Zionism’s problem with antisemitism

So BBC Radio Four tweeted about Michael Rosen’s latest Word of Mouth programme, which prompted one Simon Myerson QC to complain about this:

Which in itself was bad enough because this dude took some petty political difference to a completely unrelated topic, but hey. Somebody else responded to him demolishing his argument:

To which he responded:

Which struck me as rather antisemitic in its undertones. Tweeting on Holocaust Memorial Day that “shtetl Judaism” was immolated “because Jews were powerless” is pure victim blaming, of a sort you sometimes seem from Zionists, if not often this openly. Zionism is of course just another variant of 19th century nationalism, the idea that you need to have your own country to be a true nation or people. And if there were other peoples already living in your chosen land, that was of no importance. As such Zionism is really no different from e.g. Serbian or Polish nationalism bound in ethnicity and loath to recognise the rights of other peoples on the same lands.

At the same time Zionism was always opposed to those Jews who’d either choose to assimilate or to live their lives according to their own traditions, without wanting or needing a ‘return’ to Israel. You see that contempt here in Myserson’s dismissal of “shtetl Judaism”. It didn’t survive, it couldn’t defend itself against the Nazis, so it’s worthless, an attitude consciously or unconsciously shared by many Zionists, seeing a strong Israeli state as a shield against persecution. Israel and Israel only can save Jews from persuction, so any other way of Jewish life is suspect and needs to be torn down to save its people from itself. And of course the worst sort of Jewish people doing it wrong are the poor peasants of Eastern Europe, backward and humble and powerless in the face of the Nazis, so there’s a particular hatred among some Zionists for anything that reminds them of that.

Myerson taps into all that, going from trying to dob in Rosen for some imagined crime against Jews to dismissing entire Jewish populations as wrong in the space of two tweets. Interesting to see how quickly somebody like him dives head first into antisemitic ideas, completely unprompted. On Holocaust Memorial Day. While lecturing others about antisemitism.