Limits of anti-Zionism

~ardi 9 septembre 2014, par Yves You can find below the first two texts of a series of 14 articles written from 2002 to 2014 which point to the limits of antizionism, illustrating this position with concrete examples. The two articles below were translated in 2002 by a Zionist website (and published with their comments which are not reproduced here but which you can read on zionism.org.) If you read French, all the 14 articles on the same subject "Limites de l’antisionisme" are here : http://www.mondialisme.org/spip.php?article2040 Y.C., Ni patrie ni frontières P.S.. In order to avoid any ambiguity I reproduce here, as an introduction, a text written in 2004 which draw a demarcation line on the socalled Jewish question, the nature of Zionism and State of Israe. On the so-called "Jewish question", the nature of Zionism and the State of Israel : Some basic elements to draw a demarcation line 1. In the Middle East and the Near East, as in other geographical areas where capitalism did not develop as much as in Europe and America, in the absence of significant struggles of the working class for the socialist revolution, the national question has taken a central place in the twentieth century. It is within this complex framework that we must analyze the question of Palestine and Israel. 2. The Jewish people has the same rights as other peoples (including the Palestinian people) to benefit from its own national state. Although it is regrettable that Israeli and Palestinian proletarians do not fight together for the socialist revolution, for a binational state, or, better yet, for a Socialist Federation of the entire Middle East, it is clear that the least bad solution, under the current capitalist system, seems to be the existence of two separate states, the borders of which remain to be defined in order to allow an equal access to all natural resources of Israel-Palestine, including water and the sea. This evolution may facilitate a clarification of class antagonisms and may push the exploited masses to struggle for their own interests, and not behind their respective national bourgeoisies. 3. Most Marxist analyses of the so-called "Jewish question" lead to an impasse and do not enable us to understand - the history of the Jewish people (reduced to a wrong identification between Judaism and the circulation of money within precapitalist societies ; or between the small commercial middle class and the Jewish people) - the existence of Zionism (reduced to a religious ideology deprived of any national roots), - the State of Israel (reduced to a temporary outpost of Western imperialism). 4. Most Near and Middle East States owe their existence to the maneuvers of the rival imperialist powers (France, Great Britain, United States) which have divided this region and continue to play one state against another for economic (oil, markets, etc.) and / or strategic reasons. In this sense, Israel is not a more vicious "imperialist puppet" than Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Lebanon or Egypt – or even Iran or Syria. We can not systematically denounce one of these "puppets" (Israel) without ruthlessly exposing the others. Yet it’s what, in fact, the Far Left, the anti-imperialists, the antizionists do most of the time. At the end of the day these political currents choose to support some states against other states just because they use a nationalist or pseudo-anti-imperialist rhethoric. Acting so, they disarm and disempower the Israeli, Arab, Turkish, Kurdish and Iranian proletarians in front of their own bourgeoisie. 5. Those who accuse Israel (a colonial state which uses mythical biblical references to justify its legitimacy) of being today a "racist" state only reproduce arguments developed by Soviet Stalinists. In coded language, this argument has fueled anti-Semiticism in the USSR and in the « people’s democracies », and perpetuated anti-Semitism in the Arab-Muslim countries, and even in the West, under various forms. The comparison between Israel and South Africa is part of the same type of easy propaganda for lazy minds, which calls upon the good anti-racist feelings and White Man’s guilt, who regrets his colonialist past but "forgets" that Western imperialism continues to plunder Africa today, and to fund permanent civil wars if not genocides (Rwanda). Israel is not a more racist state than France, Switzerland, Sweden, Japan or the United States. Being used in all circumstances, the weapon of anti-racism risks to become useless in our hands. 6. It is criminal to compare Israel to Nazi Germany, Hitler and Sharon, and Jenin to the Warsaw Ghetto. The Nazification of a political enemy only obscures the fight against it and makes it more difficult to fight it. French militants should remember those who presented de Gaulle as a "agent of fascism » during the Second World War or after the 1958 legal state coup. Was their political analysis correct ? De Gaulle was certainly an enemy of the working class, but he has not introduced fascism in France. In the case of Israel, this comparison goes often together with a disgusting manipulation of multisecular anti-Semitic feelings in the European or Arab-Muslim societies. And in this case it’s perfectly hypocrit to hide oneself behind the writings of antizionist Jews or Israelis to cover a gross manipulation. ***************** Limits of anti-Zionism A Criminal Amalgam Since the beginning of the second Intifada, and especially since the Israeli army, under the direction of Sharon, re-occupied the territories that were under the control of the Palestinian Authority, on several occasions, there was a recrudescence, in the ranks of the extreme left, of a whole series of crude slogans and doubtful comparisons between the policy of the State of Israel and that of the Nazism. With this aim, the critics proceeded by successive reductions. Initially the Israeli government of national union, that almost all the parties supported, became the Sharon government. Then Sharon became the Butcher, then Charogne (the charnel one) - a sinister example of dehumanization of a class enemy . Finally, some merged Sharon into Hitler (1). CQFD. To understand how we got there, I will approach the "theoretical" base that allowed these slips using an article published in Socialist Review of July-August 2002, then I will take two significant examples in the French revolutionary press (Socialisme), and American (Socialist Worker) (2). However, anyone with a computer can find hundreds of other occurrences of this criminal amalgam, simply by using a search engine on Internet, and typing in the words "Sharon" and "Hitler." Let us note that in this field, as in many others today, one can find solid reasons to fight against an adversary only by comparing him with Hitler. From Bush (who compared Milosevic and Saddam Hussein with Hitler) to the revolutionaries, one finds a common language and Pavlovian reflexes, indicating a particular poverty of thought that is not astonishing in the American president, but which must cause worry in the case of revolutionaries who have, supposedly, a theoretical tradition and a capital consisting of a range of solid arguments that could be used to fight Le Pen, Milosevic, Saddam Hussein or Sharon. Alleged "economic" origins of anti-Semitism In the July-August issue of of Socialist Review, Sabby Sagal reviews what she considers the Marxist position concerning the "Jewish question". She describes the history of anti-Semitism in several periods. Before the industrial revolution, anti-Semitism would be explained, according to her, mainly by the fact that the Jews were usurers, tax collectors, bankers, tradesmen, in short, intermediaries necessary to the operation of the small saleable output of then incipient capitalism. This "analysis" takes again an assumption advanced by the Trotskyist Abraham Leon in 1942 in The Marxists and the Jewish question, a book that had merit at the time, because it was produced under extremely precarious conditions, but which is totally obsolete today. Progress of historical research Indeed, historians have considerably advanced in the last sixty years. It is enough to scan, for example, the four volumes of La Société Juive a collection of contributions published under the direction of Shmuel Trigano by Fayard in 2000. In Islamic lands of the Middle Ages, the Jews, far from being specialized in trade and finance, exercised nearly 250 different trades ! The is very far from the stereotype of the Jew unable to cultivate the ground or to work with his hands. The immense majority were hawkers, servants, employees, peasants, companions or craftsmen. In the medieval Occident, at a time when, in theory, the Jews were confined to certain professions, they in fact engaged in other trades than those which were allowed to them by the Church. The large traders and the Jewish bankers did not constitute the majority of the Jewish population, however small the communities were (they varied from a few hundreds to a few thousands of individuals, at the time and were very dispersed on the European continent). The tax registers of the twelfth century, for example, show that only a minority of the 3,000 Jews living in England were saddled with taxes, and that this minority paid for the whole of the community, much too poor to pay anything. In Germany, in the fourteenth century, of 8,000 families, 2,000 were poor and depended on alms of their co-religionists. Certain Jews were even so destitute that they joined groups of marginal and delinquent Germans, which explains why the vocabulary of the underworld German contains a significant number of Hebrew words ! In Moravia, in a community of 50 hearths, in the seventeenth century, 5 families provided 3/5 of the community taxes. In Amsterdam, at the end of the eighteenth century, 4,000 people maintained 18,000 poor. In Frankfurt, in 1870, 25% of the community were without resources. In Warsaw in 1872, the financial, industrial and commercial upper middle classes represented only 6 % of the Jewish population. These few examples taken in a seven century interval show well the falseness and the perversity of the "Judaism = religion of money" myth, a myth maintained by the various religious and political institutions, taken up again ad nauseum by Marx in the Jewish Question and again recently illustrated by Jacques Attali in his book about the Jews and money (3). With due respect to the simplistic Marxists and... to the anti-Semites, the "economic" explanation quite simply does not quite hold water. Likewise, we should not be astonishing that certain Marxists gather untruths so that their theses do not appear glaringly wrong. Thus in the Sabby Sagal article already quoted, the author claims that in the Middle Ages the Jews enjoyed "protections and privileges", that they had a "legal status much better than that of the serfs", assertions which lead one to think that the majority of the Jews of the time formed part of the privileged classes, which is false. The economic explanation does not make it possible to understand the reasons for the hostility of the agricultural work force or townspeople to Jews over the centuries. The religious factor played a great part because all Western societies until the nineteenth century rested on Christian values and these values organized all : political power, justice, teaching, laws, social life, etc. Moreover, linguistic, ethnic, and national factors had a role : apart from Hebrew, Judeo-Spanish or Yiddish, the Jews often spoke another language that that about the country where they lived (for example, the Jews expelled from France to England in 1066, spoke French, before being driven out, in their turn, from England two centuries later, in 1290 ; in 1895, 80 % of the Serbian Jews still spoke Judeo-Spanish (Ladino) as did about 96 % of Bulgarian Jews, etc.) and this characteristic distinguished them and isolated them from the remainder of the population ; finally, the fact that the Jews could read and write (for religious reasons) made them a very distinct minority, in an ocean of illiteracy and crass ignorance maintained by the dominant Church and classes. The elimination of illiteracy constituted a very appreciable asset for them when they were allowed to use their talents, and that could only cause hatred and jealousy. However, the fact that Marxists reduce anti-Semitism to a primarily economic question has one second problematic consequence : it would imply that, when capitalism disappears, all forms of racism will go up in smoke (4). It is difficult to imagine a more naive position. Israel : a "colonial settlement" to the supporters of national liberation movements With regard to Zionism, it has been curious that the British Socialist Workers Party, which justifiably supports the Palestinian national liberation struggle after having supported, in a relatively critical way, all movements of national emancipation for half a century, does not realize that Zionism was also a kind of movement of national liberation, even if it led to creation of a colonial settlement in the image of the United States, Australia or South Africa (5), which gives it particular and extremely displeasing characteristics. However, isn’t this the case of all the national liberation movements ? If the majority of them were not supported by American imperialism, they profited from the very effective military support of the Russian imperialism. Where is the difference ? An insuperable theoretical difficulty

~Finally, the argument that Zionism requires anti-Semitism to exist recalls the arguments of those who claim that if women did not wear revealing miniskirts or low necklines, they would not be raped by men. (Sabby Sagala goes so far as to write that "where anti-Semitism does not exist, Zionism creates it out of whole cloth.". She quotes in support of its "thesis" the fact that the Mossad placed a bomb in the Fifties inside a Baghdad synagogue to create panic among Iraqi Jews). It is hard to believe that only one bomb was enough to put an end to 2000 years of idyllic coexistence ! Let us push this "reasoning" further : isn’t it true that if there were no more Jews, there would be no more anti-Semitism ? That is, in any case, the reasoning which Marx advances in The Jewish Question, when he explains why once all the people (including the Jews) are relieved of religious alienation, the Jews will disappear (obviously, in 1844, Marx did not think of physical elimination, but of total assimilation and disappearance of the cultural, religious, racial, social, etc., barriers between men). It is obvious that the existence of the Jewish people poses a problem for the "Marxists", and that they do not manage to define a position vis-a-vis these millions of men and women who do not fit within their rigid theoretical framework. One feels irritation and incomprehension when Sabby Sagala explains to us that "most of the peoples of antiquity were assimilated to the surrounding societies and disappeared as distinct ethnic groups". Ah, those Jews, what spoilsports !

~Curiously, the majority of these Marxists lapse into exaltation of Arab nationalism or pan-Arabism, a phenomenon even vaguer and more complex to comprehend than Jewish nationalism, but it does not matter. There is no question of being astonished by the lack of "assimilation"... of the Arabs ! Marx did not write a work called The Arab Question or The Moslem Question, [though the Arabs] also feel the right to launch into all kinds of catastrophic innovations (6). Jews and Arabs : 2000 years of peace ? In its article, Sabby Sagal also claims that the Arabs and the Jews lived harmoniously for 2,000 years, and that only the existence of Israel and the "provocations" of this State, have caused the hostility of the Arab masses to the Jews. There still, the author is deliberately ignoring reality and does not take account of the historical data. Whoever opens the Quran even for a few moments, could not be unaware that it is filled with extremely violent and heinous propositions against the Jews. Admittedly, the anti-Jewish diatribes coexist with more moderate language, but we must note that in fact the most subtle parts of Quran did not have, historically and politically, the most impact (7). Additionally, it should be stressed that the Jews were subject to a specific legal status in the Moslem world (that of dhimmi) undoubtedly better than that which they had under the medieval Christendom, but which did not guarantee total legal equality, and prohibited them from engaging in certain functions. Lastly, the author forgets to say that the situation of the Jews in the Arab countries became more difficult at the twentieth century, not so much not because of the creation of the State of Israel in 1948, but because of the movements of national independence which affected all this region and which began at the very start of the twentieth century. The French of Algeria had to pack their bags, like the Jews of the Arab countries, because these two communities, for partly different historical reasons, did not show solidarity with the struggles for national independence in the areas where they lived for centuries, and because they occupied a social position that was "privileged" in many respects compared to the destitute Arab masses, at least in their relationship to the colonial powers. And even if Israel had not been created in 1948, it is a good bet that the Jews of the Arab countries would have been used as scapegoats for the local nationalists in any event.

~Zionism was born and thrived historically especially because million men and women, for both religious and historical reasons, always considered and consider that they have something very much in common, more powerful than their membership in some other national State. This "something" (this feeling of membership in a people) varies according to the individuals, the periods, the social groups, and since the existence of the State of Israel it is obviously used by Zionism. However, it existed well before Shoah [Holocaust] and Zionism. In such political and theoretical confusion, it is easily understandable how, in daily anti-Zionist propaganda a few doubtful slips can occur. We will give two such examples. Trying to prove too much... Number 3 of Socialisme (p. 8 and 9) presents two photographs side by side, one showing German soldiers during the Second World war and the other an Israeli soldier. During one of the demonstrations of "solidarity" with Palestine in Denfert-Rochereau, in Paris, the quarter was covered with anonymous small posters reading : "Hitler has a son : Sharon." To draw a parallel between Sharon and Hitler can only bring leftists, full of good intentions (but having, nevertheless a bottom unconscious anti-Semitism), to give free rein to their racist impulses. These two photographs play the same role as the moronic slogan. The captions under the photographs are still worse : on one side, there is "Nazi soldier, " on the other "Israeli soldier." First of all "Nazi" is not a nationality, as opposed to "Israeli", but a political affiliation. It it thus acts of a German soldier, and not of a Nazi soldier (at least the editors of Socialisme do not know anything about the subject). On the other hand, what the German soldiers (Nazis or not) did to the Jews was not "hazing" as the caption claims : a hazing obliges somebody to run around nude, or makes him swallow something disgusting, etc., in short what one did in the army 50 years ago or in the preparatory classes at the large schools or in the faculty of medicine still today. The German soldiers did not "haze" the Jews, they exterminated them without the least pity. The difference between hazing and the extermination of 6 million people is not a simple nuance of language. On the other side, Socialisme presents a photograph of an Israeli soldier who "threatens" (according to the caption) the Palestinians. Firstly, this photograph is cut, that is cropped : cropping leads us to believe that the soldier threatens the family with its child, but it does not show the people who are certainly in the background, and further away. Socialisme does not specify in what circumstances the photograph was taken, whereas, concerning the photo of the Jews and the German soldier, everyone knows what occurred during the Second World War. Moreover, the word "to threaten" is much stronger than the word "to haze". For a weak mind, the conclusion is simple : what Israelis do to the Palestinians is at least as serious (if not worse) than what the Nazis did to the Jews (8). The principal political parties of the Israeli democratic state do not intend to exterminate the Palestinians and never devoted themselves to practices of massive elimination of thousands of Palestinians. To imply the opposite is irresponsible (9). On the contrary, it is in the Arab States that the Protocols of the Elders of Zion are freely distributed (10) and it is there that a whole bunch of Nazis were converted after 1945 into Arab political leaders in political circles. It is in the Arab States that the newspapers diffuse anti-Semitic propaganda daily. And it is the Arab States that kill or imprison Jews, simply because they are Jewish. The article in Socialisme does not mention any of this. Modern anti-Semitism Number 3 of Socialisme publishes extracts of the autobiography of Tony Cliff (11) (A World to win), and an article by Daniel Lartichaux. These two texts are filled with inaccuracies about anti-Semitism. D. Lartichaux claims that "the only motive" of the "horrible acts" against the synagogues in France could be "the conflict in the Middle East". He forgets to mention that there exists in France a long-standing anti-Semitism, in both rightist and extreme rightist circles as in leftist fringes, and in part of the Maghrebian population and its children. The votes of Le Pen come from both rightists and leftists ; moreover, coexistence between Judaism and the Islamic religion in the Maghreb was not always without difficulties ; that must influence the behavior of those whose parents or grandparents were born in Islamic lands. The extract of Cliff’s autobiography also contains enormous errors. Cliff quietly affirms that "the economic and intellectual ghetto disappeared" in connection with Germany of the beginning of the twentieth century. Whoever knows the history of the Jews of Germany knows that anti-Semitism persisted well after the first unification. Otherwise, Hitler would never have made it a part of his program in Mein Kampf. Likewise, he could never have easily imposed all the anti-Semitic laws once he came to power, and certainly not the Final Solution. But obviously that makes it possible to reduce Nazi anti-Semitism to the need to inventing scapegoats for the "crisis which destroyed the means of existence of important layers of the lower middle class" (Socialist Review). Moreover, Cliff "has forgotten" to mention the launching of Scud missiles against Israel and all the speeches and the acts of the Arab leaders against Israel for 50 years. If the Jews of Israel have not been massacred or at least thrown into the sea since 1948, it is not because the Arab States of the region did not want to do it, but because the Jews prevented it, and to that purpose, they used all possible allies. At the time of the 1948 war, Russian imperialism saved the Jews by massive weapons deliveries via Czechoslovakia, then American imperialism took up the relief much more effectively. Admittedly, the question of Israel is complex, and one cannot say it all in two pages, but by establishing a dangerous parallel (and with anti-Semitic connotations, even if it is not obviously at all the intention of Socialisme) and forgetting to speak about the anti-Semitism of which the Jews in Germany and France are still victims, the review implies that the Jews had another immediate and concrete solution. Which ? In theory, a world socialist revolution, but there never was one, and nobody knows if there will be one soon. Faced with very real anti-Semitism, it was necessary to defended oneself. In the past, hundreds of thousands of Jews tried to follow the way that Socialisme recommends today ; they were involved in all the streams of the workers movement. The least which one can say, is that this choice protected them neither from the anti-Semitism of the left, nor from extermination by the Tsar, the Nazis, Pétain and others. Moreover, the "Jewish question" was always underestimated by the left and the extreme left. How is it possible not to understand that the existence of a State - possessing, in addition, nuclear weapons - seems to the Jews, since the Holocaust, a guarantee (relative) more certain than a century and half of beautiful speeches against racism ? This policy leads certainly to a total dead end from a historical point of view, but the labor movement has its share of responsibility in this failure. Again it is necessary to admit it honestly and to seek the causes of the failure. If Israel did not exist and had not decided, roughly speaking after the Eichmann lawsuit, to conduct a worldwide campaign against anti-Semitism, we would not know the hundredth of what we know today about anti-Semitism, the passivity of the majority of the European populations, and the complicity of the bourgeois states before and during the Second World war. If today Israel partly uses the Holocaust to justify its colonialist policy in Palestine, it is because, for decades, the left and even the extreme left did not regard anti-Semitism as a fundamental problem (12). A dangerous slip The second example of doubtful anti-Zionism is that of the Socialist Worker Newspaper, an organ of the International Socialist Organization in the United States, which compared the progress of Israeli tanks in the streets of Jenin with that of the Germans in the Warsaw ghetto ! ! ! Exploiting the declaration of an Israeli officer who had made this comparison, the American weekly magazine brings grist to the mill of anti-Semitism while hiding hypocritically behind the remarks of a Jewish Zionist ! However, it should be pointed out, there are no concentration camps in Israel/Palestine and the Israeli army does not occupy a "foreign" country (the situation is much more complex) ; the Israeli soldiers are not thousands of kilometers from their native ground, and especially they do not intend absolutely to exterminate the Palestinian population like the Nazis and their Polish henchmen did. This comparison can only nourish anti-Semitic sentiments which here, in France, brought individuals who were either simpletons or manipulated or both, to try to burn down synagogues, to throw stones and beat up Jews in the open street. Moreover, this position does not help the Palestinians to be clearly aware of the true objectives of their leaders. It is one thing to favor the existence of a Palestinian State, another to unconditionally support the corrupt dictatorship of Arafat and his allies. It is one thing is to support the fight of the Palestinians for their democratic rights, another to believe (or to make believe) that terrorism is only or mainly the product of the Israeli expansionist policy. Religious forces (Hamas, Jihad) and non-religious (PLO, etc.) all defend martyrdom - which amounts, according to all logic, to massacring Israeli civilians regularly and preventing any peaceful coexistence between the Israeli and Palestinian peoples. NOTES 1. It is interesting to note who was, undoubtedly, the first to show Jews to be accessories to Hitler, even in the time of Hitler Germany. As Tom Segev recalls, in the Seventh Million, extremely violent political rivalry separated the ancestors of the members of the Labor Party (Mapai) and Likud stream (Herut), the party of Ariel Sharon. The Jews of Palestine knew perfectly well what occurred to Germany and, because of very restrictive clauses concerning immigration in Palestine, they had to make extremely painful choices from 1930 to 1940. But the fact that Zionist Jews used this kind of villainous amalgam to disqualify other Jews politically and morally does not in any way justify the use of this tactic by the extreme left today. 2. Except for some nuances, the three publications cited above defend the positions of the British Socialist Workers Party, the most important organization of the extreme left in Europe today. Claiming to follow in the tradition of Lenin and Trotsky, this rather lively group introduced some alternatives into Leninist orthodoxy by denouncing State capitalism in all the so-called socialist or workers’ states, and adopted a more critical analysis and attitude to national liberation movements than the various branches of the Fourth International. 3. This completely irresponsible intellectual did not hesitate to diffuse his views in the media, explaining that the Jews had the "genius of money". It is hard to understand why people equipped with so many allegedly hereditary qualities would have constituted a State perpetually in full financial bankruptcy and why all the Jews of the planet are not billionaires. But it does not matter to Attali that his absurd theses are grist to the mill of the coarsest anti-Semitism and do not tally with the facts. Since it gives him publicity, he is happy. 4. This absurd position is found in the propaganda of the revolutionary groups regarding all aspects of current society. It enables them to neglect the conflicts which divide nations, ethnic groups and races, to take refuge in the happy belief that the revolution will solve all. To quote another version of this blindness : "It is only when the majority of the Jews denounce Israel that anti-Semitism will be overcome." (Socialist Review) As if the anti-Semitism did not exist before 1948 and the Jews were the principal persons in charge ! In Yair Auron’s book, The Jews of the Extreme Left in May 68, a militant leftist who visits for a time in the Palestinian camps during the Seventies tells of the extremely hostile reaction of his interlocutors when he naively told them that he was Jewish. 5. Cf the article by Yoren Iftachel on the Bedouins of Israel, Transeuropéennes N° 22. 6. This is why some seek to explain why fundamentalist Islamism is a quasi-revolutionary ideology, but we will cover this subject in another article. 7. In the same way, it is the anti-Jewish (thus anti-Semitic) reading of the New Testament which influenced the Christians for 2000 years, and not more balanced interpretations. Even recently, the Catholic Church had to destroy a million copies of a new edition of the Spanish Bible, because it contained many anti-Semitic comments. 8. Besides, it includes one of the anti-Semitic arguments in reverse , employed often on the left and the extreme left. "Our good souls are astonished that people who underwent so much persecution during its history can in its turn carry out a wild repression in the occupied territories." Firstly, this reasoning begins from a false premise, that of the collective responsibility : all the Germans were not Nazis (Hitler threw more than one million in the camps) and all the Jews were not victims (some collaborated with the Nazis, hoping to save their skins ; others thought only of themselves, emigrated in time and were unaware of the fate of their co-religionists ; others fought the weapons with their hands, etc). In the same way, all the Jews of today do not agree with the policy of their government and the demands of the army. And some of those who live in Israel go so far as to refuse to serve in uniform. Moreover, this reasoning rests on the naive idea that anyone who was victim of an injustice, oppression, torture (or whose parents or grandparents were martyred or killed) would automatically have a higher moral stature and political clarity . This is close to the idea of a genetically linked superiority, due to the direct or indirect experience of martyrdom. In brief, this floats in fantasy land. 9. The Israeli state is carrying out a dirty war which, like all the modern wars, hurts civilians more than professional soldiers. In any event, in this particular conflict, the distinction between civilian and military is hardly valid, since any Israeli, man or woman, can be called up for the military service and any Palestinian can be involved in an organization practicing anti-Jewish terrorism. 10. A forgery manufactured by the Tsarist police force to support the thesis of an imaginary Jewish plot to dominate the world. 11. Director of British SWP, deceased in 2001, who made his first debut in Palestine under the British mandate, in the Trotskyite movement, before becoming an activist in England. It in particular wrote two biographies of Lenin and Trotsky as well as an important book translated into French : State Capitalism in Russia, EDI. 12. This problem did not begin yesterday, as some can testify ; for example, the attitude of the French Socialists during the Dreyfus affair or that of the resistance during the Second World war and afterwards, both of which reflect anti-Semitism at second glance. *** Questions and Answers (The Limits of anti-Zionism 2) What is Zionism ? There are all kinds of definitions of Zionism and all kinds of Zionists : religious, atheists, socialists, right-wing, left-wing, extreme right-wing, etc. It does not seem useful to me to go into the details of all the nuances or the divergences which separate them. It is enough to indicate that Zionism is a form of nationalism, therefore an ideology which rests on an imaginary community of interests between individuals belonging to different social classes. Zionism tries to mobilize the Jewish people in a completely uncritical [eclectic] way (on an international scale) and the Jewish citizens of Israel behind the government of the state that has been constructed in the Middle East since 1948. Does the Jewish people exist ? For the two readers of Socialist Worker, the Jews would be only the practice of a religion, like the Catholics, the Protestants, the Hindus or the Buddhists and thus the Jewish people would not exist. Consequently the Jews would not have any "right" to a state, at least it is what their letter implies. Indeed, if it is denied that there is Jewish people, and that these people have possibly a right to some share of the ground on this planet, it is much easier "to solve" the problem... on paper. Unfortunately for our limited dogmatists, there is in fact a Jewish people, and today an Israeli people and state. One cannot turn back the clock. But the problem should be investigated a bit further. The Marxists have always defended the right of the people to self-determination as a democratic claim which could possibly resolve certain inextricable situations. For that reason, for example, Trotsky momentarily considered the possibility that the American Blacks create their own state, faced with the incorrigible racism of the Whites. On another hand, Marx was opposed to the national liberation struggles of certain Central European peoples, because they did not seem to him to follow the "direction of the History". Today, one can draw up the balance between these positions : the socialist revolutionaries had no influence on the development of the various national liberation struggles and the twentieth century saw the appearance of numerous new independent states. Apparently this process of parcelization into nation-states, even in old Europe where separatist movements separatists thrive, in Scotland, in the Basque Country and Catalonia, and passing through Corsica. This will of return to oneself, this need for local, regional or national identity, unfortunately proved much more urgent than proletarian internationalism, the class solidarity between exploited. One can regret it, denounce nationalism as a dead end, but how can one close one’s eyes to this phenomenon and be astonished that the Jewish people wanted, also, to have its own state ? Nothing prevents us from believing that one day the Romany people ["gypsies"] as much as it is an anti-official minority if it is until now, also claims to have a nation-state with some share of the planet. It is thus within this more general framework that it is necessary to locate the force of Jewish nationalism, the renewed interest of many secular Jews or atheists in their culture and their religion, etc. To this general situation came to be added the elimination of 6 million Jews during the Second World war. Could the Holocaust do anything other than convince (definitively ?) the Jews that they could count only on themselves, and that their only means of not being massacred once again was to form a block, to support the constitution of a state having an imposing military power and to conclude all military or economic alliances possible, including with the most villainous states ? Is the nationalism of oppressed less harmful than the nationalism of the oppressors ? What hides behind the often a-critical support for national liberation movements, is both the same time the idea that the nationalism of the old nations would be more harmful than that of the young nations, and also that national liberation struggles could accelerate the advent of a socialist revolution. This analysis is completely erroneous. No victorious national liberation movement in the Third World countries led to a social revolution. Colonial or imperialist Domination was replaced by implacable dictatorships over the working class and the exploited classes in China in Algeria, and in passing, Cuba. That does not mean, however, that one did not have to oppose the colonial wars, but that fixes the limits of the support which one can bring to national liberation struggles and especially to the organizations which lead it, and to the illusions which give birth to these movements. In brief : "yes" to support of the right of the people to dispose of their own destiny, "no" to carrying the bags of the future exploiters ! At least than, following the example of incorrigible third-worlders of Le Monde diplomatique, one wants to get a whiff of politicians like Nasser, Ben Bella, Torrijos, Chavez, Castro or Noriega, while relieving them of socialist and anti-imperialist virtues that they never had. Is Zionism colonialist ? Yes Israel is a colonial settlement whose evolution resembles that of the United states, of Australia, even, in some aspects, of South Africa This last comparison is, however, dangerous because the situation of the Palestinians in Israel does not have, for the moment, any relation to that of the black Africans in South Africa before the end of the apartheid and because it dangerously criminalizes not only the Israeli government but all citizens. Israel built itself on the violent expropriation of the land and of the goods of the Palestinian people and this process never stopped. Is the Zionism a imperialist ? If one understands by this that the state of Israel has expansionist aims, yes. But what can one then say of the invasion of Kuwait by Iraq, and of Lebanon by Syria, to take only two examples in the area ? If one uses the word "imperialist" in the sense of expansionist, that is true of an impressive number of states on earth, which the leftists do not spend the same amount of time denouncing as they do Israel. But the leftists also employ this word in another sense : they consider Israel a "servant of the American imperialism". Any movement which advertises itself as a national ideology can be led to ally itself with one or more imperialist powers. It is what did the Algerian FLN, the Vietnamese FLN, all guerrilla movements of Latin America and Africa, the Cuban state, etc, with the Russian imperialism. It is what the Afghan resistance did by accepting the American assistance. The Israeli governments, them, chose the American imperialism after being directly helped by the Soviets, at the crucial moment of the creation of the state of Israel, in 1948. Thus yes, the Israeli state has strong affinities with the large powerful imperialists, but that does not make them imperialist with the economic and financial meaning of the term. Or in any case, it would be necessary it to show, figures to support the claim, and not to be content with invective. Is Zionism racist ? Any nationalist ideology can, at one moment or another, employ racist arguments. And any national state uses, at one time or the another, the weapon of xenophobia or racism. Nationalism, the state and racism sometimes go together, sometimes are separate, but there is no major incompatibility between the three. Besides, that is why the revolutionaries support disappearance of nations, borders and states. Therefore, yes the Zionism has a potential racist dimension, but like any other national and nationalist ideology, including that of the Palestinians, and not more than another. Besides let us note that even within Israel there are powerful racist prejudices among the Jews themselves, prejudices denounced for decades by Eastern or Ethiopian Jews, and sources of real discriminations in Israel. However, to constantly underline the racist tendencies of Zionism, while being silent about the racist tendencies of the Palestinian nationalists is extremely dangerous. The systematic use of this argument is relatively new, as shown in the Durban international conference on racism where Israel was condemned as a racist state by the majority of those present. Those which want absolutely to show that the Zionism is a racist ideology exploit moral indignation which the Holocaust caused and try to turn it against Israel. This process is villainous because it succeeds, by successive degrees, in making a parallel between Zionism and Nazism. And it is precisely what Socialist Worker did by comparing the Palestinians of Jenin to the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto, and what Socialisme did by juxtaposing photographs of Nazi and Israeli soldiers. Such comparisons are not at all innocent, because they constitute one of the favorite weapons of the refusal front and the anti-Semites who want at all costs to show that the Jews are as racist as the others, even more. Lastly, with the force of banality, the charge of racism becomes a kind of cream tart, which removes all seriousness in the eyes of most people, reinforcing the new creed of the reactionaries who preach, in the tones of good sense, that everyone is racist and that one can do nothing about it. A state or two states ? The readers of Socialist Worker preach the creation of a state which would bring together Jews and Palestinians. Their position is incoherent. One cannot at the same time claim that the Jews are only the practitioners of a "religion", that they occupy a "foreign" territory, that their state is "racist", "colonialist" and a plaything of "imperialism" and to believe at the same time that the Jews could live tomorrow on the same territory as the Palestinians. The readers of Socialist Worker do not even employ the term of binational state, which is logical, since they deny, at least in their letters, that there is Jewish people and thus a Jewish nation. If the Jews of Israel are the "Pieds noirs" [French settlers in Algeria] of Palestine, or a simple band of fanatic or enlightened religious people, then it is necessary to draw the appropriate conclusion : they must return to the "imperialist" metropolises that they left, as happened to the hundreds of thousands of French who lived in Algeria or to the Portuguese who lived in Angola, Mozambique or Guinea-Bissau. Let us point out that it was creed of the PLO for tens of years (cf declarations of Shoukairy who wanted "to throw the Jews with the sea"), that its timid change of position is only very recent (1988), and that it remains the position of terrorist organizations like the Hamas and the Islamic Jihad which plant bombs in Israel. Our two readers know this well, but carefully avoid posing the problem. And to make the situation even more inextricable, they take refuge behind a resolution of UN which, while it states a perfectly justified right, is inapplicable. One can hardly see how the 4 million Palestinians of the Diaspora could recover the land and the houses that were expropriated as well as employment of which they were deprived. Where would the expropriators go, that is,. the Israelis ? The payment of compensation seems more reasonable, and the "right to the return" seems to be an aberration for the Palestinians - but also for the Jews of the whole world. The Jews established a state based on force, as all the people which sought to have their own territory. The Zionist legend would have it that they arrived in an uninhabited area but today even some Israeli historians disproved this gross lie. The compromises that must be made one day will be inevitably painful and unjust for both parties. This is why I had written in Socialist Worker that the Israelis "did not occupy a foreign country" and that the situation was "more complex" than a traditional colonial occupation of a distant territory. The borders of the state of Israel are by nature extensible, since from the beginning neither this state nor the state of Palestine had a recognized existence and consequently clear borders. Considering the current situation, and the nationalist ideology which mobilizes the two peoples concerned, it seems impossible to conceive that Palestinians and Israelis can live in the same state. Two states and not one are therefore needed. Does the state of Israel engender anti-Semitism ? Not, this charge is absurd. Or, it is true only in the sense that all states create hostility to their nationals when their armies carry out criminal acts. The armed intervention of the United states in Serbia, in Afghanistan, in Iraq or Somalia engenders anti-Americanism : many people, of all political tendencies, scorn the Americans totally. But as one could also say that Chirac, at this moment, causes anti-French reactions in the Ivory Coast or that Mitterrand caused them before in Africa and in the Middle East. Revolutionaries will therefore not allow one to repeat that one cannot confound the citizens of a state with the policy of their government, and are unwilling to make known the struggle of Israelis who oppose their government and fight for peace, even at the risk of imprisonment and being regarded as traitors by their compatriots. And the revolutionaries must have explained to them the differences between Israelis (citizens of Israel), Jews as members of the Jewish people and Jews as practitioners of Judaism. The anti-Semitic cretins in fact are motivated by their racist impulses and not by the criminal acts of the Israeli army. It is not the Israeli state which engenders anti-Semitism, but the anti-Semites themselves. The struggle against anti-Semitism needs serious explanations on the origins of the racism rather than twisted reasoning and the ensnarement of excuses. Will the state of Israel involve "us" in war, even in a world war ? This way of putting the question reveals one of the principal reasons why the Israeli-Palestinian conflict stirs so much passion in France, while [in fact] this confrontation, which is minor when judged by the size of the directly impliecated populations, remains marginal and other world conflicts are infinitely more fatal. As the singer Noa (who happens to be the daughter of Itzhak Rabin) said, "In Israel, more people die because of road accidents than because of the attacks ;" the importance of the Israeli-Palestinian confrontation is measured rather by its duration, the number of refugees and exiles concerned (several million) and above all by its symbolic importance. Many people have the impression that the Western world could be at the edge of the chaos, or in any case threatened by terrorism, because of Israel (actually, because of the Jews). The billionaire Ben Laden reinforces this impression, while pretending to be interested in the fate of the Palestinians, that is, by exploiting their situation, like all Arab leaders. But, as has always happened, he will forget them at the first opportunity. The absence of Palestinian militants in the Al Qaida networks seems to indicate that they are not easily deceived by its demagogic character. To analyze war in connection with Israel, it is necessary to touch on the problem of the origin of wars. Even if this state had not been born in 1948, the competition would be very strong in this region, which has seen a situation of considerable geopolitical instability since the collapse of the Ottoman empire. This is due largely to the actions of the great imperialist powers of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century, which sought to divvy up zones of influence, to adapt markets and to control the oil reserves. The liquidation of any regional power and its disintegration into more or less artificial local states supported the external interventions and stokes the internal motives for conflicts. Thus, the most serious war in the area, which occurred independently of the existence of Israel, opposed Iraq to Iran in 1980 to 1988. It represented for the countries involved, a bloodletting equivalent to that caused by the First World War in Europe. All the Western states, as well as the USSR, supported the Iraqi aggression against the Iranian Islamist government. Even the French state was a cobelligerent there, by lending war planes and pilots to Iraq. The terrorist attacks of 1986 were a consequence of the dispute of the French state with the Iranian state, exacerbated by the question of a credit line which the French did not want to restore. Who in this country denounced this disastrous diplomacy ? One can admit that the existence of Israel and its total economic dependence on the United states complicate the situation, but they are not at the origin of the multiple tensions which wrack the area, although the Tel Aviv leaders make believe they are. Those which would like to make Israel into a scapegoat, and to see in it an the obstacle with peace in the world, have forgotten the two world wars, the cold war and all the colonial wars in one century. To out the question differently, does Israel form or not form a part of the Western world ? And if it does, can this fragment embedded in the arabo-Moslem world suck the Western world into a conflict with the whole of this world ? No matter what happens, everything seems to happen as if Europe had tried to solve its Jewish problem on the back of the Palestinians. The historical responsibility of Europeans is thus even heavier than that of the Americans. The aggravation of the situation in Palestine is not the product of Machiavellian cynicism of some Israeli politicians, nor of the criminal unconsciousness of an Arafat. These people rather thrive on a compost of inextricable problems that all our leaders wove for the last one or two centuries. As we continue to leave them in place, there is no reason while matters should resolve themselves. Does the gathering of the Jews in a separate state constitute a resignation to anti-Semitism ? No. For a few decades, hundreds of thousands of workmen and Jewish intellectuals believed in socialism, even in the socialist revolution. In Europe as in North America and Latin America, the labor movement included very many Jews, atheistic and revolutionary theorists, as did the Marxist and anarchist movements. But considering the passivity or the inefficiency of the international labor movement in the face of the persecutions and the massacres of the Jews, particularly before and during the Second World war, one can understand that the majority of the Jews concluded that the attempts of a significant minority of them to solve the alleged "Jewish question" by a socialist revolution were failures. At least, the Soviet Union, held up as a paragon by the vast majority of leftist people of the world for decades, could only be used as a counter-example, in view the importance of anti-Semitism in that country and the way Stalinists used it, in the people’s democracies as well What the leftists request from the Jews is to trust them blindly, to believe that the small revolutionary groups, if ever their ideas seized the masses, would not commit the same crimes and would produce, why not, improved humanity. It is a lot to ask, no ? Especially when it is known that one (small) part of the left, the French refusal front, comes from the rows of the extreme left. This same extreme left does not hesitate to demonstrate with groups that hold up the flags of the Hamas and scream "Death to the Jews" in the streets of Paris. Again, recently, Saturday October 12, a call expressing "solidarity with the Palestinians", a call signed by tens of organizations of extreme left and left, explicitly denounced the current Israeli policy, without mentioning even once the terrorist attacks that claimed hundreds of victims in Israel. Moreover, who can affirm seriously that anti-Semitism will disappear in a socialist world, if ever one is born ? Lastly, it is false to claim that Israel does not fight anti-Semitism. On the contrary, it has done just that for 50 years. It mobilizes all efforts against anti-Semitism on an international scale. That this propaganda does not make anti-Semitism disappear, is obvious (but which propaganda could it ?) ; that it imposed limits on its public expression in Western democratic countries is not easily contestable. Between the Palestinians and colonialism (or imperialism), which does one have to support ? Given the way in which the question is put, [one must support] the Palestinians, of course, but it all depends on what you mean : Palestinian people or the PLO ? In fact, this way of posing the problems is only the resumption of an old argument that the Stalinists and the international bourgeoisie already used during the cold war "Whoever is not with us is against us" It is curious that this kind of reasoning is again taken up by the sympathizers with a political current that was born precisely of the refusal to choose between American imperialism and Russian imperialism. Socialist Worker is the newspaper of the International Socialist Organization, whose ancestors fought in the years 1940, 1950 and 1960 both against the Stalinists and against the American bourgeoisie. Today and tomorrow, just as yesterday, there is no reason to choose between Sharon and Arafat, the rope and the firing squad. If one day a solution takes shape between Israelis and Palestinians, it will be done despite the nationalists on the two sides, Zionists, members of the PLO or the fanatic movements. Thus, while it may be what one thinks, one does not declare one’s intentions now for tactical reasons. The Palestinian Authority is as much the enemy of the Palestinian people as the rightist and leftist Israeli parties are the enemies of the Jewish people. Translated by Ami Isseroff Letter of Yves Coleman to Socialist Worker You can’t compare Israelis and Nazis April 19, 2002 Dear Socialist Worker, In a recent editorial (SW, April 12), you compared Palestinian suicide bombers to Jews who resisted the Nazis during the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, and quoted an Israel Defense Forces (IDF) officer talking about how the lessons of that battle have been put to use to put down the Palestinian resistance. Even if you took this comparison between the Warsaw Ghetto and Palestine from the words of an IDF officer, it only—I repeat ONLY—has an anti-Semitic implication. There are no concentration camps in Israel/Palestine. The Israeli forces are not occupying a foreign country (it is much more complex). The Israelis are not thousands of miles from their native soil, and most of all, they are not determined to exterminate the Palestinian population as the Nazis and their Polish friends were determined to exterminate the Jews. Your comparison can only fuel anti-Jewish feelings—which here in France have led manipulated individuals to burn synagogues and beat up Jews in the street. It is one thing to be in favor of a Palestinian state, but it is another to support uncritically the corrupt dictatorship of Yasser Arafat and his allies. It is one thing to stand in favor of democratic rights for Palestinians, but it is another to think that terrorism is only the product of Israel’s expansionist policy. The religious forces (Hamas, Jihad) and nonreligious forces (PLO, etc.) make excuses for "martyrs"—meaning people who blow up innocent Israeli civilians. This has nothing to do with socialism. Yves Coleman, France Ni patrie ni frontières "Question juive", sionisme et antisionisme Billets d’humeur Combat communiste (1975-1988) Combats pour les sans-papiers et les réfugiés (De Fabel van de Illegaal) Compil’ n° 5 : Religion et politique Compil’ n° 6 : Polémiques et antidotes (mai 2011) CONTACT : yvescoleman@wanadoo.fr De Fabel van de illegaal : La Fable de l’illégalité (1998-2007) Documents utiles Emma Goldman (textes inédits en français) Encyclopédie anarchiste (1925-1934) G. Munis, Oeuvres choisies, 1936-1948, tome 1 Islam, islamisme, "islamophobie" Karim Landais Livres Religion Sur le fascisme Textes de Loren Goldner : "Demain la révolution" volumes 1 et 2 Texts in English Venezuela Worker’s Liberty 1 - Sur l’URSS - Nouveau parti anticapitaliste - Lutte ouvrière - Elections (septembre 2002) 2 - Famille, sexualité et libération de la femme (2002) 3 - Que faire contre les guerres ? 4/5 - Etats, nations et guerre — Bilan des grèves de mai-juin 2003 6/7 - Les syndicats contre les luttes ? 8/9 - Anarchistes et marxistes face au sionisme et à la prétendue "question juive" 10 : Irak/ Terrorisme/Multiculturalisme/ Laïcité/ Elections 11-12 Terrorismes et violences politiques (février 2005) 13 -14 : Europe et démocratie 15 - Bilan des "émeutes" d’octobre-novembre 2005 16-17 : Révoltes de la jeunesse lycéenne et étudiante 18-19-20 : Idéologies rances : nationalisme, racisme, recours à Dieu 21-22 - Offensives réactionnaires (2) - (octobre 2007) 21-22 : Offensives réactionnaires (1) (octobre 2007) 23-24 "Justice" et "Démocratie" : Corée, Venezuela, Iran, Irak, Argentine (Mars 2008) 25-26 : Sans-papiers - RESF - Venezuela - Pays-Bas - Tibet 27-28-29 Gauchisme post moderne – Sans-papiers – Venezuela, etc 30-31-32 : Travailleurs contre bureaucrates : 1876-1968 (novembre 2010) 33-34-35 : Les pièges de l’identité nationale - France- Pays-Bas- Belgique (juillet 2011) 36-37 : Extrême droite, extrême gauche : Inventaire de la confusion 38-39 : Des altermondialistes aux Indignés (avril 2012) 40-41 : Soulèvements arabes : Tunisie, Egypte (mai 2012) 42-43 : Nos tares politiques (tome 1, juillet 2014) 44-45 Nos tares politiques, tome 2, Antisémitisme de gauche et négationnisme, août 2014 Rechercher : Dans la même rubrique Limits of anti-Zionism (1 and 2) How to identify the sources of Left anti-Semitism in order to fight it Antifascism in France Some clichés and preconceived ideas about the National Front The National Front and its influence among French workers Beware of the French fascist Bloc Identitaire ! "Charlie Hebdo", "Muslims", and how to defend freedom of expression Five things Trotskyists should know about today’s young « anarchists » Two years supporting undocumented workers in france – an assessment The vicious French debate about migrations and national identity : some of its background reasons 2003-2014 mondialisme.org

Limits of anti-Zionism (1 and 2)

Some basic elements to draw a demarcation line 1. In the Middle East and the Near East, as in other geographical areas where capitalism did not develop as much as in Europe and America, in the ...

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