamin Netanyahu.

By endeavouring to equate anti-­Zionism, which is the rejection of the political agenda of the Likud Party, with anti­-Semitism, Netanyahu attempts to deflect all criticism of Israel’s illegal settlements in the Occupied Territories and its illegal blockade of essential goods for 1.8 million in Gaza, now in its seventh year.

Political Zionism is a movement that crystallised with the publication of ‘Der Judenstaat’ (‘The Jewish state’) by Theodor Herzl, a Viennese journalist based in Paris in February 1896. However, it would be more than 50 years before the Political Zionist Movement, through AIPAC, eventually succeeded in persuading US President Harry S. Truman, to recognise the forced establishment of an Israeli state, in the centre of the Muslim Middle East, designed to take in hundreds of thousands of European Jewish survivors from the horrors of WW2 and its Nazi implemented Holocaust.

Tragically, the problem that was conveniently ignored by the Political Zionists, both then [and now], was that Palestine in 1947 was not an empty space but a land populated with a million Arabs ­ which was the inconvenient fact of which Israel’s future prime minister, David Ben Gurion, was all too well aware but kept silent.

The Palestinian Arabs with their neighbouring states, voted against the UN resolution of 1947 to partition their land in order to accommodate the victims of a European war thousands of miles away. Land that they had populated for over a millennium. Furthermore, war was explicitly threatened if the proposal to partition Palestine was passed.

In the event, it was passed by a minority representative UN, and war was declared, but lost, and over 700,000 Palestinian civilians were forced to flee to avoid being massacred by an Israeli militia in an orgy of terrorist atrocities that had previously culminated in the bombing of Jerusalem’s King David Hotel, killing 92, and the razing of the Arab village of Deir Yassin and the murder of all its residents.

The above is a very brief history of Mr Netanyahu’s brand of Political Zionism. It has virtually nothing whatsoever to do with Judaism. Israel is a secular state whose government uses biblical quotations to justify its unlawful actions against the civilian populations of the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza.

The conflation of anti-Likud Zionism with anti-Semitism is an odious political ploy used to conceal a very dangerous threat to both the Middle East and Europe by the extremist government of today’s only secret nuclear-weaponised state.

© EUNewsdesk London 2016 (but freely distributable), [email protected]