IDOT 17 Zionism and Colonialism

8/20/2019 IDOT 17 Zionism and Colonialism

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In Defence of

TrotskyismNo 17

£1 waged, 50p unwaged/low waged, €

1.50

Zionism and Colonialism

Political Zionism: The Hegemonic

Racism of the early 21

st

Century

By Ian Donovan

The popular image of Ar-abs in some our most be-loved Hollywood moviesactually resembles … thepopular image of Jews inNazi propaganda … Hol-lywood and Washington

share the same genes. Po-litical and economicevents like the crisis ofhigh oil prices in theUnited States as a resultof the refusal of the Ar-abs to export it to us, the(non-Arab) revolution inIran, as well as Al-Qaeda

activities, the events of9/11 and others, exporteda bad, faded image aboutArabs to every Americanhome... a blatant patternof profiling to stereotypethe Arabs and they alsoshowed the similarity of

this stereotype with theracist, anti-Semitic cari-cature and cartoon artthroughout history.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Qaedahttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Qaedahttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Qaedahttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caricaturehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caricaturehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caricaturehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caricaturehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Qaeda


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Where we stand (extracts) 1. We stand with Karl Marx: ‘The emancipation ofthe working classes must be conquered by the work-ing classes themselves. The struggle for the emanci-

pation of the working class means not a struggle forclass privileges and monopolies but for equal rightsand duties and the abolition of all class rule’ (TheInternational Workingmen’s Association 1864, Gen-eral Rules). The working class ‘cannot emancipate

itself without emancipating itself from all othersphere of society and thereby emancipating all otherspheres of society’ (Marx, A Contribution to a Cri-tique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, 1843). 2. In the class struggle we shall fight to develop everystruggle of the working class and oppressed in thedirection of democratic workers’ councils as theinstruments of participatory democracy which must

be the basis of the successful struggle for workers’ power. 5. We fight for rank -and-file organisations in thetrade unions within which we will fight for con-sciously revolutionary socialist leadership in line with

Trotsky’s Transitional Programme statement:“Therefore, the sections of the Fourth Internationalshould always strive not only to renew the top leader-ship of the trade unions, boldly and resolutely incritical moments advancing new militant leaders in

place of routine functionaries and careerists, but alsoto create in all possible instances independent militantorganizations corresponding more closely to the tasksof mass struggle against bourgeois society; and, ifnecessary, not flinching even in the face of a direct

break with the conservative apparatus of the tradeunions. If it be criminal to turn ones back on massorganizations for the sake of fostering sectarian fac-tions, it is no less so passively to tolerate subordina-tion of the revolutionary mass movement to the con-trol of openly reactionary or disguised conservative(“ progressive”) bureaucratic cliques. Trade unions arenot ends in themselves; they are but means along theroad to proletarian revolution.” 6. We totally oppose all economic nationalist cam-

paigns like for ‘British jobs for British workers’ thatmeans capitulation to national chauvinism and so tothe political and economic interests of the ruling classitself. We are therefore unreservedly for a SocialistUnited States of Europe.

8. We fully support of all mass mobilisations againstthe onslaught of this reactionary Troy Government, in particular we stand for the repeal of all the anti-tradeunion laws and strongly opposed the new ones prom-ised. 9. We are completely opposed to man-made climatechange and the degradation of the biosphere which iscaused by the anarchy of capitalist production for

profits of transnational corporations. Ecological ca-

tastrophe is not ‘as crucial as imperialism’ but caused by imperialism so to combat this threat we mustredouble our efforts to forward the world revolution. 11. We also support the fight of all other speciallyoppressed including lesbians and gay men, bisexualsand transgender people and the disabled against dis-crimination in all its forms and their right to organiseseparately in that fight in society as a whole. In par-ticular we defend their right to caucus inside tradeunions and in working class political parties. While

supporting the latter right, we do not always advocateits exercise as in some forms it can reinforce illusionsin identity politics and obscure the need for classunity. 13. We fight racism and fascism. We support the rightof people to fight back against racist and fascist at-tacks by any means necessary. Self -defence is nooffence. It is a legitimate act of self -defence for theworking class to ‘ No Platform’ fascists but we nevercall on the capitalist state to ban fascist marches or

parties; these laws would inevitably primarily be usedagainst workers’ organisations, as history has shown. 14. We oppose all immigration controls. International

finance capital roams the planet in search of profitand imperialist governments disrupts the lives ofworkers and cause the collapse of whole nations withtheir direct intervention in the Balkans, Iraq andAfghanistan and their proxy wars in Somalia and theDemocratic Republic of the Congo, etc. Workershave the right to sell their labour internationallywherever they get the best price. 19. As socialists living in Britain we take our respon-sibilities to support the struggle against British impe-rialism’s occupation of the six north-eastern countiesof Ireland very seriously. For this reason we have

assisted in founding the Irish Republican PrisonersSupport Group and we will campaign for politicalstatus these Irish prisoners of war and for a 32-countyunited Socialist Ireland. We reject ‘two nations inIreland’ theories. 21. We are for the re-creation of a World Party ofSocialist Revolution, a revolutionary international,

based on the best traditions of the previous revolu-tionary internationals, critically understood, particu-larly the early Third and Fourth Internationals, withtheir determination to combat and overcome bothreformism and centrism. It is by orienting to the ranksof workers in struggle, struggles against imperialism,

struggles of oppressed minorities against varied allforms of social oppression, as well as political fer-ment among intellectual layers radicalised throughthese struggles, that we will lay the basis for regroup-ments with forces internationally breaking with re-formism, centrism and various forms of radical popu-lism/nationalism, and seeking to build a new revolu-tionary Marxist international party.

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Socialists (and anti

-racists more general-

ly) have to confront the role of politicalZionists as the chief promoters of open rac-ism today. This means open racism, notracism in general. There are many othertypes of racists active in the advanced capi-talist countries, but with the exception ofthe political Zionists they largely operate inan obscured, crypticmanner in terms of

political discourse.

We have to do this because we do notreduce all questionsinvolving oppressionin a vulgar mannerto economic rela-tions alone. Workingclass politics is morecomplex than that,and class and social antagonisms are re-fracted through, and often obstructed by, asubstantial overlay of questions resultingfrom other complex types of oppression thatcannot be simply reduced to ‘class’. AsLenin put it over a century ago, when deal-ing with often very different concrete ques-tions, but of the same type:

“the Social-Democrat’s ideal should not be

the trade union secretary, but

the tribune ofthe people, who is able to react to everymanifestation of tyranny and oppression, nomatter where it appears, no matter what stra-tum or class of the people it affects” (https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1901/witbd/iii.htm)

The concretes may have changed, but the basic principle is the same. Socialists areconsistent democrats, and need to be able toaddress questions involving such forms ofoppression concretely, completely, and inan up-to-date manner in order to help re-solve them and bring the explicit class as-

pects that underlie them to the fore. In to-day’s circumstances, with a new Intifada seemingly breaking out in Palestine, andwith politics in the imperialist countries,including British politics substantially influ-enced by Zionism, and with injunctionsfrom leading people influenced by it in allthe major parties as to what views are, and

are not, consideredlegitimate in the

body politic, gettingthis right is a matterof the highest im-

portance. Later Iwill deal with someconcrete manifesta-tions of this regard-ing the rise of Jere-my Corbyn to theleadership of the

Labour Party, but first of all it needs a prop-er elaboration and concrete theorisation.

It is necessary to define exactly what wemean by political Zionism. This is a move-ment whose objective is the maintenance byany and all available means of a Jewishethnic state in the territory now known asIsrael, which was taken by force from itsindigenous Arab inhabitants over 70 yearsago, and is still maintaining that state by themost monstrous force against the indige-nous people of Palestine. Though in its coreit is Jewish, Zionism is not just confined toJews. If it were simply a narrowly Jewishmovement it would not be so dangerous andhegemonic. Rather, it has a great moral authority among the ruling classes of theadvanced capitalist countries, in a manneranalogous to the way that white suprema-

cism, anti-

communism, homophobia andeven ironically anti-semitism once had asimilar authority.

Political Zionism: The Hegemonic

Racism of the early 21

st

Century

By Ian Donovan


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There is a com-mon thread to allthese bigoted ideo-logies, which havetaken root as ideo-

logical watchwordsof the bourgeoisiein discrete historical

periods. They are/were all seen by the

bourgeoisie asmeans of ideologi-cal terror againstthe opponents of thecapitalist system,

and thus as meansto preserve a capi-talist social systemthat does not have much appeal to its vic-tims among the working class and exploited

people generally. If the political representa-tives of capitalism proclaimed openly thatthe system was dedicated to the enrichmentof a tiny minority of the population, itwould not last very long. Its strength is inits ability to create ideologies that hide thatreality, that instead provide reasons for sec-tions of the subject population to hate othersections to the benefit of capitalism.

Capitalism lives by scapegoating; this tech-nique is the basis of convincing part of theworking class and middle class populationthat they have a common interest, not with

each other against capital, but with capitalagainst some population oppressed by it.This has always been the purpose of racismin all its varied forms. It was obviously the

purpose of white supremacism, which exist-ed since the dawn of capitalism; to create anideology whereby instead of opposing slav-ery and colonial oppression, part of theworking class particularly of the oppressornations considered that they benefitted insocial terms from the enslavement of the(usually) non-white working class in thecolonial countries.

There was, and still is (in a modifiedform) a material basis for this in that theenormous profits gained initially from thehybrid capitalist form of chattel slaverywere used to fund the industrialisation ofthe first advanced capitalist countries, nota-

bly Britain, France, Holland and later theUnited States. This laid the basis for thesestates to wage extensive wars of conquestaround the globe, and thus for the later ex-

ploitation of colonies and semi-coloniesunder modern monopoly capitalist imperial-ism.

As the gap between the emerging ad-vanced capitalist nations, and the countriesand peoples their ruling classes plunderedand enslaved, grew progressively greater inmaterial terms, some of the wealth thusgained was, and still is, used to buy off alayer of the working class in advancedcountries, with social gains that, it wasclear, depended on the fortunes of ‘their ’imperialist country in the world order. Thiswas justified by the pernicious idea of racialsuperiority and inferiority; this was actuallyalways the basis of imperialist ideology in

the working class.

The doctrine of white ’racial’ superioritywas dominant within imperialist ideologythroughout the colonial period, but suffered


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a seemingly huge, discrediting blow withthe defeat of Nazi Germany in WWII. Hit-ler ’s regime was the concentrated expres-sion of this doctrine; although by virtue ofits defeat in the 1914-18 war Germany’s

colonies in Africa had been taken away.Instead of a colonial empire based on plun-der in what is now known as the GlobalSouth, Nazi Germany concentrated its mainefforts to the East. Its version of ‘racialsuperiority’ treated Slavs, and in a moreconcentrated form Jews and Roma as unter-menschen (subhumans) who were to beexploited as slaves and ultimately extermi-nated for the supposed benefit of the Aryan

übermenschen.

Contradictions and Paradoxes The blow to notions of racial superioritythat resulted from Hitler ’s defeat was notwithout its contradictions, paradoxes andambiguities, however. One being thatthough the ideological roots of NationalSocialism were firmly rooted in white su-

premacism, many if not most of its victims

in the genocidal terror that was concentrat-ed in Europe, were actually white (thoughconsidered not to be ‘Aryan’ according tothe Nazi racial ideology).

The claim that the slaughter of Jews wassimply unique, made today mainly by Jew-ish chauvinists or those who follow ele-ments of their ideology, is false. The Nazigenocide of between 5 and 6 million EastEuropean Jews, today called the Holocaust

or Shoah, took place alongside a similarnumber of non-Jews murdered, including atleast four million Slavs of various national-ities, half a million Gypsies, tens of thou-sands of homosexuals and numerous identi-fied Communists.

It was not even the first such mass killingof millions under modern imperialism. Acomparable slaughter took place, of ap-

proximately 10 million Congolese BlackAfricans, at the hands of the Belgian State,which instituted personal rule of the Congo

by its king, Leopold II, just prior to the

beginning of the 20th Century. This incredi- ble act of mass killing is infinitely less well-known than the slaughter of Jews in WWII(see the 1998 work King Leopold ’ s Ghost

by Adam Hochschild for a comprehensive

account).

The reasons for this lack of knowledgeare several fold; one is that a great deal ofeffort was expended by the Belgian rulingclass to cover it up. They had plenty of helpfrom more powerful imperialist allies; Bel-gium was the casus belli for Britain’s in-volvement in WWI. The violation of the‘neutrality’ of ‘ poor little Belgium’ by Ger-many as a military manoeuvre against its

opponent France was the excuse for Brit-ain’s (already planned) declaration of warin 1914. The portrayal of Belgium as a vic-tim would not be quite so convincing if itwere widely known that Belgian imperial-ism was guilty of an act of slaughter thatmassively exceeded any then known, andthat even Hitler probably did not exceed.

The genocidal slaughter of black Africansin the Belgian Congo is also indicative ofsomething else that is grossly hypocriticalabout the claim of Western imperialism tohave overcome racism. This is only theworst of many atrocities committed againstnon-white peoples by colonial and imperi-alist powers. Yet it was not the slaughter ofdark -skinned Africans that supposedly dis-credited the cause of racial supremacy – onthe contrary the Belgian crime and manyothers in Africa and Asia have been mar-ginalised in public consciousness and areunder -recognised to this day. Rather, it wasthe mass killing of European Jews that issupposedly the seminal event that discredit-ed the notion of racial supremacy.

Yet despite the supposed rejection of ra-cial supremacy that the Jewish Shoah

brought about, imperialism still slaughters people in the Global South who challenge

imperialist domination, and such slaughters proceed unabated, albeit these days oftenunder the banner of ‘humanitarian’ inter-vention instead of racial supremacy. Except


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that where Israel’s dis- possession of the Pales-tinian Arabs is concerned,even this fig leaf is miss-ing as the ‘Jewish state’ is

overtly supremacist andhas openly racist laws.

Cultification of the Shoah

The way this is rational-ised in the West isthrough the cultificationof the Jewish Shoah. Sowhile such events as King

Leopold’s Congo murderof millions are not givenanything like the historical prominence theydeserve, in effect covered up by omission,the Shoah of Jews (though of not Hitler ’sother victims) is sacralised as the ultimatecrime in human history. Jews are portrayedas the ultimate victims, their suffering theShoah is implicitly deemed to put them in adifferent, saintly category to the rest of hu-

manity. For those who subscribe to thishypocritical ideology, which is itself geno-cidal in its logic, past Jewish sufferingmeans that Jews are completely entitled toestablish a Jewish ethnic state in the MiddleEast by expelling the majority of the indig-enous people of Palestine. Furthermore,according to practitioners of this ideology,which include almost all North Americanand West European bourgeois politicians,as well as political servants of the bourgeoi-sie on the so-called left, Israel “has the rightto defend itself ” from the people it dispos-sessed by force, and whom it drove out oftheir own country.

This purely racist concept manifests itselfwhenever Israel decides to “mow the lawn”as it calls its periodic genocidal massacresof the indigenous people whose land it took

by force, and continues to take more andmore of. Whenever this happens, in re-sponse to completely justified rage andhatred from normal, decent working class

people against the beasts who carry outthese ‘mowings’, youhear a caterwaul aboutso called ‘anti-

semitism’ which is purely racist in content.After all, it’s only Ar-abs who are the vic-tims, and they don’treally matter at all,what really matters isthe dominance overthem of Israeli Jews,who are part and parcel

of ‘Judeo-Christian

civilisation’, and sovaluable to the capitalist system itself thatnormal considerations of human decencygo right out of the window. This is themainstream racist ideology in the Westtoday, shot through with a hypocritical,gangrenous pseudo-anti-racism.

One important consequence of suchevents as Leopold’s Congolese carnage

remaining little-known is that it helps to

propagate the myth that the barbarism of Nazi Germany was some kind of aberra-tion, something extraneous, not rooted inthe capitalist mode of production itself.

Nazi Germany is deemed alien to the hu-mane and tolerant ethos of profit-makingthat is supposedly characteristic of capital.

Nazism is bracketed instead with‘communism’. The atrocities of Stalin, Maoetc., along with Hitler, are depicted as sup-

posedly in a completely different,‘totalitarian’ category to ‘normal’ capitalistsociety.

But these distinctions are phoney. In fact both Nazism and Stalinism are products ofthe class struggle that is organic to capital-ism, from which it can never escape what-ever stratagems its ruling class may resortto. Both, in rather different ways, were


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movements directed against the workingclass. Nazism was a mass movement of thedespairing petty-trading middle class and

powerless, chronically unemployed whowere used by German capitalists as a bat-

tering ram to smash the strongest labourmovement in Europe when German capitalfaced the deepest, most crippling crisis inits history during the depression of the1930s.

It was only able to do this because theGerman labour movement was politicallydominated by the Social Democratic la-

bour bureaucracy, which had proven itsloyalty to capitalism in 1914-1918 by its

support to the imperialist war effort. Thissame loyalty and servility to capital meantthey refused to fight Hitler ’s fascist terrormovement with the methods of civil war;under their misleadership the Germanworkers were crushed without resistance.

The German Communist Party (KPD)was supposed to be the revolutionary oppo-sition to this. It had been founded by princi-

pled fighters for the working class who had

been the most determined opponents of theimperialist world war. Key founders of the

party were murdered in 1919 by the ultra-right acting in an uneasy alliance with the

pro-war right-wing social democrats in thecontext of an incipient, spontaneous work-ing class revolution. The infant CommunistParty, knowing it was too small and inexpe-rienced to lead the revolutionary upsurge tovictory, attempted to give what leadership itcould while minimising the danger of acrushing defeat for the working class. How-ever this cost them the death of some oftheir best leaders: Luxemburg, Liebknecht,Jogiches and others.

The KPD never recovered from the lossof its revolutionary founders, and it becamea casualty of the degeneration of the Rus-sian revolution. A series of lesser leader-ships were imposed on it by the degenerat-ing regime in Russia, which was becomingincreasingly hostile to the possibility ofworking class revolution anywhere else.

But it had acquired the means to controllarge Communist Parties in some parts ofthe world, and to impose on them policiesthat served the interests, not of the workingclass in their own countries, but of theclique around Stalin in the USSR. For itsown factional- prestige reasons, the Stalin

regime at that point saw social democracyas its main enemy, so it directed its tameleadership of the German CP to pursue a

bizarre policy of denouncing the Germansocial democrats as ‘social fascists’ andeven at times allying with the Nazis againstthem. The actually had the effect of makinga united fight against fascism of the Ger-man workers impossible – it also played acrucial role, alongside the servility of thesocial democrats themselves, in allowingHitler to win without any serious resistance.

These events took place in a much widercontext: the defeat of the post-World War Irevolutionary wave in the advanced West-ern countries, most crucially Germany,meant that the only place where a victoriousrevolution had taken place was backwardRussia. The confinement of the workingclass to an isolated, but massive, backwardcountry where the urban workers were mas-sively outnumbered by peasants based on

backward rural economy, meant that social-

The memorial to Rosa Luxemburg at theLandwehr Canal where her body was dumpedby the far right Freikorps. Social Democratic

leader Friedrich Ebert had ordered the bloodysuppression of the January 1919 revolution.


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ism, always conceived of as an internation-al endeavour involving at minimum severalof the most advanced countries acting to-gether, was in the given situation impossi-

ble.

The Soviet state did not thereby cease toexist; rather a new conservative layer arosewithin the Communist Party itself, which

by degrees manoeuvred the genuine inter-nationalist communist elements out of pow-er, and then repressed them savagely in acounterrevolutionary bloodletting at theend of the 1930s that rivalled the repressioninstituted by fascism in the capitalist coun-tries. This amounted to the working class

being pushed out of power and replaced byan anomalous form of class rule based on astate bureaucracy, which mimicked theexploitative role of capital while taking halfa century to openly break with the formalideology of the revolution and the stateowned economy that was created by it.

For all that this regime continued to callitself ‘communist’, continued for decadesto rule a state-owned economy, and even

managed to attract imitator ‘communist’movements in a number of backward coun-tries, such as China, Vietnam, even Cuba.These were not working class movementsseeking international socialism on the basisof working class democracy and the mostadvanced productive forces.

Rather they were middle class/peasantnationalist movements, looking for an alter-native way for backward countries to in-

dustrialise using a centralised state as aweapon as with the Russian example, incountries where capitalism itself appearedat that time to have led these countries intoa morass of foreign domination, enslave-ment and paralysis. These regimes in effectsaved capitalism from itself, through attain-ing independence, unification, and the con-ditions for the emergence of viable nationalcapitalist markets in countries that had ear-lier been plundered and ruined by imperial-ist predation to the point that the traditionalforms of capitalist rule had become tempo-

rarily unviable.These Stalinist regimes were not an alter-

native to capital in historic terms, but actedas something akin to a plaster cast for thecapitalist system, a rigid framework be-

neath which the broken bones of local capi-talism could repair themselves. Contrary tothe demonology and myth-making of out-right apologists for capitalism and imperial-ism, these regimes were not the creation offanatics and extremists; the very fact thatmasses of the people sought an alternativeto capital in the first place was becauseimperialist capital had driven these socie-ties to the point of social collapse. Their

rejection of supposed ‘ultra-leftism’ and

‘Trotskyism’ was not some obscure pointof doctrine, but rejection of the workingclass itself, in pursuit of a programme thatgave these hybrid bureaucratic regimes ofstatified capital a regent-like character, thatwas ultimately pro-capitalist in a profoundsense, paving the way for the rebirth ofcapitalism proper. Thus the politics of Yelt-sin were not a divergence from the politics

of Stalin; the politics of Deng Xiaopingwere not a divergence from that of MaoZedong; they were rather the logical de-scendants of the earlier phase.

Shifts in the imperialist ‘racial’hierarchy

This may appear as a digression from thesubject matter of this article, but it is not.Zionism is not a parochial movement con-

fined to the Middle East, but rather some-thing that plays an important role in severalimperialist countries, notably the UnitedStates, but also in Western Europe. In dis-cussing the rise of such a movement to

prominence, and the world role that it actu-ally plays in the present phase of the epochof capitalist-imperialist decline, the widerworld context in which such developmentstook place also needs to be understood. Therole of would

- be communist movements

internationally, especially given the powerthat those movements wielded through the


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period we arediscussing, is a

part of this in-ternational con-text, which

cannot be ana-lysed in Marx-ist terms with-out touching onthis question, atleast in its mostimportant fea-tures.

These events are important for under-standing how Zionism gained the hegemon-

ic position in bourgeois politics that it hastoday. It is bound up with a major change inthe position of Jews in the pecking order of

peoples that is inevitable in a world dividednot just into classes, but also into a systemof nation-states in which a number ofwealthy imperialist countries systematicallyextract tribute from less wealthy nations andthe corresponding peoples that underliethem. Thus overlaying the class divisions

between the working class and the bour-geoisie are massively unequal relationships

between peoples. The ruling classes ofsome nations actually play a role in sup-

pressing the economic and political devel-opment of other peoples, though plunder,and both direct and indirect exploitation.Thus we get the phenomenon of oppressorand oppressed peoples, in all its variation,which contaminates the ‘ pure’ class strug-

gle with complex national questions.

Also overlaying this is the oppression ofimportant ethnic minorities in the imperial-ist countries. For instance, there is the op-

pression of the black population of the Unit-ed States, which was derived from slaveryin the early capitalist period, and (BarackObama notwithstanding) is still a long wayfrom real equality. There is the oppressionof aboriginal peoples in a number of formercolonial

-settler states, in Australia and New

Zealand where this is still a major socialquestion; or for that matter in the United

States and Can-ada where theremnants of the

Native Ameri-can population

have been driv-en to the mar-gins and treatedas pariahs. Inthe past therewere colonial-derived settler

states where formal racial discriminationwas state policy, such as apartheid SouthAfrica and ‘Rhodesia’. Something similar in

some ways is being attempted in OccupiedPalestine though there are some importantdifferences.

There is also the situation of numerousimmigrants from ex-colonies in the imperi-alist countries, such as Afro-Caribbeans,South Asians, and latterly Africans in theUK, Maghrebin Arabs and others in France,as well as Black Africans and those fromFrench Caribbean dependencies, Turkish

‘guest workers’ in Germany, to the oppressed Roma population in much of East-ern Europe, Caucasians and those from for-mer Soviet Central Asia in Russia, or eventhe Korean migrant population in Japan.More recently migrations of East Europeansin the EU free movement context, havecomplicated, but not fundamentallychanged, these issues.

All of these questions involve the creation

of ethnic (or ‘racial’) hierarchies throughhistorical processes, both within and with-out the imperialist countries. All of them arein some way abound up with the enforce-ment of some kind of servitude or secondclass status on entire peoples, to the extentthat it is true that the majority of humanityis not just subject to exploitation in thesense of a worker under capitalism, but isalso to some additional form of national orracial oppression on top of that. Somethingthat in practice deprives them even of equalstatus with ordinary working class people of

King Leopold and his families in Belgium and the Congo.


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the imperialist countries,who themselves constitutean exploited and often semi-suppressed class. Thesekinds of relations between

peoples, once consolidatedunder capitalism, have tend-ed to become intractable, aninherent part of the system,to the point that it is obviousto anyone who seriouslystudies such things in theirhistorical sweep that the realemancipation of these peo-

ples from such systematic

oppression can only fullytake place when capitalismis abolished.

The exception to therule

There is one glaring excep-tion to this: one formerlyoppressed population thatunder capitalism has es-

caped from oppression anddegradation, and even aserious attempt at genocidein the middle of the 20th Century, to ascend the de-facto hierarchy of peoplesthat capitalism has createdright to the top. Jews have,uniquely under capitalism,escaped from being a semi-

pariah population in theearly 20th century to being

joint top dogs of the imperi-alist world in the early 21st Century. Symbolic of this isthe term ‘Judeo-Christiancivilisation’ that is habitual-ly used by ideologues ofWestern imperialism to de-note the supposedly innatesuperiority of the West to its

perceived ‘others’. By de-grees, this has become the

dominant narrative; sincethe 1967 war at least it wasthe default view, marginalis-ing the anti-Jewish themesof the previous manifesta-

tions of imperialist reaction.In the 2000s, with the erup-tion of imperialism’s ‘waron terror ’: ideological coverfor an attempted partial re-colonisation of part of the

Middle East by imperialiststates, it has become a fe-verish, militaristic barely-disguised racist narrative inits own right.

The reversal of the posi-tion of the Jews in imperial-ism’s pecking order of peo-

ples has a materialist expla-nation. Unlike virtually eve-ry other victimised popula-tion that has been subjectedto racial oppression undercapitalism, Jews were never,except in the circumstancesof the actual attempt at gen-ocide, an enslaved popula-tion of colonial-type sub-

jects. Rather, the Jewish population was a differenttype of pariah populationwith a complex origin

bound up with their eco-nomic role in pre-capitalist

European society. Theywere a commodity-tradingand later money-trading

people-class, in societies

where commodity exchange,let alone commodity pro-duction (which was virtuallyunknown), was an activity atthe margins of the economicsystem, which was based onnatural, agricultural econo-my and a form of exploita-tion based on the appropria-

tion of material goods (i.e.use values in Marxistterms), not exchange values.

This is a complex subject,which has been treated infull elsewhere. It wastouched on by Karl Marx inhis celebrated early essayOn the Jewish Question. Theunderstanding of the Jews as

a people-class of traders in

pre-capitalist society waselaborated at length inAbram Leon’s notable workThe Jewish Question: A

Marxist Interpretation, andsome extensions of thisanalysis were much morerecently put forward by my-self in a series of articles onthe website Communist Ex-

plorations, most synthetical-ly in the Draft Theses on the

Jews and Modern Imperial-ism.

The core of this under-standing is that the pariahrole of the Jews was a tran-sitory phenomenon that was

not organic to capitalism, but rather was a hangoverfrom the late feudal period,when their pre-capitalist role


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as a ‘foreign’ commodity-trading class wasrendered superfluous by the emergence ofthe bourgeoisies as competitors. They were

pushed to the margins and became a pariahlayer associated above all with usury,

forced into ghettos by feudalism whichincreasingly used them as a scapegoat formass discontent with a disintegrating eco-nomic system, while at the same time beingregarded as insidious competitors by theemerging native bourgeoisies.

This pariah status and oppression, as wellas the wide-ranging international tradingconnections of the Jews derived from theirstatus as a religious minority in many coun-

tries, led to their being radicalised both asan intellectual layer and an artisan proletar-iat, and in those roles playing an importantrole both in the bourgeois revolutions,where the demand for Jewish emancipationfrom the ghetto was an important democrat-ic issue, and in the early working class,socialist and communist movement. At thesame time, the centuries-long experience ofJewish traders, merchant and usurers in the

world of commodities gave them a culturaladvantage in the new capitalist societiesthat were based on generalised commodity

production and exchange. Part of the Jew-ish population was therefore absorbed intothe bourgeoisies of the new capitalist coun-tries in Europe and then North America,and became often extremely successful, in a

proportion far beyond the proportion ofJews in the general population.

This combination, of successful Jewishcapital, and Jewish participation in theworking class movement, was the material

base that gave birth to a peculiar, racist anddeeply reactionary ideology, classical anti-semitism, when capitalism ceased to be anexpanding, progressive system in the late19th century. This ideology was based on acounter -revolutionary racist demonology; itsaw Jewish bourgeois as the financiers of aJewish

-led subversive movement against

‘Christian’ civilisation. This was initiallythe ideology of late-feudal reaction in 19th

Century Tsarist Russia, where the largeJewish population was subjected to viciousattacks and pogroms. But as many Jewishrefugees fled Russia to the West, the ideol-ogy of ‘anti-semitism’ and the Tsarist for-

gery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion became a major force in European politicsfirst in France with the Dreyfus case, thenin Germany in the early-to-mid 20th Centu-ry, culminating in the rise of the genocidalanti-Jewish National Socialists under Hit-ler ’s leadership.

Some say that the defeat of Nazi Germa-ny and the exposure of its mass slaughter ofthe Jews, along with other less well-

regarded minorities such as Roma and ho-mosexuals, a considerable number of Slavs,as well as many communist and socialists,were decisive in discrediting racism. It isironic then that today, the one state in theWestern ‘family’ of nations based on the‘Judeo-Christian’ tradition that openly

propagates ethnic criteria for whom it re-gards as a real citizen of the state, andwhich openly engages in violent, oppres-

sive treatment and even mass expulsions of(non-Jewish) people indigenous to its sup-

posed national territory on ethnic grounds,is Israel: the Jewish state. It is also notablethat this savage ethnocratic oppressiontakes place with the fulsome approval of itsWestern allies in Europe and America, withonly the occasional half -hearted slap on thewrist when Israel ‘goes too far ’ in someincredible atrocity against its indigenousPalestinian Arab population.

This suggests that the outcome of WorldWar II was not the straightforwardly devas-tating defeat for racism that Western impe-rialist liberal apologists would like to pre-tend it was. Rather, it suggests that imperi-alist racism underwent a quasi-revolutionary transformation of its form,into something more sophisticated, moresynthetic, and in many ways more perni-cious and hypocritical. However, it was stillracism in real practice: an ideology that,whatever its finer points, justified the sys-


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tematic oppression and repression of themass of the people of entire ethnic groups,

based on a rationale that considered thosegroups as in some way collectively inferiorand expendable for the supposedly greater

good of the dominant peoples. Jews hadnow joined the dominant peoples, as indi-cated by the increasingly prevalent tropeabout ‘Judeo-Christian civilisation’.

Transformation into the opposite The reason for this is not obvious, but can

be explained by historical materialist analy-sis. One of the very factors that had createdthe conditions where ‘anti-semitic’ racism,

and indeed the Nazi genocide, could take place, had been transformed into a novelway into its opposite. Prior to the genocide,as mentioned earlier, the combination of thedisproportionate success of Jewish bour-geois in capitalist business with the radicalrole of Jews in the workers movement had

produced anti-semitism as a racist, coun-terrevolutionary paranoia among the non-Jewish imperialist bourgeoisie.

The Nazi genocide dealt a savage blow toJewish radicalism, by physically extermi-nating an enormous number of communistand socialist Jews. But it also dealt an evenmore devastating blow, as the sheer barba-rism involved and the lack of effective soli-darity that such Jews received from the(previously crushed) non-Jewish proletariatin Germany and its expanded Reich laid the

basis for the political displacement of Jew-

ish socialism by Zionism, as a nationalistmovement that, even though it initially tookleft-sounding forms, had a deeply divisiveand anti-communist logic. And thirdly,though the Jewish bourgeoisie sufferedgrievous losses in the Third Reich, theoverrepresentation of Jews among the bour-geoisie that had in part prompted the rise ofanti-semitic agitation (the “socialism offools”, as Bebel called it), remained com-

pletely intact in the United States, not tomention the UK and other European impe-rialist countries, even if some did have to

take refuge elsewhere for the duration ofthe conflict with Hitler.

In other words, what WWII and the geno-cide brought about was an ideological revo-lution, a major qualitative and regressive

leap in the consciousness of the Jewish people. The pro-working class, radical part ofthe Jewish people was physically wipedout, and where it was not, was ideologicallywiped out. This regressive change is irre-versible in terms of the specific peculiarityof the Jewish people as a partial vanguardof socialism prior to the genocide: thesespecific elements of Jewish consciousnessand the vanguard role they once played are

gone, and can never be re-created.

A crucial indication of this is also repre-sented by a major change in the relationship

between Jews and the Communist move-ment, both the genuine internationalist(‘Trotskyist’) minority, and more signifi-cantly in terms of brute social power atleast, the degenerated ‘Communist’ move-ments led by Stalin and his successors, bothwithin and without the USSR. The previous

radicalisation of the Jews as a result of theiranomalous position in early capitalism ledto Jewish intellectuals and workers playinga disproportionate, and thoroughly progres-sive, vanguard role in the early socialist andcommunist movement. However, the de-cline of genuine internationalist com-munism with the degeneration of the Stalin-led communist movement from internation-alism to ‘socialism in one country’, and

then the rise of third-world surrogate

-

nationalist movements in ‘Communist’ garbled by the likes of Mao, Ho Chi Minh, Cas-tro and Guevara, produced a fairly general-ised rift of Jews with the communist move-ment.

Both the internationalism of the bulk ofthe early communist movement, and theinternationalism of the radical Jews whosupported it, were extinguished and werereplaced by symmetrical forms of reaction-ary nationalism. Where communist Jewswere not exterminated by the fascists, many


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lost the real internationalist element withintheir tradition and became Zionists, seekingthe re-creation of a 2000-year -old semi-mythical Levantine Jewish state in the con-ditions of modern capitalism: a totally reac-

tionary goal. Some hid the reactionary implications of

this, even from themselves, by projecting a‘socialist’ Israel – the USSR even armed theinfant Israeli state, before

being quickly rebuffed. Overtime the rift between Zion-ised Jews and the Stalinistregimes became a massiveone; the participation of

many Western Jews withIsraeli government support-ers in campaigns to ‘FreeSoviet Jewry’ (they hoped tosettle these in Israel) wasalso a crucial factor in turn in

bringing about an equallydrastic change in the view ofthe non-Jewish imperialist

bourgeoisie towards Jews.

Whereas previously theyhad often looked at the Jew-ish bourgeoisie with suspi-cion, as a potential danger to them, nowwith the defeat of the Jewish left, they be-gan to develop the opposite conception,which is the case today. As part of the out-come of these events, the non-Jewish bour-geoisie has come to regard its Jewish com-

patriots as a priceless resource of the capi-talist system itself, a kind of vanguard, classconscious layer, the bearer of a culturewhose connection with commodity ex-change is older than capitalism itself, as asystem based on the generalisation of com-modity production and exchange. This be-came clear in the post WWII period, partic-ularly after the rise of Israel and the 1967war. It was manifested in the rise of neo-liberalism, with ideologues like MiltonFriedman, and then neo

-conservatism in

Cold War II and later the neo-colonial warsagainst the Muslim world, with the very

prominent role of Zionist ideologues, oftenJewish, in these bourgeois political move-ments and trends which have become prettywell hegemonic in bourgeois politics.

Vanguard of imperialist racism

And that is the take-off point for the situa-tion we have today. Zionism has become thevanguard of racism in the main, traditional

imperialist countries. Zionistsare the vanguard of anti-Muslim agitation, they have

been the core of the neo-conservative movement thathas been, and still is, the van-

guard of imperialist milita-rism in the Middle East. To areal extent, they are seen as avanguard by the imperialistruling classes in the mostadvanced countries. This hasa material basis; for the his-torical reasons mentionedearlier, Jews have always

been over -represented in the

bourgeoisie of the advancedWestern capitalist countries.In the earlier period of Jewish

involvement in genuine revolutionary anti-capitalism, this was seen as threatening bymany non-Jewish bourgeois in the imperial-ist countries.

But with the revolutionary change of con-sciousness referred to earlier among bothJews and the non-Jewish bourgeoisie, this

has been transformed into its opposite. Jewsare now seen as almost the Holy of Holies

by the Western imperialist bourgeoisie. This process was inseparable from the rise of thestate of Israel with its peculiar citizenshiplaw, the Law of Return, which gives every-one regarded as Jewish in the conventionalsense the right to Israeli citizenship. Thusthe overrepresentation of Jews in the rulingclasses of the imperialist countries added an

additional element; that overrepresentedlayer acquired a material stake in anotherstate, one they had already been considera-

Zionist Milton Friedman,

advisor to Ronald Reaganand Margaret Thatcher.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronald_Reaganhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Thatcherhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Thatcherhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronald_Reagan


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bly involved in funding and bringing intoexistence in the earlier period on the basisof a Zionist-nationalist vision. What in ef-fect happened is that part of the ruling clas-ses of the Western countries came to over-

lap with the ruling class of Israel, the mostrecently and artificially created of the ad-vanced-capitalist, imperialist states. That isthe material basis of Zionist power in theadvanced capitalist countries; the ‘moral’authority of Zionism and Israel has had itsown autonomous elements, but materially itis based on that.

Corbyn, Labour and Zionism

This has particular relevance for what hasrecently happened in the British LabourParty, when a working class revolt from

below has expressed itself in a rejection ofneo-liberalism and the imperialist milita-rism of the neo-conservatives, as most clas-sically expressed by the foul legacy of TonyBlair. This has been done, not surprisingly,against the bitter opposition, resistance andhatred of Zionists, with the Jewish Chroni-

cle playing a particularly prominent role.

Zionists played an enormously prominentrole in attacking the Corbyn campaign, andit has to be said that the British workingclass movement is not yet armed politicallyto deal with this. At this point in time theworking class movement is unable to give acomplete political answer to Zionism’switch-hunting methods and strategies, be-cause it lacks a coherent and consistent

Marxist understanding of the Jewish Ques-tion and its implications. But the analysislaid out above does answer the basic pointsthat need to be addressed in combattingthis, now dominant, form of racism in theimperialist countries.

Contrary to the disingenuous rantings andsophistry that has been oozing through the

bourgeois press, and finding ready supportin a number of ‘ pro-war -left’ or left-neocon

blogs, the reason that Corbyn has been tar-geted is precisely because he is an anti-racist and because, despite his left social

democratic political limitations, this anti-racism has led him to solidarise with thevictims and opponents, some of whom areflawed, others of which are politically con-fused, of this historically specific type of

racism and virulent reactionary nationalismthat is hegemonic in Western societies to-day.

Distinction between oppressor andoppressed

The attacks on Corbyn for fraternising withHamas and Hezbollah, for instance, duringhis victorious election campaign, weretrumpeted far and wide by the bourgeois

media and echoed by Blairite shill’s andeven some left Zionists in and around theLabour Party, such as the Alliance forWorkers Liberty, who are in the embarrass-ing position of attacking Corbyn from theright and trying to curry favour with allkind of foul pro-imperialist war and anti-Arab ‘left’ bigots, while at the same timeneeding for reasons of historical attachmentto keep one foot in the camp of the far left.Therefore they were compelled to supportCorbyn’s election campaign, even though intheir own terms they continually had tohold their noses because of the frequentintrusion of genuinely left-wing, anti-Zionist sentiments into it. This is their acutecontradiction, and given their long politicalassociation with all kinds of reactionary pro-imperialist reactionaries and bigots, notone that we should have any confidencewill be resolved positively from the point ofview of the left.

Corbyn has been forced somewhat on thedefensive when accused of sharing plat-forms with Hamas and Hezbollah militantsat events opposing Israeli crimes against thePalestinians and Lebanese, and has rational-ised his addressing their representatives as‘friends’ as simply a diplomatic form of

address to people he nevertheless stronglydisagrees with and seeks to persuade of the benefits of ‘ peace’. This is actually an un-necessary concession to bourgeois ‘ public


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opinion’, and is reflective of a contradic-tion and weakness in Corbyn’s own ideolo-gy. ‘Peace’ is all very well, but as we aresure he would agree when pressed, peace isonly possible when legitimate grievances

are fully addressed and when oppressioncomes to an end.

In which case, Corbyn has nothing toapologise for about engaging in joint pro-test activity and campaigning against Zion-ist and imperialist oppression with repre-sentatives of the Palestinians and LebaneseShia Muslims who have systematically (inthe case of the Palestinians) and periodical-ly (in the case of the Lebanese Shia) been

murdered and oppressed by racist ZionistIsrael, with Western support, for decades.Those who scream about the supposed‘anti-semitism’ of Hamas and Hezbollah,and thereby imply that Israeli-Jewisharmed settlers (which is what, in reality all adult Israelis amount to in current politicalconditions) are in some sense the actual or

potential victims of their ‘racism’, arethemselves peddling an anti-Arab, racistnarrative.

Anti-racism cannot ever be an injunctionon the oppressed to love their oppressorsand not to hold views of them that aretinged with hatred, even if expressed inreligious and/or racialized terms. Racism isnot about the oppressed holding suchviews about their oppressors. Racism israther an expression in ideological terms ofa power relation that an oppressor peoplemaintain in oppressing an oppressed peo-

ple. It systematically regards the oppressed people as in some sense of a lower order,as deserving of the oppression visited uponthem.

This understanding is the basis of theelementary distinction that Marxists havealways made between the nationalism ofthe oppressor and the nationalism of the

oppressed, or between the violence of theoppressor and the violence of the oppressed. As Trotsky said of this issue inTheir Morals and Ours:

“A slave-owner who through cunning andviolence shackles a slave in chains, and aslave who through cunning or violence breaks the chains – let not the contemptibleeunuchs tell us that they are equals before acourt of morality!” (https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1938/

morals/morals.htm)

In this sense, the record is quite clear. Pal-estinians have been driven out of their ownhomeland for the past 70 years, and thosein the additional parts of Palestine Israelconquered in 1967 have been under Israeliracist-terrorist rule for 50 years. The Leba-nese Shia, the main Lebanese populationthat has been periodically targeted for mas-sacre by Israel since Begin’s day, are like-

wise in a power relation with Israel that iscrystal clear. What is true of violence andnationalism is also true today of religiousfundamentalism or even so-called‘racism’ (or ‘anti-semitism’) by supportersof these movements – we distinguish be-tween the ideologies and actions of theoppressor, and the oppressed.

So actually, ‘concern’ about ‘anti-semitism’ by supporters of Hezbollah and

Hamas in the context of Israeli ethnic-cleansing and mass terrorism is akin to

‘concern’ about ‘anti-white racism’ among


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blacks in the context of apartheid SouthAfrica, or white ‘Rhodesia’, or Jim Crow inAmerica, and all manner of other racistcrimes. It is racist demonology.

While Marxists do not subscribe to the

programmes of these movements or the ide-ologies that underpin them, neither do weconsider them in any way comparable to theracism of Israel and its supporters and apol-ogists in the West. They actually arose, to aconsiderable extent, because of the success-ful actions of Zionism in destroying andhumiliating earlier, secular movementsagainst Zionist oppression.

Which make these Zionist attacks on the

‘reactionary’ politics of their supportersdoubly hypocritical. There should be noconcession to the calumnies about the ‘anti-semitism’ of the Arab victims of Zionism,

but rather those who raise these ‘concerns’should receive a robust response.

It is these critics who are the racists, whoare inverting the relation between the op-

pressor and the oppressed in the MiddleEast in a truly Orwellian manner.

They are in reality devotees of the domi-nant racist narrative of the bourgeoisie ofthe ‘Judeo-Christian’ imperialist countries,using this anti-Arab, anti-Muslim narrativeto justify massacres, ethnic cleansing andthe threat of nuclear war in their neo-colonial offensive that has reduced much ofthe Middle East to chaos and bloodshed.

Paul Eisen and the Holocaust Then there is the other question Corbyn wascastigated about (by the Daily Mail and the

Jewish Chronicle, among others) during hiscampaign for the leadership – his supportingevents by so-called ‘anti-semites’ and Holo-caust Deniers. Most importantly, Corbynwas denounced for having attended eventsorganised by Deir Y assin Remembered , anorganisation that was founded mainly byJews and Israeli expats to commemorate the

Zionist massacre of over 100 Palestinianvillagers at Deir Yassin, on the edge ofWest Jerusalem, in April 1948. The Director

of Deir Y assin Remembered is Paul Eisen, aBritish Jew who lives in North London.

Any examination of Eisen’s materialwould reveal that he is deeply sensitive tothe crimes that have been committed in the

name of the Jewish people (and therebyhimself), and has an emotional response tothis that may be eminently comprehensible,

but is hardly the best way to achieve politi-cal clarity. He embodies a deep sense ofguilt for crimes committed by his own peo-

ple, as he sees it. This is not an unfamiliar phenomenon to those active on the left. Onesometimes comes upon those who have asimilar response to their British, German or

American heritage, and are consumed withguilt about the crimes of imperialism. Thisis not usually a working class response;however neither is it anything to fear, it can

be the beginning of wisdom if those usuallyquite middle-class radicalised types breakwith their guilt reaction and seek to analyseimperialism politically, using Marxist meth-ods of analysis.

What is relatively new is coming across

Jewish people who have a similar guiltcomplex about their own Jewish origin.This is evidently the case with Eisen, whohas reacted to the cultification of the Shoah and its use to justify crimes against the Pal-estinians today, by publicly expressingstrong doubts about the truth of key aspectsof the Shoah, particularly the existence ofgas chambers and whether there was ever a

Nazi plan to exterminate Europe’s Jews in1941

-5. He considers that Jews were sub-

jected to arbitrary imprisonment, starvationand slave-labour which caused many deaths,

but was aimed at ethnic cleansing and expulsion, not mass extermination, and thatthe number of Jewish victims was thereforeinflated, partly by inaccurate estimates ofthe Jewish pre-war population.

This is a fair summary of Eisen’s viewsand motivations, some of which are stillavailable on the web. His personal websitewas made private when his views and activ-ities became a political issue during Jeremy


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Corbyn’s election campaign. Corbynhimself had attended some events of DeirYassin Remembered , most recently in2013, when he was pictured at a publicevent along with Gerald Kaufman, the

‘father of the House [of Com-mons]’ (longest serving MP) who in hisyounger days had been a fervent and ide-alistic Zionist; in later life he became oneof the most outspoken Jewish critics ofIsraeli crimes and himself has been fre-quently denounced as a ‘self -hating Jew’. Itappears that Corbyn sometimes gave dona-tions to this grouping for its work in com-memorating a hideous, too-little-known

massacre and bringing it to public attention.

Eisen’s views are misguided and histori-cally wrong. Apart from the dubious factual

basis of the material he directly cites, main-ly gleaned from dubious sources on the old-style far right concerned to minimize Hit-ler ’s crimes (which Eisen accepts withoutany real examination of motives, a productof his guilt about current crimes), his analy-sis accepts one key aspect of Zionist ideolo-

gy that neither he nor most of his detractorseven notice – the view that the Nazi Geno-cide was really only about the Jews.

But it was not: half a million Roma gyp-sies were also wiped out by the Nazis. Alsoseveral million Slavs, gays and communists.Jehovah’s Witnesses even. Jews had thehighest death toll because they were thetarget group with the highest population, butit was not all about the Jews. But while Ei-sen has become fixated with debunking theessentially true but misused facts about theactual slaughter of Jews, many of his mostvehement critics share this focus on the Jew-ish ownership of the Shoah. But unlike Ei-sen, most of these do this same thing from astraightforwardly Jewish chauvinist stand-

point.

Jewish racism against … Jews? After all, racism is above all a reflection ofreal relations of oppression. Judge in thatregard, the allegations of ‘racism’ that have

been flung at Eisen, and were also flung atCorbyn by association. How on earth is Ei-sen a racist in propagating his (incorrect)views on the Shoah? Is he, as a Jew, en-

gaged in some form of oppression of otherJews by means of his opinions? Not at all,the idea is absurd, since (a) Jews are not anoppressed minority, but a rather well-off andin many ways privileged minority in Britishsociety today, and (b) if they were in someways oppressed, they would then have a lotmore to worry about than the views of amistaken Jewish individual like Eisen. Thehounding of Eisen by the media to get at

Corbyn was an act of chauvinistic bullying by the most powerful gang of organisedracists in Western societies today. It is thekind of thing the workers movement needsto oppose. But to oppose things like this, itis necessary to understand the complexitiesof the question and why this is necessary.

This is a problem also with some whoaspire to be anti-Zionists and supporters ofthe Palestinians. For instance, when the‘scandal’ of Corbyn’s sometime associationwith Deir Y assin Remembered was in fullswing, and Corbyn had issued the necessarystatements pointing out that he had no sym-

pathy for Eisen’s views (obviously true),then a letter was put together by a bunch ofJewish leftists ‘defending’ Corbyn againstthe attacks of the Jewish Chronicle:

“You report Paul Eisen as saying that Jeremy

Corbyn donated to Deir Yassin Remembered.So did many people before discovering theexistence of anti-semites and Holocaust-deniers in the organisation. Many people


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attended the occasional fundraising concertthat DYR organised, without either knowingof or sympathising with Mr Eisen’sviews.” (http://www.thejc.com/news/uk -news/142553/anti-israel-activists-attack - jc-challenging- jeremy-corbyn)

What is notable about this letter is two-fold.One is that while it is obviously correct forCorbyn to dissociate himself from Eisen’sviews, which no-one has ever seriously sug-gested he had anything in common withanyway, this letter attacks Paul Eisen as an‘anti-semite’, i.e. as a racist. This goes fur-ther than simply dissociating the authors(and Corbyn) from Eisen’s views. The other

point is that this letter does not mention thatEisen is actually Jewish himself. This is notaccidental. For if it had mentioned this, itwould have somewhat undercut elements ofideology that these leftists share with the

Jewish Chronicle and the main bevy of Jew-ish chauvinists attacking Corbyn.

Attacking a Jewish person as ‘anti-semitic’ is very odd. In situations where realoppression is taking place, in Nazi Germa-

ny, for instance, or in Israel/Palestine today,it is perfectly possible for some member ofthe oppressed population to betray theirown people. There are examples, both cur-rent and historical. Many Palestinians con-sider, with good reason, the sinister formerPLO official Mohammad Dahlan, to be anIsraeli agent. There were good grounds, intimes past, to consider the Stern Gang(Lehi) terrorist and later Israeli Prime Min-

ister Yitzhak Shamir to be a Nazi collabora-tor. Similar things occur in every struggleagainst oppression, in South Africa duringthe anti-apartheid struggle the Zulu chiefButhelezi was a blatant collaborator andtraitor. During the Jim Crow period in theUS, the phenomenon of the ‘Uncle Tom’was also well known – Booker T Washing-ton was perhaps the best known example.

Such people betray their own people in a

struggle against oppression. It would not beaccurate to actually call them racists againsttheir own people, but their betrayals were

certainly products of their own weakness,cowardice and corruption in the face of theoppressor. They are, and were, rightly re-viled.

But Jews are not the victims of oppression

today. They are the perpetrators of oppres-sion in the Middle East. And many, if notmost, diaspora Jews support that. Jews aresubject to no oppression in the advancedcapitalist countries. So where do allegationsof ‘anti-semitism’ against Jewish figureslike Paul Eisen come from? How is it possi-

ble to be racist against yourself, or even insome way a traitor to your own people in asituation where your own people are not

oppressed, but many of them are either par-ticipants, or complicit, in oppression them-selves?

These are not idle questions. Paul Eisen isthe tip of an iceberg. There is quite a long,and growing list of people of Jewish originwho have been accused, including by Jew-ish activists on the far left, of being anti-semites, i.e. anti-Jewish racists. If you satdown and wrote out a list, you could come

up with dozens of prominent people – alook at the board of directors of Deir YassinRemembered yields quite a few to startwith. And if those are the prominent ones, itis doubtless true that there are many morenon- prominent ones who agree with them.So a whole layer apparently exists of ‘anti-semites’ of Jewish origin who it is supposedto be permissible for the left to join withZionists in denouncing and ostracising.

Some of the most sophisticated of these‘left’ Jewish chauvinists, uneasy about thelogic involved in this, concede that theseJewish non-conformists are not dangerousin the least to Jewish people. But they say,the Palestine solidarity movement must be‘ protected’ from their influence to avoid it

being ‘discredited’ as ‘anti-semitic’ by theZionists. This argument is steeped in pater-nalism, apparently non-Jews in general (andArabs in particular) are too stupid to be ableto handle this complex problem throughdemocratic engagement and debate. It has


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to be solved by surgical means by Jewish political vigilantes.

The real explanation for this is that manyof those on the left who aspire to be anti-Zionists nevertheless share the dominant

prejudice today that for all the crimes ofIsrael and its supporters internationally(particularly the bourgeois ones who signif-icantly materially and politically support it),there is something inherently progressive

and ennobling about being Jewish, some-thing that puts Jews on a higher moral levelto the rest of humanity.

Collective guilt vs. collective inno-

cence: a false dichotomy

We as Marxists reject the notion of collec-tive guilt of entire peoples. Many good lib-eral middle class Germans, often quite left-ist in their aspirations, are consumed withguilt about Germany’s past, and even todaymobilise politically on the basis of suchguilt. Such is the basis for the middle-classleft anti- Deutsch movement in Germany,whose guilt about the Shoah leads them,logically enough, to turn a blind eye to thecrimes of Zionist Jews today because Jewswere once victimised appallingly by Ger-

man imperialism. Their slogan, we shouldnote is, “ Never Again Germany”.

Paul Eisen and his ilk are the Jewishequivalent of the anti- Deutsch. This is notracism at all, in other words, but a confused

anti-racist impulse. This is shown, inci-

dentally, by Netanyahu’s recent pronounce-ment that Hitler did not want to exterminatethe Jews, but merely to expel them from theReich. According to Netanyahu, Hitler was

then persuaded to ‘ burn’ the Jews bythe Palestinian potentate Haj Aminal Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jeru-salem. There is a degree of formalsimilarity between what Netanyahu

says about Hitler, and what Eisensays. But the intention is the oppo-site. By denying Hitler ’s guilt, Eisenis trying to undercut the Israeli ra-tionale for the oppression of the Pal-estinians. But when Netanyahu de-nies Hitler ’s guilt, it is in order totransfer it to the Palestinians throughthe person of the Mufti: Netanyahuis seeking to create the political con-

ditions for a genocide of the Pales-tinians. So here you see similar elements offalse analysis, but used for opposite

purposes. But absurdly, one of theresponses of the Jewish-centred left has

been to accuse Netanyahu of ‘holocaustdenial’. Thus massively missing the point,and showing that even now, they considerJews to be much more important than Ar-abs. Netanyahu is not interested in history,except as a means to incite the massacre ofArabs in the here and now. Whereas Eisenis wrongly using history to defend the Pal-estinians, in the way he sees it. These areopposite phenomena.

Anyone in Germany who denounced theanti- Deutsch as anti-German ‘racists’would be engaged in the same kind of fun-damental error that those on the British leftwho denounce Eisen and co. as ‘anti

-

semitic’ are engaged in. Implicitly, suchaccusers of the anti- Deutsch could be said


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to share someof the con-ceptionscharacteristicof Nazi apol-

ogists. And those

who makeanalogousallegationsagainst Ei-sen, in exact-ly the samemanner, are echoing what are in fact Zion-ist tropes about the sacral nature of the

Jewish people, and their moral superiorityover others.

This is also the unconscious or semi-conscious driving force of the various Jews-only groupings that are regularly formedin and around the Palestine solidaritymovement.

Socialists reject the notion of collectiveguilt of peoples. But we also reject the no-tion of collective innocence, which in fact

just displaces the notion of collective guiltonto other people(s). The theory of Israelas a colonial-settler state, as opposed to astate of Jewish settlers politically identicalin substance to the current settler ‘ pioneers’who are slicing up the West Bank, assignsthe primary role in driving Israeli colonisa-tion to the United States and the formercolonial powers.

It essentially says that no matter what

crimes Jewish political or military forcesmay commit against Arabs, Jews collec-tively are innocent of these actions. It is theAmericans and British who are really to

blame.And of course, they share much of the

blame, from the Balfour Declaration toSuez, to the massive US support for Israelin recent decades, the US, UK and otherimperialist bear massive culpability. But

Jews as a semi-national grouping, with a

ruling class that spans some national bor-ders and has its own independent interests,

are not col-lectivelyinnocenteither. They

bear as

much of theresponsibil-ity as theirallies. There is nocollectiveguilt ofAmericans,

British, French or Germans, or Jews, forany of these things. The blame fundamen-

tally lies with the various ruling classes, intheir different forms and permutations. Butcollective innocence of any and all of themis a capitulation to some form of reaction-ary nationalism, and exonerates these rul-ing classes.

In the case of Jews it is evidence of somelevel of shared conceptions with Zionism – a product of social pressure, since as is themain theme of this article, a modified form

of racism, incorporating Zionist concep-tions and influence, is the hegemonic formof racism today.

To conclude, Karl Marx stated that “The philosophers have only interpreted theworld in various ways; the point is tochange it”. This rightly emphasises the roleof practical activity in order to affect mate-rial reality. However, a corollary of this isthat in order to begin to change the world,

you have to understand it, at least at some basic level.

And through either lack of real analysis,or social pressure, or more likely a combi-nation of the two, understanding of the realrole of Zionism in Western societies, andthe material roots of this, has been lackingamong Marxists. This article is part of anattempt to rectify that, to arm the left andlabour movement with a coherent under-

standing of this very sophisticated, and alsovery coherent, form of bourgeois class-enemy politics. ▲


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Judeo

Christian or Judeo

Christian

culture or Judaeo

christian

civilisation


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This set of theses will be presented fordiscussion at the meeting on 14th

September of the Communist Platform ofLeft Unity

1. Of all the advanced capitalist/imperialist countries today, Israel is secondonly to the United States in the threat it

poses to the future of humanity. It is anartificial imperialist entity introduced intothe Middle East from without, and consoli-

dated though the expulsion of the bulk ofthe indigenous Palestinian Arab popula-tion. As a result it is in a state of perma-nent conflict with the Palestinians, whohave a dual national consciousness both asPalestinians and as part of the nationalaspirations of the Arab peoples of the en-tire Middle East.

Israel is built entirely on territory stolen by force from a native population that is on

a much higher cultural level than the indig-enous victims of earlier settler states asso-ciated with European colonialism, such asthe United States and Australia. Its conflictis with Arabs who have a modern nationalconsciousness and greater cohesion thanvirtually any dispossessed indigenous peo-

ple. Israel has therefore armed itself to theteeth and become a garrison state, stockpil-ing likely hundreds of nuclear weapons,

and threatens the population of the semi-

colonial Arab states that surround it withdestruction should it fear loss of suprema-cy.

2. What is distinctive about Israel is that,unlike earlier settler states populated bycolonists from imperialist nations that con-quered them as part of an imperial project,Israel has no ‘mother country’. It was pop-ulated by part of the Jewish populationfrom several countries, as part of a deal bythe Zionist movement with British coloni-alism during the First World War. The

Zionist movement being a unique national-ist movement politically led by part of theJewish sections of the bourgeoisie in sever-al advanced capitalist countries. This dealled over three decades of British colonial-ism and gradually accelerating Jewish im-migration, in the context of the Nazi massmurder of European Jewry during WWII,to a reactionary war of national independ-ence partially against the British, but main-

ly against the Arab population. With conventional settler states, that

have a ‘mother country’, the character ofthat power plays a major role in determin-ing the character of the settler state thatsubsequently emerges. But in a sense, Is-rael’s ‘mother country’ is the Zionistmovement itself, not Britain, which only

played an enabling role in the foundationof Israel by a third party movement. There-

fore, the character of the Zionist movementitself is decisive in determining the charac-ter of Israel.

It is crucial for communists particularlyin the Western imperialist countries, Is-rael’s bankrollers in terms of aid, and ar-mourers, to have a clear conception of theforces in the world that are supporting Isra-el in its war against the Palestinians. Thisis because, unlike the West’s allied dicta-

torships, from whom the ruling classes arecompelled to maintain a certain politicaldistance, Israel is openly embraced as a so-called ‘democracy’ and treated as a part ofthe ‘family’ of ‘civilised’ nations. Thismeans ignoring that Israel’s Jewish‘democracy’ was achieved by expelling themajority of its Arab population; withoutthis expulsion a Jewish state would be im-

possible. For communist internationalists,no stone can be left unturned and or ques-tion considered taboo in exposing the real

bases of support for the oppression of the

Draft Theses on the Jews and

Modern Imperialism By Ian Donovan 6 9 2014


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Palestinians in the Western countries. Tofail to do this is to betray internationalismand the Palestinians.

3. Empirical observation alone shows thatIsrael has organised bases of support within

the ruling classes of several imperialistcountries, centrally the United States, andthose in Western Europe (including theUK). In the US, AIPAC (American-IsraeliPolitical Action Committee) operates withgreat influence in both political parties; inthe UK, there are powerful ‘Friends of Is-rael’ factions in all three major parties; theConservative Friends of Israel in particular-ly embraces 80%

of Tory MPs.This is a stagger-ing level of spon-sorship from themain party of theBritish rulingclass; it is echoedin the other par-ties and this pro-Israel ideology

has a similar levelof hegemony toCold War anti-communism amongthe ruling class.

This ruling classsupport has a material basis, and not just interms of old-fashioned imperialist realpoli-tik. As the late Israel Shahak, genocide sur-vivor and decades- long defender of Pales-tinian rights within Israel, wrote in a veryimportant work on the Jewish question: “US support for Israel, when considered

not in abstract but in concrete detail, cannot be adequately explained only as a result ofAmerican imperial interests. The stronginfluence wielded by the organised Jewishcommunity in the USA in support of allIsraeli policies must be taken into accountin order to explain the Middle East policiesof American administrations. This phenom-enon is even more noticeable in the case ofCanada, whose Middle Eastern interests

cannot be considered as important, butwhose loyal dedication to Israel is evengreater than that of the USA. In both coun-tries (and also in France, Britain, and manyother states) Jewish organisations support

Israel with the same loyalty which com-munist parties accorded to the USSR for solong. Also, many Jews who appear to beactive in defending human rights and whoadopt non-conformist views on other issuesdo, in cases affecting Israel, display a re-markable degree of totalitarianism and arein the forefront of defence of all Israeli pol-icies. It is well known in Israel that the

chauvinism and

fanaticism in supporting Israel dis- played by diasporaJews is much great-er (especially since1967) than thechauvinism shown

by an average Is-raeliJew…” (Jewish

History, JewishReligion: the

Weight of ThreeThousand Years,1994, p102). The influence Jew-

ish organizations are able to exert in imperi-alist policy is not the product of the ‘Jewishvote’ or even some mysterious ‘lobbying’

power at their disposal, as is euphemistical-ly said by some critics who fear being false-ly accused of racism. The Jewish vote inimperialist countries is electorally tiny. Inthe US around 2% of the population areJewish, and there is no reason, is strictlynumerical terms, why a ‘lobby’ based onsuch a small percentage of the populationshould have the power not only to forceAmerican governments to adopt the mostslavish support for very brutal actions ofIsrael, but also to destroy the careers of

politicians who speak out against such ac-tions.

Netanyahu addresses the American Israel Pub-lic Affairs Committee's Policy Conference at theWalter Washington Convention Center 4March, 2014 in Washington, DC


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4. It is however, explained by one salientfact: Jewish overrepresentation in the USand other ruling classes. For the UnitedStates, which is the most powerful state inhuman history, you can easily find informed

Jewish sources that place the representationof Jews among billionaires, the most power-ful elements of the capitalist elite, at be-tween 40 and 48% – nearly half (for exam-

ple see http://www.jewishworldreview.com/ joe/aaron101007.php3). This is the onlylogically coherent explanation for the powerof the so-called lobby. It must be faced fear-lessly by Marxists, irrespective of any dis-comfort that may result from confronting

the widespread prejudice (for that is what itis) that to mention, let alone try to analyse,such factual matters is in some way racist.To ignore them in this way is itself an act of

betrayal of those on the receiving end of thecrimes that result from this state of affairs,and in that sense a chauvinist position.

A materialist analysis of why this is thecase is crucial. This is a very complex anddifficult question, and there are enormoussocial pressures on those who would try toanalyse it. The history of genocide againstthe Jews in the first half of the 20th centuryis ruthlessly used by propagandists for theZionist project to justify today’s crimesagainst the Palestinians. Not only that, butin the earlier period anti-semites exploitedthe atypical social structure of the Jews – their overrepresentation in business andfinance – as an important component of the

paranoid, racist ideology that led to the Na-zi genocide in Germany and Europe. Thishistory is also exploited today against crit-ics of this phenomenon. However difficultthis makes addressing today’s problems inthis regard, the challenge of producing acoherent materialist analysis of them cannot

be ducked. Today, as Palestinians face reg-ular one-sided massacres and the threat of

mass population expulsions, and the widerArab and Middle East faces the real possibility of a nuclear genocide at Israel’s

hands, solving this very tricky ideologicaland political problem is possibly the mostcrucial, strategic task that communists haveto solve. If we can’t confront this, we mayas well give up any pretence of communism

and revolution.

5. Fortunately, there is a materialist,Marxist tradition we can draw on in analys-ing the origins of this. In its most developedform this was developed by Abram Leon, ayoung Jewish Marxist, during the SecondWorld War. His work The Jewish Question,a Marxist Interpretation is the classic Marx-ist study of Jewish history, basing its start-ing point on Karl Marx’s earlier sketch of

this question. Beginning in antiquity,Leon’s work most directly relates to the

period from early medieval times to that ofearly imperialist capitalism. His analysis isof the Jews as a ‘ people-class’, whose verysurvival as a people since antiquity was

bound up with their role as the repository ofmerchant’s capital, commodity distributionand therefore foreign trade in fundamentallyfeudal society, where the dominant mode ofexploitation involved the production of usevalue, not exchange value. Trade was there-fore regarded as a separate activity, outsidethe social norm, that could best be confinedto practitioners of a ’foreign’ religion.

This is somewhat different to the questionof usury, which only became dominantamong the Jews with the decline of feudal-ism and the rise of commodity exchange asan increasing norm. This brought the rise of‘native merchants’ etc., which pushed theJews to the margins of commodity ex-change in the form of usury, which wasregarded as a socially odious activity.

Leon noted that in the early period of feu-dalism, the Jews were in fact often highly

privileged due to their specialist tradingrole. Later, as their role shifted to usury, tax-farming, etc., they became exploitative

intermediaries that were often hated by theexploited peasantry. On more than one oc-casion, events that are often regarded as


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pogroms were in fact peasant revolts againstexploitation. In the laterfeudal period this had adynamic that led to the

Jews retreating intoghettos and/or beingdriven from country tocountry as their eco-nomic role became in-creasingly superfluous.This happened at differ-ent times in Westernand Eastern Europe, sothere is quite a complex

tapestry of events thatneeds to be under-stood. In Eastern Eu-rope, this period of Jewish decline and op-

pression coincided with the beginning ofthe decay of capitalism.

In the early capitalist period, a keyachievement of the bourgeois revolutionswas the opening up of the ghettos, and a

beginning was made to the assimilation ofthe Jews, the logical outcome of the redun-dancy of this medieval trading class. How-ever, with the end of the epoch of progres-sive capitalism, this came to a halt and youhad the rise of racialised anti-Jewish senti-ment. Leon witnessed the growth of thishatred, and the rise of Nazism, and project-ed that the Jews would remain pariahs, andthat status would only be relieved throughthe overthrow of capitalism.

Unfortunately Leon did not live to see thefoundation of the state of Israel, and thus to

be able to analyse the Jewish Question inthe post WWII period. He perished inAuschwitz in 1944, at the age of only 26.His writings about history were spot on; hisspeculations about future developmentswere not, since Jews are no longer pariahs

but have been re-absorbed by later imperi-

alism in a different political situation. Butgiven that his historical analysis was cor-rect, it ought to be possible to pick up the

threads from wherehe left off and, usingthe same method,analyse the currentsituation correctly.

6. The redundancy ofany class, including a

people-class, resultsin its dissolution andits members’ absorp-tion into other clas-ses. This process be-gan with the emanci-

pation of the Jewsafter the bourgeois

revolutions as laidout by Leon andreferred to above.

Members of the former people-class wereabsorbed into the bourgeoisie, the workingclass (particularly as an artisan- proletariat),and various layers of the urban petty-

bourgeoisie. As a people with centuries ofexperience of trade in commodities – thatis, in the operation of merchant’s capital –

prior to the capitalist era proper, they hadmajor cultural advantages for operationwithin the bourgeoisie. They had more ac-cumulated

Documents

IDOT 17 Zionism and Colonialism