Rev Left Radio - [BEST OF] A Brief History of Jewish Anti-Zionism

Episode Date: October 8, 2023

Originally aired on Jun 3, 2021 In this classic mini-episode, Alyson Escalante summarizes and analyzes the history of Jewish Anti-Zionism. 

Hello, Patreon backers. This is Allison, and you are listening to our Red Minnis episode for the month of May. So one thing that, you know, we got into on this month's main episode was the history of Palestine, the history of Zionism, and the history of Israeli occupation. And I went fairly in depth into that history as best as I could while not trying to bog the episode down too much. And part of that meant cutting out a lot of things that I had really wanted to include in that history. And one of the things that I ended up deciding to cut out after doing quite a bit of research on it with the help of several fantastic and amazing Jewish comrades who helped provide me with resources, information that I could work on, is the history of Jewish occupation to Zionism. I think this is a really important history and a really important story that many people aren't familiar with, but ultimately it kind of fell outside the scope of the episode. So for this month's Patreon episode,

I'm kind of taking some of those notes that I had and expanded on them a little bit further to really kind of do a deep dive into the history and present day Jewish opposition to Zionism and why that history matters. So that's what we're going to be doing here today. We don't have Brett on this episode. It's just me with sort of everything that I've compiled after all of this. I'm hoping this will be a helpful resource to you. I'm going to go ahead and just kind of jump right into it. And once we get to the end, we can do a little bit of reflection on why this history matters for understanding colonialism, settler colonialism, and opposition. So, kind of to get started, I think we need to consider some of the ideological contours of

Zionism in more depth than we had time to during our official episode for this month. Many have argued that Zionism is a religious phenomenon based maybe on Hebrew prophecy or teachings within the Torah, but this is a largely historically incorrect view, which actually obscures what's at play in Zionism and in kind of a deep. dangerously and potentially anti-Semitic manner seeks to kind of group a critique of Zionist of their colonialism and with the critique of Judaism and Jewish values. And we need to push back against that very strongly. So I want to think about Zionism a little bit more. We can acknowledge, of course, that within Jewish liturgy and culture, there's references to Israel as a place, and there has been mourning for the Roman displacement

of Jews, which occurred in the wake of the Jewish rebellion against the Romans. But these cultural and religious aspects here have not historically been interpreted as a nationalist project which should be actualized through violence and occupation until relatively recently. Zionism was from the beginning a secular project. It was grounded in nationalism and colonialism. Zionism emerged at a time of nationalist fervor in which imperialist nations themselves started to deploy the language of self-determination to justify their actions. In the late 19th century and early 20th century, we saw many groups around the globe begin to conceptualize themselves as nations and demand national autonomy. Theodore Herzl, who we got into in our main episode, was clearly impacted by these perspectives.

Herzl's early writings on the necessity of a Jewish state are actually remarkably secular, with references to Jewish religion largely focused on assuring his adherence that the Jewish state would be a modern secular state, which would keep religion in its rightful place. And in addition to kind of being a secular nationalist, project, Zionism was also colonial in origin. The Zionist project was enabled constantly by the intervention of colonial powers such as Britain, and the language of early Zionism was the language of settlement in colonialism. You could see this in organizational names, such as the Jewish Colonial Fund, for example, and in the language adopted in early Zionist

pamphlets. Colonialism has always, you know, cynically deployed whatever ideologies it needs, including religious ideals in order to justify itself. But as, as a lot of, As Marxists, we need to understand that this is merely an ideological deployment of dominant ideas. This is what ideology always is. The source of colonialism is never religion or whatever ideology it grounds itself in. It's the material relations of capital that create global competition for spheres of influence in ongoing resource extraction or land theft. So we know, as Marxists, that colonialism doesn't come from ideas.

It comes from material relations. What should be very clear for us is that Zionism was not historically understood as a religious ideal founded in Judaism, but as a secular nationalist project. Despite this, it is, you know, we have to acknowledge Zionism has since adopted religious ideology. Israeli politics has become dominated sort of by a coalition of far-right secular revision as Zionists, as well as far-right religious Zionists. And this coalition has increasingly grounded their defense of Zionism in religious values. But we should understand this as a cynical move to secure power from as broad of a base as possible, rather than an accurate statement about the relationship between Jewish teaching Jewish identity and Zionism. Well, it's important to emphasize that Zionism was a secular nationalist project.

We also have to point out that it wasn't the only such project. One other project that I'm sure some of our listeners are familiar with is the General Jewish Labor Bund, and we're going to spend a little bit of time looking at this group in its history in detail. So the Jewish labor bund was first founded in Lithuania in 1897, and while the Bund would become intensely anti-Zionist later in its development, its origins are somewhat more complex. To understand the emergence of the Bund, we need to understand the experience of the Jewish communities in Russia and Eastern Europe. In Russia, the Jewish people had largely been segregated from the rest of the population and forced to live in an area referred to as the Pale of Settlement. Eastern Europe also

saw similar tendencies leading to the development of a fairly distinct Jewish community within Europe and Eastern Europe and Russia. Throughout much of this geographical area, the Jewish community spoke Yiddish, in addition to whatever local languages were predominant, further leading to the development of a distinct Ashkenazi Jewish culture, which also was preserved due to anti-Semitic hostility that prevented really any sort of large-scale assimilation. By the late 1800s Jewish workers in Eastern Europe and the Pale of Settlement had already begun to organize along working class lines. And there was already the beginning of an ideological movement to understand Jewish experience alongside working class experience, often through an explicitly Marxist or socialist lens.

The 1880s in particular saw a proliferation of Jewish working class organizing with study groups, mutual aid societies, all developing along Marxist or socialist lines. The radicalization of these Jewish workers was, of course, a product of extreme exploitation shared among the working class as a whole, but also the uniquely intense forms of anti-Semitic violence which occurred in the area. These conditions produce some of the early precursors to Zionism, such as the Hovee v. Zion, which translates to the lovers of Zion, and was represented by several different groups. These groups did eventually advocate leaving behind Eastern Europe for immigration. These movements were extremely influential, for example, in the development of the first and second Alia, which we talked about in our main episode. Despite the reorientation of some Jewish radicals towards Palestine, other Jewish revolutionaries

developed a nationalist focus which understood their nationalism as rooted in Eastern Europe and Russia. These socialist radicals would begin to conceptualize their socialism in terms of nationalism as well as international solidarity between all workers. Their focus was on the development of a Jewish socialism, which would not demand assimilation into the cultures around them, while still fighting for solidarity with non-Jewish workers and revolutionary movements. This development of this ideology came alongside a sort of cultural revival with the revival of the Yiddish language in particular, serving as a very good example of what this looked like. By the time of November 1897, when the Bund was founded, all of these conditions were ripe for more formal organization. And so in that year, we saw the creation of the Bund.

And the Bun pretty much immediately ingrained itself within the broader Russian socialist movement. The Jewish Virtual Library writes that, quote, At the founding convention of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party in March 1898, three of the nine delegates were bundes, end quote. And again, this really shows how integrated at this time, within Marxism and revolutionary organizing more broadly, these bundists were. The Bund quickly developed union and strike infrastructure, mutual aid groups, and also study circles. And importantly, the Bund also undertook the development of Jewish self-defense infrastructure. Antisemitic pogroms became a growing problem in the 20th century, and the Bund responded by advocating. for armed self-defense. And this was a very clever move strategically, and the Bund was ultimately able to significantly grow its base through this advocacy. Within the broader Russian revolutionary movement, though, the Bund began to distinguish itself by demanding that the future socialist

republic, which would be built, should exist as a federation of autonomous nations based on national self-determination. And this was a Marxist argument in many ways, although it would come to but heads with other Marxists. This position would become controversial within the RSDLP, due to concerns that such nationalistic impulses would lead to chauvinism and divisions among the workers. And unfortunately, as a result, the Bund would eventually find itself having to split from the RSDLP over this and having to become an independent organization. It's with the emergence of this form of Bundist nationalism that we can begin to see the way that the Bund was distinct from what would ultimately come into conflict with Zionism.

Again, we're going to quote from the Jewish Virtual Library, who writes that, quote, The Bund did not consider the Jews a worldwide national entity and was opposed to a global Jewish policy, limiting its demands for rights and autonomy with reference to the Russian Jewry. The Bund rejected in the name of class war principles in collaboration with other Jewish parties,

even in the organization of self-defense against pogrom. end quote. And so here we can see the way that the Bund is walking this complicated line, distinguishing itself from the other Jewish political groups on the basis of its Marxism, but also distinguishing itself from the RDSDLP on the basis of its nationalism. And this is where things become somewhat tricky. The Bund was actively opposed to the emergence of Zionism by this period in time, and Bundist propagandized significantly against Zionism as a reactionary movement. The ideology of the Bund began to focus on a notion of dookiet, which means heerness. The idea behind this concept was summarized,

I think, quite well by Mishka Bargman, an Australian bundist who wrote, quote, The only way to truly build Jewish life is to follow the principle of Doiket, of believing in the life force permanence and rootedness of the Jews there where they live, end quote. This concept of heerness and this demand for national recognition in Eastern Europe and Russia clearly was at odds with the Zionist desire to move to Palestine. The Bundists were critical the Zionists for choosing to abandon a region where a vibrant, if oppressed, Jewish culture had emerged and for abandoning the Ashkenazi culture of Eastern Europe.

The Zionist choice to revive modern Hebrew instead of Yiddish was one source of particular ire that we can see here. Now, as time moved on, the Bund participated in radical organizing throughout Russia between the 1905 Revolution and the October Revolution in 1917, but the organization had begun to shrink from its earlier prominence and size. By the early 1920s, the majority of the bundist organizations throughout the USSR had either dissolved or merged with the predominant communist parties. And it was the official position of the common term that the buns ought to merge into these

communist parties throughout the world. And so we saw really the end of the bun as an organized Jewish nationalist movement. So why does the story of the bun Bund matter. What's ultimately important to understand about the Bunn's nationalism is that it shows that Zionism was one of several secular national projects of its time. The existence of the Bund contest the Zionist claim that Zionism is the sole and only organic expression of Jewish self-determination, while simultaneously contesting the anti-Semitic arguments that Jewish ideals and nationalism had to end in genocidal settler colonialism. The ideology of the

the Bund is, of course, complex, and we never saw its nationalism transformed into an actual project of nation-building. And it's possible that such a project could have encountered serious problems, but the organized agitation for such a project does a lot to shatter the common ideological justifications for Zionism. We might, and I would even say we must be critical of some of the ideology with the Bund at the same time. Bundism spread throughout the world, with an American Bund forming as well. But given, as we talked about in our main episode, that America is itself a settler colony, we might push back against the appropriateness of the concept of heerness on stolen land. Still, these are largely hypothetical considerations

as the project of the Bund never materialized. The Bundist ambitions gave way to the communist position of the common turn, and that was kind of the end of that story. We do have to recognize, of course, that many anti-Zionist Jews today draw serious inspiration from the Bund, and that these histories have been revived and reconsidered and wrestled with in truly inspiring ways. So it is something that we still need to think through. The Bund, of course, was only one instance of Jewish opposition to Zionism. And the Bundist opposition to Zionism, again, kind of, it was rooted in similar secular and nationalist ambitions to those held by the Zionists themselves.

But these are not the only groups upon, are the only grounds upon which Jewish anti-Zionism would be developed. So let's take a little bit of time and think about one of the other organizations that kind of approached anti-Zionism from a different perspective. One example that I think we can look at is the American Council for Judaism, which was rooted in the ideals of reform Judaism. Zionism had received near instantaneous opposition from reformed Judaism upon its development, with Herzl actually struggling to even find a venue for the first Zionist Congress due to reform rabbis. trying to stop the Congress from taking place. Reform Judaism within Europe and the United States had largely embraced a view of Judaism as a religious movement

rather than a national identity. Reform Jews focused on seeking rights for Jewish people within the frameworks of European liberalism and human rights and democracy. And we can already see here how distinctly this position differs from the Bundist position, despite the fact that during the height of the Bund, both groups would have been a problem.

opposed to Zionism. Over time, the reform movement would give way to more positive views on Zionism, with most major organizations adopting neutrality towards Zionism by the late 1930s. Today, reformed Judaism is largely Zionist in orientation, you know, where there has been almost a 180 in terms of the general position on Zionism. Still, the history of this 180 and this development of the modern movement wasn't simple, and it was marked by internal dissent. and anti-Zionism. In 1942, reformed Judaism was caught up

in a particular controversy and debate around the idea of developing a specifically Jewish army in the British mandate Palestine to fight alongside the British during World War II. While many reform rabbis would come to support this position,

the American Council for Judaism was founded to oppose the foundation of this Jewish army. The position of the ACJ in opposition to Dubundism and Zionism was distinctly anti-nationalist. The ACJ was opposed to political Zionism as a project and argued that, quote, Jewish nationalism tends to confuse our fellow men about our place and function in society and diverts our attention from the historic role to live as a religious community

wherever we may dwell. End quote. This statement might superficially sound similar to the Bundist notion of Hearness, but it's important to note that there's a key distinction in as much as the notion of Hearness was meant to be the basis of nationalism, whereas the ACJ meant to emphasize the role of Jewish people within the nations in which they resided. Unfortunately, this led the ECJ to grounding its Zionism in a liberal support for the nationalist ideals of whatever nation the Jewish people found themselves in. An example of this can be seen when the ACJ argued for an example that, quote, the flag of Americans of the Jewish faith is the stars and stripes, end quote.

In this statement, we can see a sort of assimilationist impulse, alongside kind of a lack of criticism of European and American nationalisms themselves. Still, despite these problems, the ACJ was a major voice of anti-Scientist opposition, and they did bravely demand that any state which would replace the British mandate in Palestine would have to be based upon universal equal rights for Jews, Muslims, and Christians rather than partition. When the UN partition was proposed, the ACJ stood in opposition arguing for a single state that equally represented the interests of Jews and Palestinians.

The ACJ was also highly critical of the terror campaigns carried out by groups such as the Argoon, who we discussed in our main episode. ACJ insisted that the Jewish community must denounce these actions. Even after the founding of the state of Israel, the ACJ continued its agitation, albeit in a less intense form. Unfortunately, this agitation would take more and more American nationalist tones with a strong emphasis on the need for Jews to integrate into American society. Following the Six-Day War, the ACJ began to lose popular support and began to shrink rather

significantly. And this has led to a further retreat from previous anti-Zionism. with the current ACJ significantly softening its critique of the state of Israel. The reason that the story of the ACJ matters at the end of the day is because it further contests this idea that Zionism is a self-evident expression of Judaism or a self-evident expression of Jewish self-determination. In the ACJ, we saw religious rabbis stand in opposition to Zionism. Their opposition was not grounded in the radicalism and Marxism of the Bund, but rather in the predominant liberal ideas of Europe and the United States.

These ideals, obviously, and I think we can be very clear about this, imposed serious limits on the politics of the ACJ, but the ACJ still deserves recognition for being a consistent voice of dissent during a period when reformed Judaism began to move into an overwhelmingly Zionist position. But the ACJ was not the only form of anti-Zionism among Jewish thinkers and leaders during this period of time, alongside the ACJ, and the Bund, there were also independent left-wing critiques made by Jewish intellectuals. Historian Benjamin Balthazar writes in an exceptional article that we can put in the show notes

that, quote, but for the Jewish left, the communist socialist, Trotskyist, and Marxist left. Their critique of Zionism came from two quarters, a critique of nationalism and a critique of colonialism. They understood Zionism as a right-wing nationalism, and in that sense, bourgeois. They saw it as a line with other forms of nationalism. an attempt to align the working class with the interests of the bourgeoisie. There was, at the time, a well-known takeover of Vladimir Jabotinsky in the New Masses in 1935, in which Marxist critic Robert Gessner called Jabotinsky a little Hitler on the Red Sea. Gessner calls the Zionists Nazis, and the left in general saw Jewish nationalism as a right-wing

formation trying to create a unified militaristic culture that aligns working-class Jewish interests with the interests of the Jewish bourgeoisie. And then he continues on. In any case, the Jewish left in the 1930s and 1940s understood critically that the only way that Zionism would be able to emerge in Palestine was through a colonial project and through the expulsion of indigenous Palestinians from the land. In a speech by Earl Browder, chairman of the Communist Party, in Manhattan's hippodrome, he declared that a Jewish state can only be formed

through the expulsion of a quarter million Palestinians, which attendees thought was very shocking at the time, but it actually ended up being a dramatic undercount, end quote. Although Balthazar's not get into this history, unfortunately, the Communist Party in the United States would eventually shift its position from opposition to Zionism to support for Zionism. Another article that is fantastic that you can look at that will link to goes into the history of how this reversal took place and how the Communist Party, USA, unfortunately, found itself in a position of supporting the settler colonial displacement of the Palestinian people. While all of this has focused, you know, really heavily throughout this little mini episode

on the history of Jewish anti-Zionism, I think it's important for us to recognize that we are also living in a moment when Jewish opposition to Zionism is beginning to reemerge. Although many key institutions within contemporary Judaism, such as the Union for Reform Judaism, have thoroughly capitulated to the Zionist position, young Jews have begun increasingly mobilizing in mass against Zionist's violence against Palestinians. Just this month, the organization, if not now, held a direct action demonstration outside the headquarters of the Union

for Reform Judaism in order to demand that reform Jews, in their own words, quote, reckon with the dispossession and displacement of Palestinians, and stop funding it, end quote. This grassroots opposition to occupation has been, been growing, although it has not always taken a distinctly anti-Zionist tone. Part of the problem, according again to Benjamin Balthazar, is with the place that Jewish anti-Zionism has been left in after all of these histories. He writes, quote, today we're in a much more fragmented space. On the same note, though, we're seeing the rebirth, or maybe continuity of Palestinian

civil rights movements with Palestinian civil society, putting out a call for decolonization, both out of their own traditions of liberation, but also looking to models from South African freedom struggles. For contemporary Jews who are progressive and see themselves on the left, they're suddenly realizing that there really is no center anymore. There is no liberal Zionist position any longer. The center has really fallen away. And we're faced with this very stark decision, that either you're going to be on the side of liberation or you're going to be on the side of the Israeli right, which has a eliminationist and genocidal intent that has always been there, but is nakedly apparent now. And so I think people are waking up and saying,

I don't want to be on the side of the executioners. End quote. Well, if not now, the organization we mentioned previously does not explicitly define their position as anti-Zionist. Their work has been influential in pushing back against institutional support for Zionism and occupation within reform Judaism. If not now, describes their mission as, quote, organizing every day to expose the occupation as a moral crisis to American Jews, end the weaponization of anti-Semitism in our political debate over Israel, and create political spaces for leaders to stand up for the freedom and dignity of all Israelis and Palestinians." The focus noted here on the end about equal dignity and freedom for Israelis and Palestinians does kind of reveal the extent to which their

criticism is not really opposition to Israel, which would be crucial for an anti-Sionist politics, but rather in opposition to the most egregious instances of Israeli violence. And while this is certainly better than tacit support for Zionism, it also tries to walk a somewhat centrist line that's increasingly untenable. Balthazar does seem to be correct to point out that the center has fallen out, and that the choice now is to oppose occupation, imperialism, and colonialism by opposing Zionism and supporting the decolonization of Palestine. We can hope, of course, that if not now, will keep up pressure against the egregious

instances of violence, but we also can hope that they'll come to connect this position with the necessity of anti-Zionism as many generations of anti-Zionist Jewish struggle from the past have, because the struggle against anti-Zionism is a global struggle against colonialism that should link all people together into man for decolonization. Another organization that's worth mentioning here is Jewish Voice for Peace, who do take the actual commendable position of seeing themselves as anti-Zionist. The organization states, that, quote, Jewish voice for peace is guided by a vision of justice, equality, and freedom for all people. We unequivocally oppose Zionism because it is counter to those ideals, end quote.

During the most recent increase in colonial violence that we've seen around Sheikh Jirae and the continued bombing of Palestine, JVP has been present at many solidarity actions, standing alongside the struggle for Palestinian liberation, and this is highly commendable and deserves recognition. JVP is also in their writings focused on these histories of anti-Zionism among the Jewish population in order to understand where this kind of opposition can draw inspiration from. Outside of these organizations, I know that over the last week, I and I'm sure many of you listening to this have seen a new level of openness in terms of critiques of Zionism and even anti-Zionism itself.

I'm seeing many of my friends, both Jewish and non-Jewish, pushing back against ideologies of Zionism that are so predominant in the United States. States. Even people who are unorganized are starting to look to histories of anti-Zionism and alternative tellings of the main story we've been told our whole life in order to understand the violence. And all of this is hopeful and it's important and it's crucial that this opposition can develop and link itself with Palestinian anti-Zionism and global demands for decolonization in Palestine, in the United States, in Australia, and throughout the world. So why did I decide to talk about all of this for today's Patreon episode. Well, because as we're all confronting the question of

Zionism, the question of settler colonialism, the question of occupation, it's essential that we disrupt Zionist ideologies which conflate critiques of Zionism with anti-Semitism. But also, it's absolutely crucial that we oppose anti-Semitic ideologies, which equate Zionism with Judaism. Jewish opposition to Zionism in all of its forms, despite what whatever limitations those forms may have opposed, has always existed as long as Zionism has existed, and has always been there to push back both against abhorrent ideologies of Zionism and abhorrent ideologies of anti-Semitism. Our main episode for this month went into the history of Palestinian Zionism, as well as the various forms of Palestinian resistance

to Ottoman, British, and Israeli occupation. And these histories are central. We have to study them. We have to learn them. And you need to go beyond what we covered in this episode to reading primary texts and accounts from Palestinians yourself. We really have to wrestle with these. But to have a complete understanding of the debates around Zionism and settler colonialism, we also have to acknowledge and understand the long and complex history of Jewish anti-Zionism. So this episode is an attempt to kind of give you some of that history. We're coming in at a little under 30 minutes, and no history in 30 minutes is ever going to be sufficient for you to learn what you need to learn about something. But hopefully this is a starting point that can help. And

hopefully that as we move forward, we can craft and build an international opposition to colonialism that understands anti-Zionism as part of a broader opposition that everyone has an obligation to participate in in opposition to genocide and exploitation. So I don't really have much more to say beyond that. I hope this is helpful again. This kind of comes from my notes that were going to be in the main episode, but some of it I took out and then I expanded on a lot here. You obviously need to go do some reading for yourself. There are countless resources available for the history of the Bund, the ACJ, or these various other groups. I would highly encourage all of our listeners to go do that. Thank you so much for your continual support for Red Minus as a project. I say this all

the time, but it blows my mind that people get something out of this project and support it the way and as much as they do, and I appreciate it, and I know that Brett appreciates it a lot. I think between this episode and the main episode, we put together maybe almost 15,000 words worth of notes, which is a lot of writing and takes a lot of time. And the financial support that we get from our patrons is part of what allows us to take the time to do that. So really, this episode, the main episode, none of what we do would exist without the support from all of you, our patrons, and that means the absolute world to us. Thank you for your support. We're excited for our episode next month, and as always, solidarity.