Revolutionary history of Jewish anti-Zionism
One conspicuous sight at the regular Palestine solidarity demonstrations is the contingents of Jews, often with banners proclaiming, “Not in my name” and the like.
This is not a recent development. Anti-Zionism has been a crucial part of the Jewish radical tradition since the late 19th century. Way back in 1886, a Russian Jewish socialist revolutionary called Ilya Rubanovich argued against Jewish settlement in Palestine:
“What is to be done with the Arabs? ... The Arabs have exactly the same historical right and it will be unfortunate for you if ... you make the peaceful Arabs defend their right. They will answer tears with blood.”
Theodor Herzl, the founder of Zionism, argued that nothing could be done about antisemitism, that it was inherent in non-Jews and that Jews must leave their home countries and set up a state of their own. The first Zionist congress in August 1897 represented only a small minority of Jews at the time.
The first organisational opposition to this current, the General Jewish Labour Bund, was set up only two months later in the Russian Empire. The core concept of the Bund was “doykeit”, a Yiddish word meaning “hereness”: it wanted to fight antisemitism in the here and now.
Based in the Yiddish-speaking Jewish working class, the Bund was the first Marxist group in the tsarist empire to create a mass organisation. It played a major role in the Russian revolutionary movement, particularly in the 1905 revolution. After the 1917 revolution, the Bund continued the struggle in independent Poland, including its polemics against Zionism.
Marek Edelman, who participated in the Warsaw ghetto uprising, put it this way: “The Bundists did not wait for the Messiah, nor did they plan to leave for Palestine. They ... fought for a just, socialist Poland, in which each nationality would have its own cultural autonomy, and in which minorities’ rights would be guaranteed”.
The local Zionists had difficulty articulating their politics. In the parliament, for example, when Jewish deputies were speaking, right-wingers would heckle them, yelling: “Go to Palestine”. The problem was that the Zionists were also calling for Jews to go to Palestine.
It’s not surprising that Zionists were often ridiculed, as we can see in a Bundist song:
You want to take us to Jerusalem
So we can die as a nation
We’d rather stay in the diaspora
And fight for our liberation!
By 1939, the Bund was the strongest Jewish political party in Poland, while the Zionist and clerical parties drastically declined.
After World War Two, the Bund continued to publicly oppose Zionism.
In April 1948, it warned that partition of Palestine was the “beginning of a new bloody chapter” in Jewish-Arab relations and that “the creation of an independent Jewish State would lead to a new catastrophe”. It said the atmosphere was becoming “more and more favourable for the development of political brigandry, terror, the extremes of home-grown Jewish fascism, nationalism and reactionary tendencies”. How prophetic.
Today, many Jews are breaking with Zionism under pressure of events in Gaza. This has also happened in the past.
For instance, the socialist-Zionist group Hashomer Hatzair (Young Guard) was a youth group in Eastern Europe with 70,000 members in 1939. Its Zionism had a strange mix of political influences including psychoanalysis and even Marxism.
Tony Cliff, who later became a well-known British socialist, was born in British mandate Palestine. He explained how “the Zionist socialists were trapped ideologically”.
“They believed that ... in the kibbutz we could see the embryo of a future socialist society ... But in the meantime, Arab resistance ... had to be overcome so they collaborated with Zionist moneybags and rich institutions as well as the British army and police. The Zionist socialists held the Communist Manifesto in one hand and a coloniser’s gun in the other.”
Nonetheless, Hashomer Hatzair provided a route towards politicisation and anti-Zionism for many people.
The most famous is probably Abram Leon, who repudiated Zionism and in 1940 became a leader of an underground Trotskyist organisation in occupied Belgium. He was arrested in 1944 and murdered in Auschwitz.
Chanie Rosenberg was another anti-Zionist who started out as a member of Hashomer Hatzair. Born in South Africa, she emigrated to Palestine in 1944 and thought she was living the socialist dream on a kibbutz. But one day she came across some guns used to steal Palestinian land. “At that point, I knew that I had become an anti-Zionist.”
The USA has a significant Jewish anti-Zionist history. During the 1920s and ’30s, the heavily Jewish Communist Party campaigned against Zionism as a component of British imperialism.
The Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party (SWP), established in 1938, was also anti-Zionist. It played an important role among Jews in 1939 when the fascist German American Bund (nothing to do with the Jewish Bund) held a mass rally in New York.
The SWP called a counter-demonstration, but not one Jewish organisation was prepared to participate. Both Yiddish daily papers called on their readers to stay away.
The Communist Party also refused to support the demo because they “could not undertake to forcibly prevent such a meeting once the City Administration had allowed it”. And the local Hashomer Hatzair branch also refused, saying “sorry we can’t join you ... Our Zionist policy is to take no part in politics outside Palestine”.
On the day 50,000 protesters turned up—way beyond anyone’s expectation. Most were Jewish, and many rank-and-file Communists defied their leadership to participate.
Anti-Zionist organisations in Palestine have an important history. First was the Palestine Communist Party (PCP), formed in 1923.
It had a promising start but quite quickly became politically confused. For instance, it attempted to integrate Arabs into the Zionist labour organisation the Histadrut. But the Histadrut was (and remains today) a conscious tool of the Zionist project in Palestine.
The PCP also had problems with the constant zigs and zags imposed by the Stalinist Comintern, as it switched strategies in the 1930s.
They were first instructed to have a class-based focus on Arab workers and fellaheen (peasants and agricultural labourers) only to suddenly be instructed to give uncritical support for Arab nationalism and the bourgeoisie. Then the Moscow show trials began in the late 1930s, with many of the victims Jewish; most of the PCP leaders were annihilated in the process. So, the PCP failed among both Arabs and Jews, and became increasingly ineffectual and disoriented.
In 1943, the political tensions became too much, and the party split into two separate organisations—one Jewish and one Arab. On Victory in Europe Day in 1945, the Arab organisation marched together with feudal and bourgeois parties, under anti-Zionist slogans. The Jewish party marched under the Zionist flag, with Zionist slogans. In 1947, the Jewish PCP completed its political destruction and endorsed partition.
Meanwhile, the Trotskyist Revolutionary Communist League of Palestine (RCL) was set up in the late 1930s. Most of its members were Jewish workers—some were born in Palestine, and some had fled from Germany. There were, however, some Arabs.
The RCL recognised that unity between Arabs and Jews could come about only “through the abolition of all racist ideology and practice on the part of the Jews”.
The RCL wanted to build a united revolutionary socialist party. But there were major difficulties. For example, when they tried to organise joint trade unions for Arabs and Jews, the British interned them without trial.
One of those interned was Tony Cliff, at that time still Yigael Gluckstein. Cliff’s family were strongly Zionist. “It took me a few years to make the transition from being an orthodox Zionist to being a semi-Zionist with a pro-Palestinian position and then to making a complete break with Zionism”, Cliff later wrote.
To be a revolutionary socialist operating illegally in Palestine required enormous commitment. With fewer than 30 members, the RCL published two magazines, one in Arabic and one in Hebrew, and put out leaflets.
Cliff was eventually released from British internment, married Chanie Rosenberg and ended up in the UK, where he was a founding member of the International Socialists, later the Socialist Workers Party.
Another RCL member, Jakob Moneta, arrested by the British at the same time as Cliff, said he “learned that democratic imperialism, in the struggle to preserve its empire, is sometimes no less squeamish than fascism going out to conquer a new empire”.
The RCL was too small to have any significant impact on workers’ struggles. The organisation collapsed after 1948, but individuals including Jakob Taut and Jabra Nicola remained active and provided continuity into the next organisation.
In 1962, a group of ex-members of the Communist Party set up the Israeli Socialist Organisation, usually known by the name of its magazine Matzpen (Compass).
Most, but not all, members were Jewish. The organisation always remained very small—only a few dozen—but was important. It is historically the only committed anti-Zionist organisation within the state of Israel. Matzpen developed a sophisticated analysis of Zionism that influenced revolutionary socialist groups around the world.
One of its members, Moishe Machover, moved to the UK in 1968. In a bizarre twist of fate, he was expelled from the UK Labour Party in 2017 for supposed antisemitism—this was the right-wing party machine cracking down on its left opposition.
Unfortunately, the stresses of trying to maintain an organisation like Matzpen are extreme, and the organisation finally ceased to exist in the 1980s. But a large amount of the standard works on Zionism that we use today were produced by or under its influence.
This history of Jewish anti-Zionism also exists in Australia.
The Jewish Council to Combat Fascism and Antisemitism, established in 1942, was non-Zionist rather than anti-Zionist. It had hundreds of members and widespread support, so much so that in 1948 the council became the official public relations representative of the Jewish community.
But the council’s non-Zionist stance was unsustainable, and it started to lose support. In 1950, a prominent Zionist attacked it, asserting that they “[do] not ‘combat’ but ‘spread’ antisemitism”. Seventy-five years ago, the Zionists were already slandering left-wing Jews just as they do today.
In 1978, a soft Zionist magazine called Paths to Peace (PTP) applied to join Melbourne community radio station 3CR. But 3CR rejected its application on the grounds that Zionism is racist.
The right-wing publication Bulletin smeared 3CR as terrorist, and PTP and others laid a charge at the Broadcasting Tribunal claiming the pro-Palestine programs were offensive to the Melbourne Jewish community because they were antisemitic. Sound familiar?
3CR organised a “fight back” campaign and mobilised 1,000 people to distribute half a million leaflets throughout Melbourne.
Jews Against Zionism and Antisemitism (JAZA) was set up in 1979 to help the defence, declaring that they “represent a socialist and internationalist tradition among Jews that is much older and has a much brighter future than political Zionism”. They held forums and demos, including against the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, and brought out Matzpen member Ehud Ein-Gil as a speaker.
History matters because the battle for memory is also a battle for the present. The Zionists don’t want us to know about this alternative history.
They don’t want us to know about the committed anti-Zionism of Jews like Marek Edelmann. During the second Palestinian Intifada, Edelman wrote a letter to the Palestinians in which he compared them to the Jewish Fighting Organisation. He addressed it to “commanders of the Palestinian military ... to all the soldiers of the Palestinian fighting organisation”.
When we loudly proclaim, “Not in our name”, we are following in these footsteps.
