Episode 27: National origins of Zionist leaders

First aired on 30 July 2022

There is a rising tide of claims from apologists for the crimes of Zionism that they have been misunderstood. Palestinians might be indigenous to Palestine, but the Jews definitely are.

What is called the ‘Israel-Palestine’ conflict is a conflict over the same small piece of land by two rival groups of indigenous people. But how true is this? And what are the consequences of the argument?

In fact, most of the power structure of the Zionist regime is dominated by Ashkenazi Jews who have no ancestral link to Palestine.

Overall despite very significant financial and infrastructural contributions from Western European countries (especially the US, UK and France, for example via the Rothschild family), Eastern European Ashkenazim have been at the center of the Zionist power structure since the early years of the 20th Century.

For example, most members of the Jewish National Council in Palestine prior to the founding of the Zionist regime in 1948 were Ukrainian. As is well- known, key leaders of the Zionist movement hailed from Ukraine many, but not all Ukrainian Zionists were close to the Ukrainian nationalist movement.

For example, the far right Revisionist Zionist Vladimir Yevgenyevich Jabotinsky (later renamed Ze’ev Jabotinsky) was himself a direct descendant of Ukrainian Jewish settlers in Odessa.

He famously consorted with the leader of the Ukrainian Nationalists Symon Petliura, a proto-Nazi responsible for pogroms against the Jews and others. Arguably Zionism and Ukrainian nationalism share certain affinities which perhaps helps to contextualise the Zionist regimes ongoing support for the Zelensky regime.

As early as January 2022, Israel began planning to transfer Ukrainian Jews to become colonists in the land of the Palestinians. Israel’s Ministry of Aliyah and Immigrant Absorption proclaimed: "We call on the Jews of Ukraine to immigrate to Israel - your home." A later Zionist colonist from Ukraine, who was Prime Minister of the Zionist entity from 1969-1974 was Golda Mabovitch (later known as Golda Meir).

She claimed I’m a Palestinian’but also denied that the Palestinian people ever existed. All in all, seven of the 14 Zionist Prime Minister’s, so far, came directly from Russia, Poland, Ukraine or Belarus. The other seven were children of parents from modern Ukraine and/or Belarus (Ariel Sharon, Ehud Olmert, Yitzhak Rabin), Lithuania (Ehud Barak), Poland (Benjamin Netanyahu) Hungary/Romania (Yair Lapid) or Poland and America (Naftali Bennet).

All presidents of the Zionist entity, bar three, came directly or indirectly from Poland, Russia, Belarus, Ukraine, or in one case Austria. The obsession with proving the that Jews, all the Jews, are indigenous to Palestine flies in the face of the overwhelming evidence of the settler colonial nature of Zionism and that fact that most of those in charge originate in Eastern Europe. Even the Zionist paper Haaretz has published an article claiming that the argument that Jews are indigenous to Palestine ‘swims in fascist water