The radical Jewish tradition—the alternative to Zionism

This article was first presented as a speech to the Gaza solidarity encampments at La Trobe, Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology and Queensland universities.

It’s just fantastic to meet with those protesting in support of Palestine and against the war in Gaza, and particularly so as I am one of those Jews who say, “not in my name”.

A couple of weeks ago, Prof Ghassan Abu-Sitta, a British plastic surgeon, was due to address the French parliament. But when he arrived at the airport in Paris he was stripped of his possessions, taken to a holding cell under guard and then deported. Why did this happen? The German government had banned him from the Shengen Area, a single visa jurisdiction encompassing 29 European nations. It may seem strange that Germany would ban a British citizen from entering France. But Abu-Sitta was about to report on his 43 days spent at hospitals in Gaza last October and November.

A couple of weeks earlier, he was due to speak in Berlin at a congress about Palestine. The German authorities prevented him from entering the country, supposedly because they “could not ensure the safety of the attendees at the conference”.

First of all, we have the assumption that a Palestinian is automatically a danger to everyone else. But second, we have what actually occurred at the conference. Far from being concerned about the participants’ safety, 2,500 riot police stormed the stage, shut off the electricity, arrested several people—including Jewish organisers of the event—and declared it banned.

The German government makes opposing antisemitism a core political issue, and so it should given its history. But how have they defined antisemitism? As opposition to Israel.

In Germany today, pro-Palestinian demonstrations are almost illegal. Wearing a keffiyeh is banned in some parts of the country. Using the phrase “From the river to the sea” and displaying the Palestinian flag are now crimes for which you can be arrested. One German state requires applicants for citizenship to declare their support for “Israel’s right to exist”.

Meanwhile, the right organises in Germany with very few restrictions. The government regularly allows far-right, and even openly fascist, gatherings. This is in spite of the fact that more than 90 percent of all antisemitic incidents in Germany are attributable to the far-right. Real antisemitism is growing largely unchecked while governments attack and arrest anti-Zionist Jews all in the name of preventing antisemitism.

The Germans aren’t exceptional here. Governments all around the world push the line that anything hostile to Israel and Zionism is antisemitic. Let’s unpack that.

First, let’s consider what antisemitism is.

Discrimination and violence against Jews are nothing new. But in the past, this was based on Jewishness as a religion. All Jews had to do to escape was to get baptised. When Spain expelled Jews in 1492, those who converted were allowed to stay as long as they abandoned their religious practices. At the time Karl Marx’s father converted around 1816, this was still the case. But by the late nineteenth century, Marx himself, although he was not born Jewish by attitudes at the time, was again considered to be Jewish. What happened in between?

Imperialism took hold during the latter part of the nineteenth century and pseudo-scientific ideas of race were used to justify the subjugation of supposedly inferior populations in the colonies. It’s no accident that around the same time Jews also came to be viewed as a race—that is something biological, something you were born with and could not change. No longer was it considered to be something in your head—your religious belief—which you could alter. The basis of modern antisemitism is hatred of Jews as an inborn condition.

The actual word “antisemitism” was invented by right-wing German nationalists who set up an organisation called the League of Antisemites in 1879.

Modern antisemitism became a tool in the capitalist divide and rule handbook. The ruling class wanted to get rid of competitors and during the nineteenth century a significant Jewish bourgeoisie arose in Germany. So, antisemitism was partly economic. But Jews in Europe were an easily identifiable community with a different language and customs, and were perfectly placed to be scapegoats for all sorts of issues. For instance, authorities in Tsarist Russia provoked pogroms to divert attention from the real causes of the misery in ordinary people’s lives.

Hostility to Jews in the late nineteenth century was also a product of their association with socialists and the working-class movement. Jews had been prominent in the 1789 French and 1848 European revolutions and in radical organisations such as the Social Democratic Party of Germany. Right wingers who wanted to attack the left often did this by pointing the finger at Jews.

On the other hand, it was the left and working-class movements that took a stand against antisemitism. Socialist parties, anarchists, the Bolsheviks, trade unions and many other working-class and left-wing organisations and independents in Europe and the US all joined in the fight against antisemitism, and against the right and fascism. Donny Gluckstein and I go into this in some detail in our book, The Radical Jewish Tradition: Revolutionaries, resistance fighters and firebrands, and show what nonsense it is to talk about antisemitism being an integral and ingrained feature of radical organisations.

So where does Zionism fit into this understanding of what is antisemitic?

Theodore Herzl, known as the father of Zionism, proposed his ideas in 1895, and in effect turned the argument about being Jewish as inborn on its head. He argued that non-Jews were inherently antisemitic, that they would always be this way and there was nothing you could do about it. This is a core argument of Zionists to this day. Herzl argued that only the creation of a nation state for Jews could provide safety from antisemitism. Because they wanted to argue for a nation, they needed to argue that they represent all, or at least the vast majority, of Jews.

The reality is that Jews aren’t a single entity, and in no way do the Zionists represent them all. In fact, regarding Jews as a monolithic entity is typical of antisemites.

Rachel Shapiro, a Jewish anti-Zionist and pro-Palestinian activist and granddaughter of a holocaust survivor, points this out:

“This designation of all Jews and all Judaism as a single uniform entity, necessarily speaking the same language (modern Hebrew), holding the same values (Zionism) and sharing an identical culture ... is, in fact, the precise definition of antisemitic, Nazistic ... rhetoric.”

Before World War Two, Zionism was a minority point of view in most Jewish communities. Although it later became much more prominent, it has never represented the entire Jewish community. This has become increasingly obvious as Jews around the world are a major feature of the current opposition to Israel and its genocide in Gaza. On the other hand, many supporters of Zionism in the world today aren’t Jews at all—right-wing Christians in the US are a major support base, and the right-wing antisemitic governments in Hungary and Romania are also important international supporters of the Zionist state.

Zionism is a modern political ideology, and opposition to Zionism is not an attack on all Jews. Modern antisemitism is socially conditioned anti-Jewish racism. In no way can opposition to Israel and Zionists be designated as antisemitic.

Equating anti-Zionism with antisemitism weakens the fight against real antisemitism and is really about preventing criticism of Israel.

Zionists constantly invoke Jewish history as a justification for their support of Israel, so an alternative view of that history becomes very immediate and urgent. Basically, Zionists don’t want their own community to know that there is a history of struggle by Jews outside the Zionist movement.

In our book we talk about the “lachrymose [tearful] conception of Jewish history”. That’s the idea that the main element of Jewish experience has been suffering—it’s always been this way and it can’t be changed. In other words, Jews are eternal victims.

There are three ways to respond to this. First, you can say we can’t do anything about antisemitism, so we withdraw into our own ghettoes, customs and religion. We do nothing and remain victims.

The second option is to get away from being a victim by joining the perpetrators: become an exploiter and an oppressor yourself, or at least side with those who do.

Zionism is a combination of both these options. They start by saying that we can’t do anything about antisemitism and non-Jews will always be antisemitic. But then they say the way to stop being victims is to take lessons and guidance from the colonialists, the imperialists, the ruling class and even the antisemites. Let’s set up our own state and become just like them.

But there is a third option. In our book, we show that while the oppression and suffering have certainly been there, Jews are not just victims. They have always fought back.

The radical tradition is the history of working-class and socialist Jewish struggle against both oppression and exploitation. It’s the tradition that says we can fight to defend ourselves. The tradition that knows what antisemitism is but doesn’t just accept it as eternal or move to set yourself up as the oppressor of someone else.

Before World War Two, the majority of Jews were working class and part of a wider struggle alongside their non-Jewish comrades on the left. Fighting oppression and exploitation took numerous political forms, including anarchism, left Zionism, Bundism (the Bund was a Jewish workers’ association) and revolutionary Marxism.

Jews fought back against pogroms in Tsarist Russia and joined strikes and mass struggles in the UK and the US in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. During the Holocaust, despite what is widely said, they didn’t go as sheep to the slaughter. They established underground resistance organisations and led uprisings in ghettos and concentration camps. Throughout, they acted in solidarity with other socialist and working-class movements. Far from the Zionist stereotype of the ultimate victims, Jews were revolutionaries, resistance fighters and firebrands.

This Jewish radical tradition is a history of resistance and the struggle to change the world. A history of people who didn’t just weep and hide away, who refused to be just victims or to join the oppressors.

This history matters because the battle for memory is also a battle for the present. The Zionists don’t want us to know there is a different answer to antisemitism than the Israeli state. The ruling class doesn’t want us to know there are ways to defeat their divide and rule scapegoating.

But this history doesn’t just belong to Jews. It belongs to all of us—to the participants in the encampments and Palestine solidarity actions everywhere, and to all who are engaged in struggle against the horrors of our society, of oppression and exploitation, and of war. This isn’t an academic or a sectional history but is avowedly partisan, a history to support and inspire struggle.

I want to end with the words of Marek Edelmann, a Bundist and participant in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 1943. After the war, Edelmann returned to Poland and remained a radical all his life. During the second Palestinian Intifada, Edelman wrote a letter to the Palestinians, who he compared to the Jewish Fighting Organisation that had led the Warsaw ghetto uprising. He addressed it to “commanders of the Palestinian military ... to all the soldiers of the Palestinian fighting organisation”.

Just as Edelmann linked the resistance fighters in Warsaw, so do I link the Jewish radical tradition with today’s fight of the Palestinians against expropriation, persecution and genocide. I stand with Palestine.

Janey Stone is an anti-Zionist Jewish socialist and co-author with Donny Gluckstein of “The Radical Jewish Tradition: Revolutionaries, resistance fighters and firebrands”, which is published by Interventions in Australia.