History Doc - Jewish Human Rights Watch
Transcription
History Doc - Jewish Human Rights Watch
A History of Jewish Boycotts 1933 - 2015 Including summary Jewish Human Rights Watch .com A History of Jewish Boycotts 1933 - 2015 Executive Summary The present day BDS movement to boycott the State of Israel – so as to weaken the Jewish state’s economy through financial disinvestment and sanctions and to isolate Israelis from global academia and culture – emulates, in disturbing ways, the Nazi boycott of the Jews in the 1930s. The Nazi boycott appeared to be simply a short-term nuisance but turned out to have been an early indication of far more nefarious and ultimately genocidal designs against the Jews. Western societies who profess to have learned the lessons of the Holocaust would do well to heed history’s warnings in dealing with BDS. Boycott, Disinvestment and Sanctions (BDS): A new idea? The present day BDS movement to boycott the state of Israel – so as to weaken Israel’s economy through financial disinvestment and sanctions and to isolate Israelis from global academia and culture – has rapidly escalated and now has Jewish people everywhere in its sights. As a campaign purportedly interested in pressuring the state of Israel into altering its foreign and security policies, BDS is at the core of hostility toward the Jewish State around the world. That hostility is exhibited in every forum in which promoters of BDS participate, from private panels to public demonstrations, where refrains such as “Hamas, Hamas, Jews to the gas” are commonly heard. Behind this ostensible concern with a foreign political dilemma is thus an elemental detestation of a domestic ethno-religious community, the Jews, a hatred apparently only genocide can satisfy. “Boycotts” have a long history and they have been used in many contexts to exert wider pressure on a regime, notably against South Africa. Even that boycott, however, never extended to South Africans living elsewhere. The boycott of Israel is as old as she is, as Arab states implemented one from her earliest days (indeed the Jewish community in the area was boycotted even before Israel’s inception) and sustained it for decades with the support of the broader Islamic world. .com Jewish Human Rights Watch page 2/9 A History of Jewish Boycotts 1933 - 2015 BDS emulates the Nazi program The BDS movement seeks to revive this strategy of isolating and injuring the Jewish State and to extend participation to non-Islamic countries. But as the movement becomes ever more prominent in Europe, the United States, Australia and Latin America, what we are witnessing is less a call to pressure a foreign country and more like a systematic campaign against an entire people, regardless of their connections with or views on Israel as a state. In this the BDS movement shares much common ground with what the Nazis did in Germany in the 1930s. Back then, what seemed like a short-term tactic was in fact a crucial step toward Germany, a modern state in the heart of civilized Europe, eventually murdering six million Jews, with the acquiescence or support of neighbouring states. The series of events culminating in the Holocaust began simply as a boycott. A merely “economic” act reflected much deeper and pernicious hatreds that would ultimately prove genocidal. What happened? Daubed in Yellow – the medieval colour for the Plague Infection At 10 am on Saturday 1st April 1933 Germany’s Jews became the target of a nationwide boycott which was pre-planned a few days earlier by a committee headed by the notoriously anti-Semitic Franconian Gauleiter Julius Streicher. Local Nazi party cells were to form special ‘action committees’ that were to implement the boycott at exactly the same time across Germany. The Nazi paramilitary groups SA and SS were to be stationed outside Jewish owned businesses to deter “Aryan” customers, while the police were ordered not to intervene in the event of trouble. Trucks filled with Brown shirted SA storm troopers raced around town centers. Armed thugs mobbed Jewish–owned department stores, shops, law firms and medical practices, which they plastered with signs reading “Germans! Defend Yourselves! Don’t buy from Jews!”, “Go to Palestine” or “Jews Are Our Misfortune!” Doors and windows were daubed with crude yellow-painted Stars of David, yellow being the medieval color for plague infection within a house. In Berlin, Goebbels himself whipped up a frenzy of Jew-hatred in the Lustgarten, while in Munich, Streicher, editor of the Nazi Party’s hate-filled “Der Sturmer”, gave vent to vicious anti-Semitic hatred. .com Jewish Human Rights Watch page 3/9 A History of Jewish Boycotts 1933 - 2015 “What a Jew chose to believe was irrelevant” The Nazi boycott was a radical extension of earlier attempts by extreme right circles to marginalize Jews socially, for example excluding Jewish people from membership of elite student societies. This applied to Jews who had converted to Christianity too. Hence it was a matter of “race” rather than religion; what a Jew chose to believe was irrelevant. The immediate pretext for the events of April 1933 was the critical reporting by international newspapers of the wave of violence that ensued from the Nazis’ “seizure of power”, which is how they described Hitler’s appointment as Chancellor of Germany on 30 January 1933. Some had recommended a boycott of German manufactured goods. From February onwards, political opponents and critics of the Nazis, as well as many obviously Jewish people, had been arrested by paramilitary policemen and taken to ad hoc detention centres. There they were abused, mocked, tortured and sometimes killed in an orgy of violence. These “wild” sites (often in basements, garages or bars) were the forerunners of more organized concentration camps, the first of which opened at Dachau outside Munich in 1934. Their inmates would be beaten and murdered according to rules known only to the SS guards themselves. Goebbels claimed that all Jews were connected in one worldwide conspiracy against Germany, hence he blamed Germany’s Jews for the foreign criticism and therefore sought to make them suffer. In reality, no Jewish dress shop owner or physician could possibly have had any influence over what appeared in Le Monde or the New York Times. But then, as Goebbels always said, “propaganda has absolutely nothing to do with truth”. .com Jewish Human Rights Watch page 4/9 A History of Jewish Boycotts 1933 - 2015 “We traitors bought from Jews” In itself, the 1st April boycott was not a success. Since it was a Saturday, many Orthodox Jews were not at work but observing the Sabbath. Others had read what was coming and simply stayed at home. It was also not self-evident which businesses were owned by Jews or merely managed by Jews for “Aryan” German owners. What, moreover, was to be done to a law firm or medical practice that had “Aryan” and “Jewish” partners? Furthermore, many ordinary Germans were appalled by being pushed around by uniformed hooligans and defiantly and ostentatiously patronized the boycotted businesses. In Annaberg in Saxony, SA men attacked those gentile shoppers and used a rubber stamp to mark their cheeks or foreheads with “We traitors bought from Jews”. In Hanover scuffles erupted between people who wanted to go to their favourite shops and those who sought to prevent them. The former were taking a risk, since Nazi cameramen were on hand to photograph them, and these pictures were then mounted in street display cases along with menacing captions. Being a prominent “Friend of the Jews” was almost as risky as being Jewish. Apart from the damage the boycott did to the German economy, the Nazis were acutely sensitive to German public opinion (and monitored it closely) and tacked their sails accordingly. In this case they drew the lesson that respectable people disliked public disorder, but would accept whatever measures had a cloak of legality. Moreover, respectable people might even be won over, if economic exclusion and marginalization of Jews might eradicate competition or open up jobs and professional posts for themselves. This may partly explain why the keenest supporters of the boycott were not only fervent Nazis but young students and junior academics who sensed opportunity in the removal of Jews. This accounts for why there were few protests a few days after the public boycott when a new law ordered the compulsory retirement of Jewish civil servants, teachers and academics from the public service, schools and universities. .com Jewish Human Rights Watch page 5/9 A History of Jewish Boycotts 1933 - 2015 The legalities A legal clause could be generalized, rather in the way that health and safety or human rights clauses are mechanically included in directives and legislation. In this case it was a clause deliberately marginalizing Jewish people. Hence hospitals and medical insurance panels began excluding Jewish doctors, followed soon by Jewish dentists. Indeed many private professions and trades took it upon themselves also to exclude Jews, on the basis of what had been decreed for the public sector, by adopting similar sounding “Aryan clauses” that restricted their activities to non-Jews. In this fashion, Jews were excluded from whole swathes of economic activity, while public contracts were only granted to “Aryan” enterprises. By May 1933 these measures had been extended to the gentile partners of Jews, so that a nurse married to a Jewish physician would find herself unemployed. It followed that informal social associations and clubs soon excluded Jews too, so that they were ostracized from everything from posh gentlemen’s clubs to card or chess societies to sports groups. In some places carpenters and undertakers would no longer afford deceased Jews coffins or funerals, and gentiles thought it best not to attend those funerals either. By July, the government took the opportunity to denaturalize all Eastern European Jewish immigrants who had gained citizenship between 1918 and 1933, rendering thousands of Ostjuden (Jews from Eastern Europe) stateless, and this at a time when other states were unlikely to welcome them as refugees. .com Jewish Human Rights Watch page 6/9 A History of Jewish Boycotts 1933 - 2015 From Boycott to Nuremberg While these voluntary forms of discrimination spread throughout German society, the Nazi government felt emboldened to regulate the status of Jews in general along racist lines. The infamous 1935 Nuremberg Laws purported to determine who was a Jew, denying them German citizenship, while drawing a line between Jews and Aryans even in the most intimate human affairs. The Nuremberg Laws forbade future marriage between Jews and Gentiles, and criminalized extramarital sexual relations too. This resu lted in many divorces, and single women forced to wear placards defaming them for “miscegenation”. In a nasty act of purposive insinuation, Jews were no longer allowed to employ Gentiles as domestic servants, the implication being that their employers would sexually misuse them. For similar reasons, Jews were banned from public swimming baths lest they seduce girls or pollute the water. A parallel law excluded all Jews from service in the German Armed Forces, in which many had fought with great distinction during the Great War. In fact the only Jews who were initially excluded from Nazi discriminatory measures were Jewish war veterans, largely because Hitler had had to respect the sensibilities of President Hindenburg and an army leadership that was wary of populist upstarts. “What seemed like a short-term tactic” Taken together these measures, which began as a one-off boycott, destroyed Jewish economic existence in Germany. In 1932 there were approximately 100,000 individual Jewish owned businesses, some large merchant banks, department store chains or such publishing houses as Mosse or Ullmann. By mid-1935 a quarter, and by mid-1938 two-thirds of these businesses had been eliminated, their owners bankrupted or taken over by “Aryan” rivals who scented a bargain. Minor Nazis on the make often benefited, since each takeover had to be approved by Party agencies, which knew how to benefit its own. In a parallel drive, the Jewish presence was systematically eradicated from cultural life too, so that even books by Jewish authors were purged from libraries, or burned by Nazi students in orgies of cultural vandalism. .com Jewish Human Rights Watch page 7/9 A History of Jewish Boycotts 1933 - 2015 Much discussion went into whether authors who used pen names (such as the biographer Emil Ludwig) should be forced to use their real name, in his case Emil Ludwig Cohn. A cultural and scientific brain drain ensued, ranging from the physicist Albert Einstein to film-maker Billy Wilder, and about a third of university professors, including 24 Nobel Prize laureates. There is no need here to pursue where this lead : to the orchestrated violence of 11 November 1938 (the Reichskristallnacht Pogrom) and then, once war erupted, to roving death squads and industrial extermination facilities. The total resources of a modern state and those of the Germans’ allies and collaborators were turned to the project of murdering Europe’s Jews. Following the War and the Holocaust, international sympathy for the Jews’ desire to found a state in their ancient homeland was driven in part by the recognition that only Jewish sovereignty could prevent another genocide of the Jews. BDS Boycotts | Nazi Boycotts It is not difficult to see the parallels between Nazi boycotts and today’s BDS, and therefore the dangers the latter poses. The boycotts for which the BDS movement strives are not a short-term measure but merely a step to eradicate the Jewish State, an aspiration its leaders have expressly declared. And the elimination of the Jewish State is part of a subtler campaign against Jews everywhere, evidenced both by the anti-Semitic atmosphere the BDS movement seeks to create and by its objective of removing the Jewish State which is tasked in part precisely to prevent such genocidal harm being dealt to the Jewish people yet again. The idea of the BDS movement is not a new one. It has a long and contemptible history, and anyone who does not mean the Jewish people harm should stand firmly against it. .com Jewish Human Rights Watch page 8/9 Jewish Human Rights Watch - Get involved JHRW welcomes your involvement in “Turning off the Tap of Jewish Hate” here in the UK. We welcome your involvement. To donate, to volunteer or support in any way - please email us as below: Email [email protected] Learn more www.JHRW.com YouTube JewishHRWatch Follow and connect with us on Twitter @JHRWatch Jewish Human Rights Watch .com