Anti-Zionists (2026)

Book Review from the September 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

Here Where We Live is Our Country. The Story of the Jewish Bund. By Molly Crabapple. Bloomsbury Circus. 2026.

The Jewish Bund was a Jewish workers’ organisation founded in 1897 in Vilnius (called Vilna in this book), today the capital of Lithuania but then part of the Russian Empire. Its official name in Yiddish, the Germanic language spoken by most Jews in Russia, was the Algemeyner Yiddisher Arbeter Bund (General Jewish Labour Union). It was the largest constituent organisation represented at the later founding of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP), the equivalent of the German Social Democratic Party,

They were known simply as the Bund, its members were Bundists and its doctrine Bundism. They claimed that only they should organise Jewish workers in Russia. Their immediate aim was the establishment of a democratic republic in Russia with cultural autonomy for Yiddish speakers, with socialism as the longer-term aim after Russia had passed through capitalism. Other Russian Social Democrats, including many of Jewish background such as Trotsky and Martov, argued that all workers in Russia, whatever their background or language, should be organised in a single all-Russia party.

When the issue came up at the RSDLP congress in 1903-4 and the Bundists’ claim was rejected, they walked out. This was a fateful decision as it meant that, in the more famous vote on how the party should be organised, Lenin and his supporters won and so got to be called ‘Bolsheviks’ (the majority) as opposed to those who lost the vote who came to be called ‘Mensheviks’ (the minority). The Bundists were opposed to Lenin’s organisational principles, and had they not walked out Lenin’s supporters might have ended up being called the Mensheviks.

The Bund’s policies and tactics were close to those of the Mensheviks and it would not be entirely unfair to describe them as Yiddish Mensheviks. Their mass basis was Jewish workers living within the ‘Pale of Settlement’, the part of the Russian Empire which covered most of Poland, Lithuania and Ukraine as well as the whole of what is now Belarus and Moldova and to which ordinary Jews were confined.

After the First World War, when Poland was reconstituted as an independent state and 3.3 million Jews made up about 10 percent of the population, the Bund was active in Polish politics. Its opponents amongst Jews were the religious parties and, above all, the Zionists. In fact they were bitter enemies, the Zionists proposing the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine and the Bundists proposing full civil and social rights for Jews within Poland. Hence the Bundists’ slogan — and title of this book — ‘here where we live is our country’. They regarded themselves as Poles who happened to be Jews. Unfortunately for them, as Crabtree recounts, Polish ‘ethno-nationalists’ as they would be called today didn’t agree and by the late 1930s the Polish government was just as officially antisemitic as neighbouring Germany under the Nazis.

As for those who ended up in Russia, the Bolsheviks banned the Bund in 1921. Some Bundists joined the Bolshevik Party but most of them were executed in Stalin’s purges in the 1930s.

Crabapple’s book is not a scholarly study of the Bund but an account based on what happened over the years in various places and to various personalities, especially her great-grandfather who had been a Bundist in a small town before emigrating to the United States in 1904. Hence the subtitle of her book, the ‘story’ (rather than the history) of the Bund. It makes for an easy and fascinating read. Disturbing too, in that many Poles, Lithuanians and Ukrainians joined in the extermination of the Jews in the Second World War.

Crabapple doesn’t disguise her own, left-wing political views and her opposition to what the Israeli state, currently controlled by extremist Zionists, is doing in Gaza. She quotes from Bundist publications predicting what would happen if ever a Zionist state was established in Palestine: the Jews would become the oppressors and the previously established population the oppressed. Which is exactly as it has turned out.

She realises that, with the social basis of the Bund’s support exterminated, after 1945 the Bund had no future and was destined to die out, in fact has aged out with the last surviving militants. Even so, she says it left a legacy. It provides Western Jews with a secular, alternative Jewish tradition to the nasty ethno-nationalism of Zionism. In fact, half the Jews in the world have done what the Bundists advocated: they have regarded where they live as their country. We would justify not being Zionists in a different way: workers should unite with other workers living under the same state to win political control there to dispossess the capitalist class. Where you live is where you should wage the class struggle.

Adam Buick

Letter: Zionism (2006)

Letter to the Editors from the December 2006 issue of the Socialist Standard

Zionism

Dear Editors,

I agree with Howard Moss that the aim should be for articles to give the socialist perspective (Letters, November Socialist Standard). However it is not so unusual for articles to outline some aspect of history or current events and only give reference to the socialist aim in the concluding comments. As socialists we wish to be as well informed as possible. I found Susan Nathan’s book The Other Side of Israel (now available in paperback) both moving and informative.

My concern is that the article (intended as a review) may not fairly represent the book as it only refers to some aspects of its content. For example it does not mention the author’s background. Her father was born in South Africa, the son of Jewish refugees from Lithuania. She is thoroughly aware of Jewish history, including the discrimination suffered by her great-grandfather in Lithuania, and had first hand experience of apartheid in South Africa. The book does not claim that conditions in Israel are identical to those that formerly existed in South Africa – the “petty elements” are absent. As stated in the article the term ‘apartheid’ is applied in a specific sense and its use is only emotive if you do not agree that Israeli Arabs are treated as second class citizens.

Pat Deutz

Life & Times: Horror in the Middle East. Choosing sides (2024)

The Life and Times column from the April 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

In the community centre where I play bowls, on a Thursday evening the room next to the bowls hall is used for meetings by the local branch of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP). They have talks, show films, engage in discussion, and I’ve often thought that I might be better occupied in with them discussing politics rather than playing bowls next door. But I’ve never done that, and recently, when I looked through the window on the door from their meeting room to the bowls hall, I was all the more tempted. I noticed that, though they only had a small attendance, there were banners, posters and leaflets about the current Israel-Hamas conflict strewn everywhere. They carried predictable slogans such as Stop the Genocide, Free Palestine, Stop the Attacks in Gaza, Defeat Islamophobia.

Anti-semitism?

I didn’t attend the meeting, but I did look in to buy a copy of their newspaper, the Socialist Worker. And all that made me reflect not just on Israel and Gaza but also on the attitude of left-wing organisations like the SWP towards the situation there, on the fact that they are all, without exception, staunchly supportive of the Arab side and profoundly hostile to Israel. From many quarters it is being said that this is a form of the oldest hatred, anti-semitism. But I find that hard to accept, since I know personally a number of the people who attend those meetings in the community centre and nothing I know about them suggests to me they are anti-semitic. In the same way, I find it hard to accept the claim made recently that London has become a ‘no-go zone for Jews’ during weekend pro-Palestinian marches. I have observed these marches at first hand myself on two occasions and, despite the anti-Israel slogans, I have seen no display of anti-semitism. I don’t of course doubt that some of those on the marches who are Muslims do not distinguish between Israel and people of the Jewish faith, nor do I doubt that many others in society with anti-semitic prejudices are using the situation to indulge their hatred of Jews. But nothing I saw among the large number of likely non-Muslims on the demonstrations, despite their obvious anti-Israel fervour, led me, Jewish by birth and upbringing as I am but of no religious faith, to attribute to them anti-semitic motives.

Crime scenes

But if it’s not anti-semitism, what is it? What makes them (and the left generally) want to give such unique prominence to horror and injustice in this one particular situation rather than talk about any of the other comparable or manifestly worse situations that exist in many other parts of the globe?

A recent issue of the Socialist Standard gave voice to this very question. It featured on its front cover the caption ‘Crime Scene Investigation’ and listed six horror scenarios taking place in the world at the moment – Yemen, Gaza, Ukraine, Congo, Syria and Iraq. It could have listed many other examples of groups of people, many of them minorities, being horribly oppressed and downtrodden (eg, Kurds in Turkey, Rohingya in Myanmar, Uyghurs in China, civil war in Sudan). Yet we see no particular protest about these scenarios by the groups and individuals demonstrating about Gaza. So why the focus on Israel alone? And why, when a situation like the current one arises, do they harden their already existing anti-Israeli stance and dedicate themselves to campaigning solely against that country and its government?

Anti-Americanism

As previously indicated, I see no evidence for anti-semitism as the motive. I attribute it rather to the anti-Americanism on the left of Western politics which dates back a long way and, despite all changes in circumstances, still survives. It goes back to the old nostalgic belief that there was somehow something good and positive about the first country to call itself ‘communist’ or ‘socialist’, ie, the old Soviet Union, and therefore more or less automatically something bad and negative about those countries and their governments that opposed it, and in particular the United States which had the most power and influence and to a large extent dominated and dictated the policies of the Western world. America was therefore the major enemy of the left and, despite everything that has happened since the end of the Soviet Union, that remains as a residual, almost visceral, feeling on the left and resurfaces with a vengeance whenever a situation arises in which a country is seen as being supported by the United States or is, in any sense, one of its clients. And this is the position of Israel today. And so, almost instinctively, without anti-semitism needing to enter into the equation, Israel and whatever action its government may take has to be opposed by those on the left because in it actions the hand of the American oppressor is seen.

So, no anti-Houthi demonstrations despite the fact that the Houthi terrorise the Yemen, operating stringent policies of repression against all who oppose them and against women and gay people; no demonstrations against Russia’s bombing of civilians in Ukraine; no demonstrations against mass slaughter and rape in the Congo; no demonstrations against China’s brutal treatment of the Uyghurs; and no demonstrations against the vicious slaughter and expulsion of the Rohingya by the military government in Myanmar. The common denominator of all these situations is that there is no obvious American hand in or support for the repression taking place.

Socialism as it really is

This is the kind of thing I would have tried to say if I’d attended that SWP meeting in my community centre. I would not have accused those present of anti-semitism, since I do not believe them to be anti-semitic, but I would have challenged them to examine their motives for such a disproportionate focus on only one of capitalism’s crime scenes compared to the very many others. And I would have invited them to consider joining with the Socialist Party to campaign not for better or ‘fairer’ conditions within capitalism (which at bottom is what they do) but for getting rid of the system that gives rise to those conditions and replacing it by a leaderless, borderless, moneyless world of voluntary cooperation and free access to all goods and service based on the principle of from each according to ability to each according to need – which is what ‘socialism’ really is.

Howard Moss

‘Take me to your leader’ (2023)

From the December 2023 issue of the Socialist Standard

These five words became the supposed, and somewhat clichéd, request made by any alien stepping from their flying saucer. This brief statement makes a huge supposition; that a society so much more advanced than ours that it can traverse light-years of space still has leaders.

Not so different to humanity at present then. The implication is that leaders will always be a necessary feature of any society. So, no possibility of socialism anywhere in the cosmos, never mind on Earth.

Fiction is often either reflective of what is, or speculative of what might be. Whilst science fiction has an honourable tradition of posing questions as to possible things to come, in this case, the alien(s) represent the world landed in, not some distant galaxy far, far away.

The role of leader in human society has taken a variety of forms, the monarchs of feudal times eventually giving way to presidential heads of state as capitalism developed. Even if, as in Britain, when there is nominally still a crowned head, the king or queen fulfils the role of president. The only difference is the method of selection, by ballot or birth.

It is not only states that have leaders of course. Industries have CEOs, with boards of directors and their chairmen/women.

The Socialist Party is an unusual political organisation in that it does not have leaders. Parties of the openly capitalist sort, usually locating themselves on the right wing, very much favour strong leadership. Those that would identify themselves as left, even those claiming to be socialist, also have prominent roles for leaders.

An ever-present problem for all leaders is that while they occupy the top spot, there are members of their own parties continually plotting their downfall to further personal ambitions. Even those who have no realistic chance of ever achieving exalted prominence will eagerly conspire against their leader if they feel their immediate interests are served. Never allow principles to intrude on personal advantage.

The recent example of Jeremy Corbyn’s brief flirtation with high office is such a case. As Labour Party leader and, therefore, potential future prime minister, he did not exhibit unequivocal loyalty to the British state or its allies.

A toxic mix of media vitriol and Israeli self-interest was unleashed with the added force of his own MPs, fearing for their seats, becoming willing accomplices in his political assassination. The anti-Zionism equals anti-semitism campaign proved, despite its absurdity in the main, a potent force.

However, as is usually the way with a poisoned chalice, it remains toxic for whoever next sups from it. Keir Starmer, proving his overwhelming loyalty to his own ambition, used the anti-Zionism equals anti-semitism weapon to quell and remove any lingering Corbynites, even expelling the man himself from the party he’d led.

However, what Starmer didn’t foresee was the 7 October Hamas atrocities in Israel followed by the savagery of the Israeli response. As the number of dead in Gaza rose beyond 10,000 Starmer found himself politically hobbled by the very weapon that brought him the leadership.

Unable to denounce Israeli military actions or even call for a ceasefire without giving rise to accusations of, by his own use of the term, anti-semitism, his leadership was undermined. Labour politicians at local and parliamentary levels must either resign and undermine him, or deny their own consciences.

Leadership implies control and elevated insight when situations arise. The Boris Johnson Tory administration very quickly began to unravel when his government, based on charismatic populism but with little substance even in terms of its own politics, was confronted by the public health crisis of Covid.

The present inquiry into the handling of that epidemic has revealed self-interested factions vying for influence, but with nothing other than invective to say to each other. At the pinnacle of this maladministration teetered the former Prime Minister who less than a year previously had been lauded for his leadership in turning the ‘red wall’ blue. An appropriate colour considering the language of choice, or the choice language, of his ‘team’.

It has been said that anyone wanting to become a leader must possess a personality that should debar them from becoming one. It is a role for a human demiurge to create a political world in his or her own image for which the required infallibility is always lacking.

Even a cursory scan of history in the capitalist era demonstrates how misguided it is to place human hopes and aspirations in the hands of leaders no matter what qualities they claim to have to navigate ‘their’ people to a better future.

The Russian revolution, whatever the claims of Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin, did not, and could not, lead to human emancipation and socialism. A Führer only leads to barbarity via the rhetoric of lebensraum and a Third Reich. The ‘Great Helmsman’ steered his state vessel onto the rocks of the Cultural Revolution.

Following a leader amounts to an abnegation of responsibility. It is people wanting an individual to deliver a better way of living for them. There is a better way for humanity to live, but it will never come about at the behest of some enlightened leader.

That better way – beyond capitalism and its attendant problems of exploitation, poverty, nationalism and war – is socialism. A moneyless worldwide commonwealth to which people will contribute in the very best way they can and have their needs met. A truly democratic society without need of, or any role for, leaders.

Should a flying saucer or otherwise unimagined vehicle traverse the cosmos and land on Earth, when the being steps from the craft a universal translator may allow a question to be clearly posed: ‘You want to take me to your leader? Why are you still inhibiting human progress with leaders?’

Dave Alton

Zionism: myth and reality (2006)

Book Review from the October 2006 issue of the Socialist Standard

Zionism misled many Jewish workers with its promise of a “homeland for Jews”. A recent book examines the fate of the million or so non-Jews in the state Zionism established.

In 1999 when Susan Nathan went to live in Israel under the Law of Return her head was “full of romantic notions of Zionism and the Jewish state.” Some three years later she moved from Tel Aviv to live, as the only Jew, in the Arab town of Tamra in the Galilee. Her book, The Other Side of Israel (published by Harper Collins last year), tells the story of her “journey across the Jewish-Arab divide”, and gives a rare insight into the Jewish state from the perspective of the Palestinians who are Israeli citizens.

The journey began when she was a patient in the Hadassah hospital in Jerusalem, where she was surprised to find Israelis and Palestinians sharing the same ward, and Palestinians who were Israeli citizens: Israeli Arabs. The real shock came when an Orthodox woman was visited by her husband who had “a pistol on one hip and a rifle slung casually over his shoulder” – no one else seemed surprised by the presence of an armed civilian. He told Susan Nathan in a strong American accent that he had requisitioned an Arab home in East Jerusalem and never left home without a weapon. The reply to her suggestion that he would be better off in the Jewish Quarter of the Old City was “All of East Jerusalem belongs to the Jews.”

More questioning came a few months later when she was invited to help with a student organisation – Mahapach, in connection with their work for disadvantaged communities in Israel, “particularly the indigenous Arab population and the community of Jews of Middle Eastern descent . . . the Mizrahim.” She knew of the latter but where did the Arabs live? Why had they been invisible to her during her first two years in Israel?

She was to learn that one million Arabs share the state, and that about a quarter of them are internal refugees. She was “profoundly shaken” by her first visit to an Arab area – the town of Tamra, made as part of the research for Mahapach. It was strikingly different from any Jewish area she had seen, with obvious, chronic overcrowding.

At the home of Dr Asad Ghanem (head of politics at Haifa University) she heard about the discrimination exercised against the Arab population “in all spheres of Israeli life.” In Arab communities there are thousands of homes judged illegal by the state and under the threat of demolition: in Tamra there are 150 such homes. The authorities’ version is that the widespread illegal building is the act of law breakers, people squatting on land or not wanting to pay for a licence. So the police bring bulldozers “at crack of dawn” to destroy illegal homes. 500 hundred Arab homes were destroyed in 2003.

Arab families are forced to build illegally because the state refuses to issue them with a building permit. Even when, as in Dr Ghanem’s case, the home is built on land owned by his family for generations the permit is still refused: he pays regular heavy fines to ward off demolition. He asked Susan Nathan if she had made Aliyah, and it was difficult to answer. Her privileges as a Jewish immigrant were at the expense of his people, “sitting in his home the reality finally hit me. The intoxicating power trip had come to an abrupt halt.” And the task of becoming informed had begun: the unlearning of her “lifelong Zionist training.”

The Zionist myth is that the “Jews had reclaimed an empty, barren land – ‘a land without people for a people without land’- we had made the desert bloom, we had filled an uninhabited piece of the Middle East with Kibbutzim, the collective farms that were the pioneering backbone of the state in its early years.” Prior to 1948 there had been aggressive colonising of the land by Jewish immigrants, and a campaign of land purchases funded by the Jewish National Fund, but only 7 percent of Palestine had been purchased.

The other side of Israeli Independence in 1948 is for the Palestinians the Nakba (the catastrophe) the loss of their homeland to the Jewish state. 750,000 Palestinians were driven from their homes and country. A map in the book marks the position of the 400 villages which were emptied and then destroyed by the army. The Kibbutzim were built on the land of destroyed villages. Around a hundred villages survived, as did Tamra because it was not on the main route of the Israeli army and was a small community providing “a useful pool of cheap labour in the area.” The original village had a population of 2,000 the number was swelled by refugees cleared from other villages. Photographs exist from 1948 which show “a sea of Red Cross tents” in which the refugees were housed for some years. One third of the present inhabitants of Tamra are internal refugees. A sizeable number of the 150,000 Palestinians who remained in the country and became Israeli citizens (“by accident rather than design”), were classified as “present absentees”, and had their homes, land and bank accounts appropriated by the Custodian of  Absentee Property. There is no instance of any property being restored to former Arab owners or compensation paid.

Apartheid

Dispossession still continues in various ways. Planning laws restrict Arab communities both in number – to the 123 listed in 1965 – and in area, even though the population has increased. Israel is an apartheid state which enforces policies of ethnic segregation. Dr Uri Davies a Jew who, like Susan Nathan, lives in an Arab town is quoted as applying the term apartheid in a specific sense to mean “the regulation and enforcement of racism and xenophobia in law.” He defines the core element of an apartheid state as “the structure of laws that allows the colonising population to exploit the resources of the state – mainly land – to the disadvantage of the native population.”

Though it is not publicly admitted “racist employment practices and the exclusion of Arabs from wealth generating sectors of the economy are the bedrock of state planning policies.” Most computer systems do not list Arab communities. Arabic is the second official language, yet people are not allowed to use it at work – a woman was sacked from McDonalds for doing so.

There are two separate school systems, with much less money spent on Arab children. There is intensive surveillance of the Arab education system, teachers are effectively “banned from teaching about the Nakba  . . . or about their people’s connection to Palestinians in the West Bank or Gaza” and the refugee camps in other countries. In Haifa the Arab Parents’ Forum failed in an attempt to register their children at Jewish schools for 2004: Arab pupils are in a separate registration area.

Susan Nathan believes that what happened in the 1948 war is at the root of conflict in the Middle East. The price of creating a homeland was to inflict the “Jewish story of dispossession and wandering on another people – the Palestinians.” She makes a distinction between making a comparison, quantitative judgements about the degree of suffering, and drawing a parallel which suggests “one set of events can echo another.” Zionist organisations, she says, like the Jewish National Fund and the Jewish Agency should be disbanded and the apartheid system ended; there should be equality between all citizens.

An old man told her of the time when it was possible to travel by train from the Galilee to all of the region’s biggest cities “when the borders existed as no more than the lines on maps produced by the area’s British and French rulers.” Socialists never supported Zionism but opposed it as yet another nationalist delusion as what we aspire to is a world without national frontiers in which free movement is possible and where all people live together as equals.

Pat Deutz

Proper Gander: Hard Labour (2022)

The Proper Gander column from the November 2022 issue of the Socialist Standard

The ongoing shambles of the Conservative Party’s leadership has overshadowed the recent shambles among the leadership of its Labour Party competitors. Although the downfall of Jeremy Corbyn after the 2019 general election was explained by many as due to his regime’s stance on Brexit and managing the economy, it has also been tainted by accusations of anti-semitism among members. Al Jazeera’s four-part documentary series The Labour Files examines the party’s toxic culture over the last couple of decades, through how these allegations arose and were handled.

The programme came about from what Al Jazeera describes as ‘the largest leak of documents in British political history’. Hundreds of thousands of internal Labour Party emails and records along with audio and video clips dating back to the late ‘90s were received (by whom? From whom?), and the programme-makers focus particularly on details of the party’s disciplinary proceedings against its members. These cases resulted in hundreds of party activists being suspended or expelled, some of whom appear on the documentary to speak about what happened and be shown for the first time correspondence about them. The allegations are revealed to follow a similar pattern, whether in Brighton, Harrow or Wallasey in Merseyside, with party officials searching through members’ social media accounts to find posts critical of Israel and then launching disciplinary procedures on the grounds of antisemitism. Those accused were supporters of Corbyn, who said that if his party got into power it would recognise the Palestinian State towards a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Their accusers tended to be pro-Israeli backers of then-leader-in-waiting Sir Keir Starmer, with some even shown to have links to the far-right English Defence League. Corbyn’s spell as leader and its aftermath have brought to the fore nasty divisions between members supportive of Israel or Palestine.

'The Labour Files’ claims that actions against Corbynites were unsubstantiated and unscrupulous have been denied by Labour itself, along with some of the individuals criticised. The documentary is also critical of how some branches of the media fuelled the original allegations, especially an edition of the BBC’s Panorama from 2019 titled Is Labour Anti-Semitic?, which invited a reply of ‘yes’. This is cited as an instance of how the predominant narrative in the mainstream media has been anti-Corbyn. Starmer (against the advice of Labour’s lawyers) later agreed to pay out a six-figure sum to Panorama’s lead journalist and seven previous Labour employees, apologising for them being defamed by claims that their actions were motivated by opposition to Corbyn. Corbyn then said in a Facebook post that this payment risked ‘giving credibility to misleading and inaccurate allegations’. A few days after Al Jazeera released its criticism of the edition of Panorama, the BBC reported on allegations that bullying and harassment among Al Jazeera’s staff went unchecked. The dispute within the Labour Party has spilled out into a spat between the two broadcasters.

The mainstream view promoted by the Panorama episode and elsewhere was that Corbyn didn’t adequately tackle anti-semitism in his party, with the implication that this is due to his pro-Palestinian outlook. It’s argued in The Labour Files that Corbyn was damned either way: if he tried to speed up the processing of disciplinary cases he then would be accused of interfering in them. Lawyer Martin Forde’s report about racism in the Labour Party (commissioned under Starmer’s leadership and published in July 2022) said that there was no evidence that Corbyn’s administration hid or didn’t deal with allegations of antisemitism, and that antisemitism was used as a weapon by both factions in the Labour Party. The report also describes a ‘hierarchy of racism’ in the organisation, meaning that attitudes towards prejudice differed depending on which group was the victim. Examples given of this include how complaints of anti-semitism were addressed but Asian members were treated with suspicion by others who believed they were infiltrating branches, and how black people and those in other ethnic groups were side-lined so that Labour could instead court their traditional ‘red wall’ voters. So, while The Labour Files casts doubt on the widely accepted extent of anti-semitism in the party, it also highlights other discrimination its members experienced.

The documentary shows us that the Labour Party isn’t the saviour of the working class which many people still want it to be. According to the original allegations it’s been contaminated by anti-Semites or, as the programme argues, it’s contaminated by people (some with far-right connections) willing to trump up charges to discredit their rivals.

Al Jazeera is funded by Qatar’s government, and in return for its money it would want the channel’s output to support its own narratives. The Qatari government is critical of the Israeli state’s actions and backs Palestine. The Labour Files reflects this stance by being critical of a pro-Israeli tendency in the Labour Party who stirred up concerns about antisemitism to discredit pro-Palestine Corbyn and his supporters. This doesn’t disprove what the programme claims, but it reminds us that viewpoints in the media are there to support the perspective and priorities of entities with enough funding to promote them widely.

Despite the weight of the claims made against the Labour Party in Al Jazeera’s investigation, it has been scarcely commented on elsewhere in the mainstream media (and the Forde Report was also covered less than may be expected). While there’s a lot else happening in the world for journalists to report on, this suggests that many media outlets want to avoid upsetting Starmer’s Labour now that the Tories are increasingly discredited.

Mike Foster

Potash and Palestine: Dead Sea Fruit. (1929)

From the October 1929 issue of the Socialist Standard

The fighting between Arabs and Jews, which broke out in Palestine in the middle of August with heavy loss of life and the usual stories of “atrocities” on both sides, has drawn renewed attention to the Zionist Movement and to the whole question of racial and religious strife in the modern world.

The Zionist Movement was founded by a Jewish journalist, Theodor Herzl, who in 1895 was sent to Paris by a Vienna newspaper to report on the famous Dreyfus case. In his pamphlet, “The Jewish State,” he argued that the relationship between Jews and non-Jews would never cease to be a problem until an independent Jewish national state had been set up, preferably in Palestine. His scheme was received at first with hostility or indifference, but from 1897, when the inaugural congress was held, the movement grew continually stronger and wealthier, being helped considerably by the gifts of Baron Edmond de Rothschild. There seemed to be little prospect of settlement on a large scale in Palestine, then part of the Turkish Empire, until the British Government, on the capture of Jerusalem, issued a declaration in 1917 committing themselves to the idea of establishing a Jewish national home in that country. Since 1919 the Jewish population has increased from 57,000 to 162,000, but they still represent a small minority in comparison with the 650,000 Arabs. The Christians number about 75,000.

It has been too readily assumed that the conflict is wholly or mainly due to racial of religious differences, a view which has been seemingly supported by the fact that the actual incident which precipitated the outburst was connected with the “Wailing Wall,” a spot sacred to the adherents of the Jewish religion but the property of Moslems. It is not necessary to look far below the surface to see that this kind of explanation is inadequate. The differences exist, but while they add bitterness to the dispute they are not the underlying cause of it. For a thousand years until after the war Arabs and Jews lived side-by-side in Palestine without ill-will. The Jews in Baghdad have issued a manifesto condemning Zionism and associating the local Jews with the protests of the Moslems. (See report in Times, 31st, August.) Many Jews in Palestine are indifferent to the Jewish religion. It is interesting to notice, also, that whereas British and American Christians in Jerusalem helped to defend the Jews against the Arabs, the native Christians sided with the Moslems. The Arab Christians are reported to have expressed the opinion not long after the British Government’s Zionist Declaration that they would prefer to be back under the Turks. (See Morning Post, September 13th.) Moreover, many Jews in Europe and America and elsewhere are still in complete hostility to the objects and principles of the Zionist Movement.

The British Prime Minister has stated his view that the conflict is not one of race or religion, but merely the outburst of disorderly persons—an explanation which again fails to explain. Then the Communists inform us, in a resolution passed at the last Congress of the League against Imperialism (one of the numerous aliases of the Communist International), that Zionism is one of the “instruments of Imperialism” for the “oppression of the Arab peoples.” (See Sunday Worker, September 1st.) They call on the British and Jewish workers “to stand side by side with the fight of the Arabs for independence.” (Sunday Worker, September 8th.)

Let us now consider the chief interested parties and what exactly their interests in Palestine and Zionism are. And, first of all, let us consider the position of the British Government.

The story is that Mr. Lloyd George was led to support Zionism out of gratitude to Dr. Weizmann, who in addition to being the head of the Zionist organisation was the chemist who made good Britain’s shortage of explosives during the war. But it is well to remember certain other facts. One is that Palestine occupies a commanding position in relation to the protection of the Suez Canal route to India and beyond. It is an essential link in the Imperial Airway to India, and there is talk of an oil pipeline from Persia to the Palestine coast. Haifa has been described as the finest naval harbour on the Mediterranean, and the only harbour except Malta in which the British fleet could anchor for its protection. In the House of Commons, on April 30th of this year (see Hansard of that date). Mr. Amery, Colonial Secretary, said that Haifa will become “one of the main ports of the Middle East.” In short, it is obvious that the British ruling class have some very powerful “Reasons of State” for remaining in Palestine, whether their proteges, the Zionists, are in trouble with the Arabs or not.

Next, let us consider the Zionist movement. On July 28th of this year the 16th Congress of the Zionists opened at Zurich, and resulted in some very important changes in the constitution of the governing body. Hitherto the “Jewish Agency,” the body which has officially represented the Jewish settlement in Palestine, has been entirely composed of Zionists. The 16th Congress marked the success of Dr. Weizmann’s plan to create an “extended Agency” representing Jewish circles quite outside and indifferent to the old Zionist movement. The correspondent of the New Statesman (August 31st) says that the old movement was democratic in organisation and “represented chiefly the lower Jewish middle-class, which in Eastern Europe was even poorer than the proletariat.” The new Agency is frankly non-democratic and “represents on the whole higher Jewish finance and big business …. the practical, hard-boiled American business man.” At its first meeting on the 11th August there were present, among others, Sir Herbert Samuel and Lord Melchett (Mond). (See Industrial and Labour Information, Geneva, September 16th.) We may observe in passing that the correspondent of the New Statesman says that many of these hard-boiled business men are interested very much in the philanthropic side of the venture, and Mr. Amery, too, thought that the American interest was “no doubt largely sentimental.” (Hansard, April 30th.) But, then, there are other things also. Lord Melchett and his business associates have interests in Palestine in connection with water power concessions for the production of electricity, but what is, at hast potentially, of most importance to them, as chemical producers, is the concession for the extraction of potash and other valuable salts from the Dead Sea. At present a German cartel practically monopolises potash and its allied chemicals, and it is hoped by the Anglo-American interests who take this philanthropic interest in Palestine that the Dead Sea may make them independent of the German producers. Colonel Howard-Bury, M.P., has said (see Hansard, 30th November, 1927) that the potash deposits alone are estimated to be worth £14,000 million at current prices ; although it is true that Mr. Amery (Hansard, 12th March, 1928) would not commit himself to this figure, and Sir Herbert Samuel has estimated it at a mere £800 million. Mr. Amery, has, however, stated that the Dead Sea is estimated to contain 2,000 million metric tons of potassium chloride and 980 million metric tons of magnesium chloride, and the financial interest behind the concessionaires believe that it can be profitably extracted. (Hansard, 12th March.) In the light of this information those words “philanthropic” and “sentimental” make us smile.

It is true that big business men, especially the hard-boiled ones, are notoriously sentimental, and they can afford to be philanthropic; but we too could afford to be philanthropic and sentimental if we were in their shoes, more especially if there was a chance that the philanthropic sprat might hook a Dead Sea mackerel worth £800 million.

In face of this it is not surprising that Mr. Felix M. Warburg, the American Chairman of the new Jewish Agency, should be very angry with the British authorities for having allowed his fellow Jews to organise provocative demonstrations at the Wailing Wall, and thus disturb the “prosperity” of Palestine. (See Times, 6th September.) Riots are bad for business as well as being a source of grief for the hard-boiled but tender-hearted captains of industry.

And what of the Arabs, on whose behalf the simple Communists want British and Jewish workers to fight for independence? Arab workers have been incited against Jewish immigrant landowners, but forget that Arab property owners sold them the land. The Mufti, in an interview with the Palestine High Commissioner on September 6th (see Daily Telegraph, September 7th), demanded :

“on behalf of the Arab community equal economic rights with the Jews, the abrogation of Jewish monopolies for hydro-electric and other concessions, and the regranting of all concessions by and through a Federal Government on the basis of open competition.”

Translated into actual facts, this means that the wealthy Arabs resent seeing all the loot pocketed by their Jewish rivals. Many of these Arabs made vast sums of money out of land speculations owing to the rise in prices following the increased demand for land on the part of the Jews. But what is the value to the propertyless Arab worker of the “right” to tender in “open competition” for Dead Sea concessions? It is worth precisely the same as the British worker’s “right” to become a shareholder in Melchett’s Chemical Combine, or the existing concession companies—nothing whatever. The whole struggle is one between rival Jewish, Arab, American and British capitalists for the valuable privilege of exploiting Jew and Arab, Christian and Atheist, and any other kind of worker. Jewish as well as Arab working-class organisations are suppressed in the employers’ interest. Religion and race, national independence and patriotism, are now, from the worker’s point of view, just so many ruling-class devices useful for the purpose, among others, of stirring up hatred when and where they may want it. Arabs and Jews in Palestine and Iraq have no more interest at stake in the independence of the states in which, and by which, their exploitation is carried on, than had British and German workers in 1914. Socialism alone is worth struggling for. That is the message of the Socialist to all the working-class dupes of the closely-allied superstitions of religious, racial and patriotic rivalries. Jewish workers and Arab workers both suffer, but not because they are Jew or Arab, or because they happen both to be in Palestine, but because they are workers and therefore exploited by those who own and control their means of life. The Jewish workers cannot solve their problems by transferring their misery from New York or Berlin to Jerusalem. The world will be fit for Jewish workers and Arab workers to live in when, and only when, the working-class, as a whole, have gained political control for the establishment of Socialism.

Edgar Hardcastle

Editorial: Why the Labour Party is useless (2021)

Editorial from the August 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard

As part of his ‘frank conversations’ with the British people, Keir Starmer recently faced a group of former Labour voters in Blackpool, where he eagerly spelt out his ‘strong ideas’ on how he would reform British capitalism to make it work for the working class, with measures such as support for children and the under-25s, and policies to buy, make and sell in Britain. Unfortunately for him, his audience couldn’t share his enthusiasm. One remarked ‘actions speak louder than words’ and another asked ‘where is the money coming from?’ With the crumbling of the Northern red wall at the last general election, the Labour defeat in the recent Hartlepool by-election, only just retaining the Batley and Spen constituency, and receiving a measly 622 votes in the recent Chesham and Amersham by-election, Starmer is facing an uphill struggle to persuade workers to elect a Labour government.

No soon as he was elected Labour leader, Starmer got to work to not just distance himself from his predecessor, Jeremy Corbyn, but to purge any influence that he and his allies may have had. He sacked Corbyn ally Rebecca Long Bailey from her post of shadow Education Secretary for retweeting an interview with the actress Maxine Peake, where the latter made comments that were deemed to be anti-semitic. He then moved against Corbyn himself by suspending him from the Labour Party for remarks he made in response to the findings of the Equality and Human Rights Commission’s report on anti-semitism within the Labour Party (although he has since been reinstated). Four left-wing groups – Resist, Socialist Appeal, Labour in Exile Network and Labour Against the Witchhunt – have been expelled from the Labour Party.

However, marginalising the Corbynistas and the left-wing is deemed not enough to convince voters that the Labour Party can be trusted. Starmer has been advised to promote patriotism and the use of the Union flag in the hope that this will help to bring the ‘traditional working class’ back into the fold. Beating the patriotic drum is nothing new for the Labour Party. All previous Labour governments invoked nationalism when it suited them. Remember New Labour’s bulldog arising from its slumbers in 1997.

In left-wing mythology, Starmer will no doubt join the pantheon of traitors who betrayed the ideals and principles of the Labour Party from Ramsay MacDonald to Tony Blair. In truth, there are no ideals or principles to betray, as the Labour Party is not a principled socialist party, but a capitalist one. It doesn’t attempt to raise working-class consciousness, but competes for votes in the capitalist political marketplace, which requires it to opportunistically play on workers anxieties and fears. The Labour Party was founded with the aim of promoting parliamentary legislation on behalf of the trade unions. It sought to run capitalism in the interest of the working class. However, this cannot be achieved as capitalism can only be run in one way, that is to generate profits for the capitalist class. Through hard experience, Labour governments have ended up managing capitalism in a similar fashion as Tory governments.

Labour’s Internal Conflicts (2020)

From the December 2020 issue of the Socialist Standard

The suspension from the Labour Party of its erstwhile leader Jeremy Corbyn initially appears to be of little note for socialists. There can be sympathy for the hounding of an apparently decent man, , but hey-ho that’s capitalist politics for you.

But actually, this is a little more serious. While Corbyn does not in any sense meet the criteria set out in our principles of what is required to be a socialist, he is identified throughout the media and in the popular consciousness as just that. Indeed he probably self-identifies as a socialist.

During the lead up to the 2019 general election, in a number of BBC Radio 4 vox pops he was frequently cited as the reason for Labour voters of many years standing insisting they would not vote for the Labour Party. Corbyn was too extreme, to the point of being denounced as a ‘communist’. As socialists who state that socialism and communism are synonyms, that the Labour Party never was, is not and never will be a socialist party, such prevalent sentiments as expressed in those vox pops are of concern.

Capitalism’s defenders are none too discerning when it comes to identifying perceived socialist threats. The faintest whiff of red smoke and any vaguely smouldering embers are to be stamped on. If possible the word socialist, never mind the concept, is to be anathema.

Socialist understanding of the Soviet Union from its inception is that it was state capitalist and not socialist/communist in any sense. Yet there can be little doubt that Lenin, who thought himself a socialist, found himself through circumstance as head of a ruling regime that had no way of pursuing socialism.

Thus the compromise of state capitalism proved to be no pre-emptor of socialism as perhaps Lenin hoped. However, it did allow for an ideological claim of communism in the making, an iron curtain indeed behind which the ruling nomenclature became the capitalist class spawning the oligarchs of Putin’s non-Soviet Russia.

By posing as communist for over 70 years, the Soviet regime has been responsible for considerable ideological damage that actual socialists have to deal with. Present-day inheritors of Lenin’s legacy continue to serve to obscure the ubiquity of capitalism throughout the world, be it ‘free market’ or state capitalism.

This serves ‘free market’ capitalism particularly well politically as those state capitalist countries who continue to don the communist mask tend to the brutally authoritarian, thereby confirming the popular conception.

There is, though, a risk in all this for capitalism in that the concept of socialism may be traduced, but it continues to exist and where that may lead is unpredictable. For example, while the Bolshevik revolution of 1917 could not of itself have led to socialism, had the idea inspired the working class around the world to seriously consider what was possible for it to achieve, then capitalism would have had a problem.

Therefore, any hint of socialism succeeding, however erroneous, must be pilloried and, where possible, crushed. Even politicians who are merely trying to ameliorate the worst effects of capitalism without challenging capitalism itself must be thwarted and shown to fail. All the better if those politicians self-identify, or failing that can be branded, as socialists/communists/Marxists.

Thus the case of Jeremy Corbyn’s suspension from the Labour Party takes on a significance of sorts for socialists. On his being elected leader a whole machinery of vilification was slipped into gear. It was his declared support for a beleaguered Arabic people, Palestinians, which ultimately led to his downfall, branded a denier of anti-Semitism.

As a case study in character assassination, it should serve as a warning as to the opprobrium that will be manufactured and freely distributed to the public should anyone appear to be gaining influence contrary to capitalism’s well-being. The synthetic outrage produced through blending anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism has proved to be powerful. It has placed a brand of aggressive ultra-nationalism beyond criticism and forged a potent political weapon to strike down opponents, leaving them apparently morally, as well politically, compromised.

The wider impact is to identify anti-Semitism with socialism. It doesn’t matter that Corbyn really isn’t a socialist, just another would-be reformer of capitalism. If this is indicative of action that can be so vigorously pursued against a reformer, what can people expect who do wish to replace capitalism with socialism through the agency of a self-aware working class acting on its own behalf?

Once the working class is so motivated, then such a political weapon will be blunted. But until then, those who have accepted the task of propagating socialist ideas need to take heed of what could be the personal consequences of becoming more influential.

There is the further, perhaps more important, point concerning democracy. Socialists do not advocate the suppression of ideas, rather they should be brought out into the open and subjected to scrutiny. Through debate erroneous notions can be exposed and correct ones clearly identified. This does not preclude individuals continuing to expound erroneous ideas, the safeguard being their dismissal by the majority. That is democracy.

This most definitely applies to socialists. If some, or even all, we advocate can be demonstrated objectively to be wrong, then so it must be. It would be utterly pointless finding some mechanism whereby such a demonstration could be suppressed. This applies to all bodies of ideas and ideologies. Any agency working to frustrate this for self-serving purposes is opposed to democracy.

The Socialist Party was vigorously opposed to Jeremy Corbyn when he was leader of the Labour Party. However well meaning, his ideas would not have brought the benefit of socialism to the working class. This for the very good reason that socialism is not something that can be conferred, it must be achieved by the working class itself.

This opposition was open and political, not personal. His subsequent vilification though the media, and by many of his own backbenchers, has most definitely served the interests of capitalism by casting guilt by association, however vague and erroneous that association may be, with socialism. The juicier story is proving to be the ongoing, and rather laboured (pun intended) anti-Semitism row. If there is a strand of anti-Semitism running through the Labour Party it would be one of the threads of racism sown into all societies based around national identities.

Zionism is but one manifestation of this and it is quite possible that those who take a specifically anti-Zionist stand slip into expressions of anti-Semitism without recognising they are doing so. While the world continues to be divided by national boundaries, so will the curse of casual, as well as intentional, racist comments and behaviour.

Suspending Jeremy Corbyn from the Labour Party not only won’t cure the problem, in a sense it deflects from the root cause. It would well serve those who are celebrating Corbyn’s predicament to examine their own attitudes as to whether they can honestly acquit themselves of ever having had a racist thought. To quote a statement attributed to a Jewish teacher, ‘Let he (or she) who is without sin cast the first stone’.

Perhaps Jeremy Corbyn will now take stock and come to realise that the best interests of society are to be served through pursuing actual socialism, not some reformist parody. In which case he may come to realise suspension, perhaps expulsion, from the Labour Party is a blessing, even if initiated by dark deeds.

Dave Alton

Was the Jewish Bund anti-Semitic? (2018)

From the June 2018 issue of the Socialist Standard

The revisionist definition of anti-semitism to include anti-Zionism is refuted by its absurd conclusion that the old Jewish Bund was therefore anti-Semitic.

The media have been carrying stories about anti-semitism, particularly on the rise of hate-crimes against Jewish individuals and religious institutions. Also in the headlines are allegations that anti-semitism exists within the Labour Party and its left-wing hangers-on.

Zionism claims to speak on behalf of Jewish people. Today, although a majority of Jews choose to live outside of Israel, only a minority still oppose Zionism and its creation, Israel. A hundred years ago, however, it was Zionism that was the minority and challenged in the working-class movement by Yiddish-speaking secularists of the Jewish Bund.

Originally Zionism was a nationalism of Jewish people outside Palestine, claiming that the main cause of the troubles of the Jews was the fact that they had no country of their own. Its supporters argued that, as a means of solving the problem of anti-semitism, Jewish people should establish a nation-state in Palestine, chosen on the grounds that the region was the historic homeland of the Jewish people. Only by settling in a country of their own would Jews be safe from anti-semitism. No longer then would they be a small minority of outcasts, dependent upon the tolerance of others, but citizens of their own state. As such they would be free from interference and discrimination.

Yet in their efforts to free Jews in Europe from anti-semitism, the Zionists generated another, Arab and pro-Arab anti-semitism, a price they were prepared to pay as David Ben-Gurion, a well-known Zionist leader and future prime minister of Israel, acknowledged when he declared even before Israel was established:

  ‘We shall go to Palestine in order to become the majority there. If need be we shall take the country by force. If Palestine proves too small . . . her frontiers will have to be extended’ (Manchester Guardian, 3 July 1946).

Many of Jewish background have been brought up to hold an image of Zionism as a movement of pioneering, progressive, pious, peace-loving nation-builders. However, in the 1920s and 1930s, some Zionists resorted to violence against fellow-Jews, breaking up meetings and fire-bombing printers and publishers so as to keep the Yiddish language and its rich Jewish culture out of public life in Palestine. An early Zionist group, ‘the Battalion of the Defenders of the Language’ who sought to make re-constructed Hebrew the national language of Israel through suppression of other Jewish traditions, was hailed ‘Heroes of Israel’ by the prominent Zionist Chaim Weizman, later the  first President of Israel (see: strangeside.com/yiddish-in-israel).

The Jewish Labour League, the Bund, believed that anti-semitism was a by-product of the private property system and would end with the end of that system; the Jews were just used as a convenient scapegoat for the problems capitalism caused other workers, easy to label and point the finger at. They did not think in terms of a return to ‘the promised land’ as a solution to the problem Jews faced.

The Bund, in Russia and Eastern Europe, was a mass movement with tens of thousands of members; and, due to emigration to Western Europe and the United States, an international network of left-wing activists. They argued that a Jewish state would be yet another class-ridden society in which Jewish workers would have to fight their Jewish bosses. The Bundists defended the rights of Palestinians against Jewish settlers. Bundism maintained the hope that Jew and Gentile could coexist in a true socialist world in all lands. Instead of falling for the divide and rule tactics which weaken the workers’ movement, Bundists said Jewish workers should recognise who their real enemy was and work together with other workers to defeat the system that exploits all workers..

People make their own history but that history gets written only later and it is often selective with great omissions. The Bundist alternative to Zionism appears to be written out of the history of the Jews. Bundists rejected emigration to Palestine as a solution and favoured a social revolution in their ‘real homeland’, i.e., the place they were born or lived. To rid the world of anti-semitism, the world itself had to change, class society had to be ended everywhere, and this was a struggle that began at home – or as Marx put it, ‘The proletariat of each country must, of course, first of all settle matters with its own bourgeoisie.’ The Bund urged Jews to remain in their countries of residence, support the workers’ movement of that country, and forge a Jewish culture around the Yiddish language. The belief of Bundists of trying to build a better Jewish life in the country where Jews lived was rejected outright by Zionism.

The State of Israel came into being in 1948. The Bund’s hopes never materialised and it finally disbanded in the mid-1950s. Although they were essentially Social Democratic reformists they never fell for Jewish nation-statism. They certainly weren’t anti-Semitic. In fact they were criticised by other Jewish opponents of Zionism for being too nationalist themselves.

We in the Socialist Party also opposed Zionism. As we wrote in our pamphlet The Racial Problem published in 1947 before the state of Israel was set up:

  ‘Our case to the Jewish workers is that under no circumstances should they allow themselves to be deluded by ideas of nationalism and “race” into supporting such movements as Zionism which will not solve their problems. The only solution to anti-semitism is Socialism, and to the extent that Jewish workers co-operate with other members of their class to bring about Socialism will the complete eradication of anti-semitism be more quickly achieved.’

So, we, too, on the invalid revision of anti-semitism to include anti-Zionism, would have to be classified as anti-Semites; which is just as absurd as the Bund being so classified. We are – and always have been – opposed to all discrimination on grounds of nationality, language or cultural tradition, including anti-semitism.

We were opposed to the establishment of Israel and we do want to see it disappear – but not, as some Islamic and Arab Nationalists want, on its own within the context of capitalism. To campaign for its abolition would be just as much a diversion as campaigning for its establishment was originally.

Instead, we want all nation-states to cease to exist and oppose the creation of new ones such as the proposed Palestinian state. What we want is the establishment of a frontier-less world community without any states as the coercive institutions of class-divided society that all of them are.

ALJO

Anti-all nationalisms (2018)

Pamphlet Review from the November 2018 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘Why Socialist Oppose Zionism and Anti-Semitism’. Socialist Party. (40 pages, £2. £3.50 p + p UK Inland)

It is common for people and organisations on the left of capitalist politics to express opposition to Jewish nationalism (i.e. Zionism) and support for Arab nationalism (i.e. Palestinian ‘self-determination’). The justification given for this is that the Zionists stole the Palestinians’ homeland, called it Israel and now oppress and intimidate them in their efforts to return to it or to achieve some kind of political status in the region. Others, conversely, support Zionism and the Jewish state and oppose the aspirations of the Palestinians on the grounds that Israel is a bulwark against forces that are opposed to Western values.

The position taken by the Socialist Party in its new pamphlet, ‘Why Socialists Oppose Zionism and Anti-Semitism’, is different from both of these. It is a position of opposition to all nationalism, whatever form it takes, which is summed up clearly in the pamphlet’s introduction:

  ‘Nations are not natural divisions of humanity: they are political constructs, “imagined nations” …..The notion that there are collectivities called nations with rights is a product of the capitalist era of human history. States – coercive institutions ruling over a given territory – existed before capitalism, but, once control over them had passed to the capitalist class and its representatives, the new rulers sought to legitimise their rule as that of representatives of “the nation”. Nearly everywhere those who ruled were not homogeneous in terms of languages or religion. They had to be moulded into a “nation” by having it drummed into them that they had a common history, interest and identity. As most states are of relatively recent origin, such “nation-building” is still going on today in many parts of the world.’

But even those sympathetic to this position may think that it applies less readily to Israel given the ‘extra’ ingredient in the mix – that of the centuries-long persecutions of Jews by those professing other religions, most notably Christianity, and hence the need for Jewish people to have a home of their own, a place to live in peace and without fear of anti-semitic persecution. This pamphlet chronicles the history, recent and otherwise, of this aspiration for a Jewish ‘homeland’ by reproducing a series of articles published on the subject in the Socialist Standard over the last hundred years. In recent times it is a history of the large capitalist powers pursuing their economic and strategic interests in the region and jumping from the Jewish to the Arab side and back again according to prevailing circumstances. The so-called Balfour Declaration of 1917 by the British government guaranteed the Jews a national home in Palestine but, when, after World War 2, this turned into the demand for an independent state, the British, initially at least, resisted this with force. But partition of Palestinian territory was finally accepted by the Western capitalist powers (and initially by Russia too), resulting in an ongoing conflict between Arabs and Jews that has lasted to this day. The words of the 1937 article reprinted in this pamphlet (‘Divide and Rule in Palestine’) have proved prescient: ‘This will give Arab and Jew (like the North and South of Ireland) something to quarrel over for years to come, to the hindrance of propaganda for working-class solidarity against the international capitalist class.’

As for a new era for Jews where they could live in peace and free from anti-semitism, this has clearly not happened as witnessed by the various wars which have taken place between Israel and neighbouring Arab states since the Jewish state was created and the perpetual tension caused by attacks on its territory and also by Israel becoming an object of hatred in the Arab world. Many Jews fled from anti-semitism in Europe but in so doing only succeeded in generating another anti-semitism in the Middle East.

The setting up of the new Jewish state in Palestine commanded a great deal of misplaced devotion, especially among the world’s Jewish population, with opposition to Israel or support for the displaced Arabs being seen as a form of anti-semitism itself. However the principled and consistent opposition of the Socialist Party to the nationalism inherent in the setting up and running of any new capitalist state, whether Jewish or otherwise, marks us off from everyone else on the political spectrum and makes it clear that our opposition to Zionism has absolutely nothing to do with anti-semitism. Evidence that we are entirely ‘even-handed’ in judging both Israeli nationalism (Zionism) and Arab nationalism is provided by the October 1993 article reproduced in this pamphlet (‘Peace in Palestine’):

  ‘Our opposition to Zionism does not mean that we support the Palestinian Liberation Organisation. Unlike some, we don’t single out Jewish nationalism for special condemnation. We condemn all nationalisms equally. The “Palestinian nation” is just as much a myth as the “Jewish nation”, or any other nation. Nationalism is the ideology which seeks to justify the capitalist division of the world into separate “nation-states”, each competing to gain a place in the sun for its ruling class and each with killing machines at its disposal. We utterly reject this view of the way humanity should organise itself.’

Since nationalist movements the world over always turn out to be movements in favour of local capitalists wanting their own state in order to be able to pursue and defend their economic interests, it follows that any talk of ‘self-determination’ for a group of people inevitably results not in some kind of ‘liberation’ but in a change of masters. Given this context can it truly be said that Jewish wage and salary workers in Israel are in a fundamentally different position from Jewish wage and salary workers in other countries? The closing words of the introduction to the pamphlet make the socialist position absolutely clear: ‘Socialist opposition to Zionism is not anti-semitic; it is opposition not just to Zionism but is based on opposition to all nationalism and all nationalist movements.’ It flows from this that we resolutely oppose the conventional left-right politics of capitalism in which people support and encourage others to support one form of nationalism against another form of nationalism.

Howard Moss