Anti-Semitism, Zionism, Anti-Zionism: all are enemies of the proletariat, Part 1

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Preface

Since October 7 2023, the barbarism of war in the Middle East has descended to unprecedented levels. Before this date, there had been numerous attacks by nationalist terrorists against the population of Israel, but nothing compares to the ferocity and scale of the atrocities perpetrated by Hamas on October 7. And while the Israeli armed forces have in the past carried out numerous brutal reprisals against the population of Gaza, nothing compares to the systematic destruction of homes, hospitals, schools and other vital infrastructure throughout Gaza, and to the horrifying numbers of dead and wounded resulting from Israel’s campaign of revenge for October 7 -  a campaign which is more and more openly assuming the form of the ethnic cleansing of the whole area, a project now overtly supported by the Trump administration in the US. And not only has the conflict between Israel and Hamas spread to the decimation of Hizbollah in Lebanon, to attacks on the Houthis in Yemen and military operations against Iran itself, the region is also convulsed by parallel conflicts which seem no less intractable: between the Turks and Kurds in Syria, for example, or between Saudi Arabia and Iran and its Houthi agents for control of Yemen. The Middle East, one of the main cradles of civilisation, has emerged as a harbinger of its future destruction.

In the article  Spiral of atrocities in the Middle East: the terrifying reality of decomposing capitalism in International Review 171, we provided a historical overview of the ‘Israel-Palestine’ conflict against the background of the wider imperialist struggles for control of the Middle East. In the two articles that follow, we will focus on the ideological justifications that are used by the warring imperialist camps to justify this “spiral of atrocities”. Thus, the state of Israel never ceases to appeal to the memory of previous waves of anti-Jewish persecutions, and above all the Nazi Holocaust, in order to present the Zionist colonisation of Palestine as a legitimate movement of national liberation, and above all to justify its murderous offensives as being no more than the defence of the Jewish people against a future Holocaust. Meanwhile, Palestinian nationalism and its leftist supporters portray the October 7 massacre of Israeli and other civilians as a legitimate act of resistance against decades of oppression and displacement that go back to the foundation of the Israeli state. And in its slogan “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”,  Palestinian nationalism offers a sinister mirror image of the demand of the Zionist right for the establishment of a greater Israel: in the dark utopia envisioned by the first slogan, the land will be free of Jews, while the project of a Greater Israel is to be achieved by the mass displacement of the Arab populations of Gaza and the West Bank.

These ideologies are not merely passive reflections of the ‘material’ needs of war: they actively serve to mobilise the populations of the region, and across the world, behind the different belligerent camps.  Their analysis and demystification is thus a necessary task for those who raise the standard of internationalist opposition to all imperialist wars. And our intention is to produce further contributions that expose the roots of other ideologies that play a similar role in the region, such as Islamism and Kurdish nationalism.

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Part One: Anti-Semitism and the origins of Zionism

The bourgeois revolution against feudalism in the Europe of the late 18th and early 19th century generally took the form of struggles for national unification or independence against the petty kingdoms and larger empires dominated by decaying monarchies and aristocracies. The demand for national self-determination (for example for Poland against the Tsarist empire) could thus contain a clearly progressive element which was strongly supported by Marx and Engels, for example in the Communist Manifesto. Not because they saw this demand as the concretisation of an abstract ‘right’ of all national or ethnic groups, but because it could accelerate the political changes required for the development of bourgeois relations of production in a period when capitalism had not yet completed its historical mission. However, in the wake of the Paris Commune of 1871, the first example of the seizure of power by the proletariat, Marx had already begun to question whether there could be any more truly national wars, at least in the centres of the world capitalist system. This was because the ruling classes of Prussia and France had shown that, faced with the proletarian revolution, national bourgeoisies were ready to sink their differences in order to stifle the danger from the exploited class, and so used the ‘defence of the nation’ as a pretext for crushing the proletariat. By the time of the First World War, marking capitalism’s entry into its epoch of decline, Rosa Luxemburg, writing in the Junius Pamphlet, had concluded that national liberation struggles had completely lost any progressive content, entangled as they were in the machinations of competing imperialist powers. Not only that: the small nations had themselves become imperialist, and the ‘oppressed’ nation of yesterday had become the oppressors of even smaller nations, subjecting them to the same policies of plunder, expulsion and massacre that they themselves had experienced. The history of Zionism has entirely confirmed Rosa Luxemburg’s analysis. It had become a significant national movement in response to the ‘return’ of anti-Semitism in the latter part of the 19th century; and thus, no less than this new wave of anti-Semitism, it was essentially a product of a capitalist society that was already approaching its decadence. As we shall show in the articles that follow, it has demonstrated again and again that it is a “false Messiah”[1], which like all nationalisms has not only always acted as a player in wider imperialist games, but has consistently instrumentalised the horrific oppression and slaughter of Jewish populations in Europe and the Middle East to justify the expulsion and massacre of the ‘native’ population of Palestine.

But Luxemburg’s rejection of all forms of nationalism is equally confirmed by the history of the various expressions of ‘anti-Zionism’. Whether it wears the green flag of Jihadism or the red flag of capitalism’s left wing, this supposedly ‘anti-imperialist’ ideology is equally as reactionary as Zionism itself, serving to dragoon its followers into the war-fronts of capital, behind other imperialist powers which have no solution to the terrible plight of the Palestinian population. We will return to this in the second part of the article.

The resurgence of anti-Semitism in western Europe in the late 19th century

The Arbeiter-Zeitung, No. 19, May 9, 1890 published the following letter by Engels, originally written to a member of the German Social Democratic Party, Isidor Ehrenfreund. It was part of a more general recognition by the marxist wing of the workers’ movement that it was necessary to combat the rise of anti-Semitism, which was having an impact on the working class, and even parts of its political avant-garde, the Social Democratic Parties[2].

But whether you might not be doing more harm than good with your anti-Semitism is something I would ask you to consider. For anti-Semitism betokens a retarded culture, which is why it is found only in Prussia and Austria, and in Russia too. Anyone dabbling in anti-Semitism, either in England or in America, would simply be ridiculed, while in Paris the only impression created by M. Drumont’s writings – wittier by far than those of the German anti-Semites – was that of a somewhat ineffectual flash in the pan.

Moreover, now that he is standing for the Municipal Council he has actually had to declare himself an opponent of Christian no less than of Jewish capital. And M. Drumont would be read even were he to take the opposite view.

In Prussia it is the lesser nobility, the Junkers with an income of 10,000 marks and outgoings of 20,000, and hence subject to usury, who indulge in anti-Semitism, while both in Prussia and Austria a vociferous chorus is provided by those whom competition from big capital has ruined – the petty bourgeoisie, skilled craftsmen and small shop-keepers. But in as much as capital, whether Semitic or Aryan, circumcised or baptised, is destroying these classes of society which are reactionary through and through, it is only doing what pertains to its office, and doing it well; it is helping to impel the retarded Prussians and Austrians forward until they eventually attain the present-day level at which all the old social distinctions resolve themselves in the one great antithesis – capitalists and wage-labourers. Only in places where this has not yet happened, where there is no strong capitalist class and hence no strong class of wage-labourers, where capital is not yet strong enough to gain control of national production as a whole, so that its activities are mainly confined to the Stock Exchange – in other words, where production is still in the hands of the farmers, landowners, craftsmen and suchlike classes surviving from the Middle Ages – there, and there alone, is capital mainly Jewish, and there alone is anti-Semitism rife.

In North America not a single Jew is to be found among the millionaires whose wealth can, in some cases, scarcely be expressed in terms of our paltry marks, gulden or francs and, by comparison with these Americans, the Rothschilds are veritable paupers. And even in England, Rothschild is a man of modest means when set, for example, against the Duke of Westminster. Even in our own Rhineland from which, with the help of the French, we drove the aristocracy 95 years ago and where we have established modern industry, one may look in vain for Jews.

Hence anti-Semitism is merely the reaction of declining medieval social strata against a modern society consisting essentially of capitalists and wage-labourers, so that all it serves are reactionary ends under a purportedly socialist cloak; it is a degenerate form of feudal socialism and we can have nothing to do with that. The very fact of its existence in a region is proof that there is not yet enough capital there. Capital and wage-labour are today indivisible. The stronger capital and hence the wage-earning class becomes, the closer will be the demise of capitalist domination. So what I would wish for us Germans, amongst whom I also count the Viennese, is that the capitalist economy should develop at a truly spanking pace rather than slowly decline into stagnation.

In addition, the anti-Semite presents the facts in an entirely false light. He doesn’t even know the Jews he decries, otherwise he would be aware that, thanks to anti-Semitism in eastern Europe, and to the Spanish Inquisition in Turkey, there are here in England and in America thousands upon thousands of Jewish proletarians; and it is precisely, these Jewish workers who are the worst exploited and the most poverty-stricken. In England during the past twelve months we have had three strikes by Jewish workers. Are we then expected to engage in anti-Semitism in our struggle against capital?

Furthermore, we are far too deeply indebted to the Jews. Leaving aside Heine and Börne, Marx was a full-blooded Jew; Lassalle was a Jew. Many of our best people are Jews. My friend Victor Adler, who is now atoning in a Viennese prison for his devotion to the cause of the proletariat, Eduard Bernstein, editor of the London Sozialdemokrat, Paul Singer, one of our best men in the Reichstag – people whom I am proud to call my friends, and all of them Jewish! After all, I myself was dubbed a Jew by the Gartenlaube and, indeed, if given the choice, I'd as lief be a Jew as a ‘Herr von'!”

This was not the first time that the workers’ movement, and above all its petty bourgeois fringes, had been infected by what August Bebel once termed “the socialism of imbeciles” - essentially, the diversion of an embryonic anti-capitalism into the scapegoating of Jews, and in particular of “Jewish finance”, seen as the unique source of the miseries engendered by capitalist society. Proudhon’s anti-Semitism was vicious and overt[3], and that of Bakunin was not far behind. And indeed, even Marx and Engels themselves were not entirely immune from the disease. Marx’s On the Jewish Question in 1843 was written explicitly in favour of political emancipation for the Jews in Germany against the sophistries of Bruno Bauer, while also pointing to the limitations of a purely political emancipation within the boundaries of bourgeois society[4].  And yet at the same time the essay contained some concessions to anti-Semitic motifs which have been used by the enemies of marxism ever since; and the private correspondence of Marx and Engels, especially on the subject of Ferdinand Lassalle, contain a number of ‘jokes’ about his Jewishness (and even his ‘negroid’ features) which can – at best - only inspire a feeling of embarrassment. And in some of his earlier public writings Engels seems more or less unconscious of some of the anti-Semitic slurs in publications with which he was collaborating actively[5]. We will take up some of the issues posed by these scars in a future article.

However, by the time Engels wrote the letter to Ehrenfreund, his understanding of the whole question had been through a fundamental evolution. There were a number of factors behind this evolution, some of them reflected in the letter.

First, Engels had been through a series of political battles, in the period of the First International and after, in which opponents of the marxist current had not hesitated to use anti-Semitic attacks against Marx himself – Bakunin in particular, who located Marx’s ‘authoritarianism’ in the observation that he was both a Jew and German[6]. And in Germany, Eugene Dühring, whose purported ‘alternative system’ to the marxist theoretical framework prompted Engels’ famous polemic Anti-Dühring, expressed a profound hatred of the Jews, which in later writings anticipated the Nazis by calling for their literal extermination[7]. Thus Engels was able to see that the “socialism of imbeciles” was more than a product of stupidity or of theoretical error – it was a weapon against the revolutionary current he was seeking to develop. Thus, he ends the letter with a clear expression of solidarity against the racist attacks published in the anti-Semitic press on the many revolutionaries who had come from a Jewish background.

At the same time, as Engels explains in the letter, the late 19th century had seen the emergence of a Jewish proletariat in the cities of western Europe “thanks to anti-Semitism in eastern Europe”. In other words, the growing impoverishment of Jews in the Russian Empire, and the growing resort to pogroms by a decaying Tsarist regime, had driven hundreds of thousands of Jews to seek refuge in western Europe and the USA, the majority of them coming with little but the clothes on their backs, and having no alternative but to join the ranks of the proletariat, especially in the garment industries. This influx was, like today’s ‘flood’ of refugees towards the west, a key element in the rise of racist parties, but for Engels there was not a moment’s hesitation about supporting the struggles of these immigrant proletarians, who, as the letter said, had shown their militant spirit in a series of strikes (and we could add, through a rather high level of politicisation). Indeed Engels, in association with Marx’s daughter Eleonor, had gained first-hand experience of the strike movements of Jewish workers in the East End of London. It was thus perfectly evident that revolutionaries could under no circumstances “engage in anti-Semitism in our struggle against capital”.

The main weakness of the letter is the idea that anti-Semitism was essentially linked to the persistence of feudal relations and that the further development of capitalism would undermine its foundations, and even make it laughable.

Of course, it was true that anti-Semitism had deep roots in pre-capitalist social formations. It stretched at least as far back as ancient Greece and Rome, fuelled by the persistent tendency of the population of Israel to rebel against the political and religious dikats of the Greek and Roman empires. And it played an even more important role in feudalism The central ideology of feudal Europe, Catholic Christianity, was based on the stigmatisation of the Jews as the killers of Christ, an accursed people forever scheming to bring misfortunes on the Christians – whether through the poisoning of wells, the spreading of plague, or the sacrifice of Christian children in their Passover rituals. The development of the myth of the world Jewish conspiracy, which was given wings after the publication of the Okhrana forgery Protocols of the Elders of Zion in the early years of the 20th century, undoubtedly had its roots in these dark mediaeval mythologies. 

Moreover, at the material level, this persistent hatred of the Jews must be understood in connection to the economic role imposed on Jews in the feudal system, above all as usurers – a practice formally forbidden to Christians. While this role made them useful adjuncts of the feudal monarchs (who often presented themselves as ‘protectors of the Jews’), it also exposed them to periodic massacres which conveniently brought with them the wiping out of kingly or aristocratic debts – and eventually, to expulsion from many western European countries as the slow emergence of capitalism produced a ‘native’ financial elite which needed to eliminate competition from Jewish finance[8].

 It was also true that the main audience for anti-Semitism were the remnants of classes doomed by the advance of capital – the declining aristocracy, the petty bourgeoisie and so on. These were to a large extent the strata being appealed to by the new breed of anti-Semitic demagogues - Dühring and Marr in Germany (the latter credited with the invention of the term anti-Semitism - as a badge to be worn with pride), Drumont in France, Karl Lueger who became the mayor of Vienna, in 1897, etc. And finally, Engels was right in pointing out that the advance of the bourgeois revolution in Europe had, earlier on in the century, brought with it a certain advance in the political emancipation of the Jews. But Engels’ view that the “capitalist economy should develop at a truly spanking pace” and thus consign to the dustbin of history all the decaying feudal remnants, and with them all forms of “feudal socialism” such as anti-Semitism, underestimated the degree to which capital was rushing towards its own period of decay. Indeed, this is already hinted at in the letter, where Engels says that the stronger capitalism becomes, the “closer will be the demise of capitalist domination”.  And in other writings Engels had developed the most profound insights into the shape this demise would take:

  • at the economic level, the very conquest of the globe and the drive to integrate all its pre-capitalist regions into the orbit of capitalist social relations would open the floodgates of world overproduction, and this perspective was already being outlined by the end of the ten-year cycle of “boom and bust” and the onset of the “long depression” of the 1880s. It should be added that the impact of the depression also contributed to the rise of anti-Semitic agitation in Europe, which often focused on blaming the ‘Jewish money kings’ for the economic ills now becoming apparent.[9]
  • at the military level, Engels was well aware that this conquest of the globe, the hunt for colonies, would not be a peaceful process, and in one of his most remarkable predictions foresaw that inter-imperialist competition would ultimately lead to a devastating European war[10]. Imperialism also provided a more ‘modern’ form of racism, using a deformed Darwinism to justify the domination of the ‘White Race’ over the ‘lesser breeds’, among whom the Jews were seen as a particularly malevolent force.
  • At the level of the organisation of capital, Engels could already see that the state was assuming a central role in the management of the national economies, a tendency which was to reach its full fruition in the period of capitalist decline[11].

Thus far from consigning anti-Semitism to the dustbin of history, the further development of world capital, its accelerating race towards an era of historic crisis, would give a new lease of life to anti—Jewish racism and persecution, above all in the wake of the defeat of the proletarian revolutions of 1917-23.

Thus,

  • In the 1905 revolution in Russia – already a harbinger of the approaching epoch of proletarian revolution – the pogrom was adopted by the Tsarist regime as direct method of crushing the revolution and creating divisions within the working class. This counter-revolutionary strategy was used on an even bigger scale by the White armies in Russia as a weapon against the revolution. Hence the intransigent opposition of Lenin and the Bolsheviks to any form of anti-Semitism, poison for the workers’ struggle.  In Germany, defeat in World war One was explained by the legend of the “stab in the back” by a cabal of marxists and Jews, giving a major impetus to the growth of fascist groups and parties, above all Hitler’s National Socialist Workers’ Party. Needless to say, these gangs were intimately linked to the military formations which, at the behest of the Social Democratic government, had carried out the brutal repression of workers’ revolts in Berlin, Munich, and elsewhere. In other European countries during the 1920s, such as Poland and Hungary, the defeat of the revolution was consolidated by anti-Semitic legislation which prefigured what was to come in Germany under the Nazis.
  • The world economic crisis of the 1930s, the product of impersonal capitalist contradictions that are rarely visible and hard to comprehend, was also exploited to the hilt by the fascist and Nazi parties to offer a ‘simpler’ explanation, with an easily identifiable scapegoat: the rich Jewish financier, allied with the bloody-handed Bolshevik in a sinister conspiracy against Aryan civilisation.

In the full glare of these horrifying developments, a young member of the Trotskyist movement, Avram Leon, trying in Nazi-occupied Belgium to develop a few insights by Marx into a historical understanding of the Jewish Question[12],  was to conclude that this was a question that decadent capitalism would be totally unable to solve.  This was no less true of the so-called ‘socialist’ regimes in the USSR and its bloc. Under Stalin’s reign, anti-Semitic campaigns were often used to settle scores within the bureaucracy and provide a scapegoat for the miseries of the Stalinist system. The “doctor’s plot” of 1953 is particularly notorious, with its echoes of the old story of Jews as secret poisoners. Meanwhile the Stalinist version of ‘Jewish self-determination’ took the form of the “autonomous region” of Birobidzhan in Siberia, which Trotsky rightly labelled a “bureaucratic farce”. These persecutions, often under the banner of ‘anti-Zionism’, continued in the post-Stalin period, leading to mass emigration of Russian Jews to Israel.

If the upsurge of modern anti-Semitism, and the reinvention of utterly reactionary mythologies inherited from feudalism, was a sign of capitalism’s approaching senility, the same is true of modern Zionism, which emerged in the 1890s as a direct reaction to the anti-Jewish tide.

Dreyfus, Herzl, and the evolution of Zionism

As we pointed out in the introduction to this article, Zionism was the product of a more general development of nationalism in the 19th century, the ideological reflection of the rising bourgeoisie and its replacement of feudal fragmentation by more unified nation states. The unification of Italy and emancipation from Austrian hegemony was one of the heroic achievements of this period which had a definite impact on the first theoreticians of Zionism (Moses Hess for example - see below). But the Jews did not conform to the main trends in bourgeois nationalism, since they lacked a unified territory and even a common language. This was one of the factors which prevented Zionism from having a mass appeal until it was driven forward by the rising anti-Semitism of the late 19th century.

Zionist ideology also drew on the long-standing ‘peculiarities’ of the Jewish populations, whose separate existence was structured both by the specific economic role carried out by Jews in the feudal economy but also by powerful political and ideological factors: on the one hand, the state-enforced ghettoisation of the Jews and their exclusion from key areas of feudal society; on the other hand, the Jews’ own  view of themselves as the “Chosen People”, who could only be a “light unto the nations” by remaining distinct from them, at least until the coming of the Messiah and the Kingdom of God on Earth; these ideas were framed, of course, by the mythology of exile and promised return to Zion which permeates the Biblical background to Jewish history.

 For centuries, however, while many orthodox Jews from the “Diaspora” made individual pilgrimages to the land of Israel, the main teaching of the rabbis was that the rebuilding of the Temple and the formation of a Jewish state could only be achieved through the coming of the Messiah. Some orthodox Jewish sects, such as Neturei Karta, still hold to such ideas today and are fiercely anti-Zionist, even those living in Israel.

The development of secularism in the course of the 19th century made it possible for a non-religious form of the “Return” to gain adherence among the Jewish populations. But the dominant result of the decline of orthodox Judaism and its replacement by more modern ideologies such as liberalism and rationalism was that the Jews in the advanced capitalist countries had begun losing their unique characteristics and assimilating into bourgeois society. Some marxists, notably Kautsky[13], even saw in the process of assimilation the possibility of solving the problem of anti-Semitism within the confines of capitalism[14]. However, the revival of anti-Semitism in the latter part of the century was to call such assumptions into question and at the same give a decisive push to the capacity of modern political Zionism to offer another alternative to the persecution of the Jews and the realisation of the national aspirations of the Jewish bourgeoisie.

The title of ‘founding father’ of this brand of Zionism is usually given to Theodor Herzl, who convened the first Zionist Congress in 1897. But there had been precursors. In 1882, Leon Pinsker, a Jewish doctor living in Odessa in the Russian Empire had published Self-Emancipation. A Warning Addressed to His Brethren. By a Russian Jew, advocating Jewish emigration to Palestine. Pinsker had been an assimilationist until his belief in the possibility of Jews finding safety and dignity in ‘gentile’ society was shattered by witnessing a brutal pogrom in Odessa in 1881.

Perhaps more curious was the evolution of Moses Hess, who in the early 1840s had been a comrade of Marx and Engels and indeed played a significant role in their own transition from radical democracy to communism, and in their recognition of the revolutionary character of the proletariat. But by the time the Communist Manifesto was produced their paths had diverged, and Marx and Engels were placing Hess among the “German” or “True” Socialists. Certainly, by the 1860s, Hess had embarked on a very different direction. Again, probably influenced by the first signs of anti-Semitic reaction against the formal emancipation of the Jews in Germany, Hess turned more and more to the idea that national and even racial conflicts were of no less importance than class struggle as social determinants, and in his book Rome and Jerusalem, the Last National Question (1862) he advocated an early form of Zionism which dreamed of establishing a Jewish socialist commonwealth in Palestine. Significantly, Hess had already understood that such a project would need the backing of one of the world’s great powers, and for him this task would fall to Republican France.

 Like Pinsker, Herzl was a more or less assimilated Jew, a lawyer from Austria who had witnessed first-hand the new dawn of Judeophobia and the election of Karl Lueger as mayor of the city.  But it was probably the Dreyfus Affair in France which had the biggest impact on Herzl, convincing him that there could be no solution to the persecution of the Jews until they had their own state. In 1894, Republican France, where the revolution had granted civil rights to Jews, was the scene of a trumped-up trial for treason of a Jewish officer, Alfred Dreyfus, who was sentenced to life imprisonment and banished to the Devil’s Island penal colony in French Guyana, where he spent the next five years in very harsh conditions. Subsequent evidence that Dreyfus had been framed was suppressed by the army, and the affair produced a sharp split in French society, pitting the Catholic right, the army and the followers of Drumont against the Dreyfusards, whose leading figures included Emile Zola and Georges Clemenceau. Eventually (but not until 1906) Dreyfus was exonerated, but the divisions within the French bourgeoisie did not disappear, returning to the surface with the rise of fascism in the 1930s and in the Petainist “National Revolution” after France fell to Nazi Germany in 1941.

Herzl’s Zionism was entirely secular, even if it drew on the ancient Biblical motifs of exile and return to the Promised Land, which as the majority of Zionists recognised, had much more ideological power than other potential “homelands” under discussion at the time (Uganda, South America, Australia, etc) .

Above all, Herzl understood the need to sell his utopia to the rich and powerful of the day. Thus, he went cap in hand not only to the Jewish bourgeoisie, some of whom had already been financing Jewish emigration to Palestine and elsewhere, but also to rulers such as the Ottoman Sultan and the German Kaiser; inn 1903 he even had an audience with the notoriously anti-Semitic Interior Minister Plehve in Russia, who had been involved in provoking the horrific Kishinev pogrom that same year. Plehve told Herzl that the Zionists could operate freely in Russia as long as they stuck to encouraging Jews to leave for Palestine. After all, had not the Tsar's minister Pobedonostsev stated that the aim of his government with regard to the Jews was that "One third will die out, one third will leave the country and one third will be completely dissolved in the surrounding population”? And here were the Zionists offering to put the “leaving the country” clause into effect…. This mutuality of interests between Zionism and the most extreme forms of anti-Semitism was thus woven into the movement from its inception and would re-occur throughout its history.  And Herzl was categorial in his belief that fighting anti-Semitism was a waste of time – not least because, at some level, he considered that the anti-Semites were right in seeing Jews as an alien body in their midst[15].

“In Paris, then, I gained a freer attitude towards anti-Semitism, which I now begin to understand historically and to make allowances for. Above all I recognise the emptiness and futility of efforts to ‘combat anti-Semitism’” Diaries, Vol 1 p 6, May-June 1895.

Thus, from the beginning:

  • Anti-Semitism was a central factor in the rise and development of a significant Zionist movement, but it was based on the belief that it was impossible to overcome Jew-hatred until the Jews had their own state, or at least their own “national homeland”.
  • Zionism therefore proposed not to focus its energies on fighting anti-Semitism in the “Diaspora”, and even advocated cooperation with its main proponents.
  • From the beginning, the Zionist project required the support of the dominant imperialist powers, as would become even clearer in 1917 when Britain issued the Balfour Declaration. This was a prefiguration of what was to become the reality of all national movements in the epoch of capitalism’s decadence: they could only advance by tying themselves to one or other of the imperialist powers that dominate the planet in this epoch.

The quest for backing by the imperialist powers was entirely logical in that Zionism was born in the period when imperialism was still very much engaged in the acquisition of new colonies in the peripheral regions of the globe, and it saw itself as an attempt to create a colony in an area that was either declared uninhabited (the “land without people for a people without land” slogan of dubious origin) or inhabited by backward tribes who could only benefit from a new civilising mission by a more advanced western population[16]. Herzl himself wrote a kind of utopian novel called Alt-Neuland, in which the Palestinian landowners sell some of their land to Jews, invest in modern agricultural machinery and thus raise the living standards of the Palestinian peasants. Problem solved!

“Workers of Zion”: the impossible fusion of marxism and Zionism

Herzl’s political Zionism was clearly a bourgeois phenomenon, an expression of nationalism at a time when capitalism was approaching its era of decline and thus the progressive character of national movements was coming to an end. And yet, particularly in Russia, other forms of Jewish separatism were penetrating the workers’ movement during the same period, in the shape of Bundism on the one hand, and “Socialist Zionism” on the other. This was a consequence of the material and ideological segregation of the Jewish working class under Tsarism.

The structure of the Jewish working class corresponded to a weak organic composition of capital inside the Pale of Settlement, which implied a concentration in the final stages of production. The cultural specificities of the Jewish proletariat, linked in the first place to its religion and language, were reinforced by structural separation from the Russian proletariat. The concentration of Jewish workers in a kind of socioeconomic ghetto was the material origin of the birth of a specific Jewish workers movement[17].

The Bund - General Jewish Labour Bund in Russia and Poland – was founded in 1897 as an explicitly socialist party and played a significant role in the development of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, of which it saw itself as a part. It rejected religious and Zionist ideology and stood for a form of “national cultural autonomy” for the Jewish masses within Russia and Poland, as part of a wider socialist programme. It also aimed to be the sole representative of Jewish workers in Russia, and it was this aspect of its politics which was most severely criticised by Lenin, since it implied a federalist vision, a kind of “party within the party” that would undermine the effort to build a centralised revolutionary organisation across the Empire[18]. This divergence led to a split at the Second Congress of the RSDLP in 1903, although it was not the end of cooperation and even attempts at reunification in the years that followed. The Bund’s workers were often at the forefront of the 1905 revolution in Russia. But the capacity of Jewish and non-Jewish workers to unite in the soviets and fight alongside each other – including in the defence of Jewish districts against pogroms – already pointed beyond all forms of separatism and towards the future unification of the entire proletariat, both in their general, unitary organisations and their political vanguard.

As regards “Socialist Zionism”, we have already mentioned the views of Moses Hess. Within Russia, there was the group around Nachman Syrkin, the Zionist Socialist Workers’ Party, whose positions were close to those of the Socialist Revolutionaries. Syrkin was one of the first advocates of collective settlements - the kibbutzim – in Palestine. But it was the Poale Zion (Workers of Zion) group around Ber Borochov which made the attempt to justify Zionism using marxist theoretical concepts. According to Borochov, the Jewish question could only be resolved once the Jewish populations of the globe had a “normal” class structure, doing away with the “inverted pyramid” in which the intermediate strata had a preponderant weight; and this could only be achieved through the “conquest of labour” in Palestine. This project was to be embodied in the idea of “Jewish Labour Only” in the new agricultural and industrial settlements, which, unlike other forms of colonialism, would not be directly founded on the exploitation of the native workforce. Thus, eventually, a Jewish proletariat would confront a Jewish bourgeoisie and be ready to move on to the socialist revolution in Palestine. This was in essence a form of Menshevism, a “theory of stages” in which every nation first had to go through a bourgeois phase in order to lay down the conditions for a proletarian revolution – when in reality the world was fast approaching a new epoch in which the only revolution on the agenda of history was the world-wide, proletarian revolution, even if numerous regions had not yet entered the bourgeois stage of development. Furthermore, the policy of Jewish Labour Only became, in reality, the springboard of a new form of colonialism in which the native population was to be progressively expropriated and expelled. And in fact, when Borochov considered the existing Arab population of Palestine at all, he displayed the same colonialist attitude as the mainstream Zionists. “The natives of Palestine will assimilate economically and culturally with whoever brings order into the country and undertakes the development of the forces of production of Palestine[19].

Borochovism was thus a complete dead-end, and this was expressed in the eventual fate of Poale Zion. Although its left wing had demonstrated its proletarian character in 1914-20, opposing the imperialist war and supporting the workers’ revolution in Russia, and even applying, unsuccessfully, to join the Comintern in its early years, the reality of life in Palestine led to irreconcilable divisions, with the majority of the left breaking from Zionism and forming the Palestine Communist Party in 1923[20]. The right wing (which included the future Prime Minister of Israel David Ben Gurion) went towards social democracy and was to play a leading role in the management of the proto-state Yishuv before 1948, and the State of Israel after the “War of Indeopendence”.

In the early 70s, Borochovism, having more or less disappeared, enjoyed a kind of revival – as an instrument of Israeli state propaganda. Faced with a new generation of Jewish youth in the west who were critical of Israel’s policies, above all after the 1967 war and the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, the left Zionist parties which had their ancestral origins in Poale Zion put their energies into winning over these young Jews lured by the anti-Zionism of the “New Left”, with the bait being the assurance that you can be a marxist and Zionist at the same time, and that Zionism was a national liberation movement as equally valid as the Vietnamese or Palestinian liberation movements. 

In this part of the article, we have argued quite the opposite: that Zionism, born in a period in which ‘national liberation’ was becoming increasingly impossible, could not avoid attaching itself to the dominant imperialist powers of the day. In the second part, we will show not only that its whole history was marked by this reality, but also that it inevitably spawned its own imperialist projects. But we will also argue, in contrast to the left wing of capital which presents Zionism as some kind of unique evil, that this was to be the fate of all nationalist projects in the epoch of capitalist decadence, and that the anti-Zionist nationalisms which it also engendered have been no exception to this general rule.

 Amos, February 2025

 

 

[1] Zionism, False Messiah is the title of a book by Nathan Weinstock first published in 1969. It contains a very detailed history of Zionism and amply demonstrates the reality of the title. But it is also written from a Trotskyist starting point which provides a sophisticated argument in favour of “anti-imperialist” national struggles. We will return to this in the second article. Ironically, Weinstock has renounced his earlier views and now describes himself as a Zionist, as the Jewish Chronicle  gleefully points out

Meet the Trotskyist anti-Zionist who saw the errors of his ways, Jewish Chronicle 4 December 2014

[2] In his book The Socialist Response to Anti-Semitism in Imperial Germany (Cambridge 2007), Lars Fischer provides a good deal of material demonstrating that even the most able leaders of the German Social Democratic Party – including Bebel, Kautsky, Liebknecht and Mehring - displayed a certain level of confusion on this issue. Interestingly, he singles out Rosa Luxemburg for maintaining the clearest and most intransigent position on the rise of Jew-hatred and its anti-proletarian role.

[3] For example: “We must demand [the Jews'] expulsion from France, except for those married to French women; the religion must be proscribed because the Jew is the enemy of humanity, one must return this race to Asia or exterminate it. Heine, (Alexandre) Weill and others are only spies; Rothschild, (Adolph) Crémieux, Marx, (Achille) Fould are evil, unpredictable, envious beings who hate us”. Dreyfus, François-Georges. 1981. "Antisemitismus in der Dritten Franzö Republik." In Bernd Marin and Ernst Schulin, eds., Die Juden als Minderh der Geschichte. München: DTV

[4] See 160 years on: Marx and the Jewish question, International Review 114

[5] See for example Mario Kessler, “Engels’ position on anti-Semitism in the context of contemporary socialist discussions”, Science & Society, Vol. 62, No. 1, Spring 1998, 127-144, for some examples, as well as some questionable statements by Engels himself about Jews in his writings about the national question.

[6]  For example, in “To the Brothers of the Alliance in Spain”, 1872. See also https://libcom.org/article/translation-antisemitic-section-bakunins-lett...

[7] See Kessler, op cit

[8] This didn’t exclude the fact that later on, especially following the political ‘emancipation’ of European Jews as a result of the bourgeois revolution, a real Jewish bourgeoisie arose in Europe, particularly in the field of finance. The Rothschilds are the most obvious example of this.

[9] See our article Decadence of capitalism (vi): The theory of capitalist decline and the struggle against revisionism. The involvement of certain Jewish bankers in the stock market crash that precipitated the depression provided fuel for this demagogy.

[10] ibid

[11] In Socialism, Utopian and Scientific

[14] In the 1930s Trotsky gave an interview in which he said that “During my youth I rather leaned toward the prognosis that the Jews of different countries would be assimilated and that the Jewish question would thus disappear in a quasi-automatic fashion. The historical development of the last quarter of a century has not confirmed this perspective. Decaying capitalism has everywhere swung over to an exacerbated nationalism, one part of which is anti-Semitism. The Jewish question has loomed largest in the most highly developed capitalist country of Europe, in Germany” https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1940/xx/jewish.htm. Given his more general political framework, this led Trotsky to argue that only socialism could offer any real ‘national self-determination’ to the Jews (and the Arabs for that matter).

[15] This outlook is even more explicit in a statement by the German political Zionist Jacob Klatzkin, who wrote that “If we do not admit the rightfulness of anti-Semitism, we deny the rightfulness of our own nationalism. If our own people is deserving and willing to live its own national life, then it is an alien body thrust into the nations among whom it lives, an alien body that insists on its own distinctive identity…It is right, therefore, that they should fight against us for their national integrity” (quoted in Lenni Brenner, Zionism in the Age of the Dictators: A Reappraisal, London 1983).

[16] There were some exceptions in the Zionist movement to this paternalistic attitude. Asher Ginsberg, better known through his pen-name Ahad Ha’am, was in fact very critical of this ‘colonising’ attitude towards the local inhabitants, and rather than a Jewish state proposed a kind of network of local communities both Jewish and Arab. In sum, a kind of anarchist utopia.

[17] Enzo Traverso, The Marxists and the Jewish Question, The History of a Debate, 1843-1943, English edition 1994, p 96

[18] See in particular Lenin, “The position of the Bund in the Party”, Iskra 51, 22 October 1903, available on Marxist Internet Archive. See also 1903-4: the birth of Bolshevism, International Review 116

[19] Borochov, “On the Question of Zion and Territory, 1905”, quoted in The Other Israel, The Radical Case against Zionism, edited by Arie Bober1972

[20] This took place after a complex process of division and reunification, essentially around the attitude to Zionism and Arab nationalism, and was to be followed by further splits around the same issues later on. It is worth noting here that the adoption of the position of the Comintern on the national question – rejection of Zionism in favour of support for nascent Arab nationalism – did not signify a move towards genuine internationalism. As we recount in our article about our comrade Marc Chirik (Marc, Part 1: From the Revolution of October 1917 to World War II, International Review 65): Marc, whose family had fled to Palestine to avoid the pogroms being stirred up against the proletarian revolution in Russia, helped, at the age of 12, to form the youth section of the CP in Palestine – but was soon expelled for his opposition to nationalism in all its forms…

Rubric: 

Ideologies of imperialist war