Zionism: A Fascist Imperialist Creation

Zionism, Part II here ♦ Zionism, Part III here ♦ Transfer Agreement here ♦

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: Fascist Imperialist Creation, Part II

(Part I of this article is here)

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!

Zionism: Fascist, Imperialist Creation, Part III

As early as 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 strongly rejected Zionism as the enemy within. But they did not see the full danger it represented. If not for the Judenrӓte (Jewish Councils), composed mainly of Zionists, the Nazis wouldn’t have been able to massacre six million Jews.

The Judenrӓte did the Nazis’ dirty work. They convinced masses of Jews to passively board the trains, lying that they would go to “work camps” instead of death camps. In exchange, some of these traitors got passage to Palestine.

In 1943, the Jews still left in the Warsaw ghetto organized the Warsaw ghetto uprising. Led by communists and other anti-fascists, their resistance became massive when they began executing the Judenrӓte. Although poorly armed, receiving only a few weapons from the Polish underground, they held down a whole Nazi division for weeks, inspiring Jews in other ghettos to rebel.

Then the Nazis bribed “trustworthy” Judenrӓte members like the fanatic Zionist Rudolf Kasztner. He made a deal with Nazi Eichmann. For telling Hungarian Jews to go quietly to the “work camps” (really gas chambers), he got safe passage to Israel for himself, his family, and six hundred “prominent” Jews whom he chose. He was responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands. Surviving relatives say that they 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. Especially after 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 Jews from Poland, Ukraine, and western Russia also escaped the Nazis by fleeing eastward. They went deep into Soviet territory.

Israel—Founded by Attacking Palestinian and Jewish Masses 

After the war, 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. The US-backed Zionist government’s massacre has, since October 7, left 100,000 people in Gaza “either dead, injured, or missing and presumed dead” because of bombing raids and 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 Netanyahu. These include fascist settlers who murder and displace Palestinians in the West Bank, and those soldiers who have swallowed Zionism’s poisonous racist ideology.

Destroying Gaza will also allow Israeli rulers to control the enormous oil and gas fields off its coast. That has been a goal of removing Palestinians from Gaza over many years.

Only 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 China. They are all complicit in this disaster. No “peace” movement can end genocide, imperialism, or fascism. But revolution to get rid of capitalism will.

From its very start, Zionism has been a fascist ideology. It is anti-worker, racist, nationalist, class collaborationist, and anti-communist. It has always been pro-imperialist. 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 with weapons, will defeat Zionism.

It has always been possible for Jews to join in solidarity with their Palestinian brothers and sisters. 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.

ICWP is fighting to build collectives to unite Palestinian, Jewish, and all workers, soldiers, and youth for a communist revolution. These will abolish racism and nationalism— mortal enemies of workers everywhere.

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 throughout Israel/Palestine, and the Middle East and everywhere. They will lay the basis for a Party of millions of workers, soldiers, and youth leaders. They will put an end to capitalism’s horrors and build the communist world that we deserve. A world of cooperation and sharing, without imperialism, money, profits, borders, or nations.

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.

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

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