Zionism Betrays the Jewish Diaspora
From Middle East Eye
Cincinnati Socialists without reservation condemns antisemitism. Everyone should be against antisemitism, not only because it is hateful and vicious, but because the liberation of humankind will require the greatest degree of cooperation, organization, and friendship among the entire planetary working class—Black and white, Jew and gentile, young and old, queer and straight—to defeat its enemies. We reject without exception any attempt to divide the worldwide proletariat on pretexts of race, religion, gender, sexuality, nationality, or disability. We should make war on antisemitism because antisemitism is a front in the war of capital against the human race, including the vast majority of gentiles. We announce it clearly: Antisemitism is a delusional sickness. However, we just as emphatically oppose Zionism as a form of national chauvinism and a tool of the international ruling class. We do not accept Zionist territorial claims over any part of the contemporary Levant, and we support the liberation struggles of the Palestinian people, including their armed struggles. Moreover, we especially reject the notion—fairly recent—that criticism of the Zionist political entity is inherently antisemitic. This notion is ahistorical and ultimately contradictory, ignoring as it does the opposition to Zionism among many Jewish intellectuals, scholars, and political leftists themselves. We especially oppose the so-called IHRA definition of antisemitism as a reactionary stratagem to quell legitimate anti-Zionism and to establish Zionism itself as a kind of secular American religion. We reject the IHRA definition as a form of what has ben called compulsory Zionism, which scholar Umayyah Cable defines as
a discourse that operates to produce “common-sense” knowledge about the Israel-Palestine question in ways that naturalize and privilege Israel, subjugate Palestinian existence, and micromanage the politics of solidarity within transnational leftist social justice movements.
In the hands of the academy, then, compulsory Zionism can be a way to silence speech and suppress legitimate scholarship. In the hands of the bourgeois state, it can serve as a pretext for state violence against Muslims, Arabs, communists, socialists, labor organizers, intellectuals, and people of any faith or ethnic group who oppose war and nationalism.
The IHRA definition was first formulated in the early 2000s in specific response to growing skepticism of the legitimacy of the Zionist project. Primarily right-wing and centrist US groups such as the American Jewish Congress and the Anti-Defamation League adopted the definition essentially as a way to silence critics of Israel. It has come under widespread and withering criticism from legal scholars and historians for its vagueness, inconsistency, and incompatibility with democratic norms of free speech. As University of London Professor Rebecca Ruth Gould has written,
If we accept the rhetorical turn that has dominated US public discourse around Israel since the advent of the IHRA definition, we are forced to choose between acknowledging Palestinians’ point of view and being accused of antisemitism. This is an unsustainable—and unacceptable—opposition that follows logically from definitions of racism that prioritize feelings over material conditions. Everyone has the right to be offended, but no one has the right not to be offended, or to translate their feeling of offense into an unequivocal demonstration of racism.
As Gould argues, the IHRA definition is so abstract and vague that it hardly even addresses the specific historical origins and character of actual Jew-hatred. Instead of treating antisemitism as a real historical phenomenon, the IHRA definition simply treats any utterance that may give offense to any Jew at any time as potentially antisemitic. By ignoring the real suffering of the great masses of European Jews and its causes, the IHRA definition is at best glib and incoherent, and at worst a tool for suppressing dissent on the question of Zionism, even among Jews themselves.
The IHRA definition of antisemitism is especially notorious for blurring the distinction between the Jewish faith and the Zionist Israeli state. To give a single example: The IHRA guidelines stipulate “Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis” as a manifestation of antisemitism. In fact, the wording of this passage negates itself through its ambiguous employment of the term “contemporary policy.” By definition all Israeli “contemporary policy” affirms and aligns itself with the historical Zionist project, and it is a well-established, well-documented, and publicly-available fact that self-described fascists, including self-avowed supporters of the fascist Benito Mussolini regime in Italy, played a role in the founding of the Zionist movement. In fact, Zionists have never hesitated to form coalitions with antisemites on the far right. Zionism's founder, Theodor Herzl, met with Tsarist Russia's homicidal antisemitic interior minister Vyacheslav von Plehve, to discuss ways to persuade Jews to emigrate from Russia to Palestine. Finally, in defiance of the worldwide boycott of Nazi Germany, German Zionists signed the Haavara Agreement with the Third Reich to assist wealthy Jews—abandoning Jewish proletarians—in leaving the nation and transferring Jewish assets to Palestine. From a Marxist point of view, the most important trait of Zionism aligning with fascism is its roots in the Eastern European Jewish petty bourgeoise. In his analysis of early Zionist flirtations with fascism, the Jewish American historian Lenni Brenner writes,
[A]s an unmistakable generality, Zionism always found its social base, if at all, in the middle class. The Jewish haute-bourgeoisie never had the least interest in abandoning its wealth in the Diaspora for remote and poor Palestine; the Jewish working class tended to link its destiny to that of its fellow workers. [ . . . ] A portion of the Jewish petite-bourgeoisie, or more particularly a portion of their youth, fully abandoned their class for Marxism. But a substantial element retained their class ambitions and sought to transfer to a new colonial setting in Palestine.
Brenner’s argument makes one thing clear: Zionism from its origins up to the time of the Nakba was not—and did not conceive of itself as—a spontaneous or popular movement for Jewish self-emancipation. Zionism was a movement for conservative Jews looking to establish themselves as a colonial élite—not for all Jews, not even for all Ashkenazi Jews, but for the middle class. Israel was in its very inception little more than a white-flight suburb for the Jewish petty bourgeoisie.
Today’s Zionism—especially among Americans both Jewish and goyische—is even less an authentic means for, or expression of, Jewish liberation. Today, it is just one facet of a degenerated and delusional Cold-War xenophobia and McCarthyism, a species of global white supremacy. For evidence, we can look at the late 20th century, during which Israel provided crucial material and ideological support to the racist apartheid government in South Africa. Likewise, during the eighties, Israel trained and armed the genocidal forces of Efraín Rios Montt in Guatemala, and helped plan the rural pacification program of 1982, which led to the extrajudicial slaughter of 10,000 Indigenous Guatemalans. Similarly, Israel was a massive arms supplier and crucial military ally of Chile during the régime of the butcher Augusto Pinochet. During Pinochet’s rule, approximately 130,000 civilians were arrested and tortured and more than 3000 were killed. Perhaps most ironically, Menachem Begin’s Israel was a key supporter and arms supplier of the Argentine military dictatorship of 1976-1983. In its seven years in power, the Argentine dictadura—along with being virulently anti-Black and anti-Indigenous, and along with slaughtering 30,000 leftist activists, many of them teenagers—was perhaps one of the most antisemitic régimes to have ever existed in the Western Hemisphere. Of the tens of thousands murdered during the so-called guerra sucia, or Dirty War, an estimated 12% were Jewish, a figure far disproportionate to the overall Jewish population of Argentina.
Zionism aligns itself with capitalist geopolitical power and national hegemony in the so-called Middle East, not the liberation of Jews as a whole. To say anti-Zionism is an attack upon Jews is an erasure of Zionism’s own sordidly reactionary politics and its well-documented history of collaboration with Jew-haters. Cincinnati Socialists insists that any attempt to defend or legitimize Zionism is itself reactionary and allied—no matter how inadvertently—with fascism, militarism, imperialism, and racism. We also say that attempts to assimilate the IHRA definition of antisemitism to US law are barely-disguised and spuriously philosemitic attacks on First Amendment liberties, including the liberties of American Jews. We urge everyone to study and emulate the lives of such truly great and earth-shaking Jewish heroes as Karl Marx, Eleanor Marx, Leon Trotsky, Rosa Luxemburg, and Walter Benjamin—three of whom were martyred in the name of human emancipation—and to reject the chauvinism of Stern, Jabotinsky, Begin, Kissinger, and Netanyahu. We stand for the slogan No war among peoples, no peace among classes. We demand the liberation of the Palestinian people and a free, democratic Palestine for all indigenous faiths and nationalities.