Palestinian residents of the town of Ramle raise their hands in surrender to Israeli soldiers on July 11, 1948. Photo: Reuters
Introduction: Zionism must go!
Israel’s genocidal war on Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank opens the prospect of a rapid acceleration of imperialist rivalry to redivide the world between the Western Bloc led by the U.S. and the Eastern Bloc led by China. The opening of this new front between the Blocs will likely spread across the whole of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) joining the existing fronts and creating new ones threatening World War III. These Blocs originated at the end of the Cold War when in 1989-91 Russia and China were finally brought to their knees forcing the ruling bureaucracies to embark on capitalist restoration.
Yet this historic defeat for workers was far from the ‘end of history’ as the victory of Western capitalism over Eastern ‘communism’. Russia and China withstood imperialist recolonisation and emerged as new imperialist powers. This set in motion a new bipolar phase in the long running dynamic of inter-imperialist rivalry for control of Eurasia. Both Western and Eastern Blocs had no option but to advance their interests at the expense of their rival but now under conditions of the economic decline of the Western Bloc relative to the rising Eastern Bloc. This saw the Western Bloc forced to go beyond diplomacy and economic sanctions to increasingly embark on a succession of proxy hot wars and invasions, from Yugoslavia in the 1990s, to Iraq and Afghanistan in the 2000s, Syria and Libya in the 2010s, Ukraine in the 2020s and Palestine today.
It is within this context that we can understand the character of the war in Palestine today and consider its consequences for the wider geopolitical realignment of imperialist forces. Israel at the level of economic relations is not different from any of the other settler colonies that came into existence to build bourgeois nation states to protect their own national capital. However, since it came into formal existence in the post WWII war period of world-wide so-called decolonisation, it has special characteristics that must be explained.
We will show that Israel’s ‘exceptionalism’ is due to the historic collaboration of the Zionist organizations with the imperialist ruling classes, including not only the British but also the fascists Mussolini and Hitler. The Zionists’ agreements with European leaders were based on the ideology they shared with the imperialist ruling classes, that Jews as a people were incompatible with the national characters of European nations. They then made pacts with these ruling classes, notably the Nazi regime, to deport Jews to Palestine, their proclaimed ‘homeland of Israel,’ and proceeded to build military organizations to displace the Palestinians. Immigrants to Israel were selected to favor capitalists and petty bourgeoisie committed to the Zionist cause. As a result, Jewish workers who joined working class united fronts to resist fascism in Europe were betrayed, as were the millions of Jews who suffered a genocide under fascist rule.
The formation of a settler state in 1948 was thus based on the economics and ideology of the Zionist bourgeoisie at the expense of Jewish workers worldwide. This had suited the economic interests of the British who helped create favorable conditions for the Zionists to build the administrative and military elements of their state in the post-WWI period. And with the post-war settlement following WWII which divided Europe between the Atlantic powers and the Soviet Union, the U.S. readily adopted Israel as a ‘land-based aircraft carrier’ to act as a forward military base of the U.S. in the Middle East. Overnight the Anti-Defamation League converted to Zionism. And once the extent of Middle East oil was understood generally by U.S. imperialism, the Zionist state project was approved and its existence guaranteed.
In the 75 years since, Israel backed by the U.S. imperialist Bloc has helped stabilize the Arab states allowing the Western Bloc to intervene at will. The Zionist’s reward has been the constant encroachment on Palestinian land by any means necessary right up to October 7, 2023. What is ‘exceptional’ about Israel then is its special role in sharing U.S. ‘exceptionalism’, that is, its impunity in projecting economic and physical expansion in Palestine by means of a brutal military occupation. This expansion was justified by the Zionist ideology of the ‘chosen people’ and led to the systematic dehumanization and genocide of the Palestinian people.
Then October 7, 2023 happened. In the 21st century, Capital’s terminal crisis in destroying its conditions of existence has intensified inter-imperialist rivalry, forcing the downloading of the costs of the crisis onto their allies, their client states, and finally onto the oppressed working masses. The class contradiction between Zionist settler colonialism and its oppressed Palestinian subjects intensified to breaking point with Hamas’ breakout from the Gaza concentration camp, revealing the hollowed-out fragility of both the declining U.S. imperialism and its military proxy, Israel.
Lenin said that a revolutionary crisis arises out of the failure of the bourgeoisie to rule in the old way, colliding with the working masses’ refusal to be ruled in the old way. The Hamas uprising signaled the disruption of the longstanding special relation between the U.S. and Israel, and tested the strength of this special relation, and in turn, relations with the Arab regimes of MENA. The cumulative build-up of military attacks on Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank about to be ‘normalized’ by an agreement between Israel and Saudi Arabia sparked off Hamas military action. The Zionist’s reaction was to reach deep into its reactionary proto-fascist ideology of ‘blood and soil’ and to bring on the final solution – the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza.
That a genocide by the Zionist state was not stopped by the U.S. and its close allies, demonstrates to the world’s workers and oppressed that the imperialist ruling classes cannot rule in the old way with impunity. Israel’s ‘right to defend itself’ has been rejected by the masses for its incredible brutality. The Zionist ideology which projects its own anti-Semitism onto its opponents is exposed as cynical and hypocritical. The ‘chosen people’ cannot hide behind their holocaust. They must decide, do they condone genocide, or reject Zionist ideology?
The Palestinians represent the vanguard of the world revolution in resisting their ‘dehumanization’ as ‘human animals’. There is no moral equivalence between the occupying Zionist state oppressors and the occupied stateless Palestinian people. Palestinians are fighting a war of national liberation which can succeed only if they win the right to return to the land from the ‘river to the sea’. The world’s workers must join forces with them in the fight for self-determination, leading the struggle to build an international United Front against imperialism and its political allies. To prevent the imperialists, West and East, turning this liberation war into one more proxy war like Ukraine, this united front must build a new party of socialist revolution with a transitional program to create soviets and workers’ governments everywhere.
Can the U.S. or China Blocs Free Palestine? NO!
The war on Gaza is realigning the two Blocs at a rapid rate as it reflects rising pressure on the fault line between Europe and Asia in West Asia. The ‘geopolitical’ experts note that the military invasion of Gaza and the armed settlers actions in the West Bank by Israel marks a ‘historical shift’. The narrative from the West sees this as the ultimate test of ‘Western Values’, i.e. human rights, democracy and freedom from ‘terror’, against the axis of evil – Islamics, communism, terror. So, the Western imperialist powers stand or fall on Israel’s right as a nation state to ‘defend itself’ against Islamic terrorism.
The counter-narrative from the East is that this is the ‘end of civilization’ understood as the reign of the European/Anglo-American powers which has lasted for centuries. Israel is a settler colony and does not have the right as an occupying power to wage war against a stateless people, let alone one it is occupying, or to deny Palestine the same national rights under existing international law, UN resolutions etc,. Moreover, if the West is really defending its values of democracy and freedom, perhaps it should be taking Israel to the International Criminal Court (ICC), as it does with Russia over alleged war crimes in Ukraine. And it should object to the IDF invasion of Gaza causing rising mass deaths of women and children, going beyond ethnic cleansing, to actual genocide.
What both the U.S. and China Blocs have in common, is the conception of world geopolitics where states compete through diplomacy, economic or military action, and arrive at a new balance of power, or ‘settlements’, of the stronger over the weaker. The assumption on both sides is that this process is based on ‘reason’. Political analyst Pepe Escobar is a good example of such thinking. He conceives of a world where the disturbances of a rational balance of power results from ‘irrationality’. That ‘irrationality’ means nations acting in their own interests against others which blowback to damage their interests. The current classic case is the West fighting a proxy war to expand NATO in Ukraine at the expense of Russia and the multi-polar Bloc aligned with China. This war is ‘írrational’ as it backfires and strengthens that bloc at the expense of the Western Bloc. For Escobar the Eastern bloc is rational in seeking negotiation and settlement of differences short of initiating wars.
Therefore, Israel as a military proxy of the Western Bloc conducting a genocidal war against Palestinians is ‘irrational’. It cannot advance its interests when it causes a massive blowback from the multi-polar Bloc, including most of the MENA states. The solution must be a re-balancing of both poles as part of a rational global order. So we see China, Russia, and the BRICS lining up behind Palestine to demand a UN controlled ceasefire to allow a negotiated settlement – a Palestinian state (apartheid statelet!) alongside an inevitably Zionist Israel! On the other side, the U.S., UK and its EU allies are so arrogant they don’t see the ‘irrationality’ of going further into debt financing Israel’s expansionist war and failing to put a stop to it.
Clearly the trans-Atlantic capitalist elites still have nostalgic delusions in a glorious historic Eurocentric hegemony over Asia and the Global South. This zombie-like Euro elite fears the loss of its declining hegemony as its zero to the sum of the China Bloc. This fear is real because while geopolitics may be the Great Game for Eurasia, the real player is the global working class that has never been reduced to a spectator in some conspiratorial game between ruling classes. This class exists as the historic protagonist for a new world which ends imperialism and its wars, when the only war is class war. It is the class struggle that forces the imperialists to go to war over their spheres of interest. In the last analysis it is the terminal crisis of capital awakening the working masses that will put an end to ruling classes and their world wars. It is the profit motive which drives great power rivalry beyond the abstract rationality of equilibrium, to the material reality of the class struggle for the survival of the fittest.
In the end it is the need for energy that drives the profit system. And it is this ever increasing energy consumption of capitalist production exhausting the world’s energy resources that is destroying the ecological equilibrium on Earth. So there is nothing ‘rational’ or ‘balanced’ about either pole in this bi-polar world continuing this destructive rampage against nature and humanity.
The great powers fight over access to cheap energy, raw materials and labor power, necessary for the production of surplus-value and profits. The failure of the U.S. Bloc to accumulate profits in the 21st century to match the rate of growth of the China Bloc explains the current power struggle. The terminal crisis of capital in the 21st century. expresses the fundamental contradiction of capitalist society against nature which makes capitalism destroy itself, opening the road for socialism.
This means today that there is no solution to the century-long war of Zionism against the Palestinians that can be negotiated by the imperialist Blocs that will bring freedom and democracy for the masses. The only ‘rational’ solution capable of stopping such genocidal wars is the victory of the masses in the class war against global capital to stop its destruction of the planet. The masses must support Palestinian self-determination against both imperialist Blocs and all their client state proxies’ endorsement of reactionary capitalism, transforming this struggle as the Permanent Revolution to overthrow the Zionist regime and install a Workers’ and Peasants’ Government.
What is Zionism?
The Zionist origins from the liberal imperialist Theodor Herzl to Vladimir Jabotinsky of the ‘revisionist’ current is an unbroken thread down to Netanyahu. We will show how Zionist ideology develops by both reflecting and rationalizing its material base as a developing settler state. Most working class Jews understood Zionism as pro-imperialist, pro-Nazi and anti-Bolshevik for economic reasons. So they had little interest in bourgeois nation building. Zionism arose as a bourgeois project late in capitalist development when most Jews were already assimilated into capitalist social relations. Fascism was the reactionary throwback of failing finance capital bent on destroying the political unity between working class Jews with the broader working class. The creation of Israel by the imperialists in their economic interests meant that the Zionist ideology had to adapt in order to keep pace with their desired role forIsrael in the decline and degeneration of capitalism during the epoch of imperialism, and now sinking into its terminal crisis. Though its basic claims of its ideology are unchanging, their expression has to become more violent, fascist-like, and its religious rationalizations more bizarre and extreme.
Understanding Zionism’s campaign to equate anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism, requires an examination of its historical record. Documents reveal not only that anti-Semitism gave rise to nationalist Zionism but that it was not the Jewish people’s only option nor their first choice. It was, from the start, the Jewish capitalist class’s solution to capitalism’s effects on the Jewish populations in the ‘Pale of Settlement’ across Eastern Europe in the age of nation building and to the irrationalism of imperialism in crisis. It emerged, as an ideology, among Jewish intelligentsia and was championed by bourgeois Jews seeking a home to build their wealth and soil upon which they could plant and defend their industries and capital. As a capitalist class project it was not readily adopted by the Jewish masses. But they, or more precisely the Jewish worker’s labor power would be needed by the Jewish capitalist and their youth as cannon fodder to fight for the nation wherever he set up shop. Would that Jewish capitalist’s profits be assimilated by the national capital of the Great Powers? Or, could a national homeland be found for Jewish national capital?
In the late 19th and early 20th century pogroms across Eastern Europe and Ukraine killed 150,000 Jews foreshadowing the coming Holocaust. Zionism, the ideological response to pogroms, was unsuccessful in winning broad support among Jewish people until after Hitler’s ‘final solution.’ Having rejected Jewish refugees for years the allied victors stood shamefaced. The allies had no plan for restitution of Jewish property. Jews and other survivors were shuttled from concentration camps to Displaced Persons (DPs) camps. Restrictions on Jewish immigration would only be slightly loosened in the UK and USA. The British realized a flood of immigration to Palestine would stoke the fears of the indigenous Palestinians so they stymied The Exodus at the port of Cyprus threatening to send the DPs back to Germany. A standoff ensued, lives were lost and the British backed down. In the U.S. a token lifting of immigration quotas, to save face, was too little too late. By the time the Displaced Persons Act was revised in 1950 the majority of the displaced Jews had emigrated to occupied Palestine.
“Never Again!” The anti-fascist slogan attributed to Jews liberated from Buchenwald, was politicized to bind world Jewry and Zionism as one. Stalin’s recognition of Israel was the fulfillment of Churchill’s fight against Bolshevism for the Jewish soul. In turn and with UN sanction Zionism gained international moral authority: any opposition to the Zionist colonial settler state and its nation building project became by agreed bourgeois definition–anti-Semitic.
Israeli revisionist historian Benny Morris an avowed ‘two-state solution’ Zionist, instructs those attempting to understand the ‘Rise of Zionism,’ to consider “age old millenarian impulses,” the “return to Zion,” “bound up with the cosmic, messianic theme of collective redemption,” as an ideology in search of its moment; that moment arrives at the Diaspora when it is confronted by the national consolidations of Europe and its effects on populations in the Eastern European “Pale of Settlement” tortured with endless anti-Semitic abuses, insults, and pogroms. [Benny Morris Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict. 1881-2001 pg. 14-15]
The claim that Zionism represents all Jews, a claim made since the 19th century to justify the need for a homeland, encountered spiritual, religious and working class opposition. For the Hassidim Erez Yisrael was spiritually the land of God within, the inner voice heard as wisdom which emerges through Talmudic study, prayer, ecstatic dance and song. Such practice would usher in the messianic age and the Third Temple could then be rebuilt. Such holdovers from a dying age would have to be overcome for an emergent Jewish bourgeois class to become a ruling class. Waiting for self actualizing spiritualists and the return of the messiah was not sufficiently expeditious to keep pace in the age of nation building. And Jewish ideology has a habit of being written and rewritten as per current conditions. The fate of the eternal souls of Jews exiled in Babylon is debated by Talmudic scholars [in Ketubot 111a], not all of whom agreed but some do that, “[H]e who resides in Babylonia, it is as if he resided in the Land of Israel.” Spiritual arguments for remaining in the Diaspora had to be defeated among the Jews and the secular liberal intelligentsia of the Great Powers. And so they were.
No less an authority on the intentions of the almighty than Golda Meir, summed up the Jewish God’s role in geo-political affairs as follows, “This country exists as the fulfillment of a promise made by God Himself. It would be ridiculous to ask it to account for its legitimacy.” [Libquotes Le Monde October 15, 1971]
The Jewish bourgeoisie found in these “millenarian impulses” its lever, with which it could assert its class interests. A theological story existed; its zeitgeist needed to be attached to a movement responding, seemingly, to the material needs of all Jews; a national movement for the ‘New Jew’ to uplift himself into the modern world, away from the unending pogroms. This period in history, the rise of capitalist imperialism, saw finance capital march across the world’s periphery. Outmoded economic classes, social relations and institutions in Jewish communities would be destroyed as the conditions for their existence were replaced by new social relations and class realignments. The big banks, industrialists, large factory towns, corporations and large merchants undercut the economic basis of shtetl life.
The masses of Jews who emigrated were not attracted by Zionist millenarian and messianic themes married to nation building. The middle layer professionals and large numbers of workers emigrated to the West embraced assimilation, spoke the local language, engaged in secular lives and served adopted nation states as citizens. Large numbers of workers and shtetl Jews across the ‘Pale of Settlement’ advocated autonomy and for ethno/religious/national rights inside the multi-ethnic/multinational states where they lived; this they debated and put in the political programs of their organizations. Among the Jewish workers, and portrayed demonically by history, internationalist socialists and communists fought to defeat the parasitism of imperialism, the chauvinism of nationalism and the chaos of imperialist wars by socialist revolution for workers’ control of the means of production in a free association of workers united as an international class without masters!
How did Jewry vote? Of course there was no direct plebiscite to choose between Zionism, assimilation, autonomy, and socialism. Rather, as is common among people suffering economic distress and in fear for their lives they voted with their organizations, their publications and their feet! What did that vote look like?
The so-called first “Aliyah” (the ‘ascension’ to Zion of the first wave of settlers,) was made between 1880’s and 1901 by “twenty to thirty thousand people, most of whom eventually returned to Russia or headed to the West.” [Morris pg. 19]
While thousands of first generation ‘practical zionists’ (called “Olim”, those who ascend) cycled through Palestine a newly de-classed and proletarianized mass headed to New York and points West!
“Between 1880 and 1924 twenty four million people immigrated to America. Included in that great mass of immigration were, primarily, 2.2 million Russian Jews.” [Jerry Klinger Jewish Mag: The Russians Are Coming The Russians are Coming]
We are not idealists. We recognize that every social theory and twist of ideology and theology reflects the interests or perceived interests of given social economic layers navigating their peculiar conditions as they unfold. ‘Great Men’ do not make history themselves and while having a hand and voice in the making of history they are rarely more than the best representatives of the currents and tendencies within the social class they act on behalf of. Because the historiography, though never ending, is sufficiently available and well informed by primary sources for objective readers to come to their own conclusions, our reliance on a mere smattering of the thoughts, utterances and acts of ‘Great Men’ is not meant to write a new history but rather to illustrate for (if not to bludgeon) our readers with the necessary background source documentation proving that anti-Zionism is not in and of itself anti-Semitism. Zionism was from the start reconciled to an ‘inevitability of anti-Semitism wherever Jews would intermix with non-Jews’ and tied itself, as a millenarian colonial settler and project to the imperialist’s various geostrategic and military campaigns in the colonies and semi-colonies, in particular exploiting people and resources in the areas now called the Global South. Think for a moment on Israel’s relationship with apartheid Rhodesia and South Africa.
We will look at early Zionism and its orientation to European powers using both the Zionists and the leading imperialists’ own arguments, to show that the Iron Wall, leading to today’s Iron Dome was proposed and initiated in full expectation of a perpetual state of war! But before we review the intertwined intentions of Herzl and Churchill, Jabotinsky and Hitler, we briefly look at the Jewish ‘problem’ which arose in Eastern Europe during the 18th to early 20th century.
Abram Leon, in The Jewish Question, summarized the social condition of the Jewish people:
“The entire situation of Judaism in Eastern Europe is explained by the combination of the decline of the old feudal forms and of the degeneration of capitalism. The social differentiation which took place in the village as a result of capitalist penetration brought about an influx into the cities of enriched as well as proletarianized peasants; the former wanted to invest their capital; the latter to offer their labor. But the openings for the placement of capital were as slight as those for work. Hardly born, the capitalist system already showed all the symptoms of senility. The general decay of capitalism manifested itself in crises and unemployment within the countries of Eastern Europe; by the closing of all the outlets for emigration outside their frontiers. Seven to eight million peasants were landless and almost without work in “independent” Poland. Placed between two fires, the Jews were exposed to the hostility of the petty bourgeoisie and the peasantry; who sought to find a place for themselves at the expense of the Jews. “Jewish positions are particularly threatened by the urban Polish bourgeoisie and by the rich peasants who seek a solution for their difficulties through a fierce economic nationalism, whereas the Polish working class suffering from permanent unemployment, seeks a remedy for its poverty through social liberation and puts its reliance upon economic and political solidarity rather than upon a sterile and murderous competition ….” [Chapter 7]
The Jews like all other ethnic groupings were tossed hither and thither as peoples were displaced and declassed. Every nation’s social classes were torn to their essential elements as the world economy was restructuring in capitalism’s image.
The struggle over the soul of the Jewish people, as if a mass of people could have ‘a soul’ was of concern to Winston Churchill. He summarized what was in actuality a class division among the Jews as a struggle between the competing etheric forces. The forces of good were the elevated Jewish ethics, the foundation of civilization, the demonic forces were a “sinister confederacy…reared up among the unhappy populations where Jews are persecuted….” These demons included Karl Marx, Trotsky, Bela Kun, Rosa Luxemburg and Emma Goldman. He argued that “…a Jewish State under the protection of the British crown…would…be in harmony with the truest interests of the British Empire.” He saw the international class struggle behind “…the fury with which Trotsky attacked the Zionists….” Churchill was writing the imperialist’s propaganda against the ‘threat’ of Bolshevism concluding: “The struggle which is now beginning between the Zionist and Bolshevik Jews is little less than a struggle for the soul of the Jewish people.” [Churchill, Winston February 8, 1920 Zionism vs. Bolshevism. A Struggle for the Soul of the Jewish People pg. 23-7 of 51 Documents ed. Lennie Brenner]
Zionism political instrument of the Jewish Bourgeoisie?
Anti-Semitism in Europe had its material basis in the economic occupations Jewish people were relegated to across the Diaspora. In Christian dominated economies usury was both a legal necessity and a clerical sin; Jews, ‘hopelessly heathen’ with unsalvageable souls, were ceded the role of banker. Feudal wars, rising city states, early nation building and their requirements for money lending were fertile ground for the emergence of a Jewish class of merchants, traders, bankers and eventually industrialists. As a social layer with a common religion, multiple Yiddish dialects and limited legal options, Jews formed a merchant bourgeoisie serving an economic role as lenders, merchants and traders. No doubt Jews often fell out of favor! Scapegoated as Christ killers, this strange and clannish lot, occupying the very money lender’s tables Jesus famously overturned, provided an easy target upon whom despots could displace the frustrations of the economically distressed. This is a classical but primitive materialist history of anti-Semitism that takes no account of the Jewish peasantry, nor of the urban artisan who also suffered the pains of anti-Semitic laws and pogroms.
Burning Jews, witches and other heathens did little to rectify conditions but the criminality of the act bound landowners, peasants, participant artisans and debtors together in their self righteousness and anti-Semitic rage, normalizing and reinforcing a false consciousness, an irrational ideology where dehumanizing the ‘other’ became accepted as the inevitable consequence of the Jewish (others) presence among the ‘civilized nations,’ cities, and villages. Agreement on a solution to the Jewish problem was made between imperialism’s ‘civilizing agents’ including Churchill and Balfour, not too busy shouldering the “White Man’s Burden” in Africa and Asia to make common cause with Zionism’s founders and warriors, including Herzl, Weizmann and Jabotinsky. They agreed that assimilation was more cause than solution for the Jewish Problem and resolved that the removal of Jews from Europe for the colonization of Palestine was mutually beneficial. It was understood that Palestine would exist, as a special colony within the empire, with no special effort made at first to reconcile Jewish and Arab claims to the same real estate. Later the British would make this worse.
Decades before Herzl, Moses Hess, once a collaborator with Marx, became an early Zionist. In his work Rome and Jerusalem: The Last Nationality Question(1862), he foresaw the rise of anti-Semitism in Europe preventing assimilation as a course toward Jewish liberation. The rise of national liberation movements in the Middle East, he expected, would challenge the Ottoman Empire. He argued that if the Jews built a state in the “heart of the Middle East [it would] serve Western Imperial interests and at the same time help bring Western civilization to the backward East.”
It was obvious to Herzl, Weizmann, Balfour and Churchill that such a project would serve imperial interests. Again consider Churchill in 1920:
“Of course, Palestine is far too small to accommodate more than a fraction of the Jewish race, nor do the majority of national Jews wish to go there. But if, as may well happen, there should be created in our lifetime by the banks of the Jordan a Jewish State under the protection of the British Crown, which might comprise three or four millions of Jews, an event would have occurred in the history of the world which would, from every point of view, be beneficial, and would be especially in harmony with the truest interests of the British Empire.” [Winston Churchill Feb 8 1920 Zionism vs. Bolshevism. A Struggle for the Soul of the Jewish People]
But to be successful Zionism would have to defeat assimilationism and autonomism as the dominant condition, and platform of most Jews. The pogroms played no insignificant role in convincing many, especially those with means, to give up hope for assimilation. One such thinker, Dr. Leo Pinsker, rejected assimilation and argued in his Auto-Emancipation: A Warning to His kinfolk by a Russian Jew (1882) that pogroms confirmed that despite proving themselves patriots in their chosen lands they would always be “plundered and dishonored” and that “we [will]dare not defend ourselves” that mobs would remind Jews over and again that they are all “nothing but vagrants and parasites, outside the protection of the law.” Like others, Pinsker found nothing ‘illogical’ in persistent anti-Semitism, rather the Jews ‘unnatural and abnormal condition,’ “lacking territory they lacked substance” threatening and irritating as they competed with Christians for professional and economic gain. Only a Jewish homeland could lead to ‘auto-emancipation.’ His eye was not on Palestine but possibly somewhere in North America. [Morris pgs. 15-17]
Zionism, since Theodor Herzl, has been the national project of the Jewish bourgeoisie, projecting its ‘civilizing role’ as moral and essential for the survival and elevation of the Jewish people; ‘a people so degraded to its culturally unpleasing state by separation from a homeland and miscegenation.’ To succeed in becoming the undisputed national ideology of the Jewish people it had to defeat not only assimilation and autonomy but also the working class alternative.
Based on lived experience, socialist Jewish workers and intellectuals adopted the method of historical materialism to discern a program for liberation. They discovered that it would require class solidarity of all the oppressed peoples of the world and was dependent on the unity of the working class leading internationalist class war to overthrow capitalism. From Zionism’s earliest days it was opposed by the Jewish majority, the working class, many of whom became socialist revolutionaries who organized Jewish unions, published voluminous socialist journals in Yiddish and built socialist parties including sections of the Bund, the Russian RSDLP and parties of the 2nd International.
Zionism vs the Bund? The class divide among the Jews
The Bund and the mass Jewish socialist workers movement’s history is one the Zionist and compliant Western historians, media and politicians want to erase. The existence of this movement was the bane of imperialism and fascism. Jewish Labor Bund: 1897-1957 (NY, 1958) records that in the interwar years in Poland, the Bund had active branches in every town and city which published regular Yiddish journals and organized strikes and self defense against the implementation of Nuremberg laws. Many Zionists seeing the futility of their program are reported to have turned to the Bund for self defense. Tens of thousands of Bundists were victims of the Holocaust.
It was Zionism’s political task to win both world Jewry and imperialist benefactors to their project. Bankers had to be convinced of the value of a loyal Jewish outpost in Palestine. World Jewry had to adopt a supra-class national consciousness embracing a mystical obligation of spiritual renewal by a return – to the ‘Promised Land.’ Soul-renewal mandated by God and only available in the Promised Land, in the eyes of a modern secular observer, has marked parallels to the “blood and soil” spirit of Nazi Volkism.
The Zionist Federation of Germany addressed the new German state in its credo of June 21, 1933, finding in Nazi Volkism a kindred spirit…,
Point #4 “Zionism believes that a rebirth of national life, such as is occurring in German life through adhesion to Christian and national values, must also take place in the Jewish national group. For the Jew, too, origin, religion, community of fate and group consciousness must be of decisive significance in the shaping of his life.” [A Holocaust Reader Lucy Dawidowicz pg 150-5 also in Brenner 51 Documents]
The story of the uplifting of Jewry was thereby coupled to the colonial settler project as a moral imperative. The uplift of Jewry would serve all the benighted nations who would benefit from their messianic return to the promised land.
The fallacy of national purity and the impermanence of borders was apparent to the Jewish workers, who in their main, were attracted to the workers movement, its trade unions and workers circles and workers press. Organizationally and politically the Jewish workers movement existed in opposition to the bourgeois Zionists, who in their writings likened themselves to the ‘benign’ imperialists civilizing the ‘darker continents.’ The mythology of “Blood and Soil” exploded, for the Jewish masses in the ‘Pale of Settlement’ during the age of nation building. There was no eternal soul in the soil of the nation as was made clear to all who experienced their homes, villages and cities, shifted accordingly with troop movements and back room negotiations determined their futures on redrawn maps:— now Poland, now Ukraine, now Austro-Hungary, now Russia.
Neither the Jewish shtetl nor the Jewish quarters in towns and cities escaped the class stratifications created by the rise of capitalism and industry. As the Jewish clerical, technical, professional, and proletarian layers stratified, assimilation into capitalist class reality was not a choice. Only a small proportion of the 8.5 million European Jews in 1900 were well off professionals and capitalists; the majority were poor city dwellers. [Kovel, Overcoming Zionism pg. 30]
Could Zionism hold together a community increasingly divided by class, emigration and assimilation into competing nation states and Great Powers? Could the mythology of “Chosen Ones” beckoned to the “Promised Land” by an almighty Yaweh, gain sway among peoples being modernized by capitalism’s consolidation? The rise of capitalism, the bourgeois democratic and scientific age, required the defeat of theocratic authority. Jews joined the ranks of the enlightened secular. The god myth could continue as a cover story but it no longer held weight to move the Jewish population from their European homes, so another catalyst was provided by anti-Semitism and Zionism adapted that to its project. Or would a cold, calculated school of Zionism cut to the chase and define the course of Zionism to the present genocidal assault on Gaza and the continuing brutalities in the West Bank?
“Every native population in the world resists colonists as long as it has the slightest hope of being able to rid itself of the danger of being colonized.”
Vladimir Jabotinsky, revisionist Zionist praised by Mussolini as a fascist, derided as ‘vegetarians’ Zionists who believed their Arab cousins could be won peacefully to welcome the colonists. Claiming no animus towards the Arabs, he coldly declared in his essay The Iron Wall that: “Every native population in the world resists colonists as long as it has the slightest hope of being able to rid itself of the danger of being colonized.” He had no doubts about bribing the Arabs with money or railroads! He knew there was no such thing as benevolent imperialism; he was a brutal realist.
To win the debate against the Zionists whose elevated ethics and morality were challenged by the task of nation building he argued…,“We cannot offer any adequate compensation to the Palestinian Arabs in return for Palestine. And therefore, there is no likelihood of any voluntary agreement being reached.” Like Churchill, Jabotinsky identified the moral good as being served by the Jewish establishment of the Jewish nation where the good Jew could flourish. Vegetarianism would not suffice! The project called for meat eating, butchery and the Iron Wall!
“Zionist colonization must either stop, or else proceed regardless of the native population. Which means that it can proceed and develop only under the protection of a power that is independent of the native population–behind an iron wall, which the native population cannot breach.” – Jabotinsky, The Iron Wall
1930 United Israel Appeal Poster
The philosophical continuity of the Likud governments runs back to Jabotinsky and is every bit as blunt. To counter the accusation of tarring all of Zionism with the brush of the fascist Jabotinsky, the record shows the gap between the words, intentions and actions of the so-called center and left Zionists and Jabotinsky was never significant.
David Ben Gurion, first prime minister and a left/center labor Zionist never shied from bluntly stating the ruthless task at hand.
“We must expel Arabs and take their places.” [Teveth, Shabtai, Ben Gurion and the Palestine Arabs, Oxford University Press, 1985.]
“We must use terror, assassination, intimidation, land confiscation, and the cutting of all social services to rid the Galilee of its Arab population.” [David Ben-Gurion, May 1948, to the General Staff. From Ben-Gurion, A Biography, by Michael Ben-Zohar, Delacorte, New York 1978.]
We could produce a catalog of similar offending quotes from across the spectrum of Zionism but that work has been done over and again here, here, here, and here.
The Jewish population was making its choices, either making common cause with imperialism or joining the workers revolution to fight anti-Semitism and all backwardness. Unable to wait for the socialist revolution or a Jewish homeland millions fled persecution, most to the U.S. Many assimilated, adopting Western cultural norms and few held on to Eastern European culture outside of synagogue. Many of those who remained sided either with the Zionists or the Bundists along class lines over the fate of Jews under fascism.
The Zionists sought economic independence of their capital from national constraints imposed by the capitalist governments across the Diaspora. The ironic lesson of the movement of the borders across the continent illustrates for the oppressed the fallacy of nationalism. The Bundists were not nationalists (though some said they were); they identified as working class fighters for socialist universalism. They rejected Zionist supra-class national unity (Klal Yisrael) and emigration to the ‘Holy Land’. The Zionists accepted anti-Semitism as the natural reaction of the ‘civilized’ West to the unkempt, recently declassed and proletarianized hordes on the run from pogroms and poverty. The Bundists fought anti-Semitism with a struggle for legal minority status in the nations they lived in. The Bundists adopted the people’s language of Yiddish as their common language. To unite a Jewish nation, the Zionists resurrected Hebrew, a long dead language relegated to use only in the synagogues for centuries.
While the Zionists navigated between the competing imperialists in search of a benefactor; the Bundists participated in the 1905 Russian Revolution, sent representatives to the Kienthal anti-war conference (2nd Zimmerwald,) were the only Jewish party to participate in the 1917 Soviets and fought in the Red Army. Indeed Bundist unions and Jewish intellectuals played a proportionally oversized role in the socialist revolution and its leadership and the founding of the Third International. “The membership of the Bund in Russia grew constantly. By the time of the October Revolution in 1917 it numbered some 40,000 members resident in 400 localities.” [Bund Archive]
It is their ghosts who haunt Zionism! In their hundreds of thousands, arms in hands, they fought the fascists, anti-Semites and pogromists while the Zionists sat on their hands advocating emigration to Palestine and armed integration into various imperialist forces instead of building mass actions in the streets and putting arms in the hands of Jewish workers to defend themselves.
“Zionism was from its inception primarily a product of anti-Semitism. Anti-Semitism was its parent, its driving force, its obsession. According to the fundamental theory of Zionism, anti-Semitism is a peculiar disease which has infected-or can infect-all or almost all non-Jews in any country. The mere presence of Jews among Christians is an irritant which generates anti-Semitism, for which there can be no remedy. Therefore the only way to solve this problem-the most important problem of the Jewish people throughout their history–is for Jews to leave the countries of their residence and establish their own state in their historic homeland of Palestine.
The Bund is based on the opposite concept namely that anti-Semitism is not a mysterious and perennial evil. Anti-Semities has its cause in the economic, political and psychological conditions of society and, like any other human evil, it can be cured by changing the conditions which brought it about. Accordingly, the Bund maintains that the Jewish problem is part of the general problem of mankind and can be solved only by the improvement of the lot of humanity as a whole, not by any special panaceas for Jews.
Instead of an exodus, the Bund, therefore advocates greater cooperation with the non-Jewish world, especially with other underprivileged and suffering peoples. Instead of Fear and suspicion of non-Jews inculcated by Zionism, the Bund offers faith in mankind and in the brotherhood of all men. Instead of nationalistic justice, which is often oblivious to the suffering of those outside a particular group, the Bund teaches international justice which combines justified Jewish claims with respect for the rights of other peoples.” [The Jewish Labor Bund pgs 17-18]
The Bundists identified with the philosophical conquests of secularism, historical and dialectical materialism, while the Zionists adopted the irrationalist ideology of racial purity of the fascists and European imperialists. For example, the Nazi ideal of Aryan purity and the role of European imperialist settler colonialism in Rhodesia and South Africa were foundational in the revisionist Zionist project. Jabotinsky, founder of Netanyahu’s political movement, the Likud, militantly opposed assimilation and ‘race mixing,’ counterposing pure Jewish blood lines and Jewish soil as the solution to anti-Semitism. Even today, under Zionist laws, Jewish purity of couples is a legal requirement for a Jewish couple to get married. Interfaith couples must seek other options such as civil weddings abroad. The son or daughter of a Jewish father and shiksa (gentile) mother may be allowed (by birthright law) to emigrate to Israel and be drafted to serve in the IDF but is not pure enough to marry!
Indeed the fight against anti-Semitism requires the defeat of national chauvinism and xenophobia which can only be defeated by the internationalist class unity of all workers, oppressed people and poor farmers. Such a fight, by its very nature, is the class struggle of the working class against capitalism and all its national state formations! Realizing this truth, Zionists launched an ideological class war against revolutionary Marxism, which they saw was attracting and organizing the newly proletarianized layers of the Jewish poor and many of the most brilliant Jewish intellectuals.
Despite the work of the anti-war internationalists of Jewish socialist Bund, against the German SPD’s betrayal of voting for war funding in 1914, one hundred thousand Jews ended up in the Kaiser’s army. Tragically just like workers fighting workers across the front lines for their national capitalist state, Jews fought Jews across the front lines for warring imperialisms. Indeed, likewise, Chuchill praised the Jews who fought for King and country.
Ben-Gurion proposed to the Ottoman empire that Jewish divisions be organized to fight for them but was rebuffed. Vladimir Jabotinsky in turn organized the Zionist ‘Mule Corp’ in 1915 to fight on behalf of the British, seeing action at Gallipoli and Nabalus in a bid for favor in acquiring Palestine. “The unit was composed of Egyptian Jews, alongside East-European Jews, predominantly Russian subjects expelled by the Turks from Palestine at the outbreak of the war.”
The fallacy and racist trope, updated by the Okhrana as The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, that the Jews controlled both the decaying capitalist West and the Bolshevik East worked its magic uniting German, Italian and Jewish fascists in an ideological, economic, political and military war on the side of imperialism and against both assimilation and the Russian Revolution and the threat of its spread.
The Holocaust became the singularly Jewish tragedy that could be used to legitimate the cause for a national homeland. It was the answer to the problem the Zionists had of explaining why Israel could not accommodate the Palestinians. The Holocaust gave the Jews special rights as a landless, oppressed people, long subject to pogroms and genocide to claim victimhood that could trump the rights of the Palestinians.
The Zionists shopped around the contending imperialist powers for a benefactor to concede land in Palestine. They used the scapegoating, anti-Semitism and ultimately the Holocaust to consolidate the national ideology over all social layers.
Zionists collaborate with fascism?
Post-Versailles, Jabotinsky oriented toward the fascists. They never mobilized a Jewish army against Hitler! On June 23, 2023 Haaertz released documents of the Stern gang’s attempt to win German support with arms for the defeat of the British and the “establishment of the historical Jewish state on a totalitarian national basis, in an alliance relationship with the German Reich, [is] compatible with the preservation of German power,…”
Efraim Zetler, a member of Stern’s Lehi Militia, “…was interrogated by Haganah fighters roughly two weeks following the Wannsee Conference in Berlin, where Nazi officials deliberated on the execution of the Final Solution. Securing Nazi support is believed to have been suggested two years prior by Avraham Stern, the Lehi leader who championed aggressive opposition to British governance.” Stern maintained that Britain was “enemy no.1” and that Nazi Germany was no enemy of Israel. See the Middle East Eye account of the Haaretz revelations.
Does this throw you? In fact it follows from the 1933 policy of the Nazi Ministry of Economic Affairs if you were well off, the Zionist organization for Germany could get you to Palestine for 15,000 Marks immediately; for 50,000 you could depart later at a time you chose. Likewise, you could transfer your property to Palestine. Needless to say, for Jewish workers, this was no small sum.
In August of 1933 the Reich Ministry of Economic Affairs published the text of a decree to transfer Jewish property to Palestine…
“The decree, which is numbered 54, and is dated August 28th, states that an agreement was concluded “with the Jewish bodies concerned,” for “promoting Jewish emigration to Palestine…”pg 47
“The Reichsbank is for this purpose opening two special accounts for the Bank of Temple Society, it states, in favor of the Anglo-Palestine Bank.”
“It is explicitly emphasized that these accounts cannot be used for other purposes than for investments in Palestine. A special Trustee Corporation has been founded for advising prospective emigrants.” [“Agreement for Transferring Property from Germany to Palestine: Details of the Three Million Mark Agreement”The Zionist Record South Africa September 20, 1933pg. 47 (Brenner, Lennie, 51 Documents)]
But half a million Jewish soldiers served in the Red Army to fight fascism, 200,000 of whom were killed in battle or prison camps. Their deaths alongside the millions killed in concentration camps would be used by the Zionists to drag the tattered beleaguered remnants of European Jewry to fight in Palestine, somewhere they never had intention of going in the first place!
After the Holocaust the founding of the Jewish colonial settler state was conditioned with a fortress mentality. The permanent militarized occupation to crush Palestinian resistance and the class stratification elevating Jewish workers a few rungs above those Palestinians allowed to work has co-opted and bought off the large majority of the settlers.
Blood and Soil: It’s all about oil. Anglo/American Zionism turns the Mandate into an armed Settler State. Or winning the imperialist franchise….
Jabotinsky’s contenders for Zionist leadership failed during World War two to realize their twin tasks, to get the fascists to open up a mass migration of Jews to Palestine and to create a flourishing trade between Germany and Palestine. However the war changed that. The British still controlled the Mandate, but the U.S. now had at least two reasons to push for a UN handover to the Zionists. One was to get an ally in the post-war settlement between the allies against the USSR able to act as a military outpost in the Middle East. The second was the discovery of new oil fields in the region. In the interregnum between the discovery of oil in the U.S. (Pennsylvania, Oklahoma, Texas, California) and, Baku, and its eventual discovery in the Gulf (Iran, Iraq, Kuwait and Saudi-Arabia), the U.S. imperialists, American Jews and European Jewry had little interest in the Zionist project before a dispossessed mass suddenly needed a place to exist.
The post-war settlement did little to alter this. But this changed by the time the Cold War began in earnest in 1948. The U.S. intervention in the Greek civil war caused the Yugoslavs to break with Stalin and when the Marshall plan pushed into Eastern Europe the buffer states had to be transformed into deformed workers’ states. The war had meanwhile accelerated the search for oil and the Allied bloc’s need for a beachhead in Palestine led to the handover of the Zionist project to the U.S. by the British, whose Empire was now left bankrupt. The armed militias of the Zionists had already driven Arabs out of much of Palestine in the 1948 Nakba. Britain gave up its Mandate and the post-1948 map of Palestine reveals Israel had annexed around two thirds of Palestine.
The Zionist state was now a reality but the question of its legitimacy remained. Of course under bourgeois ‘right’ no state can be sovereign or free if it occupies another state. But the war had provided a trump card for the Zionists. Though they collaborated with the Nazis to undermine the workers resistance to fascism and did nothing to resist the Nazis, this was quickly forgotten against the overwhelming fact of the Nazi Holocaust – the genocide of the Jews. This by itself seemed to guarantee the legitimacy of the new state – however there was the inconvenient fact that in 1948 elsewhere there was a rush of colonies to win their national independence. So the Zionists needed more than the Holocaust to justify their settler colonization of Palestine.
Of course one such argument was that Israel was also ‘decolonising’ by taking over from Britain a part of the former Ottoman Empire. So with this monstrous fabrication Israel becomes an independent sovereign nation state, with bourgeois rights such as democracy, land rights, and the right to ‘defend itself,’ while simultaneously denying all Palestinian rights! Naturally the Anglo-American Zionists in business and the media spread this propaganda.
But this image was built on a faulty foundation, Israel never had a ‘decolonization policy’ as demonstrated by their military intervention on behalf of the French and British during the Suez Canal crisis of 1956 to stop Egypt from nationalizing the Suez Canal. Zionism never had a ‘good neighbor’ policy, it was destined, like Moses Hess predicted, to serve imperialism’s interests. The Suez episode marked the demise of the UK’s power in the region and henceforth, the U.S. would become the new benefactor, lord and master.
The newly anointed state was sustained by the massive arming by the U.S. so that each time the Arab states got involved in war with Israel or the Intifadas blew up, these wars were legitimated by Israel’s right to defend itself! On that basis Israel was free to act as the U.S. enforcer in its military adventures in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) states, ignoring UN resolutions and ‘international law.’ Ultimately therefore, Israel’s ‘exceptional’ status as a ‘decolonising colony’ was its dependence on the U.S. ‘exceptionalism’, that is, its global hegemony. For that reason, U.S. weakness in decline is necessarily reflected in Israel’s weakness as a client proxy militarized state.
To drive home the case for national victimhood, the Zionists had to convince the world that they were not a colonizing power, but the chosen people decolonising Israel by occupying the British Mandate. Britain had occupied Palestine as part of the break-up of the Ottoman Empire and administered the state on behalf of the League of Nations – that well known ‘den of thieves’ – and was reluctant to hand over ‘decolonisation’ to the Zionists. Look at how Jabotinsky recognizes the significance of the Balfour Declaration:
“What is the Balfour Declaration for? What is the [British] Mandate for? Their meaning for us is that an external force has taken upon itself the obligation to create in the country such conditions of government and protection, under which the local population, irrespective of its wishes, would be deprived of the opportunity to interfere with our colonisation administratively or physically. And all of us, all without exception, urge every day this external force to fulfill this role firmly and uncompromisingly.” [Jabotinsky The Iron Wall]
But what angered the Zionists most was the plan to share Palestine with the Palestinians. Former Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin (a Likudite and disciple of Jabotinsky) before his rise to legitimacy as a revered world leader proclaimed: “We intend to attack, conquer and keep until we have the whole of Palestine and Transjordan in a Greater Jewish State”.
So the Zionists mobilized their militias to harass the receding British and force a handover of the state. This was achieved in 1948 when the militias launched the Nakba, attacking villages, killing thousands, driving perhaps a million Palestians out of the greater part of Palestine. Far from the act of a decolonising people, the Zionists acted as colonizing oppressors to build a new nation on the national territory of Palestine. Harry Truman recognised the new state of Israel almost immediately, followed by the UN in 1949. Clearly the special relationship between Israel and the U.S. was instrumental in legitimizing in the eyes of the world the founding of a settler colonial state while the rest of the developing world was fighting for national liberation.
It is no accident that the Zionists treated the Palestinians as inferior or subhuman.There has always been a Euro-centric racist strain in Zionism.
The early Zionists campaigned for national and ethnic purity. This was confronted daily by the fact that there is no uniquely Jewish genotype, a DNA that links the Ashkenazi to Sephardim and the Mizrahi! Jews are Black, Brown White and Asian! Jabotinsky, of course got his knickers in a twist about miscegenation when considering the demography of the ‘Promised Land’ to be conquered. He queried the assimilationists, “But how this will happen and what will be the nature of this new mixed race; will it consist only of the white races or will it admit also the Negroes?” [51 Documents Brenner pg. 17]
The Dreyfus case confirmed for Herzl that assimilation was futile, as he saw anti-Semitic’ discrimination followed Jews in their newly assimilated positions. This alienated existence could, in the Zionist plan, only be negated by protecting racial purity in the “Promised land” as the national homeland. For all the talk of freeing world Jewry to raise up the ‘New Jew’ freed from cultural assimilation we find today that of Israeli Jews over 20 years old, according to Israeli statistics, 45% are secular, 33% observant and 10% orthodox. Most Ashkenazi are relatively indistinguishable from Europeans and Americans in their tastes and lifestyles. Even the racism of the West is reproduced as Ethiopian and Mizrahi have struggled for years against structural racism and prejudice.
It’s clear that the Zionist ideology tracked the creation and development of Israel in relation to the Palestinians, the Arab states and its imperialist sponsor the U.S.. From the time of the British Mandate, it counted on, depended upon and today still rests upon the imperialist West (in particular the UK/US and France) to sustain it. The expressed support by Churchill, already in 1920, with his praise of Jews who rejected Bolshevism and the person and leadership of Trotsky, is indicative of a conscious alignment of class interests. [Winston Churchill Feb 8 1920 Zionism vs. Bolshevism. A Struggle for the Soul of the Jewish People]
Evolution of the relation of Zionism with US imperialism
The final aspect of the adaptation of Zionism to the special relationship of Israel with the U.S. in the post WWII period is that of making Zionism a constituent feature of U.S. imperialism. Here we are speaking of the working class defense of U.S. imperialism as the world’s peacekeeper and bearer of democracy and freedom in the Cold War against ‘communism.’ Support for Zionism is the equivalent of an article of faith for Democrats and hence, for the labor bureaucracy. Erstwhile Israeli Communists and some socialists made a bloc with center and right wing Zionism, and in the U.S. they found their mirror image in the labor Zionist phenomenon. Defending its colonial settler state as an armed outpost becomes one with defending U.S. imperialism. The championing of the new state by the UN, the U.S. and some especially well-placed and talented propagandists all combined in the developing Cold War to cement a “Zionism” of Jews and gentiles in the portraits of conventional (bourgeois) success and U.S. patriotism. Television and the enormous library of World War II film made possible what has been termed a “Holocaust Industry” of heretofore unthinkable scope of indoctrination.
Raised on Zionism’s slogan, “a people without a land for a land without a people,” a generation of U.S. Jews, only a few years away from mere subsistence, were extorted to dig deep to support emigration that would afford Jews safety and make a desert bloom. The greening of the desert and the indoctrination of Jewish youth across the Diaspora went hand in hand. Buying Jewish National Fund memorial trees, a cursory tale of the Diaspora from Babylon to the concentration camps was retailed, and singing the Hatikva became the norm in Hebrew schools and Hebrew summer camps.
Stalin’s support for Israel, which seems to be a complete secret from the ranks of today’s neo-Stalinists, was derived in part from his own anti-Semitism and in part from a desire to make difficulties for the UK at a time when it was preoccupied with its troubles in India. Thus we saw Pete Seeger sing songs popularizing the life of the kibbutzim. Most Americans do not know about the rotten immigration position of the USA, the 1924 Immigration Law quotas and how they did not let Jews escape to the USA. Even the British did better than the U.S. did. Bourgeois support for Zionism in the later 1940’s hid the truth of the Ku Klux inspiration of the immigration quotas, corresponding to then-trendy concepts of race and eugenics among the U.S. ruling class of the pre-Civil Rights movement era. Hardly any one talks about the St. Louis, the ship which no one let dock to let off the fleeing German Jews.
The St. Louis Jewish Refugees turned away at the port of Miami 1939
“Oil is much too important a commodity to be left in the hands of the Arabs.” – Kissinger
The U.S. hid behind its 1924 Johnson Reed immigration Act quotas and only later after oil was discovered all across the Middle East did Roosevelt decide upon his support for Zionism. Why did he suddenly discover Zionism? Because U.S. geologists found oil in 1938 in Saudi Arabia. Gulf Oil found it in Kuwait and Mobil found it in Iraq. A pipeline existed for a dozen years between Habbaniya and Haifa (i.e.1935-48) which was ultimately closed by the Iraqis. There was a battle over the pipeline due to the Nazi-supported uprising against the British puppet in Iraq in 1941. History records this as the battle for the Habbaniya oil field of 1941. In September 1939 when Kriegsmarine Grandadmiral Raeder heard the war started he realized Germany would lose because they hadn’t got enough oil. Oil had become the commodity incomparable, or as Daniel Yergin wrote “The Prize.”
An account of the then-secret wartime meeting of FDR and King Abdul Aziz in history.com shows an early interconnection in U.S. foreign Policy circles between increasing Jewish settlement in Palestine and security of strategic oil supplies.
“Secretary of the Interior, Harold Ickes, saw Saudi oil and the national security/welfare of the U.S. as umbilically linked and even proposed that the federal government establish direct control over all oil resources owned by American companies in Saudi Arabia,” Montgomery says.
There were also signs that the British were trying to take control over Chevron-Texaco, so part of Roosevelt’s goal in meeting the Saudi king was strategic. As Montgomery says, FDR knew it “would serve U.S. national interests in oil security long-term.” [our bold ed.]
King Abdul Aziz Ibn Saud of Saudi Arabia with Franklin D. Roosevelt on the USS Quincy Egypt February 14, 1945
FDR met king Abdul Aziz ibn Saud in 1945 and told him there should be a national homeland for the Jews and expressed the notion that it should be in Palestine.
The King responded“that the Jews should be ‘given living space in the Axis countries which oppressed them’ rather than Palestine. In response, ‘The President remarked that Poland might be considered a case in point. The Germans appear to have killed three million Polish Jews, by which count there should be space in Poland for the resettlement of many homeless Jews.’”
...“Ibn Saud responded that he opposed ‘continued Jewish immigration and the purchase of land [in Palestine] by the Jews.’ The king insisted that ‘the Arabs and the Jews could never cooperate, neither in Palestine, nor in any other country.’ President Roosevelt ‘replied that he wished to assure his Majesty that he would do nothing to assist the Jews against the Arabs and would make no move hostile to the Arab people.’
...“Roosevelt’s remark ignited a firestorm of criticism in the American Jewish community. “One wonders why Arab [leaders] were consulted about the fate of the Jewish National Home,” the American Zionist leader Dr. Abba Hillel Silver complained. “Were the Jewish people consulted about the fate of Iraq, or Syria, or Saudi Arabia.”
Three years later Truman elaborated a policy to control and discipline the oil producing regimes with the colonial settler fortress state. The U.S. bourgeoisie got on board as ‘Christian Zionists’ and this reinforced the exclusionary immigration policy, i.e. the government was still refusing to let ruined European Jews immigrate to the U.S. These were the rabid Cold War days and you never heard what Lenni Brenner later revealed about the Zionists’ dealings with the Nazis; that was a subject they didn’t want to talk about when everything was anti-communism. That the U.S. went back on its word to the Saudi monarch, that they would not make hostile moves against the Arabs, wasn’t a subject of note either.
So the Israeli war on the Palestinians and the surrounding Arab states was cleverly sold as part of the bourgeois “decolonization” of the European powers’ empires to those with no idea of the true events. The resemblance was a superficial camouflage of what was in fact the exact opposite of “decolonization.” The fact that Palestine had been a British colony was hyped. The bigger truth that Israel was the triumph of colonial settler invaders exactly when the oil monopolies needed them as a border army was hidden.
The San Remo Conference attended by the French and British and other victors of WWI, on April 25th, 1920 they signed an oil agreement carving up and sharing out Turkish Petroleum. Business before pleasure, the partitioning of the Ottoman empire could wait until August that year. Movietone newsreel exists on YouTube of the French and British high commissioners ceremoniously starting the pumps on the Habbaniya-Haifa oil pipeline in February,1935. The Rashid Ali coup in Iraq of 1941 attempted to deny this source to Britain, but the support extended by Hitler and Mussolini to Ali was ineffective.
The biggest pool of all, even down to today, was found under Saudi Arabia by the geologists and drillers of the CASACO consortium of five U.S. oil companies in March, 1938. CASACO became ARAMCO in 1944. By the time Roosevelt met King Abdul Aziz it had already been long apparent to the “7 Sisters” oil firms that control of all sources of oil on the capitalist world market was essential to the ability to support its price! So the U.S. went back on FDR’s word after just three years, leaving little doubt who holds the power in America. Zionism was all about blood and soil. But under the soil was big oil.
BUT Fascism???? Only technically not fascism!
Churchill, the spokesman, on this subject for both the Anglo and American ruling classes, was preoccupied throughout his career with preventing and then defeating the Bolshevik revolution. This mandate was picked up by the Zionists and shared with the Italian and German fascists. Thus we make the case above for Zionism as anti-Bolshevik and pro-fascist. It remains to be seen if Zionism has plumbed the depths of its racist colonial settler national chauvinism and emerged under terminal crisis as full blown fascism to realize its historic mission defending Israeli finance capital. Will they succeed as a bulwark against Permanent Revolution into the indefinite future? Everything will depend on the workers’ subjective factor across the region.
Is the evolution of Zionism in its current form under Netanyahu qualitatively fascist? Or has it always been proto fascist in search of its own crisis-ridden finance capital? The expulsion of Palestinians was always the objective and now it is happening again. Is this because Zionism has had to adapt to the terminal crisis of capital as a settler colony, which crisis it experiences as an existential threat revealing its inherent barbarity in service of a panicking national bourgeoisie?
We argued against the International Leninist Trotskyist Fraction (FLTI) in 2009 that Zionism is not fascist despite having long associations with fascists and sharing many characteristics with fascism. It lacks the vital ingredient in that the Israeli working class is not yet a revolutionary threat to the rule of finance capital.
“Nevertheless, despite its history, its complicity with Nazism, and its occupation of Palestine, the Zionists are not fascists. They are extreme racist nationalist colonial settlers who in many ways resemble fascists. But since the Israeli working class is also Zionist there is no need for the Israeli bourgeoisie to impose a fascist reaction to smash any communist movement among Israeli workers. When Israeli workers turn against Zionism and unconditionally support the Palestinian struggle for self-determination, then we will see the Zionist regime resort to fascism.” – Living Marxism, “Is Zionism Fascism?”
The extent or level of barbarity and dehumanization offender states subject occupied or warred upon peoples and nations to are not elemental in a historical materialist definition of fascism. The genocidal brutalities carried out against Palestine are dwarfed in magnitude by U.S. imperialism’s brutalities in the Philippines, Japan, Korea and Vietnam etc. The racism and dehumanization of whole populations, concentration into viciously policed ghettos, pogroms, concentration camps, and disproportional mass incarceration are all elements of the democratic bourgeois state as evidenced by the U.S., the British and the French imperialists. Were Puerto Rico, Guam or Hawaii, Guadalupe, or Martinique to act up or get out of hand we would expect U.S. or French forces to assert their authority with all the brutality deemed necessary.
Special laws targeting Jewish economic and legal rights were elemental in the lead up to the Nazi final solution and today the Palestinians inside the Green Line are subject to dozens of special laws to limit their legal and economic power. Black and Brown folk in the democratic U.S. have suffered similar restrictions without the U.S. capitalist class requiring fascism.
The Palestinian working masses do represent a threat but they have not organized a politically independent working class organizational threat. In large part because the majority of the Jewish workers are not receptive to a united Jewish /Palestinian Workers Party. Their loyalty to Zionism pushes the Palestinian workers into the shadow of the bourgeois nationalists. The October 7th events showed the limits of an isolated military incursion without a coordinated working class united front to strike against the entire state. Tactically it may have mobilized the opinion of the Global South and driven the wedge deeper into the Zionist hold on the Jewish youth in the Diaspora, but without the program of Permanent Revolution the threat is missing– its Bolshevik leadership. (Even Churchill knew that.)
As for the elements of a corporate state that fuses finance capital with state capital to keep overall capitalism afloat against the collapse of industry and the threat of worker occupations…is that the case with Israel’s economy? The industry shows no sign of collapsing requiring state ‘intervention’; workers’ occupations are so far not even a threat.
Fascism in Israel would shut down all opposition in the press, academia and the class struggle. Today there is not much opposition from the Jewish working class and the Palestinians inside the Green Line are restrained and ironically academics, mainstream and alt-media still issue stories that are more highly censored in the U.S. than in Israel. And only this summer we saw mass demonstrations against the Likud government consolidating unconstitutional powers.
The definition of the ideology of fascism has been summed up by an anti-Marxist academic Ryan Chapman on YouTube to a pithy statement : “We think with the blood of our nation.” By that measure the Zionists can be equated with the fascist ideology. Marxism explains that fascism is always waiting in the wings, that fascist power is employed in the streets to crush the threat of the working class taking power and it is employed as a regime as punishment for the workers not having taken power.
“At the moment that the “normal” police and military resources of the bourgeois dictatorship, together with their parliamentary screens, no longer suffice to hold society in a state of equilibrium – the turn of the fascist regime arrives. Through the fascist agency, capitalism sets in motion the masses of the crazed petty bourgeoisie and the bands of declassed and demoralized lumpenproletariat – all the countless human beings whom finance capital itself has brought to desperation and frenzy.
From fascism the bourgeoisie demands a thorough job; once it has resorted to methods of civil war, it insists on having peace for a period of years. And the fascist agency, by utilizing the petty bourgeoisie as a battering ram, by overwhelming all obstacles in its path, does a thorough job. After fascism is victorious, finance capital directly and immediately gathers into its hands, as in a vise of steel, all the organs and institutions of sovereignty, the executive administrative, and educational powers of the state: the entire state apparatus together with the army, the municipalities, the universities, the schools, the press, the trade unions, and the co-operatives. When a state turns fascist, it does not mean only that the forms and methods of government are changed in accordance the patterns set by Mussolini – the changes in this sphere ultimately play a minor role – but it means first of all for the most part that the workers’ organizations are annihilated; that the proletariat is reduced to an amorphous state; and that a system of administration is created which penetrates deeply into the masses and which serves to frustrate the independent crystallization of the proletariat. Therein precisely is the gist of fascism …”
But holding an ideology is one thing, using its state power to crush the working class with authoritarian measures is not always necessary.
Trump appeared as a wannabe fascist dictator, he had executive power for four years, but fascism was not necessary to protect capitalism from popular revolt. Likewise, Israeli citizens’ persistent and mass anti-Netanyahu demonstrations earlier this year were never a threat to the Zionist project, only to the illusion that democratic institutions are capable of eliminating corruption and providing an independent judiciary. October 7th provided Netanyahu a reprieve from the pressure but he has no need to continue to assert authoritarian controls on citizens.
Fascistic, authoritarian control of information flows, brutal disregard for human rights and sanctioned extra-legal murder of occupied peoples, journalists, and political oppositionists are all recurrent elements of liberal democracies, such as have been employed by the U.S., Britain and France against oppressed people at home, in their colonies and semi-colonies. Zionism claims to have established the only liberal democracy in the Middle East and in comparison to the behavior of its benefactors it complies with tradition. Even to the point of having incipient or proto-fascists administering their ‘bourgeois liberal democracy.’
We claim the basic characteristics of Zionism in and out of power are pro-imperialist, anti-Bolshevik, colonial settler state myth-and nation-builders. As an ally of fascism which defines its international work, what is Zionism today in Israel? We say that Zionism is proto-fascist. We use James P. Cannon’s 1954 article on fascism which argues that capitalism in decline keeps its fascist layers available for counter-revolution when it can no longer rule in the old ways. So while the Zionist state is not yet fascist, the compounded terminal crisis guarantees that the conditions will arise to make fascism the last resort of the Israeli finance capital.
The qualifier ‘proto’ fascism is used here to mean the same thing as incipient fascism. Moreover, Zionism has been in ‘proto mode’ for a long time as the degeneration of the capitalist mode of production makes it certain to be unleashed. We know that the ruling class will fail to rule in the old way, the regime’s weakness and desperate resort to genocide shows that it knows it has to smash all resistance. We also know that the Palestinians will keep fighting, and that now they have the support of the Arab masses, the masses in the Global South, broad layers of alienated Jewish youth, and important layers of radicalizing workers in the imperialist countries.
But critically, these layers need to form an alliance with all radicalizing Jewish workers’ and anti-Zionists inside occupied Palestine. The revolutionary traditions of the Bundists who joined the Bolsheviks must be revived in historic Palestine to unite Jewish, Arab, Christian and secular workers. This will break the congealed Zionist popular front where Zionist workers have been pulled right into support for any number of bourgeois parties, none of whom can mount a movement that can strip power from the far right Likud and even further right parties, and behind them their international co-thinkers in an international popular front, as the U.S. and Chinese imperialists attempt to resolve the war with a regime change and new bantustans.
The ostensible opposition parties all support or acquiesce in Zionist agendas, even as some hopelessly ‘represent’ two-state plans in the Knesset. So as revolutionaries we have to confront this objective situation with the building of the new world party of socialism that exposes the neo-Stalinists, neo-Maoists, and fake Trotskyists, all of whom fail to raise the Transitional Program for workers’ democracy, workers’ power and workers’ states to overthrow the bourgeois states and the global capitalist system.
How to defeat Zionism
By necessity our party and program is international. For socialism the national program is insufficient.
Our program must call for building the multi-ethnic revolutionary workers party uniting Hebrew and Arabic speaking workers inside the Green Line and in the occupied territories.
Our party exposes the fallacies of Zionist nationalist program and the limits of Arab nationalism’s programs in liberating the region from the dominant and competing imperialist powers.
Our party unites the Jewish and Arab workers against becoming proxies in Great Power politics by bringing the politics of Permanent Revolution to the front of all workers struggles and struggles of the oppressed. We fight species extinction and against Capitalism and its offspring wars, climate catastrophe and economic depressions. Today to secure democratic reforms of society only the self-organized productive class in society can deliver!
IDF Out Now from Gaza and All Occupied Territories! Stop the bombing now!
Release all Palestinian resistance fighters! This means all those in “Administrative Detention” too! Free All the Kids snatched from the streets!
For International Worker actions to strike Israeli shipping at the ports! For Labor Political Strikes against Israel’s genocidal war! Transport and Port Workers: Refuse to Handle All Military Aid to Israel!
Victory to the Palestinian resistance! Break the economic blockade of Gaza! For Labor-Organized International Aid With Distribution Under Palestinian Workers’ Control!
Smash the Apartheid walls and closure system checkpoints! Build a secular multi-ethnic worker’s militia to defeat the IDF! For an international working class military bloc with the resistance fighters of today.
Down with U.S. imperialism! Abolish U.S aid to Israel! Close U.S. foreign military bases! Bring the fleets home! To do so, troops must form enlisted persons unions and a “Let’s go home” movement.
For a multi-ethnic revolutionary Workers Party uniting Arab and Hebrew workers inside the Green Line and in the occupied territories.
Our party must fight against Jewish-only trade unions both inside the Histadrut and outside to demand its expulsion from the ILO. Build class struggle caucuses fighting to break from Zionist racist practices and ideology. Build multi-ethnic trade unions! Same Work, Same Contracts on both sides of the Green Line!
For socialist revolution to establish a workers government based on workers councils and an armed, multi-ethnic workers militia!
For workers control of production and its management for use, by means of a democratically formulated central plan. Open the Books! Stop capital flight. For a state monopoly of foreign trade.
A workers government must fight for:
For Palestinian National Independence by Socialist Revolution to break the chains of Imperialism.
The expropriation of the Imperialist and national Capitals by the Working Class for its use under its plan! Full employment. Thirty hours work for forty hours pay.
For massive public workers to raise Arab communities housing, utilities, transportation, educational, medical facilities, water and food distribution to parity with Jewish communities.
Ensure the right to return for all expelled people and their descendants. For the return of all confiscated properties. For rebuilding and return to prior inhabitants all destroyed housing and agricultural plots.
For Women’s Liberation through Socialist Revolution! For freedom of sexual orientation! For full democratic rights for Lesbians and Gays!
Freedom of the press, internet, the right to assembly and religious privacy. For secular marriage rights. For passports and state identification in two languages without ethnic or religious identification.
For a secular, multi-ethnic Socialist Palestine! For a Socialist Federation across MENA!
Build the Revolutionary Workers International! For the World Socialist Revolution!
– International Leninist Trotskyist Tendency (ILTT) December 4th 2023
red rave is the loud mouth of members of the Communist Workers' Group of Aotearoa/New Zealand, committed to building a new communist international to lead workers to the revolutionary overthrow of global capitalism. Since 2010 we have been in a Liaison Committee with the Communist Workers' Group (USA), the Revolutionary Workers' Group (Zimbabwe) and the Revolutionary Workers' Group (Brazil). In December 2019 the LCC became the International Leninist Trotskyist Tendency (ILTT) on the basis of agreement on program and perspectives, and the need for a higher level of democratic centrism in the fight for a new world party of socialism.
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