Blogger's Note:
This letter was in response to a two part article that appeared in the July and August 1935 issues of the Socialist Standard.
The Future of Palestine
Amhurst Road, E.8,
August 25th, 1935.
The Secretary,
The Socialist Standard,
42, Gt. Dover Street,
S.E.1.
Dear Sir,
Kaye and Scrutator have gone to great lengths and to a good deal of trouble to show the fallacies of Zionism and the utter uselessness of a Jewish State. In their eagerness to “prove” their theories they have written quite a number of words, quoted a lot of phrases torn from their context, said quite a lot of irrelevant (and shallow) things, but have not given one single and valid reason why the Jewish people, out of all other peoples who inhabit this unhappy earth, should not possess a country of their own, where they should be able to lead a normal national life, unhampered and unhindered by the tremendous forces which, everywhere, make Jewish life a burden and an encumbrance.
In their quotations referring to conditions in Poland, they show that prominent Jewish employers refuse to employ Jewish labour. In a Jewish State this would, of course, be automatically impossible. On the other hand, they blame the Zionist authorities for disqualifying Jews from membership from the Z.O. who do not employ Jewish labourers! This | is only one glaring example of the shallowness of your writers.
There are many more. “Many Jewish workers in Germany,” they state, “knew the terrors of unemployment long before the coming of Hitler” | (does this mean that Hitler is, after all, not such a bad fellow?). Precisely so. Only that this fact, which also refers to Poland and many other countries, proves conclusively how necessary it is for the Jewish people to have a country of their own, where they will not be subjected to unemployment because they are Jews, and where, since your scribes seem to be so deeply concerned about the religious requirements of the Jewish workers, a Jewish Government will impose Saturday as a day of rest.
One does not know whether it is sheer stupidity or malice when your writers assert that "in the more developed capitalist countries, conditions are not so favourable for the growth of anti-Semitism.” In view of what has been happening in one of these “more developed capitalistic countries”—Germany —where even the “joint control of huge undertakings by Jewish and non-Jewish capitalists” does not tend to “weaken racial prejudice,” one must be utterly blind or foolish to state that there “is little danger from pogroms in advanced capitalist countries,” when for 2½ years there has been one continuous, incessant and intensive-pogrom of the most efficient and gigantic variety, and where Jewish capitalists, middle-class people and Jewish workers alike have been mercilessly and ruthlessly ousted from their homes and positions and are prevented from earning a living and doomed to certain death and extinction. The same process, only not so thorough, goes on in Poland and in Rumania, and elsewhere, where the ruling and capitalistic class are not at all afraid that anti-Jewish “riot and bloodshed would upset the delicate mechanism of capitalist trade and finance.”
“Even in Germany,” your scribes console us, “at the height of the Nazi triumph, there has not been a pogrom of a Czarist character.” Is then a pogrom less beastly and cruel because it takes place, like in Germany, not in the open market-place, but in the concentration camp or in the subterranean passages of the Brown Shirt Headquarters? Or are all the reports contained in the Brown Book and in the hundreds of newspapers mere figments of the imagination, and the result of what Hitler and his gangsters call “Greuel-propaganda” ?
As to the unlikelihood of anti-Jewish riots in a city like London, perhaps I may refer your scribes to what happened in a “city like Berlin” only a week or two ago, on the Kurfuerstendamm, where “valuable property in which many non-Jews are interested” exists, and where the police had no desire to “keep such a mob in hand.”
The extremely complicated Jewish problem is not at all safe even in the hands of the working classes. In Germany and in Poland, Rumania and elsewhere, the working classes are the first to destroy Jewish property and mutilate Jewish lives, and we have even read in the London Daily Worker that the slaughter of Jews in Palestine in 1929 was the rising of the Arab masses against Jewish exploitation. Jewish exploitation by 65 poverty-stricken Talmud students in the ”Yeshibah” of Hebron! We have also seen how a Labour Government, then in full power, instigated a slaughter of 150 Jews in Palestine in August, 1929, how that Government treated the all Jewish demand for protection with the greatest and cruellest callousness, how that chief culprit, Lord Passfield, an avowed Socialist, and then in charge of the Colonial Office, has, as a result of the ghastly slaughter by Arabs of Jews, punished the Jews, curtailed their rights, suppressed their aspirations, and rewarded the Arab murderers, extended their rights and encouraged them in their devilish designs. It was that very Socialist who said that he bad no sympathy with the aspirations of the new generation of working Jews, but that he understood and sympathised with the old, the pious, i.e., the idle, Jews! So much for the safety of the Jew under a Labour Government. That Labour Government, too, was unable, or unwilling, to “keep such a mob in hand,” and allowed the iniquity to go unpunished. The Mufti, that arch-murderer, is still a persona grata with the British authorities.
It will thus be seen that there is no remedy for the Jewish problem except a Jewish State. It has long been recognised that all classes of Jews not only suffer in common with all classes of humanity, but that they are subjected to very special—and inevitable —sufferings and persecutions which are alone the result of their being a pariah among the nations for the last nineteen centuries. All attempts to solve this vicious problem have so far failed. As a Zionist theoretician puts it: “To be robbed as a Jew is equally humiliating, equally hurtful to the self-respect of the Jew, as it is to be protected as a Jew/1 Judeophobia is an hereditary form of demonopathy, peculiar to the human race, and anti- Semitism is based upon an inherited aberration of the human mind.
No people, generally speaking, has any predilection for foreigners. This has its ethnological basis and cannot be brought as a reproach against any people. But the Jews, more than any other people, are subject to this dislike. Every foreigner is more or less respected because he can repay in his own country with the same coin. The Jew, alone, because he has no country. remains the stranger “par excellence.” He remains a refugee always, and who is the refugee to whom a refuge cannot be refused ?
The real panacea for the Jewish problem, and the only one, is and remains a Jewish State. And in that State, according to the best Jewish and Zionist traditions and teachings, there shall be “one law for the citizen as well as for the stranger that dwelleth in its gates.”
I am, Sir,
Yours faithfully,
Jacob Sarna.
Reply.
It is a pity that Mr. Sarna offers no evidence to support his accusation that we have torn phrases from their context in our anxiety to misrepresent the Zionist position. Our correspondent, evidently, does not share our eagerness to "prove” things.
The attitude of our critic is that of a nationalist. He writes about Peoples. We analyse society in terms of classes. To him the Jewish "problem” is the problem of the Jewish people. To us all problems are to be examined in the light of working-class interests. A considerable divergence of opinion is expected in these circumstances.
We should be glad to learn more about this “normal national life" from which Jews are debarred. May we remind Mr. Sarna, that in the United States of America, one of the wealthiest countries in the world, according to Senator T. H. Caraway, there were in 1930 1,000 deaths a day from starvation (Daily Telegraph, February 2nd, 1931). There are now about 12,000,000 unemployed, and millions more are in misery and want. Here in England, hundreds of thousands of people are on the borderline of starvation. Surely this is not what Mr. Sarna, and those who think with him, are striving so hard to attain? We are afraid it is. Palestine must be developed on capitalist lines, they say; then it will produce the same conditions. We suggest that it is precisely these conditions which are the “tremendous forces" that hamper and hinder Jewish workers, and all workers, the world over.
It is obvious that in a Jewish State where presumably the bulk of the population would be Jewish, the employing class would have no option but to exploit Jewish workers, unless they had facilities for importing cheaper labour. What of the cheap negro and continental labour which the American capitalists imported into “God’s own country” ? Industrial history is full of examples of how employers have used “foreign” labour to break down strikes or to lower the standard of living. Furthermore, we did not, as Mr. Sarna suggests, BLAME the Zionists Authorities for any of their actions. We merely gave this information in order to prove that it was unnecessary for the Jews to wait for Sir Oswald Mosley or Adolf Hitler to make them unemployed, as Mr. Smilansky and his capitalist colleagues in Palestine, Manchester, London, and Warsaw have no compunction, when their interests dictate, in sacking their “fellow" Jews. A capitalist, be he Jewish or British, in London or in Jerusalem, has as his first consideration, the making of profits.
Mr. Sarna objects to Jewish workers being unemployed because they are Jews. We go further. We object to Jewish workers, and all workers, being subjected to unemployment because they are surplus to the needs of capitalist industry. Our argument is that the overwhelming majority of unemployed Jewish workers are such because they are privileged to enjoy some of the blessings of our “normal national life.” This is not a defence of Hitler. It merely proves that Hitler and other individuals are not responsible for the existence of unemployment. Why Mr. Sarna believes we are deeply concerned about the religious requirements of Jews, is a mystery yet to be solved.
Our correspondent betrays his ignorance of German political conditions, and we must advise him to make sure of his facts before he again rushes into print. One of the reasons for Hitler’s advent to power is that the German workers had not yet become accustomed to the altered political conditions since the setting up of the capitalist republic after the War. There are also millions of small property owners, peasants, and petty proprietors of workshops in Germany, and these people are very susceptible to anti-Semitic propaganda. Large areas in Germany, are as yet, relatively untouched by industrial development. Mr. Sarna should also keep in mind that most of the Nazi victims in concentration camps are political prisoners, and in view of the support given by numbers of Jews to the Social Democratic Party, it is not surprising to find some of them there together with Communists and Catholics. There is one other point; Mr. Sarna's attitude, and that of other Jews, to this vexed question of brutality and violence, is peculiar and rather limited. They fume with indignation over the atrocities of Hitler, but are strangely silent when the name of Mussolini is mentioned. Marshal Pilsudski, the late dictator of Poland, well known as a pogrom-inciter during and immediately after the War, was lauded to the skies in the Jewish Press on his death. Our sympathies are much larger than Mr. Sarna’s. We also sympathise with the workers who are ill-treated for their political views. Nor would the establishment of a Jewish State on Revisionist lines safeguard the Jewish workers from brutalities at the hands of their “brother” Jews. In order to show how closely the Revisionist organisation is modelled on Fascist lines we shall give a further quotation. In the " Blue-White papers, 1935," published by the Revisionists, there appears a short account of the brown-shirted Revisionist youth organisation, the Berit Trumpeldor. The following are some clauses from their “ Heptalogue ” : —
(1) The Jewish State as the purpose of your own life.(2) “ Monism ” in the sense of rejecting all subservience to slogans not connected with the Jewish State, especially that of the “ Class War ”(4) The duty of self-defence, and readiness to join a Jewish Legion should necessity arise . . .
As regards the destruction of valuable property in the streets of Berlin some weeks ago, the “valuable property” destroyed consisted of some broken windows, tables, chairs, crockery, and some smashed windscreens (see Jewish Chronicle, 19/7/35).
We do not understand why Mr. Sarna should have brought The Daily Worker, Lord Passfield, and the Labour Government, into the discussion. Mr. Sarna must know that we are opposed to the Communist Party and the Labour Party. It is absurd of Mr. Sarna to try to foist responsibility for The Daily Worker's nonsense, and the Labour Government’s colonial policy on to the Socialist Party.
Therefore we are on unassailable ground when we urge the Jewish workers not to waste their energies struggling for something out of reason, and which, if achieved, would confer very doubtful and dubious advantages on them, and urge them to assist us in the task of establishing Socialism. The disabilities they suffer as Jews are inextricably bound up with the far greater disabilities they suffer as members of the working class.
Mr. Sarna believes that anti-Semitism is based upon an “inherited aberration of the human mind.” We contend that anti-Semitism in the modern world is mainly a smoke screen used by nervous sections of the ruling class in order to distract the minds of the workers, and to cover the class struggle. It is a means of diverting class-antagonism into racial hatred, and of splitting the workers into warring groups. By trying to fool the workers with fairy stories about the intrigues of secret councils of Jews planning to overthrow all Christian states; of conspiracies of “Jewish” capital, it is hoped to discourage revolutionary ideas. Anti-Semitic propaganda can flourish best where there is an inexperienced and uninformed working class. The only real solution for the Jewish problem is the spread of Socialist knowledge, which teaches the workers that the main struggle is between worker and capitalist. It dispels the illusion, fostered by Zionist and anti-Semite alike, that racial and national distinctions are of concern to the workers.
The spread of Socialist knowledge will bring nearer the day when we can say good-bye to capitalism, and build up a Socialist system of society, which will involve the ”emancipation of all mankind without distinction of race or sex.” Instead of this, Mr. Sarna offers to Jewish workers something which will not bear a moment’s examination, as can be seen from the opening paragraph of his letter. He asks why the Jewish people, out of all other peoples who inhabit this unhappy earth, "should not possess a country of their own.” Note these words, “possess a country of their own.” We challenge Mr. Sarna to show us how it will be possible for Palestine to be possessed by the Jewish people, in view of the fact that it is to be run on strictly capitalist lines, which means, of course, that it will be monopolised by the capitalist class, like all those other countries at which Mr. Sarna casts such envious eyes, but which he himself dubs “unhappy.”
Kaye & Scrutator
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