Defeat Fascist Zionism and All Attacks on Workers

Zionism is a Fascist, Imperialist Creation Part 1 here ♦ Nanjing Holocaust: Imperialist Attack on the Working Class here ♦ Resolving Contradictions by Becoming a Communist here ♦ We are One International Working Class here ♦

Tel Aviv (Palestine/Israel)—1970s. Members of Matzpen (Compass), a socialist organization, made up of Jews and Palestinians,  protest against the occupation, against expanding settlements, and for Arab-Jewish unity against the Zionist government after the 1967 war. The sign in Hebrew reads ”Down with the Occupation!”

Zionism Is a Fascist Imperialist Creation (Part 1)

“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.

Nanjing Holocaust: Imperialist Attack on the Working Class

December 13th was a very solemn anniversary in China and for the international working class. On that day in 1937, Japanese imperialists captured Nanjing, then the capital of the Republic of China. They brutally slaughtered tens of thousands of working-class brothers and sisters there.

An estimated eighty thousand women were subjected to dehumanizing and often fatal sexual violence. Some were mutilated by the Japanese military. The invading army grabbed many children from their parents’ hands and smashed or stabbed them to death. In some cases, Japanese soldiers even forced Chinese family members to commit incestuous acts.

Six weeks after the massacre began, more than 300,000 of our working-class siblings in Nanjing had been massacred. One third of the city had been destroyed by arson and looting. Japanese soldiers had broken into almost every building.

The Nanjing Holocaust and other crimes against humanity committed by the capitalist-imperialists serve as a wake-up call for the working people of the world to unite and fight for communism. History is already repeating itself in Gaza. Israeli fascists are committing the exact same genocidal acts against Palestinian working-class civilians as the Japanese fascists had done to Chinese working people from 1931 to 1945.

Capitalist-imperialists profit immensely from genocidal racist wars like these. Their education system, media, and police forces all serve the interests of the capitalist ruling class. Capitalists constantly use these to divide the working class and win people of our class to the capitalist side. The indoctrinated civilians end up fighting for the capitalists and killing civilians of the same class on the other side.

More than eighty years after the Nanjing Holocaust, many Chinese have been demanding a sincere apology from the Japanese government for past war crimes. But we know this will never work. Like all the other capitalist rulers, the Japanese capitalists hide the reality of capitalism from the masses to keep the masses divided.

The capitalists know that a united working class means the end of their days of exploiting and oppressing workers. Only a worldwide communist revolution will forever end all oppression, exploitation, and genocide. Then genocidal massacres such as the Nanjing Holocaust will never repeat again.

WORKERS OF THE WORLD, UNITE! WE HAVE NOTHING TO LOSE BUT OUR CHAINS OF OPPRESSION!

DOWN WITH ALL CAPITALIST-IMPERIALISTS!

COMMUNISM WILL WIN! LONG LIVE THE COMMUNIST REVOLUTION!

—Comrade Chan, a new ICWP comrade

Resolving Contradictions by Becoming a Communist

My parents were religious Jews and Zionists. They believed that you had to support IsRrael because of the Holocaust and continuing antisemitism.

But they also taught us that it was important to be active, especially against racism.

They sent us to Sunday school where we heard that only the Jews suffered the holocaust and no one else understands. A lie that leaves out all the other holocausts that capitalism/imperialism has inflicted on our class.

I went to a Jewish summer camp twice where we sang, “No man is an island, no man stands alone; we need one another, so I will defend each man as my brother, each man as my friend.”

Talk about a mixed message!

I got active in the movement against the Vietnam war and racism. We saw the racist murders of Black children in the South. A friend went to help.

In college, I demonstrated against the war in Vietnam. We saw on TV youth beaten by the Chicago police for protesting the Vietnam war. We demonstrated against the racist murder of M L King.

Our family had an annual Passover dinner. Passover is supposed to celebrate the Jews’ freedom from slavery in Egypt. We would read aloud that “no one is free until everyone is free.” At these dinners, I raised that this includes especially Palestinians. It became a big struggle—for years.

I rejected religion. I hated the hypocrisy of the Rabbi who, before he would “bless” my wedding, lectured me for “selfishly” actively opposing the war in Vietnam and bringing grief to my parents.

I loved my parents, but not their Zionism. I couldn’t understand their racist indifference about what was happening to the Palestinians.

When my father visited Israel, he wrote to me that if I had been to the wailing wall with him, I would have understood that Jews’ suffering had to be answered with a Jewish state. I told him that if I had been at the wailing wall with him, I would have mourned the Palestinians killed and displaced by the Zionists as well.

I like to think that if my parents were still alive to see the fascist attack in Gaza, they would be on the correct side.

The children and grandchildren of the Nazi holocaust victims should be with the Palestinian masses. So should all workers. Increasingly they are!

I became a communist—my best decision.

I’ve had the honor of knowing and learning from comrades from many places who are committed to the fight for our class’s collective communist future. They don’t see “race” or nationality as primary, but only class.

Now we are building ICWP. We ‘re committed to mobilizing the masses worldwide for communism and nothing less. Interest in ICWP is growing! Young people are looking for a revolutionary alternative.

Comrade Hamza in Gaza, facing death from fascist Israeli government bombs and bullets, is mobilizing for communism. He inspires all of us to struggle harder to build one ICWP everywhere. Thank you, comrade!

—Comrade in the USA

We Are One International Working Class

“I don’t even want to call myself a Jew anymore,” said a terribly upset friend who was born in Israel.

“You were born into a Jewish family, but you were also born into the working class,” I responded. “Mainly you are a worker and should think of yourself that way.”

“That’s what my parents always said,” she remembered.

Each of us has a personal identity with many aspects. But we are all workers, or allies of the working class. More and more of us identify mainly as communists.

Being a worker (even a communist worker) doesn’t make other aspects of our identity disappear. It means they are secondary, though often we struggle to remember that.

Where we grew up, what languages we speak, where we live, our life experiences, all help to shape our personal identities. We may see ourselves as culturally Jewish or Muslim, Christian or Hindu, even if we don’t practice the religion.

We may identify with others who share a skill set (surfers, poets, electricians, nurses). Or a passion (fans of Mihlali, Taylor Swift, Shah Rukh Khan, Lionel Messi, Manchester United). Most of us don’t let such things divide us from the rest of the working class.

Other things are harder. We know that “race,” gender, and nationality are socially constructed. That means they are boxes that capitalist society invented to sort us into, on purpose to divide us. They are part of the material reality of the wage system.

So, we can’t just say to someone, “You’re not Black (or Palestinian or gay or a woman), you’re a worker.”  We experience capitalist oppression and exploitation differently, based on what boxes we’ve been put in. We can’t defeat the divisive ideology of “identity politics” by denying this reality.

What we can and must say is that the only way to end the oppression we each experience is to unite as the working class and destroy capitalism. To mobilize for communism and uproot the wage system.

To struggle, as a united working class, against all the “isms” that divide us. To identify ourselves first, and mainly, as workers. As my friend’s Israeli parents told her, fifty years ago.

—A Comrade

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