“Being a Jew and a Zionist are one and the same” (Jewish Chronicle)

BY GILAD ATZMON – Anti’ Zionist Jews insist that Zionism and being Jewish are entirely different matters that have nothing to do with each other. Jonathan Boyd, the Executive Director of the Institute for Jewish Policy Research (JPR) claims the opposite.  According to Boyd, statistics proves that “being a Jew and a Zionist are one and the same, they cannot be separated out.” Demands to separate Zionism and the Jews tear “Jewishness in two,” Boyd wrote today in the Jewish Chronicle.

According to Boyd, a 2010 JPR survey of British Jewish attitudes towards Israel found that “82 per cent of British Jews say that Israel plays either a central or important part in their Jewish identity. 95 per cent of British Jewish adults have visited the country at least once, and 90 per cent regard it as the ancestral homeland of the Jewish people.” 

I guess that Jewish statistics has now replaced the Talmud and the Torah as sources of law. If as many as 90% of Jews believe that Palestine is a Jewish land, then the Palestinians must have been living there by mistake. 

Boyd opines that drawing parallels between Nazis and Israelis, or calling for boycotts of Israeli products makes British Jews feel threatened. 

I agree with Boyd. I am not keen on the equation between ‘Israelis and Nazis.’ I think that it is not fair to German National Socialism. Israel is a democracy and its crimes reflect the popular choice of the Israeli Jews and according to Boyd the vast majority of world Jewry who identify with Israel and Zionism. National Socialist Germany wasn’t a democracy and the different measures of political oppression it inflicted on Jews and others lasted for, at most, 12 years. Israel’s racist abuse of Palestinians has been going on for almost seven decades. 

Boyd further reveals to us that most Jews do not believe in God. They actually believe in the ‘Jew.’ In 2013, JPR asked British Jews which aspects of Jewishness were most important to them.  Eighty-nine percent highlighted “feeling part of the Jewish people.” 

This makes economic sense. Instead of inventing a god who chooses you over all other people, the contemporary secular Jew cuts out the almighty middle ’man.’ The Jews love themselves just for being themselves. This seems the ultimate form of collective narcissism. JPR’s findings agree with what I have observed so far: all permutations of Jewish ID politics from JVP to ADL and beyond are in practice different forms of intense tribal self love. 

Boyd explains.  “The reason for that is because the Jews are a people over and above a religious group…the truth is you don’t actually have to believe anything to be Jewish. According to Jewish law, you simply need to be born to a Jewish mother, or convert. What you believe, or practise, whilst vital to the maintenance of that identity, is immaterial to your fundamental status as a Jew.”

There you go. Jewishness is a blood related identity, call it biology or race or a matter of conversion. Conversion into what? You guessed right –collective narcissism, self love or shall we simply say, ‘choseness.’

But Boyd insists that British Jews are also connected to Britain. “That (Zionist) feeling does not necessarily translate itself into Jews wanting to live in Israel. While about 35,000 have made aliyah since 1948, most British Jews feel very connected to Britain.” 

According to Boyd, EU data reveals that “84 per cent (of British Jews) feel fully part of British society.” Fascinating. I would advise Boyd and his fellows at the Jewish research institute to try and find out what the British people think about the Jewish Lobby, the CFI and the LFI that push them into immoral interventionist wars in Iraq, Libya, Syria and Iran.  Boyd and his institute should try to ascertain what British people think about the fact that a tribal foreign lobby dominates Britain’s political affairs. What do the British people think about the idea that an ethnic group that amounts to less than half a percent of British society has so much influence in politics, finance and media? Looking into these topics may help to save both Britain and its Jewry from an unfortunate disaster.