Rebels Against Zion: Studies on the Jewish Left Anti-Zionisim

289 Pages·2011·5.69 MB·English

by  August Grabski (ed.)

Rebels Against Zion
Studies on the Jewish Left Anti-Zionism
© Copyright by Zydowski Instytut Historyczny im. Emanuela Ringelbluma
© Copyright by August Grabski
Referees:
Dr. Piotr Weiser, Dr. Urszula Lugowska
General editor:
August Grabski
Consulting English language editors:
Barbara Pomorska, Grzegorz D^bkowski
ISBN 978-83-61850-24-3
Photo on the cover: A female demonstrator in a protest against the siege of the Gaza Strip
and the killing in Beit-Hanoun, holding a placard of BANKI (the Union of Israeli Com­
munist Youth), saying “We refuse to be enemies,” 7/11/06, Qirya (IDF Base) Tel-Aviv,
Israel. Credit to: Keren Manor/activestills.org
Graphic design, cover art and typesetting:
Agencja Poligraficzna Slawomir Zych
Rebels Against Zion
Studies on the Jewish
Left Anti-Zionism
Edited by August Grabski
Warsaw 2011
To the memory of Marek Edelman
(1919-2009)
Contents
Introduction................................................................................................................. 7
RONI GECHTMAN
The Debates on the National and Jewish Questions in the Second
International and the Jewish Labor Bund, 1889-1914 ................................ 11
RICK KUHN
Jewish Anti-Zionism in the Galician Socialist Movement........................... 47
JACK JACOBS
Bundist Anti-Zionism in Interwar Poland........................................................ 67
HENRY SREBRNIK
“An Enemy of the Jewish Masses”: The ICOR and the Campaign
Against Zionism, 1924-1935 . 89
BAT-AMI ZUCKER
American Jewish Communists and Palestine during the 1930s ...............Ill
SILVIA SCHENKOLEWSKI-KROLL
Ideology and Propaganda in the Collective Memory’s Construction:
Zionism and Communism in Argentina..........................................................125
AUGUST GRABSKI
“Matzpen” and the State of Israel (1962-1973) ............................................ 139
GENNADY ESTRAIKH
An Opportunist Anti-Zionism: Sovetish Heymland, 1961-1991 ............... 157
PHILIP MENDES
Denying the Jewish Experience of Oppression:
Australian Jews Against Zionism and Anti-Semitism (JAZA)
and the 3 CR Controversy ..................................................................................171
BASHIR ABU-MANNEH
Israel in the U.S. Empire - Reflections on the Post-Zionism......................189
POLLY PALLISTER-WILKINS
The Anarchists Against the Wall: A Post-structuralist
Challenge to Zionism..............................................................................................213
URI DAVIS
In Support of a Hybrid One-State Solution .....................................................231
ILAN PAPPÉ
The Making and Unmaking of HADASH ........................................................245
STAN CROOKE
Boycott Apartheid Israel?.......................................................................................259
Contributors’ Biographies ...........................................................................................287
Introduction
Written by historians, political scientists and activists from a number of
countries, the collection of papers in this book deals with the many different
ways in which the Jewish Left has contested Zionism and the State of Israel.
Zionism emerged as a political movement towards the end of the nineteenth
century. It took as its starting point the idea of a mass exodus of Jews to Palestine
and the establishment of a new Hebrew-speaking Jewish nation there. One of many
movements in Jewish communities before the Second World War, Zionism became
politically dominant in those communities after the Holocaust. The different Zion­
ists groups varied from one another in their nature and continue to do so, ranging
from the extreme Right to the extreme Left, and from anti-clerical to religious.
While acknowledging the existence of different definitions of Zionism, it
can be said that Zionism is a political idea based on four elements: the primacy
of the Jewish community in Israel over Jewish communities around the world;
the primacy of Jews over Palestinian Arabs within the borders of the former
colonial mandate in Palestine; the elevation of ethnic-religious conflicts over
class conflicts; and attributing to" Hebrew the status of being the main or even
only national language (and rejecting Yiddish in particular). Some Zionists did
not, it is true, meet all the criteria of this definition, and especially so in relation
to the language question. Yiddish was defended, for example, by the Poale Zion
Left and Zionist-oriented anarchists such as those linked to the magazine “Prob­
lemen” (published in Israel between 1959 and 1989).
The Zionist project remains linked to an indisputable fact: the oppression -
national as well as political, economic and religious - of the Palestinians in both
the State of Israel and the Occupied Territories. This fact took on an even more
dramatic form with the acceptance of the State of Israel (as of 1988) by the main
current in the Palestinian national liberation movement, the PLO. This oppres­
sion violates, of course, not just international human rights laws but also the Is­
raeli Declaration of Independence, which promised full social and political
equality for all its citizens, regardless of faith, race and gender. Any analysis of
trends in the thinking of the Jewish Left is therefore significant not only from a
historical point of view but also in terms of facilitating ways to find a solution
to the explosive mixture of ethnic and religious violence in the Middle East.
Proceeding from the above definition of Zionism, those who fall to be con­
sidered as anti-Zionists are those who challenge at least one of the first three
8 Introduction
elements of the definition (although it should be noted that the defining ele­
ments are closely interwoven and are difficult to treat in separation from one
another) and also adopt a negative self-definition towards Zionism. Rejecting
one of the first three defining elements almost automatically means going be­
yond a nationalist discourse in favour of a position of empathy and openness
to co-operation and co-existence with the Palestinians and the Arab world.
This abovementioned additional self-defining element is absolutely indis­
pensable due to the existence of many Jewish peace organisations which follow
the pattern set by the Israeli Gush Shalom organisation, the political practice
of which is in fact anti-Zionist, although it does not define itself as such and
does not exclude the participation of moderate Zionists.1
In considering such basic issues of definition, a line must also be drawn be­
tween justified criticism of Israel (anti-Zionism) and that criticism of Israel
which leads to the stigmatisation of Jews as such. This distinction is all the more
important given that the most common and most striking post-Holocaust ex­
pression of anti-Semitism is the adoption of an “anti-Zionist” standpoint, which
is then combined with many of the traditional themes of anti-Semitism (in par­
ticular, the notion of behind-the-scenes Jewish rule, which today finds expres­
sion in the theme of the power of the Jewish lobby in the USA). There are many
different approaches to analysing the circumstances under which anti-Zionism
becomes a form of anti-Semitism. Particularly worthy of note is that adopted
by the Canadian researcher Todd M. Endelman, for whom anti-Zionist criti­
cism of Israel crosses over into an expression of anti-Semitism under the fol­
lowing circumstances:
1. When it questions the legitimacy of the Jewish state, but no other state,
and the legitimacy of Jewish nationalism, but no other nationalism, either in
the Middle East or elsewhere.
2. When it denies to the Jewish state, but no other state, the right to express the
character of the majority of its citizens (that is, to be as Jewish as France is French).
3. When it demonizes the Jewish state, turning the Arab-Israeli conflict into
a morality play, a problem that Jews, and Jews alone, created and for which
Jews, and Jews alone, are responsible.
1 Gush Shalom (Hebrew, Bloc of Peace) was founded by Uri Avnery in 1993 and is based on the
following principles: withdrawal of the Israeli Army from the territories occupied in 1967; recog­
nition of the PLO as the representative of the Palestinians; recognition of the right of the Pales­
tinian people to establish their own sovereign state alongside of Israel, with East Jerusalem as the
capital of this state. With respect to Palestinian refugees, Gush Shalom anticipates recognition of
the right of return of the Palestinian refugees, allowing each refugee to choose freely between fi­
nancial compensation and repatriation to Israel or Palestine. The number of returning refugees
would be fixed in annual quotas by mutual agreement, in such a way so as “not to undermine the
foundations of Israel.” Gush Shalom is open to activists from political parties but does not identify
itself with any one political party. The Gush Shalom website is at: http://gush-shalom.org/
Introduction 9
4. When it expresses an obsessive, exclusive, and disproportionate concern
with the shortcomings of the Israelis and the sufferings of the Palestinians
- to the point that a conflict between two small peoples is transformed into
a cosmic, Manichean struggle between the forces of Good and Evil.
When criticism of Israel crosses any of these lines and becomes an obsessive
narrative of fantasies and fears - that is when we are dealing solely with anti-
Semitic notions.2 Examples of left anti-Semitism, from which Poland also has
not been immune,3 have generally not been covered in the analysis of the au­
thors whose writings are included in this book (with the exception of the arti­
cles by Philip Mendes and Stan Crooke).
To complete the list of definitions involved in this work one further concept
needs to be introduced: post-Zionism. For post-Zionists, Zionism has already
fulfilled its historical role in that it has founded the economically, demograph-
ically and militarily powerful State of Israel. Given these circumstances, it is
no longer a question of thinking solely in terms of the fight for its survival but
a question of its integration with its neighbours. Post-Zionists support Israel
becoming a “normal liberal-democratic state,” the state of a new nation - the
Israeli nation which is not an emanation of the international Jewish community.
Some post-Zionists, such as the peace activist Uri Avnery, Gideon Levy
(“Ha’aretz” journalist), historians Norman Finkelstein and Ilan Pappé (one of
the authors included in this book), Meron Benvenisti (former Deputy Mayor
of Jerusalem and currently a supporter of a “two nations state”) and Abraham
Burg (former Knesset Speaker) are accused - especially by the Zionist Right -
of either straightforward anti-Zionism or post-modernism. Post-Zionist think­
ing, however, appears to be utopian in the extreme in a situation when 68% of
Israeli Jews do not want to have an Arab as their neighbour4 and none of the
thirty plus governments formed in the history of Israel have ever included an
Arab party. The first Arab minister (who was not a Muslim but a Druze, and
therefore a representative of a religious minority traditionally loyal towards
the State of Israel) was given a post only in 2001. The first Muslim minister
was Ghaleb Majadele, appointed by the Labour Party in January of 2007.
The concept of post-Zionism is criticised not only by the Israeli nationalist
Right but also by part of the Left. One example of this is the article included
in this collection by Bashir Abu-Manneh, who points out that the majority of
2 Todd M. Endelman, “Antisemitism in Western Europe Today,” in: D. J. Penslar, M. R. Marrus,
J. Gross Stein (eds.), Contemporary Antisemitism, Canada and the World, Toronto 2005, p. 71.
3 On the reception of the phenomenon of leftist anti-Semitism in Poland, see, e.g., August Grab-
ski, Piotr Kendziorek, “The Return of ‘Left Anti-Semitism’ in Poland?” in: August Grabski (ed.),
Zydzi a lewica. Zbiôrstudiôw historycznych, (The Jews and the Left. A Collection of Historical
Papers), Warszawa 2007, pp. 329-337.
4 “Counterpunch” 23 March, 2006.
10 Introduction
post-Zionists conflate arguments about peace in the Middle East with attribut­
ing to the USA the role of defender of the international order. This, of course,
differs from the way in which the Marxist Left perceives the USA, i.e. as an im­
perialist state with its own particular interests.
The book includes articles which illustrate how Zionism has been criticised
by Communists, Trotskyists, Bundists, anarchists and other leftist radicals.
These political trends were all minority currents in Jewish communities, and
so too in Israel as well. (But this is usually the case, apart from moments of
capitalist collapse, with such movements.) Their dissident nature, however, has
attracted the attention of many observers. It should also be noted that, as a re­
sult of legislation concerning political parties adopted in 1992, parties that re­
ject the existence of Israel as a Jewish state are banned in Israel.
In discussing the contemporary fate of anti-Zionism on the Jewish Left, it is
difficult not to be struck by its evolution from constituting huge organisations
in the workers’ movement to an incomparably smaller cluster of weak and dis­
persed groups today. Such groups also clearly have much less of a media profile
than anti-Zionist religious activists such as the American Rabbi Yisroel Dovid
Weiss from Neturei Karta International (Neturei Karta: Keepers of the City in
Aramaic). Weiss has become well-known as a result of his numerous protests
against the existence of the State of Israel, especially his participation in the con­
ference “The Holocaust, Global Vision,” organised in Tehran in December of
2006 by the Iranian President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Apart from attracting
publicity for statements about dissolution of the State of Israel, Ahmadinejad
also achieved notoriety for inviting to the Tehran conference pseudo-historians
and other speakers who deny the scale and nature of Nazi crimes against Jews.
But the decline over time of Jewish left anti-Zionism does not justify coming
to a verdict on whether its rich traditions have already reached the limits of
their power to inspire new generations of activists and thinkers in Jewish com­
munities, or whether it will eventually decline into nothingness. Reaching a
verdict on this question becomes even more difficult given that, despite the
current weakness of Jewish left anti-Zionist organisations, it is precisely the in­
tellectual tradition of those organisations that has dominated the way in which
the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is perceived by considerable segments of the in­
ternational anti-globalisation movement and by organisations and movements
to the left of the mainstream social-democratic parties.
The studies which make up this volume were collected in 2007 and 2008.
They include new texts and also a number which have already been published
but are not known to a wider public. The editor would like to express his
thanks to the following: Dr. Urszula Lugowska, Barbara Pomorska, Grzegorz
Dqbkowski, Dr. Piotr Weiser and Prof. Andrzej Zbikowski.
August Grabski