I’m sure many have been scratching their heads trying to figure out why on earth the government of Israel and so many staunch Zionists are just fine with the election of Donald Trump – the darling of the anti-Semitic alt-right. The answer however, is really pretty straightforward: this is nothing new. Zionism has had a cozy, if somewhat Faustian relationship with anti-Semitism since its very origins.

The founder of modern Zionism, Theodor Herzl never made a secret of his belief that his new movement would have to depend upon anti-Semitism and anti-Semites in order to create a Jewish state. In his pamphlet, “The Jewish State,” he suggested raising money for the effort by means of a “direct subscription,” adding that “not only poor Jews but also Christians who wanted to get rid of them would subscribe a small amount to this fund.”

In his diary, he was even blunter:

The anti-Semites will become our most dependable friends, the anti-Semitic countries our allies.

True to form, in 1903 Herzl met with the Russian minister of the interior Vyacheslav von Plehve, an infamous anti-Semite who encouraged the Kishinev pogroms that very same year. Plehve’s reply: as long as the Zionists encouraged emigration of Jews from Russia, the Russian authorities would not disturb them.

This Zionist strategy was also central to the diplomatic process that led to the 1917 Balfour Declaration, in which British Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour famously announced that his government “view(ed) with favor the establishment of a national home in Palestine for the Jewish people and will use their best endeavors to facilitate the achievement of this object.” Although Balfour has long been lionized as a Zionist hero, he wasn’t particularly well-known for his love for Jews or the Jewish people. When he was prime minister, his government passed the 1905 Aliens Act, severely restricting immigration at a time in which persecuted Jews were emigrating from Eastern Europe. At the time, Balfour spoke of the “undoubted evils which had fallen on the country from an alien immigration which was largely Jewish.” Balfour, like many Christians of his class, “did not believe that Jews could be assimilated into Gentile British society.”

In this regard, it is worth noting that the sole Jewish member of British government, Edwin Montagu, strongly objected to the Balfour Declaration, submitting a memorandum to the British cabinet in August 1917 that resonates with haunting prescience today:

I wish to place on record my view that the policy of His Majesty’s Government is anti-Semitic and in result will prove a rallying ground for Anti-Semites in every country in the world…When the Jews are told that Palestine is their national home, every country will immediately desire to get rid of its Jewish citizens, and you will find a population in Palestine driving out its present inhabitants… When the Jew has a national home, surely it follows that the impetus to deprive us of the rights of British citizenship must be enormously increased. Palestine will become the world’s Ghetto. Why should the Russian give the Jew equal rights? His national home is Palestine. Why does Lord Rothschild attach so much importance to the difference between British and foreign Jews? All Jews will be foreign Jews, inhabitants of the great country of Palestine.

The most troubling example of Zionist association with anti-Semitism occurred in 1933, when the Jewish Agency struck a deal with the Nazis’ Economic Ministry known as the Ha’avrah (Transfer) agreement. Breaking the international Jewish boycott, the Zionist movement negotiated with Nazi Germany in order to facilitate the transfer of German Jews and their property to Palestine.

In an essay for Yad Vashem’s Shoah Resource Center, Israeli historian Y’faat Weiss pointed out that the Nazi regime’s participation in the agreement was motivated both by a fear of the boycott and its desire to rid Germany of its Jews. While it is clear that this deal occurred in the context of very real persecution, history has not been kind to the legacy of the Ha’avrah agreement. As Weiss herself noted:

In retrospect, and in view of what we know about the annihilation of European Jewry, these relations between the Zionist movement and Nazi Germany seem especially problematic.

It is not difficult to understand why, on a practical level, the Zionist movement would find a perverse kind of common cause with anti-Semitic regimes. As a form of ethnic nationalism, Zionism has always been dependent upon the maintenance of a demographic majority of Jews in the land. It makes sense that Zionists have been willing to deal with nations that were more than happy to rid themselves of their Jews in order that they maintain their own national ethnic homogeneity.

But it has been a Faustian bargain. From its very origins, Zionism has necessarily fed off the existence of anti-Semites to justify the need for a Jewish state. Even more tragically, as Edwin Montagu predicted, Jewish ethnic nationalism did indeed result in a “population in Palestine driving out its inhabitants.”

Fast-forward to present day and the rise of an alt-right movement promoting a new form of white ethnic nationalism that takes its cue from Israel. Alt-right leader Richard Spencer claims he doesn’t hate Jews, but in fact admires them. He openly says he merely wants for “his people” what Zionism offers the Jewish people. But of course, Spencer’s “genteel white supremacy” is nothing but a fig leaf for the age old desire of anti-semites to create Jew-free nations.

As journalist Betsy Woodruff correctly observed in the Daily Beast:

White supremacists, alt-right leaders argue, think white people are the best race. The alt-right doesn’t necessarily think that, they say; instead, they say they just want white people to have their own homeland. With no Jews. (Alt-right leader Richard) Spencer in particular fixates on the homeland idea. The alt-right needs to aspire to something, even if that dream won’t come true in his lifetime—and that means they should aim to build an ethno-state for just whites. And Spencer made it clear that white-only means Jews aren’t invited. They have their own identity, and it isn’t white-slash-European, and that’s that. “Jews are Jews,” he said.

As troubling as this all may sound, political Zionism has made another, even darker sort of Faustian bargain – namely with Christian Millenarians and End-of-Days extremists. In the era of Trump, this is a relationship that should concern us deeply.

I’ll have more to say about that in my next post.