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From Socialist Worker, No. 2501, 29 April 2016.
Copied from the Socialist Worker Archive.Ken Livingstone and Naz Shah are not antisemites. Anti-Zionism is not antisemitism. Nevertheless the anti-Zionist, pro-Palestinian case must be argued effectively and sensitively. Traps must be avoided which favour our opponents.
On Thursday Ken Livingstone created then walked into precisely such a trap. The argument about Zionist collaboration with the Nazis has been around for a long time. It is rightly ignored by solidarity activists with Palestine.
Ken, as a seasoned campaigner, should have known that. I explain in some detail in my book The Myths of Zionism the problems with this argument.
It’s true that when Hitler came to power some Zionist leaders stupidly thought that they could do a deal with him that would enable some German Jews to go to Palestine. But Ken should have known that this disgraceful manoeuvre bitterly divided the Zionist movement.
Many young Zionists, in particular, were outraged. They took for granted you had to fight Hitler to the death.
It suited Hitler to string those particular Zionist leaders along for a while. Part of the deal was that they would oppose the world-wide anti-Nazi campaign demanding a boycott of German goods.
In 1989 I had the good fortune to meet Marek Edelman in Poland, then the last remaining leader of the five-person command group that led the Warsaw Ghetto resistance to the Nazi Holocaust. I asked his permission for the Socialist book shop Bookmarks to publish his memoir The Ghetto Fights in Britain for the first time. He agreed.
During our discussion I asked about his relations with the Zionist fighters in the resistance. Marek was a member of the anti-Zionist Socialist Bund, a Jewish workers’ movement adamantly opposed to Jewish migration to Palestine and the creation of a Jewish state.
He told me that whatever their differences were over Palestine, the anti-Zionists and the Zionists had to unite to fight the common enemy, the Nazis. The creation of the united Jewish Fighting Organisation (JFO), including the Communists, would have been impossible without them.
Marek’s closest comrade in the JFO was “Antek” Zuckerman. His memoir, A Surplus of Memory, is as powerful as Marek’s. But unlike, Marek, who refused to live in Israel after the war, much preferring his native Poland, Antek went to live on the Ghetto Fighters Kibbutz in Israel.
It’s both a reminder of the complex roots of Zionism and underlines part of the unique international socialist case for the liberation of Palestine. This perspective sees a free Palestinian Arab majority welcoming its Holocaust survivors, and the generations that have followed them, as equal citizens in their country.
Marek Edelman died earlier this century. He remained steadfast in his views until his dying day. One of his last public acts was to declare the solidarity of the Jewish Fighting Organisation and the Warsaw Ghetto resistance with the Palestinian fighters for the liberation of their homeland.
Some further reading:
John Rose on Ten reasons to oppose Zionism.
John Rose on Time to debate Israel.
Michael Rosen on an attempt to smear anti-Zionist into silence.
Nick Clark on Is the left to blame for antisemitism?
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Last updated: 11 December 2024