Already the founding father, Theodor Herzl, a Viennese writer, penned some pieces with a clear anti-Semitic slant. For him, Zionism was not just a geographical transplantation, but also a means of turning the despicable commercial Jew of the Diaspora into an upright, industrious human being.

Herzl traveled to Russia in order to win the support of their anti-Semitic, pogrom-inciting leaders for his project, promising to take the Jews off their hands.

Indeed, it was always a main plank of Zionist propaganda that only in the future Jewish state will Jews be able to live a normal life. The slogan was to "overturn the social pyramid" – putting it on a sound basis of workers and farmers, instead of speculators and bankers.

When I was a schoolboy in (then) Palestine, everything we learned was soaked with a profound contempt for "exile Jews", those Jews everywhere who preferred to stay in the Diaspora. They were definitely much inferior to us.