Even by Indy standards, this is just bizarre. Their Middle East correspondent, Bethan McKernan, contextualized an article on Donald Trump’s recent invitation to Mahmoud Abbas by citing the “analysis” of a fringe extremist named Ralph Schoenman.
The March 13th article cites Schoenman – the “leading academic” thusly:
US President Donald Trump’s extended invitation to Palestinian Authority PresidentMahmoud Abbas to discuss bringing peace to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will not affect the Israeli right wing’s “long-term desire” of “pushing the Palestinian population out of the West Bank,” an American academic and anti-war activist has said.
…
“The outline of what they intend to discuss [is] ways in which for Abbas can provide some sort of covering sanction for the plans of Trump to accommodate himself to the agenda [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu has with respect to Palestinians and the occupied territories,” Ralph Schoenma, author of the influential 1988 book ‘Hidden History of Zionism’, said on Monday.
So, who is Ralph Schoenman?
He’s a fringe Marxist, 9/11 conspiracy theorist and fraudulent scholar who’s erroneously claimed that Jews dominated the slave trade and that Zionists collaborated with the Nazis to create the Holocaust.
Indeed, his “influential book” (which we’d never heard of) includes a litany of every conceivable disproven libel about Zionism’s ‘roots’ in racism, fascism and even Nazism. Chapters within Hidden History of Zionism include: “Zionism and Fascism”, “Collaborating with the Nazis”, and “Embracing the SS”.
Here are a few excerpts:
“Step by step, [Zionists] assimilated the values of Jew-hatred and anti-Semitism, as the Zionist movement came to regard the anti-Semites themselves as their most reliable sponsors and protectors.”
“Zionism sought bodies with which to colonize Palestine and preferred Jewish corpses in their millions to any rescue that might settle Jews elsewhere…”
“In place of compassion, the Zionists celebrated the persecution of others, even as they first betrayed the Jews and then degraded them. They selected a victim people of their own on whom to inflict a conquering design. They aligned the surviving Jews with a new genocide against the Palestinian people, cloaking themselves, with savage irony, in the collective shroud of the Holocaust.”
“Seven years [after the Holocaust], the Zionists emulated the Nazis, whose backing they sought and even at times achieved, and they covered bleeding Palestine in multiple Lidices [97], driving 800,000 people into exile.”
Also, whilst in the Indy article, Schoenman claims merely that Israeli right wing’s “long-term desire” of “pushing the Palestinian population out of the West Bank”, in his book (in a chapter called “Depopulating Palestine”) he goes much further, suggesting that Israel plans to ethnically cleanse not only all Palestinians, but Arab Israelis as well:
Not only must Palestinians be driven out of the West Bank and Gaza, but from the Galilee and pre-1967 Israel. They are to be scattered as they were in 1948.
He also wrote in his book that genocide against the Palestinians was Zionism’s goal all along:
From its inception, the Zionist movement sought the “Armenianization” of the Palestinian people. Like the Native Americans, the Palestinians were regarded as “a people too many”. The logic was elimination; the record was to be one of genocide.
It’s quite telling that of all the political analysts the Indy journalist could have asked to comment, she chose a conspiracy theorist and extremist who employs tropes about Zionism’s putative collusion with Nazism so vile they’d likely make Ken Livingstone blush.
