The Time Has Come for Britain’s Anti-Zionist Jewish Groups to Unite

At a Time of Genocide, Division and Disunity is a Luxury We Cannot Afford

When I ‘came out’ as an anti-Zionist Jew in 1970 it was a lonely experience. I lived in Liverpool where my father was a rabbi in a community of about 8,000 people (now less than 2,000).

The only other Jews I knew were in a socialist group which I joined at the age of 16 (expelled at 19!), the International Socialists (now the SWP). It was thanks to them that I read my first anti-Zionist pamphlet, the Class Nature of Israeli Society, by Moshe Machover, Haim Hanegbi and Akiva Orr.

This pamphlet, which first appeared as an article in the New Left Review, helped me to make sense of my instinctive hostility to Zionism as a Marxist. Zionism I began to see as an exclusivist ideology and movement whose only concern was the Jews. This was before the oppression and dispossession of the Palestinians and the Apartheid nature of Israeli society had become widely known.

At that time there was no Palestine solidarity movement in Britain and much of the left had illusions in Israel. Tony Benn and Eric Heffer, two stalwarts of the Labour left were members of Labour Friends of Israel.

Today everything is different. Jewish anti-Zionists are not rare. Zionism is no longer assumed to be the natural home of Jews. Its alliance today with the far-right – the EDL, Tommy Robinson, Bannon, Orban etc. – is well known, clear and unmistakable but half a century ago things were different.

interview with neo-Nazi Richard Spencer on Israel’s Channel 2 about why he calls himself a 'white Zionist'

Hasbara, the Zionist version of propaganda still held sway. The Labour Zionists who had formed the government of Israel from 1948-77 continuously spoke of peace whilst they waged war. As I wrote in Tribune in July 1984, there was nothing Likud had done that Labour hadn’t done before it.

It took the invasion of Lebanon in 1982 for the scales to fall from the Left’s eyes. Benn and Heffer resigned from LFI. For much of the left Israel had been an oasis of socialism in the Middle East. Even Hannah Arendt was fooled into believing that the Kibbutzim were ‘perhaps the most promising of all social experiments made in the 20^th century.’ [The Jew As Pariah, p. 185.

The image of the Kibbutzim seen in the West - Zionism and Socialism - however Arabs played no part in this 'socialism'

The kibbutzim were held to be models of socialism with their collective organisation and their lack of private property. No one told me that they were racially exclusive societies that banned Arabs from membership or that they had been established over the ruins of confiscated Arab villages whose inhabitants had been expelled. Nor had we been told that they had been established as the most effective and economical method of colonisation and were stockade and watchtower settlements.

Israel was not founded for the benefit of Jews. The West does not support Israel because it calls itself a ‘Jewish’ state. As James Baldwin noted in 1979:

Whenever criticism of Israel is made our rulers profess to be concerned about ‘anti-Semitism’. It is the only form of racism they are concerned about. Even Donald Trump, a bigot and racist for every season, is not only concerned about Jewish students (Zionist Jewish students naturally) suffering from anti-Semitism on campuses but he has cut federal funding from those universities and colleges which allow Palestine solidarity protests on campus.

This is at the same time that he is insisting that diversity and anti-racist programmes be ended, migrants be deported and that Confederate flags and symbols be preserved.

You would have to be stupid (unfortunately many people are) not to see how the rich and powerful, not least racists like Starmer, are using Jewish people and what they call ‘anti-Semitism’ (i.e. anti-Zionism) as a means to intimidate and frighten off support for Palestine and opposition to Zionism.

The same is true in this country. The racist Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, Mark Rowley, has used the pretext of Jewish Sabbath Services to reroute, ban and delay Palestinian marches on the grounds that they might cause offence to Zionist Jews. Jewish residents of Swiss Cottage are the pretext for banning demonstrations against Israel's racist ambassador, Tzipi Hotoveli.

British and Western support for Zionism is not because of their concern for Jews but because of their own imperial interests. Jews constitute the moral alibi for imperialism in the Middle East.

It is for that reason alone that it is incumbent upon Jews who are not Zionists to say in both words and deed that what Israel does is not in my name.

Jews in America, for a number of reasons have been in advance of British Jews. From May 1-4 over 2,000 members of Jewish Voice for Peace gathered in Baltimore for a member’s conference (see Massive JVP member meeting vows to fight Zionism, fascism, and the weaponization of antisemitism).

In the United States 40% of young Jews see Israel as an apartheid state and one suspects that that figure is far higher today in the midst of the current genocide. No one who is progressive and Jewish has any excuse any longer for neutrality. Non-Zionism is no longer an option. It is fence sitting.

As Martin Luther King said ‘The hottest place in Hell is reserved for those who remain neutral in times of great moral conflict.’  

Archbishop Desmond Tutu observed that if you are neutral at a time of injustice you have chosen the side of the oppressor.

Today it is not difficult to be Jewish and anti-Zionist. On April 10, the Zionists’ propaganda organ, the Jewish Chronicle, woke up to the fact that young Jews were turning against Zionism and carried an article ‘Who are the young Jews turning against Israel?’ by Jane Prinsley.

Former General Amiram Levin

Of course Jane, like all the Jewish Chronicle’s journalists is a Zionist. If she wasn’t she wouldn’t be working for them. The JC had started to realise that ‘Radical new groups for Jews who do not support Zionism have formed on campuses up and down the UK’. It went on to say that

‘radical Jewish student groups have emerged to cater to Jews who do not support Zionism. From Leeds, Liverpool, Brighton and Birkbeck to Edinburgh, Warwick, Cardiff, Cambridge and UCL, students have formed Jewish communities, or kehillot.’

This followed an article by Karen Glaser who used to be a features writer on the New Statesman where she wrote what I called the most ‘trivial, trite and superficial’ article the NS has ever run. Its subtitle was  ‘How Karen Glaser’s ex-boyfriend had a very very narrow escape!’ The article was about how Ms Glaser had kicked her Corbyn supporting, socialist boyfriend out of the nest at 2 am in the morning because he doubted that Corbyn was quite the anti-Semite that his girlfriend imagined.

So the article ‘I can’t discuss Israel with my anti-Zionist kids – it’s pointless’ was on a par with Glaser’s normal output. It described how 11 year old Talia had given her mother back the Star of David she had been given as a baby and further that she was ‘resigning as a Jew’.

Not only that but Talia had disposed of her mother’s big Israeli flag! Bright and intelligent child you might think. Clearly someone to interview. Karen though thought differently:

Zionist parents whose children are scared of being associated with Israel; youngsters who have internalised antisemitism, in particular its political iteration, anti-Zionism. Their parents say these young people openly loathe the Jews’ nation state. And anecdotal evidence suggests that the problem has grown exponentially since the October pogroms.

Karen Glaser is nothing if not stupid. That after all is why the Jewish Chronicle sought her out. It probably hadn’t occurred to her that it isn’t internalisation of anti-Semitism but detestation of burning children alive and bombing hospitals that is making Jewish youngsters puke at the mere mention of the ‘Jewish’ state. Talia doesn’t sound like someone who is intimidated.

Naturally I wrote a letter to the JC suggesting that it might have been a good idea to interview the children concerned and find out their views. And equally naturally the JC refused to print it. The last thing the JC wants to admit is that there may be good reasons why young Jewish kids detest Jewish racial nationalism.

Shortly after these articles 36 members of the Board of Deputies signed a letter to the Financial Times. It was not an anti-Zionist letter. Far from it. But even hardened Zionists had begun to realise that they were defending the indefensible. A war driven by neo-Nazis in Israel's government.

Equally predictable was the reaction of the genocide supporting President of the BOD, Phil Rosenberg, and the rest of the Board's Executive. There is no atrocity, no genocide that they cannot support. The presence of open fascists in Israel's government worries them not. They immediately suspended Harriett Goldenberg, the Vice-Chair of its International Division and opened disciplinary proceedings against all 36 signatories.

Moshe Yalon – Ben Gvir & Smotrich are Mein Kamp Reversed

Being good Zionists the last thing they wanted to see is any discussion over the rights and wrongs of the actions of what I have called ‘Hitler’s Bastard Offspring’. The BOD is there to support whatever Israel does, right or wrong. Jewish neo-Nazis like Itamar Ben-Gvir trouble them not. After all even Gvir and Smotrich are Jewish and Zionism is about the unity of the Jewish tribe.

Rosenberg then issued a disingenuous statement that proclaimed ‘The Board of Deputies is a democratic organisation’ without mentioning the suspension of one officer and the disciplinary process (in the form of a complaint) that was taken against the dissenters.

It is clear that the worm is beginning to turn. That all those who have not become overt fascists and racists, like Rosenberg and his Executive, have developed qualms about the genocide being conducted against 2 million Palestinians in the name of a war against Hamas.

It is therefore incumbent upon Jewish anti-Zionists to come together and form one united organisation like Jewish Voice for Peace in the United States.  At the moment we have a plethora of organisations. I am in Jewish Network for Palestine, there is Jewish Voice for Labour, formed in the Labour Party during the ‘anti-Semitism’ smear campaign against Corbyn and there is the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Organisation and the newcomer on the block Na'amod, which contains a few Zionists, non-Zionists and anti-Zionists. Na'amod is the most moderate and probably the largest.

There is also the older Jews for Justice for Palestinians which is a 2 states group that does very little except canvass for signatures for its founding statement and there is also Independent Jewish Voices which made a big splash when it was created in 2007 but which is now inactive. Its website was last updated a year ago and its last meeting was over four years ago.

By my estimates there are about 2,000 people who are members of the above organisations. There are undoubted differences between people but there is no reason why there should be so many organisations.

JfJP and IJV are not membership organisations. Clearly Na'amod, in so far as it contains some Zionists, will not be able to join a unified anti-Zionist organisation but there is no reason why the 3 anti-Zionist Jewish organisations cannot come together into one single anti-Zionist Jewish organisation.

Although JVL has not explicitly declared itself as anti-Zionist, in practice it is. There will obviously be differences over things like one or two states though the consensus today is that two states cannot be achieved given the number of settlers in the West Bank.

However we owe it to the Palestinians who are undergoing such terrible massacres and pogroms to put aside minor differences in the name of not only unity but effectiveness. A single united anti-Zionist Jewish group would be a pole of attraction, in particular to young Jews who do not wish to have to bear the strain and the stain of being seen to support genocide in the name of Jews. Most Jews who have grown up with the exploitation by Zionism of the memory of the holocaust find it strange that the most ardent supporters of Zionism today are the neo-Nazi and far right in politics.

When Tommy Robinson, Donald Trump and Viktor Orban are on your side, with neo-Nazi Richard Spencer declaring that he is a White Zionist, many Jews will decide that they have had enough of Zionism and its quest for Jewish racial purity. It is the duty of the existing anti-Zionist groups to facilitate that journey not to erect obstacles to it.

Tony Greenstein

Zionism - an Antidote to Socialism (von Plehve – Czarist Interior Minister)

Despite its Pretensions Socialist Zionism was simply an an attempt to reconcile the irreconcilable – Colonisation and Socialism

On Sunday at 5 pm, I will be giving a talk on my book Zionism During the Holocaust to the Communist Party of Great Britain and I intend to focus in particular on the reactionary and counter-revolutionary role of Zionism amongst the Jews of Europe. You can join using this link

I grew up in a Zionist household with all the myths of Zionism. I learnt that what we now call the Nakba (a word never used) was the Palestinians voluntarily leaving in order to make way for the invading Arab armies.

We were told that far from expelling the Arabs, the Zionists had begged them to stay! What was never mentioned was the use of barrel bombs against the Arab population of Haifa and the fact that they were forced to board ships to flee. Far from wanting to ‘drive the Jews into the sea’ the opposite was the case. It was the Palestinians who were driven into the sea, many of whom drowned.

The Idealised View of the Kibbutzim

Israel was seen as an oasis of socialism in a backward, feudal Arab Middle East. The Kibbutzim were held out as socialism in action and many were the times I was told that far from taking part in struggles here I should go and live on a Kibbutz. Of course I was never told that the Kibbutz was a racially pure institution, which no Arab could become a member of or that they were established as stockade and watchtower settlements on confiscated Arab land.

The myths of Zionism could, by themselves, fill a whole volume.  Today of course people are wiser as the true nature of Zionism has revealed itself with the ascent to power of the Jewish Nazi Jewish Power (Otzma Yehudit) and the assorted freaks of Israel’s far-Right.

What is interesting is how it began. Is it true that when Zionism began amongst the Jewish masses in Czarist Russia that it was a progressive movement that over time has moved to the right? Was Zionism a good idea that turned out badly or was it born with the Mark of Cain?

The strategy of the founder of Zionism, Theodor Herzl, was a simple one. He wanted to establish a Jewish State and from the start he sought to find a partner from one of the imperialist powers. This was a strategy that the Zionist movement never deviated.

In 1917 Great Britain agreed to sponsor the Zionist colonisation of Palestine and it formalised its agreement in the Zionism Haifa Otzma Yehudit Balfour Declaration but before then Herzl had traipsed round the rulers of Europe – from the Ottoman Sultan, the German Kaiser, the Pope, Hungary’s King Victor Emmanuel and the Ministers of Czarist Russia.

Before the advent of Hitler and the Nazis the Czar of Russia was seen by most Jews as the symbol of murderous anti-Semitism. Pogroms against the Jews were seen as a means of diverting the wrath of the masses away from the Czarist regime and towards Jews living in the Pale of Settlement where they were confined.

Vyacheslav von Plehve

To this end Czarist Interior Minister Vyacheslav von Plehve organised the Black Hundreds, a group of reactionary, counter-revolutionary, anti-Semitic groups during and after the Russian Revolution of 1905. They were responsible for hundreds of pogroms against Russian Jews and the death of thousands. They were supported by Czar Nicholas II who instructed his ministers to support and fund them.

The Bolsheviks and Russian workers were forced to fight them militarily. Lenin called them ‘tramps, rowdies, hawkers, and similar disreputable characters’. See The Black Hundreds and the Organisation of an Uprising

Brendan McGeever - Revisionist anti-Communist Historian

Russia had been plagued by pogroms against the Jews. Anti-Semitism was seen as the way of dividing the opposition to the Czarist regime. This was why, contrary to revisionist academics such as Brendan McGeever’s Bolsheviks and Anti-Semitism, the Bolsheviks took anti-Semitism very seriously as it was a weapon posed over the heart of the revolution.

The most famous pogrom was in Kishinev on 19- 20 April 1903. Nearly 50 Jews were killed and 92 were severely injured. ‘No Jewish event of the time would be as extensively documented.’ [Zipperstein, Pogrom: Kishinev and the Tilt of History]  Reports in the New York Times and The Times ensured that it had an unprecedented impact internationally. [See Jewish Massacre Denounced’. NYT April 28 1903].

The attitude of the Hayim Nahman Bialik, the Zionist national poet, “In the City of Killing” was to talk of the ‘disgraceful shame and cowardice’ of the Jewish victims of the pogrom. The Zionists of course had done nothing to organise self-defence.

The Czarist regime refused to intervene except when the Jews defended themselves. The international and the liberal press in Russia were outraged by stories of rape, mutilation and the murder of children. The anti-Zionist Jewish Bund organised self-defence units here and elsewhere.

The Governor of Bessarabia, whose capital was Kishinev, was replaced by Prince Serge Urusov, a ‘severe critic of autocracy’. Urusov’s study of the massacre confirmed that it had been instigated by Plehve.

On August 8 1903, barely four months after the Kishinev pogrom, Herzl visited Russia, meeting with Plehve. Herzl was concerned that Zionism should retain its legal status. As he began explaining the merits of Zionism Plehve interrupted him: ‘You don’t have to justify the movement to me. Vous prêchez un converti.’ [You are preaching to a convert].’ [Herzl Diaries, pp. 1522-1525, 10.8.1903]

What was the response of the Zionists?  Did they condemn the Czarist regime?  Not at all. The 6^th Zionist Congress which met on 23 August 1903 said nothing just as 30 years later in Prague, it would remain silent about the Hitler regime. It was more concerned with the Uganda Project.

Herzl asked Plehve: ‘Help me to reach land sooner and the revolt will end. And so will the defection to the Socialists.’ [Complete Diaries, p. 1526] Plehve approved the holding of the second Russian Zionist Conference, the publication of a Zionist daily, Der Fraind and the legalisation of the Zionist movement at a time when all other political organisations were banned.

The Jewish Bund

Herzl promised that the revolutionaries would stop their struggle in return for a charter for Palestine in 15 years. The Bund were outraged. [Henry Tobias, The Jewish Bund in Russia – From Its Origins to 1905, p. 252] Kishinev created a crisis for the fledgling Labour Zionist groups, who realised that they could not ignore the struggle against anti-Semitism.

Herzl had earlier written to the Kaiser describing how:

our movement… has everywhere to fight an embittered battle with the revolutionary parties which rightly sense an adversary in it. We are in need of encouragement even though it has to be a carefully kept secret. [Complete Diaries, p. 59, October 17 1897]

Lucien Wolf - Anti-Zionist Spokesman of the Board of Deputies

Later when he came to London, in an interview with Lucien Wolf of the Board of Deputies, Plehve spoke favourably of Zionism as an encouragement to Jewish emigration. For ‘non-emigrants’ he thought that ‘Zionist ideas... might be useful as an antidote to Socialist doctrines.’ [The Times 6.2.04, ‘Mr Lucien Wolf’s Interview with M. de Plehve’].

Sixteen years later, in February 1920 Winston Churchill wrote in Zionism v Bolshevism of a ‘worldwide conspiracy for the overthrow of civilisation’ by Jewish revolutionaries. In 1935 Ben-Gurion described Zionism as a ‘bulwark against assimilation and communism.’ [ https://tinyurl.com/y269wb72]

Socialist Zionism arose out of the contradiction between the needs of Jewish workers in Russia to fight anti-Semitism where they were and the dream of Palestine. Although Zionism had foresworn the struggle in the here and now, it couldn’t ignore the fact that Russian Jews were the oppressed of the oppressed.  Socialist Zionism arose as a result of the conflict between Zionism’s support for the existing order and the Jewish proletariats' class interests. [Lucas, Modern History of Israel, p. 35]

The myth of Zionist socialism in Palestine rested on the belief that the kibbutzim were socialist. In reality the kibbutzim were the result of an alliance between the Zionist labour movement and the Zionist financial institutions. The socialism of the pioneers did not prevent them from entering into an alliance with the Jewish bourgeoisie.

Collective colonisation was the most efficient and cost effective means of colonising Palestine. They were not a means of changing society. They were ‘tools in forging national sovereignty.’ [Ze’ev Sternhell, Founding Myths of Israel, p. 325] They fooled though westerners like Hannah Arendt who described them as ‘the most promising of all social experiments made in the 20^th century.’  [Hannah Arendt, The Jew As Pariah, p. 185].

The internal social structure of the kibbutzim reflected their political role. Personal space was eliminated in favour of collectivism. They were a Zionist Sparta intended to produce fighters without personal attachments of affection to each other or their children. ‘Everything was the property of the collective including the individual’s thoughts.’ [Bloom, ‘What “The Father” had in mind,’ p. 346].

The kibbutzim were Jewish-only stockade and watchtower settlements, marking out the borders of a future Jewish State. They provided the organisational backbone of Haganah, the pre-state army and Palmach, the Zionist shock-troops. Although never more than 5% of Israel’s population, the kibbutzim produced a disproportionately high number of Israel’s officer corps.

As the pogroms intensified, Labor Zionist parties were drawn into the fight against anti-Semitism. In Poland Poale Zion split into a Right and Left at its February/March 1919 conference, with Left Poale Zion emerging as much the stronger. This was the forerunner of the split at the World Union of Poale Zion’s fifth world congress in Vienna in 1920. LPZ supported the Bolshevik revolution and attended the second and third congresses of the Communist International as observers. LPZ opposed the decision by PZ to rejoin the World Zionist Organisation [WZO], viewing it as bourgeois.

But in Palestine it was the right-wing of PZ which was stronger. Because of the rhythms of colonisation Palestine PZ gravitated to the right whereas Poale Zion’s diaspora sections were pulled to the left as a result of the class struggle and the fight against anti-Semitism.

In Russia the success of the revolutionaries in overthrowing the Czarist regime in February 1917 lessened the attraction of Zionism. At their conference in Petrograd in June 1917 the Russian Zionists omitted all mention of British sponsorship of the Zionists settlement in Palestine. [Leonard Stein, The Balfour Declaration. p. 437].

According to the Labor Zionists, the Jewish and Palestinian workers would unite against the Jewish bourgeoisie at the very same time that they were calling for a Boycott of Arab Labour! We can see the results in Israel today where the Israeli Labor Party and Meretz (Mapam) entered into a coalition government with the far-right. Far from achieving socialism, the ‘left’ Zionists have almost disappeared.