(A series of articles from Red Flag)
— Part I —
TEL AVIV (Palestine/Israel), 1970s—Members of Matzpen, a socialist group uniting Jews and Palestinians, demonstrate against the occupation, Zionism, and expanding settlements after the 1967 war. Sign in Hebrew says “Down with the Occupation.”
“Zionism isn’t Jewish. Zionism is imperialist,” said a Palestinian man at a demonstration against the Israeli government genocide in Gaza. He gladly took Red Flag, saying that we don’t need Jewish capitalists or Palestinian capitalists.
Zionism and Judaism are hugely different things. Zionism is a political ideology and movement. It is the fascist ideology of the Israeli government. Judaism is a religion and ethnicity.
Capitalism uses superficial differences like ethnicities to make workers feel different and divided. Many Jews oppose Zionism, especially with the current genocide in Gaza. Many who support Zionism are not Jews, like Biden, all US and European imperialists, and the right-wing Christian movement.
Zionism is a racist ideology based on nationalism. It lumps “the Jewish people” together, victimized by antisemitic discrimination and genocide. To be safe, they say, they need their “own” nation state.
As with every group, however, there are two classes. Jewish workers and Jewish capitalists have opposing interests – like workers and capitalists worldwide. Our main identity is as members of the international working class. All else is secondary. Jewish workers have more in common with Palestinian and the rests of the world’s workers than with any capitalist-imperialist.
Zionism has been used to justify and conduct ethnic cleansing, mass expulsions, and genocide against Arabs and Palestinians. Israel’s army is today conducting genocide in Gaza and abetting murders in the West Bank. Its generals are just like the Nazi generals who murdered Jews in the Warsaw ghetto!
Socialism (later, Communism) versus Nationalism
After the 1789 French revolution, socialist ideas spread among many, including European Jews. Especially after the racist pogroms that began in the 1820s.
As the Ottoman empire decayed, nationalism and capitalist nation-states developed globally. Nationalism helped convince workers to serve the capitalists as wage slaves and soldiers. Zionist and other nationalist ideas were pushed in opposition to socialist and communist ideas and movements.
Some Jews, mainly Jewish capitalists like garment bosses, became Zionists. Theodor Herzl, an Austro-Hungarian Jewish journalist, founded modern Zionism as a political organization in 1897. He claimed that European Jews couldn’t be safe without their “own” nation state. After considering alternatives, Zionists chose Palestine, an Ottoman-controlled province.
Jewish capitalists funded Herzl. He knew that a Jewish state could only exist in Palestine by displacing people who already lived there. He lied about this. He never mentioned Palestinians in public while he planned their displacement privately with fellow Zionist leaders.
This nationalist/racist project represented only the interests of Jewish capitalists and British, Russian, French, and, later, US imperialists. It never represented the interests of any Jewish, Palestinian, or other workers.
In contrast, the socialist Bund in Russia represented tens of thousands of Jewish workers. They hated the Zionists.
In 1903, Herzl visited Russia after a pogrom there. He met with leaders of the Czarist government. He told them to support Zionism to “end the revolt and the defection to the socialists.” A Czarist official answered, “you are preaching to a convert.” He approved publication of a Zionist daily newspaper.
Herzl also wrote to the German Kaiser asking him to support Zionism to stem the growth of revolutionary parties “even though it has to be a carefully kept secret.”
Before Herzl, prominent non-Jews backed Zionism. Evangelical Christian politician Earl Shaftesbury advocated the Jewish colonization of Palestine. British imperialism used Zionism to lend moral legitimacy to its plans to dominate the oil-rich Middle East. Shaftesbury was antisemitic. He opposed Jewish participation in the British parliament.
Britain had eyed the Ottoman Empire well before World War I. In 1915 the Sykes-Picot Agreement planned how British and French imperialists would divide it up after the war. Britain was then the top imperialist. Its empire reached from Cape Town to Cairo in Africa. In Asia, it controlled much of southern Iran through the Anglo Persia oil company as well as the whole Indian subcontinent. Palestine, at the mouth of the Suez Canal, was the strategic connection between these two parts of the British Empire.
The Balfour Declaration of 1917 helped British capitalists use Zionism to advance their imperial plans. It pledged to establish a “national home” for Jewish people in Ottoman Palestine. Only 6% of Palestine’s population was then Jewish! The Balfour Declaration never mentioned the Palestinians. Chaim Weizmann, president of the British Zionist Federation, lobbied for this declaration.
In 1922 the League of Nations gave Britain the “mandate” to govern Palestine and create a “Jewish National Home.” Zionism had become an official arm of British imperialism. “Jewish Palestine” was intentionally created to “be a safeguard to England, in particular with respect to the Suez Canal,” Weitzman explained.
NO capitalist nation helps any worker anywhere. Workers have no nations. They all belong to the capitalists.
— Part II —
AGUADILLA (Puerto Rico), January 15.: “Zionism is Fascism. The Solution is Communism”
Capitalism Promoted Pogroms
The Russian imperial government organized pogroms (mass racist massacres) against working-class Jews in Russia, Poland, and Ukraine, starting in the nineteenth century. These began after Imperial Russia first acquired territories with large Jewish populations from the Ottoman Empire and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.
Russian rulers made these areas into the “Pale of Settlement” to control Jews and exclude them from the cities. They invented racist lies to win workers to intense antisemitism, scapegoating Jewish workers and peasants for capitalism’s failures.
They lied that Jews were “Christ killers,” “baby killers,” and “cruel money lenders.”
Feudal nobles thought themselves above handling money. They used Jews as money lenders. Christian churches prohibited believers from lending money with interest. Jews loaned the nobles’ money with interest, keeping some as profit and giving the rest to the nobles. Then, the nobles confiscated all the money, calling Jews “greedy usurers.”
Many Jewish workers fled to Europe and the US in response to pogroms. Large numbers joined the Bund, a Jewish socialist group. In the 1880s, thirty percent of Russia’s socialists were Jews. Many later left the Bund to join the Bolsheviks and helped organize the 1917 Russian Revolution.
That year, Winston Churchill, head of Britain’s navy, said that the creation of a Jewish state by the Jordan River under British protection “would be in harmony with the interests of the British Empire.”
In 1919, an estimated 100,000 Jews were killed in pogroms in Ukraine and Poland. They were accused of being Bolsheviks. Many were.
Founding Myth
Jewish and Christian Zionists push the myth that the Biblical story of Jews being enslaved in Egypt and expelled from Palestine was historic fact. They asserted that Jews had remained true to their beliefs despite “wandering” for 2000 years, and thus had the absolute need and right to return to their “homeland.”
There is no historical evidence of this. There is evidence, however, that Jews, Muslims, and Christians lived in Palestine side by side for over a thousand years. During the Ottoman Empire, some Jews converted to Islam, partly because Muslims paid lower taxes.
There is also evidence of the existence of Khazaria, a vast Khazar Kingdom (c. 650–965 CE). Not wanting to be subjects of either the Muslim or the Christian empires, the Khazars converted to Judaism. They also converted many others to Judaism in the Caucasus, along the Volga River, and in what is now Poland. In The Invention of the Jewish People, Tel Aviv University historian Shlomo Sand shows that Eastern European Jews originated from these areas, not from Palestine.
Zionists and imperialists used the founding myth and the “wandering Jew” stories to justify a Jewish state in Palestine. As nations and nationalism developed throughout Europe, they popularized the identity of “the Jewish people.”
Jewish Workers Fleeing Fascism Forced to Go to Palestine.
Many Jewish workers who fled fascist Europe in the 1920s and 1930s did not know anything about displacing Palestinians. They only hoped to start a new life, safe from pogroms and genocide. Neither the Ottoman-era Jewish residents, who lived for centuries alongside Muslims and Christians, nor most of the newcomers thought of starting a “Jewish state” to serve the interests of any imperialist.
To create a Jewish state, Palestine needed more Jews. British and US imperialists conspired to make Palestine the only place Jews fleeing antisemitism could go. The US slashed immigration of Jews to only 8,000 yearly in 1924. Britain also drastically restricted Jewish immigration.
Topping this, the US Zionist organizations opposed the entry of Jewish refugees from Nazi-occupied Europe to the United States!
In those decades, Jewish and Palestinian workers often united in struggles against British, Palestinian, and Jewish capitalist exploiters, especially in the port city of Haifa.
Jewish and Palestinian capitalists attacked these anti-racist and communist workers. Zionist goons attacked and killed many Jewish workers for fighting alongside their Palestinian brothers and sisters.
Communism Will End Racism, Nationalism, and Imperialism
Capitalism is based on competition for maximum profits, made from exploiting workers. Competing capitalists capture rivals’ markets or destroy their industries through war. The rulers build nationalism to make us think we’re defending “our country” when we fight other workers to defend the rulers’ profits and empire.
Capitalism’s wage system needs racism and terror to divide and weaken our class, and pay some less, to keep us from uniting for revolution.
When the Palestinian and Jewish masses, and all workers, unite for communist revolution, we will eliminate genocide, production for profit, competition, and the wage system. We will create the material basis to abolish racism and nationalism. The communist masses, without nations or borders, will collectively produce only to meet humanity’s needs!
— Part III —
ICWP in South Africa march against Genocide in Gaza and for Communism. Their banner says “Palestinian, Israeli, and All Workers, Let’s Unite for Communism! ICWP” in English, Arabic, Hebrew, Spanish and Xhosa
In 1906, Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, urged workers in Jaffa to oppose those who wanted to organize, instead of excluding, Arab workers. He emphasized the “evil of mixed labor.” In 1930, one of his followers bragged about “attacking Jewish housewives in the markets and smashing the Arab eggs they bought.”
Zionism and the Nazi Holocaust
Ben Gurion welcomed Hitler’s rise in Germany. He saw it as an opportunity to build a Jewish state in Palestine. In 1933, Zionists wrote to Hitler, “We too are against mixed marriages and for maintaining the purity of the Jews.” Nazi and Zionist ideology are both fascist.
The Nazis, in turn, allowed Zionist organizations to function while banning all other gatherings of Jews.
Most German Jews rejected Zionism but didn’t see its full danger. Without the complicity of the Judenrӓte (Jewish Councils, mostly Zionists), the Nazis couldn’t have massacred six million Jews.
These Nazi collaborators convinced masses of Jews to passively board the trains, lying that they would go to “work camps” instead of death camps. Some of these traitors then got passage to Palestine.
In 1943, the Jews remaining in the Warsaw ghetto organized an uprising. Led by communists and anti-fascists, their resistance became massive when they began executing the Judenrӓte. They were poorly armed, receiving only a few weapons from the Polish underground. Yet they held down a whole Nazi division for weeks, inspiring other ghetto rebellions.
Nazis bribed “trustworthy” Zionists like Rudolf Kasztner. He made a deal with Nazi Eichmann. For telling Hungarian Jews to go quietly to the “work camps” (gas chambers), he got safe passage to Palestine for himself, his family, and six hundred “prominent” Jews whom he chose. He is responsible for the deaths of many thousands whose surviving relatives say would have escaped if they had known they faced certain death!
Tens of thousands of Jewish resistance fighters did escape to the forests to join communist-led partisans. Stalin’s Partisan Order in 1942 declared a “peoples’ war.” It reversed the Soviets’ previous reluctance to accept civilians, minorities, including Jews, and women as fighters. Up to two million others escaped to eastern Russia.
Israel: Founded by Attacking Palestinian and Jewish Masses
In 1948, the UK imperialists backed the founding of Israel. From 1947 to 1949, the Israeli government violently evicted 750,000 Palestinians from their homes. It was the racist Nakba (Arabic for “catastrophe”). In southern Israel, Palestinian refugees were forced into the Gaza Strip. After 2006, it became the world’s largest open-air prison.
That ethnic cleansing continues today! Since Oct 7, the US-backed Zionist government’s massacre has left 100,000 people in Gaza “either dead, injured, or missing and presumed dead” from bombing raids, fighting on the ground. (World Health Organization, February 5, 2024)
Zionism is against the interests of Palestinian, Jewish, and all workers. But many Israeli Jews support Zionism: the fascist settlers who murder and displace Palestinians in the West Bank, and those soldiers who have swallowed Zionism’s poisonous racism.
Destroying Gaza will also allow Israeli rulers to control the enormous oil and gas fields off its coast.
Communism Will Abolish Racism, the Mortal Enemy of All Workers
The only answer to the racist genocide in Gaza today is communist revolution to wipe out all capitalists and imperialists, including from China. All are complicit in this disaster. No “peace” or “resist” movement can end genocide, imperialism, or fascism. But revolution to end capitalism will.
From its very start, Zionism has been a fascist ideology. It is anti-worker, racist, nationalist, and anti-communist. It has always been pro-imperialist and capitalist. It is anti-Muslim and antisemitic. Zionist leaders were responsible for the deaths of thousands of Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe and tens of thousands of Palestinians today!
The masses, armed with communist ideology and weapons, will defeat Zionism and all fascism.
It has always been possible for Jews to join in solidarity with their Palestinian brothers and sisters. More are today. This must and will be the future! Palestinians and Jews, and all workers, need to build communist relations of friendship and solidarity in our struggle for communism.
Our victory depends on the ideology of the mighty working class, especially industrial workers, soldiers, and the youth.
Let’s spread Red Flag and build communist collectives to unite Palestinian, Jewish, and all workers, soldiers and youth for a communist revolution.
These will lay the basis for a Party of millions of workers, soldiers, and youth leaders. They will abolish racism and nationalism—mortal enemies of all workers. We will end all capitalism’s horrors and build the communist world that we deserve. A world of cooperation and sharing, without imperialism, money, profits, borders, or nations.
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German Zionists, Nazis, and the British Mandate in Palestine Conspired to Make Transfer Agreement
In 1933, Jewish US war veterans organized a hugely effective, massive worldwide boycott of Nazi Germany because of its antisemitism. The boycott was popular among Jews and non-Jews alike, cutting German exports drastically. It threatened the German economy and Hitler’s power in his first year as head of state. It forced the Nazis to scale back their open attacks on Jews, temporarily.
But the Zionists opposed it! Treacherous German Zionist leaders rallied to oppose the boycott. In exchange, the Nazis would let some German Zionists transfer part of their assets to British Mandate Palestine and go to Palestine. In return, the Zionist leaders there bought more and more goods from Nazi Germany, breaking the worldwide boycott.
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