Imagine an alternative “Israel” in Eastern Europe... A forgotten history of the anti-Zionist Jewish left

In Mike Gould's 1930 novel Jews Without Money, a young narrator travels with his parents to the then-Brooklyn suburbs with a "Zionist leader" to consider a purchase offer made by a real estate dealer in racially segregated residential areas.

By observing isolated neighborhoods and exploring the connections between whites, pro-Zionists, real estate dealers and speculators, the young man compares anti-working class with the racism of Zionism.

With the Israeli occupation seeking to expand by annexing the West Bank lands to Israel by force, left-wing Jewish and Israeli intellectuals are reconsidering Israel as a colonial project that arose in the context of the imperialist movement and relied 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. Today, many intellectuals, academics and left-wing activists are increasingly leaving Israel, choosing a life of exile, having been harassed and silenced, with no choice but to leave and to Irreversible.

These situations are not new;

In the 1930s and 1940s, there was a broad left-wing Jewish tendency that opposed the Zionist movement as a facet of colonialism, and it was seen as a form of right-wing nationalism and imperialism that fundamentally contradicts the left's prevailing ideas of "working-class internationalism", but this voice fell in favor of the left Zionist supporter of Israeli policies after World War II.

non-Zionist jewish

In her report to the American magazine In These Times, Sarah Lazar interviewed American academic Benjamin Baltasir, assistant professor of multiethnic literature at Indiana University, about his article dealing with the left-wing Jewish movement against 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 attitude towards it as a right-wing nationalist form.

A poster of the Jewish Bund movement in the Ukrainian capital Kyiv in 1917 saying "Where we live... here is our country" in refusal to emigrate to the Palestinian territories (Agency)

Baltasir affirmed in the dialogue that his idea denies the claim 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 with Palestine, but also their place in the world as an ethnocultural minority from the diaspora that has been historically persecuted, we have to think about On our side, what global powers do we want to align with?"

He added, "If we do not want to stand with the executioners of the extreme right, colonialism and racism, there is a Jewish cultural position that we can rely on," meaning the anti-imperialist and anti-Zionist left.

Baltasir considered that there is a long Jewish history that precedes the Zionist ideology, adding, "There have been attempts throughout Jewish history, disastrously, to return to the land of Palestine, the most famous of them in the 17th century, but mostly Israel was understood as a kind of cultural longing, and there was no Jewish desire actually move there.” Nevertheless, a small number of Jews continued to live in Palestine during the time of Ottoman rule, and their number was estimated at about 5% of the population.

Alternative "Israel"

Baltasir added, "Contemporary Zionism, especially political Zionism, relies on this great reservoir of cultural longing and religious text to legitimize its project, and here comes the confusion."

"Modern Zionism arose in the late 19th century as a European national movement; I think this is the correct way to understand it. It was one of many such European nationalist movements created by persecuted minorities that attempted 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 19th and early 20th centuries, and Zionism was only one of them,” he said.

The American academic reviewed the models 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 Eastern Europe to be its natural homeland and land, and its language was “Yiddish.” This movement spread in Tsarist Russia, Lithuania and Poland. She supported the survival of Jews in Europe against oppressive governments and refused to emigrate to Palestine.

Baltasser states that "were it not for the Nazi Holocaust eradicating the Bund and other socialist movements in Eastern Europe, Jewish nationalism might have been in a completely different context now.

In addition to this movement, there were Soviet experiments in the Russian city of Birobidzhan, as well as in Ukraine, and these movements sought to create 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 the matter different is that it set itself on the path of British colonialism, a relationship that was clearly revealed with the Balfour Declaration of 1917, and British colonialism provided the appropriate conditions for realizing the dream of Zionism in the occupied Palestinian territories.

“On some level, you could say, Zionism is a toxic mixture of European nationalism and British imperialism whose heritage derives from a cultural reservoir of Jewish myths,” Baltasser says.

double loyalty

The American academic, who was brought up in a left-wing family, considered that before the end of World War II and even shortly thereafter, most Jews did not like Zionism;

There is a liberal criticism of it, especially in the United States, which viewed the founding of Israel as questioning the American affiliation of the Jews residing in the United States, and a kind of double loyalty that threatens integration into American culture.

However, for the Jewish left - the communist, socialist, Trotskyist and Marxist left - their criticism of Zionism came within the critique of nationalism and colonialism; they understood Zionism as a right-wing national movement, and in this sense, bourgeoisie" and also viewed it as an extension of British imperialism.

But that changed in the forties of the last century at the time of World War II, especially after the Jewish Holocaust, although the European Jewish left was aware that the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine would mean a colonial project that would expel the Palestinian population from their land.

In a speech by Earl Browder, head of the Manhattan Communist Party, he declared that a Jewish state could only be formed through the expulsion of a quarter of a million Palestinians.

The American academic asserts that Zionism was just a political choice 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 Bevin, the British Foreign Secretary, who said that the only reason the United States sent Jews to Palestine was “because they don’t want much.” them in New York.

liberation from empire

The American academic asserts that any liberation struggle will come from the oppressed themselves, so the Palestinian liberation movement is the one who will set the rules for the Palestinian struggle, but for the Jews in the United States they can stand in solidarity with the oppressed others.

Baltasir considers that the Cold War destroyed the old Jewish left and its organizations, and the rest of it turned toward 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.

Recently, the Israeli newspaper, Haaretz, published a report, dealing with some of the stories of immigrant intellectuals from Israel, some of whom founded political movements or headed left-wing organizations and human rights associations, before some of them were forced to leave their academic jobs because of their political beliefs and activities, after they felt that they could no longer express their opinions. Their opinions are in Israel without fear, and they no longer have a place within Israeli society.

Many activists of the so-called radical left left in the past decade, including founders of some of the most important non-governmental organizations, such as: B'Tselem, Breaking the Silence, the Coalition of Women for Peace, Zochrot, and Matzin, the latter being an anti-Zionist socialist movement founded in the early 1960s by former members In the Israeli Communist Party, they advocated a one-state solution that would include the Arab and Jewish populations.