In the 1930 novel by American poet and writer Mike Gould "Jews without money," a young narrator travels with his parents to the outskirts of Brooklyn with a "Zionist leader" to consider a purchase offer made by a real estate dealer in racially divided residential areas.
By observing isolated neighborhoods and exploring links between whites, pro-Zionists, real estate dealers, and speculators, the young man compares anti-working class and racism to Zionism.
As Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu seeks to annex up to 30% of the West Bank lands to Israel by force, left-wing Jewish and Israeli intellectuals regain Israel as a colonial project that originated in the context of the imperialist movement and relies on ethnic cleansing and violent control of the Palestinian people.
Many Jews around the world object to the idea that the State of Israel represents the will and interests of the Jewish people, and at the present time, many intellectuals, academics, and left-wing activists are increasingly leaving Israel and choosing a life of exile, after they are subjected to harassment and silence, and they have no choice but to leave and to Irreversible.
These situations are not new. In the thirties and forties of the last century, there was a broad left-wing Jewish trend opposing the Zionist movement as one of the faces of colonialism, and it was seen as a form of right-wing and imperialist nationalism that fundamentally contradicted the prevailing ideas of the left on “internationalism of the working class”, but this voice retreated in favor of the left Zionist supporter of Israeli policies after World War II.
Non-Zionist Judaism
In her report for the American magazine "In These Times," American journalist Sarah Lazar interviewed Benjamin Baltasir, associate professor of multi-ethnic literature at Indiana University, about his article on the left-wing Jewish movement opposing both Zionism, imperialism and racism in the twentieth century. The dialogue dealt with the colonial origins of modern Zionism and the reason for the negative left-wing Jewish stand towards it as a right-wing nationalist form.
He asserted in the dialogue that his idea denies claiming that Zionism reflects the will of all the Jewish people, and said, "For Jews in the United States who are trying to think about their relationship not only to Palestine, but also their place in the world as an ethnic, cultural, minority of the Diaspora that has been historically persecuted, we have to think about On our side, what global powers do we want to reconcile with?
He added, "If we do not want to stand with the extremists of the extreme right, colonialism and racism, there is a Jewish cultural position that we can build upon" and that means the anti-imperialist and Zionist left.
He said that there is a long Jewish history that precedes the Zionist ideology, adding, "There were attempts throughout the Jewish history, catastrophically, to return to the land of Palestine, the most famous of which was in the 17th century, but mostly Israel was understood as a kind of cultural longing, and there was no Jewish desire To actually move there. However, a few Jews continued to live in Palestine during the time of the Ottoman rule, and their number was estimated at about 5% of the population.
An alternative "Israel"
And he added, "Contemporary Zionism, especially political Zionism, depends on this great reservoir of cultural longing and religious text to give legitimacy to its project, and here comes confusion."
"Modern Zionism arose in the late 19th century as a European nationalist movement; I think this is the correct way to understand it. It was one of these numerous European nationalist movements created by the oppressed minorities that tried to build ethnically homogeneous nation-states from the diverse cultures of Western and Eastern Europe; and there were many Of the Jewish nationalities in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, and Zionism was only one of them, "as he put it.
The American academic reviewed the examples of these European Jewish movements, most notably the "General Jewish Front" (The Bund), which was a left-wing socialist movement that emerged in the early twentieth century and considered that Eastern Europe is its natural home and land, its language is "Yiddish", and this movement spread in Caesarea, Lithuania and Poland, She supported the Jews' survival in Europe against repressive governments and refused to emigrate to Palestine.
"Had it not been for the Nazi Holocaust to have wiped out the Bund and other socialist movements in Eastern Europe, Jewish nationalism would have been in a completely different context now," Baltasir says.
In addition to this movement, there were Soviet experiences in the Russian city of Biropigan, as well as in Ukraine, and these movements sought to establish Jewish autonomous regions in areas where Jews lived or within the Soviet Union, and these movements were rooted in Yiddish culture and language.
Zionism was one of these Jewish cultural movements; But what made it different was that she put herself on the path of British colonialism, a relationship that was clearly exposed with the Balfour Declaration in 1917, and British colonialism created conditions for realizing the dream of Zionism in the occupied Palestinian territories.
"At some level, you can say, Zionism is a toxic mixture of European nationalism and British imperialism that derives its heritage from a cultural reservoir supplied by Jewish myths," said Baltasir.
Dual loyalty
The American academic, who grew up in a left-wing family, considered that before the end of World War II and until a little later, most Jews did not like Zionism. There is a liberal criticism of it, especially in the United States, which considered the establishment of Israel as a skepticism about the American affiliation of Jews residing in the United States, and a kind of double loyalty that threatens to integrate into American culture.
"But for the Jewish left - the Communist, Socialist, Trotsky, and Marxist left - their criticism of Zionism came within the critique of nationalism and colonialism; they understood Zionism as a right-wing nationalist movement, and in this sense a bourgeoisie," and also viewed it as an extension of British imperialism.
But that changed in the 1940s during the time of World War II, especially after the Jewish Holocaust, even though the European Jewish left was aware that establishing a Jewish state in Palestine would mean a colonial project that would drive the Palestinian population out of their land.
In a speech given by Earl Broder, head of the Manhattan Communist Party, he declared that a Jewish state could only be formed by expelling a quarter of a million Palestinians.
The American academic affirms that Zionism was just a political option for the leadership of the Jewish movement, and some of them struggled to immigrate to the United States, and cites a famous quote attributed to Ernest Piven, the British Foreign Secretary, who said that the only reason the United States sent Jews to Palestine is because "they don't want much Of them in New York. "
Freedom from the Empire
The American academic affirms that any liberation struggle will come from the oppressed themselves, so it is the Palestinian liberation movement that will set the rules for the Palestinian struggle, but for Jews in the United States they can solidify with the oppressed others.
He considers that the Cold War destroyed the old Jewish left and its organizations, and turned the rest towards Zionism in the post-World War II era, denouncing the choice of American Jews to agree with an "American imperial project, and people like Jared Kushner" as he put it.
And recently, the Israeli newspaper "Haaretz" published a report, which dealt with some stories of immigrant intellectuals from Israel, some of whom founded political movements or chaired left-wing organizations and human rights associations, before some were forced to leave their academic jobs because of political beliefs and activities, after they felt that they could no longer express Their views in Israel are without fear, and they no longer have a place in Israeli society.
Many activists have left the so-called radical left in the past decade, and among them are founders of some of the most important non-governmental organizations, such as: B'Tselem, Breaking the Silence, The Coalition of Women for Peace, Memories, and Mitzpe, the latter is an anti-Zionist socialist movement founded by the early 1960s. In the Israeli Communist Party, they advocated a one-state solution that includes the Arab and Jewish population.