MIA > Archive > Morrow > Fight Anti-Semitism
From Socialist Appeal, Vol. II No. 54, 17 December 1938, p. 3.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
The meaning of assimilation, of identification with the bourgeois state, is clear. If bourgeois German Jewry were not bestially persecuted by Hitler, it would have to join him, however reluctantly and squeamishly, in his bestial persecution of the German labor movement. Until yesterday anti-Semitism was not part of the fascist apparatus of Italy; and until yesterday Jewish diplomats, generals, financiers and industrialists, were members of the Fascist party of Italy; a Jewish general led one of Mussolini’s armies against Loyalist Spain! In British South Africa, Jews are part of the white community which exploits the black natives and in innumerable humiliating ways maintains a system of racial superiority. As a matter of fact, one need go no further than the American South to see the same phenomenon of Jews Jim-crowing Negroes.
Quite apart from anti-Semitism, therefore, the Jew must take his place: either with the persecutors or join with the persecuted in the struggle for liberation. There is no third category in modern capitalist society, whether fascist or democratic! Such is the structure of rotting capitalist society.
Theodore Herzl, founder of Zionism, typifies the leadership of that movement: disappointed assimilationists seeking their own (bourgeois) nation at a time when the productive forces of the world are strangling within the confining national boundaries.
But we, as revolutionary socialists, precisely because we are internationalists, stand for the unconditional freedom of every people. If only a small segment of Jewry, if only a million Jews, desired a Jewish Homeland, they would have the right to establish it. But under what conditions and by what methods can a Jewish Homeland be established? We declare categorically that it is only possible in a Socialist world.
For the Jews are not only dispersed and have no national state; the same is, in essence, true of the Irish, for every Irish nationalist knows that the government of “Eire” is a puppet of British imperialism. But the inhabitants of Ireland are Irish, while the inhabitants of Palestine are predominantly Arabs.
Under what conditions, then, can one envisage a Jewish Palestine? Obviously only two: (1) By agreement with the Arabs, who inhabit not only Palestine but the Near East; or (2) by driving the Arabs out of Palestine with fire and sword. There is no third real alternative. An ostensible third alternative, the proposal that Jews enter Palestine in such numbers that they will constitute the majority in the country, is merely a variation of either (1) or (2) for it means Jewish domination of Palestine.
The actual course followed by the Zionists has been a futile attempt to avoid these plain alternatives. The leaders of the Histadruth (Federation of Trade Unions) understood quite well in the early post-war years that to reach an agreement with the Arabs meant to unite the Arab peasants and workers with the ]ewish agricultural and industrial workers against their oppressors, the Jewish and Arab bourgeoisie and landlords and the British overlords, the “mandate power.” But the Jewish Agency and the Jewish National Fund were dominated by the Jewish capitalists, especially the American-Jewish capitalists – incidentally, dominated by the non-Zionist Jewish capitalists and financiers, who looked upon Palestine as merely one form of Jewish charity. The Histadruth adopted regulations providing for Arab-Jewish labor unions; but it remained a platonic gesture, for the Zionist leadership feared to antagonize those who held the purse strings. They feared, too, a collision with the mandate power, Great Britain, which of course would have understood that Arab-Jewish labor unions would be a revolutionary force endangering imperialist hegemony in the Near East. They took the road of opportunism: class-collaboration with their own capitalists and with Britain.
While the Irish nationalists denounce collaboration with Britain as treason to Irish freedom, Ben-Gurion, head of the Histadurth, denounces opposition to collaboration with Britain as treason to Zionism. The result? Britain has been enabled to pit Jew and Arab against each other. The British have been helped in this by Zionists of every hue, including the “Socialists.” It is enough to recall the shameful slogan, “Conquer Jewish Work,” i.e., get the jobs for the Jews, which has thrown the Arab workers and peasants into the arms of their bourgeois-feudal leaders who, for their own reasons, are irreconcilably opposed to Jewish expansion in Palestine. The Jewish Fascists, Jabotinsky’s Revisionists, are at least realistic when they draw the conclusion that the way to establish a Jewish state is to demonstrate their usefulness and indispensability to British imperialism and thereby secure a free hand to drive the Arabs out by armed force. Without British bayonets, the Jews today would be driven out of Palestine by the Arabs. Jewish colonization in Palestine continues only thanks to British imperialism.
This is understood, and resented, by the other nations oppressed by British might. When Mahatma Ghandi, after solidarizing himself with the Jewish victims of Nazi persecution, goes on to speak bitterly of the Jews being imposed on the Arabs, he is undoubtedly expressing the feelings of the Hindu people. Leaders of the black peoples oppressed by Britain have expressed themselves similarly. When these people, the natural allies of the Jews – and who moreover understand their common cause with the Jews – speak out against Zionism in Palestine, every Jew should take heed.
And to what end do the Zionists thus endanger the friendship of the colonial peoples of Asia and Africa for the Jews? Is it not clear that no matter how servile the Zionist movement will be to Britain it will not receive in return the right of unrestricted immigration into Palestine? That is excluded in advance. British imperialism weighs in the balance: 400,000 Jews in Palestine, backed by some part of the 16 million Jews of the world – against 50 million Arab-speaking Moslems backed by the whole Moslem world! Lest the Arabs seek freedom from Britain, the British ruling class diverts them from that path by preoccupying the Arabs with the Jewish problem. The Jew thus serves Britain as scapegoat in the Near East, as he serves Hitler and Mussolini and the Polish and Rumanian gangster-rulers as scapegoat in Europe. But in return for the collaboration of the most powerful Arab landlords and capitalists, Britain keeps a sharp rein on the influx of Jews into Palestine and never, under British imperialism, will the Jews be freed from that rein. In return for this mess of pottage, shall world Jewry lose the friendship and potential alliance with the peoples of Asia and Africa, the colonial peoples everywhere, the oppressed of the earth? No, it is too high a price to pay when the only result is perpetual civil-war in Palestine in which a small segment of Jewry faces the Arab masses.
In any event, it is abundantly clear, the salvation of most of the sixteen million Jews of the world cannot be sought in Palestine. Not even the Zionists contend that Palestine under the British Empire can absorb more than a small part of Jewry. We must look elsewhere than in Zionism for the solution.
Last updated on 11 September 2014