By Eamonn McCann

Nobody seems to have spoken up for Mel Gibson following his diatribe against Jews. But the Passion of the Christ man was hardly just speaking for himself.

"Give it to the Jew-boys!" someone had remarked to me in a shop in Derry earlier the same week. I’d just confirmed that I’d be talking at a rally that evening against the Israeli assault on Palestine and Lebanon.

He wasn’t a one-off, either. I recalled where I’d last heard "Jew-boys" - in Grafton Street in Dublin in June, shortly before Father’s Day, when I’d indulged myself in an extravagant tirade against Father’s Day, Mother’s Day, Great Granny’s Day and all the rest of the glut of greeting card days when we are guilt-tripped into buying vastly over-priced lumps of cardboard.

"Aye," agreed my companion, a former Republican activist, now something of an unaffiliated dissident, "more money for the Jew-boys, eh?" Jews had cunningly invented all these phoney occasions - and also owned all the major card-manufacturing companies, it was explained.

What was immediately striking in both cases was the ease with which the jibe against Jews rolled off the tongues of people who would feel insulted and genuinely hurt if called racist. What struck me, after I’d thought upon it, was the historical relevance of their remarks.

The pair would have said - did say, when challenged - that it wasn’t Jews they felt hostility towards, but Israelis; the persecutors of the Palestinians, the Zionists.

But Zionism has its roots not, as the Zionists themselves would have it, in the expulsion of Jews by the Romans from Palestine almost 2,000 years ago, but in the attitudes and actions of Europeans in the 19th and 20th centuries, who put into practice the injunction to "give it to the Jew-boys."

Zionism arose as a political philosophy and guide to action in eastern Europe in the late 19th century - most importantly in the decaying empire of the Tsars, where more than half the world’s Jews then lived. Threatened by more dynamic competitors abroad and by the rising discontent of the lower orders within, Tsarism targeted the Jews as scapegoats.

Discrimination, legal lynching and mob-handed assaults on Jewish neighbourhoods and property were stridently encouraged by the State and given the imprimatur of the Russian Orthodox Church. Christ and Caesar hand in glove, or mailed fist. An exodus ensued.

But only a tiny minority paid heed to Zionism and headed for Palestine. The idea of a God-given right and sacred duty to inhabit ‘Eretz Israel’, the Land of Israel, didn’t occur to the majority. Most went to western Europe and the United States, and created vibrant Jewish communities to enrich the cities they settled in.

Virtually all the great popular song-writers who emerged in New York in the 1920s and 30s came from this background. Little yearning for a supposed ancestral homeland is detectable in their work. We had to wait for bland British Christians Lloyd-Webber and Rice to produce ‘We have been promised a land of our own.’

Contrary to the falsifiers of history who currently lead Israel, Zionism, even in moments of desperation and flight, did not provide an overarching sense of identity for Jews, but was an esoteric minority taste.

It was anti-Semitism in Europe in the 20th century, most horrendously under Nazism, (and the unwillingness of the Allied powers to make saving the Jews a serious priority) which enabled Zionism plausibly to proclaim itself the sole authentic belief-system for Jews everywhere. Israel’s 1948 Declaration of Independence explicitly cited the Holocaust as justification for the creation of the State.

The Palestinians were driven from their homes by fire and sword to clear space for refugees pouring in. The mainly Muslim indigenous people were made to pay the price for a Christian, European slaughter. Thus was the conflict which still rages today set in motion.

As settler colonists in a hostile land, the Zionists needed powerful allies. At the same time, their ideology dictated that the maintenance by force of a Jewish State for a Jewish people was non-negotiable. So, they were not for sale. But they were for hire.

The Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz put it plain (September 30, 1951): ‘Israel is to become the watchdog. There is no fear that Israel will undertake any aggressive policy towards the Arab states when this would explicitly contradict the wishes of the US and Britain. But if for any reasons the Western powers should sometimes prefer to close their eyes, Israel could be relied upon to punish one or several neighbouring states whose discourtesy to the West went beyond the bounds of the permissible.’

Ronald Reagan was making the same point when he observed in 1981: "With a combat experienced military, Israel is a force in the Middle East that is actually a benefit to us. If there were not Israel with that force, we’d have to supply it with our own."

This accurately characterises the relationship between the US administration and the Israeli Defence Forces in Lebanon and Gaza today.

The world has rightly laughed to scorn the Bush/Blair/Israeli pretence that the current spate of violence began with the kidnap of three Israeli soldiers last month. It’s not sensible, anyway, to try to put an exact date on the origin of so complex a conflict.

But, if we have to select an instant of germination, we might point to the moment it became politically acceptable in modern Europe to advocate aloud that we should "give it to the Jew-boys."

Belfast Telegraph