By David Rowlands – 01-22-24
Above: Germany, 1938. If you were Jewish and hadn’t escaped by 1937-1938, you were trapped with nowhere to go, and you likely perished. Jew hate was a prime contributor to the defeat of the German working-class in the 1930’s, which led to a colossal world slaughter of 60 million people and the near extermination of the Jews in Europe.
Above: The United States, 2024. A pro-Hamas graphic glorifying the 10-7 pogrom. In a somewhat unexpected twist of fate, the main transmitter of antisemitism in the world today is the middle-class left, under the veil of “solidarity” with the Palestinian people.
Aw….look at the little darlings above with their nifty signs and black masks, signaling support for the 10-7 pogrom.
For those of you who are familiar with my past political contributions, which take up questions of importance to the working-class, you are no doubt aware of my favorable opinion of the Socialist Workers Party, even though I have no formal relationship with the organization. And since this piece falls under the category of “thinking out loud”, I feel it’s important to make clear that the views expressed within are mine alone, which may or may not reflect the views of the revolutionary party, either in whole or part.
And so, with that aside, let us begin. Please note that these observations are not meant to be a detailed account of the last seventy-five years, or an exact rendering of who did what and when, but rather a more general overview of my amended view of what Israel is and is not.
I reckon I might as well spill the beans from the get-go and let ‘er rip; in case you, dear reader, are not equipped to handle the rest of what I have to say. I’d hate to be the one responsible for a hot spot of exploding craniums, not to mention being the primary cause of an unwanted pity-party over wasted time.
To Wit, I do not think Israel is a “colonial-settler state”, nor do I think it ever was, and I believe it is now necessary to go back to the beginning and consider the question anew. Nor do I believe Israel is imperialist, although I don’t think that’s in dispute among serious Marxists. Israel is, of course, a capitalist state with a government and military machine that defends the interests of the exploiting classes, and as such has serious limitations when it comes to defending Israel as a refuge for Jews. And it’s hardly going to act in a way to bring about the union of workers, a task that remains for the workers themselves. In the final analysis, only the advance of the socialist revolution, stalled since 1975, will guarantee the safety of the Jewish people worldwide. That said, Israel has the right to exist, the right to defend its citizens and the right to serve as a refuge for the Jewish people around the world.
Are you with me so far? If so, let’s proceed.
The first point to be made is that the Jewish people have had a continuous relationship to the land of Israel, going back at least 3,500 years. And I’m not talking about the campfire tales of Bedouin folklore, which is partly fact (the Davidic dynasty and the exile to Babylonia) and partly fiction (Jonah and the whale and the parting of the Red Sea), but of the presence of a people with a distinct culture, in terms of religion, tradition and language, that has never left the region, despite repeated dispersals by the Greeks, Persians and Romans, plus the bloody flare-ups with the Christians and the Muslims during the medieval period.
Above: The City of David. Circa: 1000 BCE. The late Bronze Age. The hilltop village founded by David would become known as Jerusalem.
Above: Original housing within the walls of the City of David.
However, the utter destruction of Jerusalem by Rome in CE 70, which included the sacking of the second Temple built by Herod, was the one bloodletting that nearly emptied Judea and Samaria of the indigenous Jewish population, which sent them to the four corners of the known world. Nearly that is, but not completely, and with time the Jewish people began to resettle Judea. And why wouldn’t they? It was, after all, their homeland, like the Black Hills is the homeland of the Lakota, whose ancestral lands also date back to BCE 3000, and is the place where they reside today, in what is now the United States.
Above: A mural in stone from the Eternal City memorializes the sacking of Jerusalem in CE 70.
The other notable happening in the first century CE, besides the diaspora at the hands of the Romans, was the rise of the Jesus movement, which began as a sect within Judaism, founded by the Jewish Rabbi, Yeshua. The ideology of this movement, where women played leading roles and where egalitarianism was a hallmark, marked an important leap forward for humanity. Jesus was Jewish, not Palestinian, as where his mother Miriam and father Joseph, his original followers, including Peter, John and Paul, John the Baptist and Mary Magdelene. In fact, the term “Syria-Palestina” did not come into use until 100 years after the ministry of Jesus had ended and was a ploy by the Romans to humiliate the Judeans.
So, can we please dispense with the “Jesus was a Palestinian” nonsense?
Below: An artist’s appreciation of what the Jewish Jesus might have looked like.
The second point on the agenda is to state the obvious, which is conveniently absent from the narrative of the professional Zionist killers, that the modern State of Israel exists as a direct result of the Holocaust and its aftermath, particularly in eastern Europe, and especially in Poland, where the end of the war did not mean the end of the nightmare for the Jews of Europe. They had their lives made miserable by the Stalinists, then the Nazis, and then by the Stalinists again and the small number who were still alive when May, 1945 arrived, exited the killing fields with nothing more than the shirts on their backs.
(The Holocaust being defined as the organized drive by the Nazis in Germany and their collaborators, who governed at the behest of the German capitalist class, made possible by the betrayal of the Stalinists, to exterminate the Jewish people from Europe and anywhere else they could be isolated and corralled).
In tandem with this was the cold-hearted refusal of the so-called democratic countries, primarily the United Kingdom, Canada and the United States, who were locked in a world war with their imperialist competitors of Japan, Italy and Germany, to allow Jewish refugee’s unhindered passage to safety. This was reason number two that made the founding of Israel inevitable.
Above: Ship carrying 937 Jewish Refugees is turned away at port in Cuba in May of 1939. Imagine the agonizing pain and fear when the smiles turned to tears upon learning that their ship was being sent back to the clutches of the fascists.
Reason number three that made the founding of Israel inevitable was the betrayal of the Stalinists in Germany, under the direction of Moscow, that was so grotesque that it led to Hitler taking power with virtually no resistance from the organized workers movement, which had, at the time, a formable presence.
Above: The Jewish Question by Abram Leon, published by Pathfinder Press, provides an invaluable source to understanding the questions under discussion. Please access the link below to order a copy.
It’s estimated that 150,000 Jews made their way to what would become Israel before, during and in the immediate aftermath of the second imperialist war (1939-1945), with hundreds of thousands more arriving as the pace of expulsions from the Arab countries began to quicken, especially in 1947 and 1948. It’s also worth noting that 400,000 Arabs emigrated to the area as well, during this time. Palestine wasn’t a distinct country as such, but a region, a part of the British Empire, and lots of people lived there, of different ethnicities and religions. Unfortunately, the thermidor in the Soviet Union twenty years earlier made it impossible for the working people to throw up a leadership that would give the workers a fighting chance to cut through the carefully orchestrated divisions contrived by the class enemy.
And so, I ask, exactly where were the Jewish people supposed to go? To the countries where they had already been refused asylum? Back to Poland and other parts of Europe where their homes, farms and property had already been looted and where vicious pogromists awaited them?
Below-Poland: “The massacre started with a blood libel. That wouldn’t be unusual, except this wasn’t the Middle Ages or even Nazi Germany—it was 1946, a year after the end of World War II. All told, 42 Jews were killed that day, including a newborn baby and a woman who was six months pregnant. Another 40 were injured. Women grieving over the coffins of those killed in the Kielce pogrom as they are transported to the burial site in the Jewish cemetery“.
U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy Leah Lahav
There were three million Jews who lived in Poland prior to World War Two. The German imperialists and their Polish collaborators killed over 90% of them. Many of those who remained emigrated to the Levant or elsewhere as soon as was humanely possible. They weren’t colonial settlers, or to use the vernacular of today’s know-nothings, “colonizers”, they were, in fact, refugees. Refugees who had been the victim of a genocide and who were doing their best to stay alive.
The sad truth is, as I’ve already noted, the working-class and its allies were never sufficiently armed to put their stamp on the events as they unfolded, be it the rise of fascism and the Holocaust, the refusal of the imperialist countries to admit Jewish refugees fleeing Europe, or to combat the degeneration within the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and the Communist International, a fight that was led by the great Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky and the Left Opposition, but was defeated.
Nor where they able to mitigate the attempts of the ruling-classes of the Arab lands to expel the Jews, from whence they had lived for centuries. Nor was the revolutionary class able to prevent the subsequent reprisals against Arab working people, which included expulsions and the expropriation of their property, which came to pass after Jordan, Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon, and Syria declared war on the Jewish state one day after its founding.
Furthermore, the working-class remains in a weakened position today, glaringly evident by its inability to launch a serious fight to combat Jew hate within the Levant, and to construct a united front of the toiling people of the region, be they Jewish, Arab, Persian, Kurdish, or Turkish.
Immigration to Israel has slowed since the high mark of the 1950’s, but despite the fact that a Zionist movement no longer exits, but a modern, multinational working-class does, around 20,000 Jews a year make the decision to emigrate. The countries with the highest number of Jews leaving today includes South Africa, Argentina, Russia and France, which highlights in stark relief why the Jewish people continue to fight for the right of Israel to exist as a refuge, and why me and my party supports that right. These numbers are bound to increase in the face of the economic, political, social and moral crisis facing capitalism as the rate of profit continues to decline and inter-imperialist tensions continue to increase.
Above: 1948. Arab villagers unjustly expelled from their homes and villages after the enactment of the United Nations mandate, which brought into being the nation of Israel, and at the same time created a Palestinian homeland. The Jewish state was attacked by Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria, twenty-four hours after the new state was declared. Below: Israel was attacked again in 1967 and 1973 by the same countries save Iraq. Those wars were a disaster for the Arab workers and farmers.
Below: Please find a link to a recent Militant article that describes the expulsion of the Jews from the Arab and Muslim nations of the Middle East and northern Africa in the aftermath of the second imperialist war.
Below: From the Militant article:
Above: 1950. Jews arrive in Israel after being expelled from Yemen.
“One million Jews lived in nine largely Arab countries in the region after World War II — Algeria, Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, Morocco, Syria, Tunisia and Yemen, as well as in Persian Iran — many in communities that had existed for thousands of years. But amid convulsions, pogroms and wars, by 2020 the total Jewish population in these countries had plummeted to only 14,500.”
“Of the 820,000 Jewish refugees fleeing their homelands in the Middle East and North Africa between 1948 and 1972, 586,000 settled in Israel while more than 200,000 found refuge in Europe and North America.”
“In Israel, the influx of Arab Jewish immigrants nearly doubled the population. Today almost half of Israel’s Jewish population descends from these refugees from the surrounding Arab world. In fact, the number of Jews fleeing Arab countries for Israel in the years following Israel’s independence was more than the number of Arabs who fled Israel.”
I’m happy to admit that I’m nowhere close to understanding why there is such a virulent antisemitism within Arab and Muslim culture, including among the working masses, with the exception of a wide swathe of the Iranian and Kurdish population and the Arab citizens of Israel, but it serves no one to deny that this is, in fact, the case.
In addition, immigration to the imperialist countries has brought with it an antisemitic lashing out that’s had a negative impact on the Jews and Arabs living in these countries and civil society as a whole, and it serves no one to deny this, either. The ceasefire crowd, influenced by a percentage of these immigrants as well as those whom we once referred to as the left, is a coalition of Jew haters, woke liberals and bourgeois pacifists, with the Jew haters maintaining ideological dominance. The pro-Hamas “ceasefire” movement is thoroughly reactionary and must be defeated.
But there’s no doubt that the animosity of Arabs and Muslims towards Jews far surpasses the ill will of Jews towards the Arabs and Muslims. I suppose it doesn’t help matters any that four of the governing and semi-governing entities in the Middle East are led by open Jew haters. This includes Iran, the sugar daddy and uber reactionary clerical regime that condones beating to death women for not covering their hair in the proscribed manner, and which is highly unpopular with the Iranian population back home, and Hezbollah, Hamas and the Palestinian Authority.
In addition, the President of Syria, the wretched beast that barrel bombed Palestinian refugee camps in Damascus a few years ago, and the nincompoop Abbas, the corrupt President of the Palestinian Authority, have publicly denied that the Holocaust took place. As an aside, Abbas recently stated that there’s nothing to see in western China where the Muslim minority is being severely oppressed by the Chinese state.
But this begs the question. Where, when and how did this nasty streak germinate in the first place? Well, it’s complicated.
Besides the ancient canards, I’m guessing that much of it has to do with the way the Arab and Muslim lands were carved up by imperialism with a complete disregard for ethnic considerations such as was the case of the Kurds, the lack of bourgeois revolutions and the associated (non) reformation of the Islamic faith, and three humiliating defeats at the hands of Israel which created catastrophic conditions for the beleaguered Palestinian people.
Above: Kurdish fighters rescued and defended the Yazidi from ISIS and defeated the genocidal beasts. The Kurdish people are largely sympathetic to the fight by Israel to defeat Hamas-ISIS, as are the Iranian masses.
However, the prevailing mantra of the 1960’s and 1970’s, that I and so many others cut our teeth on and treated as Gospel, that the migration of Jews to the region known as Palestine, at the behest of the British, were coopted to serve as a bulwark for the interests of British and American imperialism, and which constituted a contrived plot involving the placement of the Jewish people at strategic locations, is patently false and absurd.
Alas, with the discovery of oil in countries like Iraq and Iran, the British quickly changed course and took the bull by the horn for themselves, which is why they established monarchies in most of the Arab countries as an aid to steal the oil that belonged to these countries and to safeguard the profits from the oil they stole.
But there is one thing that has remained the same lo these many years, due to a relationship of class forces that remains unsympathetic to the workers of the world, that the main task of those who consider themselves to be revolutionary socialists is to make available the lessons of our class to our fellow workers and to build revolutionary working-class parties that can then help lead the fight for the establishment of workers and farmers governments.
Defend the right of Israel to exist as a refuge for the Jewish people!
Support the working people and women of Iran as they struggle against the reactionary regime!
For the defeat of the Hamas murderers, rapists and kidnappers, the declared enemy of the people of Israel and Gaza!
For the union of the working people of the Middle East and the world!
ADDEDUM: A friend wrote me after reading this essay and mentioned that the term “safe haven” may not be the most accurate, because the Jewish people will never be completely safe as long as capitalism exits. He suggested “refuge” instead and upon reflection, I think he is right.
The Union Of Workers 