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15. Bruno Kreisky, Israel, and the Palestinian Question
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CHAPTER 15 Bruno Kreisky, Israel, and the Palestinian Question It was during the Holocaust years which he spent in the Swedish capital of Stockholm that Bruno Kreisky—the young exile from Vienna who would radically transform postwar Austrian Social Democracy—first honed many of the diplomatic skills which marked his later ascendancy as a political leader.1 At the same time, it was also in the safety of neutral Sweden (where he lived between 1938 and his postwar return to Austria) that Kreisky could distance himself not only from the Nazi reign of terror but from any serious reflection concerning the mass murder of European Jewry. The apparent indifference of the future Socialist Chancellor of Austria (who lost twentyone relatives to the horrors of German Nazi barbarity) in the face of the ravages of genocidal antisemitism should not, however, be ascribed primarily to his Swedish environment. Though Sweden’s wartime record during the Shoah was far from being exemplary, it did at least produce one truly unique Holocaust hero in the shape of Raoul Wallenberg. Kreisky’s attitude to issues of Jewish identity both before, during, and after the Holocaust could not have been more different. It was, if anything, distinctively Austro-Marxist and Jewish-assimlilationist rather than typically Scandinavian. Kreisky had, after all, already been socialized in an Austrian labor movement (he was twentyseven years old by the time he reached Stockholm) that was decidedly ambivalent about Jews. Though Kreisky subsequently insisted that he had never once suffered from antisemitism in his youth, this is simply not a credible claim. But it was one of many assertions by Bruno Kreisky which would subsequently heighten his popularity as the one Jew who could grant Gentile Austrians full exculpation from a latent sense of guilt over their prominent role in the Holocaust. Kreisky was destined to become the Entlastungsjude (exonerating Jew) freeing Austrians of the burdens of complicity in the German mass murder. In effect, twenty-five years after the end of World War II, he emerged as the star witness for the defence of Austria against “troublemakers” like Simon Wiesenthal and a multitude of critics abroad. Bruno Kreisky, Israel, and the Palestinian Question 480 Nobody seemed better suited than Kreisky to reinforce the Austrian cult of historical amnesia from within. Not only that, but Kreisky in the 1970s insisted on pushing the Socialist International and the European community towards full recognition of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO)— then still a self-avowed terrorist organization—as the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinians. Moreover, his polemics against Israel as an “undemocratic,” “clerical” and militarist State (unusual assertions for a leading European Social Democrat in the 1970s) ensured continuous confrontations with world Jewry as a whole. It should be remembered that Kreisky began to brand Israel as a “semi-fascist” or an “apartheid” State well before this turned into a respectable mainstream opinion or trendy sport in the West.2 In his provocative Middle Eastern foreign policy, Kreisky was generally supported by his own party (though some had reservations about his highly personalized feud with Nazi-hunter Simon Wiesenthal) and by the broad mass of Austrians—with whom Kreisky certainly appeared to be in tune at the peak of his career. Kreisky did not shrink from using his Jewish descent (which he never denied) to argue that he could be more “objective” than others in his relationship to Israel and Zionism. He had no hesitations, for example, in reproaching his friend, the West German Chancellor and SPD Chairman, Willy Brandt, for excessive “loyalty” to Israel. Nor did he draw back from asserting the essential commonality of interests between antisemites and Zionists—a recurring theme in his pronouncements which was guaranteed to arous the ire of many Jews.3 In bending over backwards to prove his total separation from anything “Zionist,” “Israeli,” or overtly Jewish, Kreisky undoubtedly reinforced his popularity in Austria, but he also ensured the enmity of most mainstream opinion among Jews. True, there were always some exceptions to the rule, like the maverick Israeli left-wing politician Uri Avnery, who not only maintained close relations with Kreisky, but reinforced his jaundiced opinions of Israel; or his friend, the extremely wealthy Austrian Jewish industrialist, Karl Kahane, who shared many of the Chancellor’s views on the Middle East and other matters. But for the majority of Diaspora Jews and especially Israelis, Austria’s socialist leader seemed like the epitome of Jewish self-loathing. Bruno Kreisky was, however, much admired as a...