Tarneem’s Life at War: Learning to Live with the Constant Uncertainty of Evacuation - The Diary of a Young Woman Keeping Ahead of Biden’s Genocidal Monsters

 The hypocrisy of the West’s leaders over the  Arrest Warrants for Netanyahu & Gallant - Unfortunately Biden & Blinken's names aren't on them

Below is a second instalment from Tarneem, a young Palestinian woman I met when she was in England. A gifted writer she describes life under Israel’s genocidal occupation and I hope you read her moving story. I carried the first instalment A Day in the Life of Tarneem at the end of April.

I welcome the proposed prosecution of Netanyahu and Gallant and hope that the rest of Israel's war cabinet and genocidaires, such as Smotrich and Ben Gvir, will follow.

The reaction of the Chief War Criminal, Netanyahu, would be amusing if this were not so tragic.

"ICC prosecutor, with what audacity do you dare compare the monsters of Hamas to the soldiers of the IDF, the most moral army in the world?," Netanyahu said in his response to the request. He added that he "reject[ed] with disgust the prosecutor's comparison between democratic Israel and the mass murderers of Hamas.

The ‘monsters of Hamas’ treated their captives impeccably compared to the treatment of Palestinians in Israel’s torture camp, Sde Teiman.

The murder of 40,000 plus Palestinians, including 15,000 children, to say nothing of attacks on hospitals, murder of hundreds of doctors and health staff, bombing of schools etc. don’t count in Netanyahu’s eyes because Palestinians are ‘human animals’ and outside the law.

Netanyahu is fond of weaponising the Holocaust but one comparison he and his fellow war criminals have missed is the fact that Himmler justified the extermination of Jews, in a speech on October 4, 1943, by referring to Jews as ‘human animals’.

As the WW2 National Museum article on Himmler’s October 1943 Speeches says

Russians, Czechs, and other Slavs, Himmler resumed, possessed no inherent value as human beings. For the SS, these “human animals” were only valuable insofar as they labored under the lordship of the superior Aryan Germans

So it is with Israel’s ‘human animals’

I've seen countless pictures and videos of IDF soldiers posing with women's lingerie and going through women's underwear drawers in Gaza. Very obsessive about the sexual lives of Palestinian women and men. https://t.co/xGsr4TuvuP

— Naheed Mustafa (@NaheedMustafa) February 12, 2024

When Netanyahu describes Israel’s army as ‘the most moral army in the world’ I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. Just today they have killed 3 children in Jenin, which Hamas doesn’t even rule. Their monsters, and here the term is apt, paraded with the underwear of the women they had killed fantasising no doubt about their victims.

But if Israel’s ‘Crime Minister’ is a figure of fun then what of the senile enabler of genocide, Joe Biden who declares that

“The ICC prosecutor’s application for arrest warrants against Israeli leaders is outrageous. And let me be clear: whatever this prosecutor might imply, there is no equivalence – none – between Israel and Hamas. We will always stand with Israel against threats to its security.”

Biden is right. There is no equivalence between Hamas and Israel. Hamas killed a few hundred Israelis in the course of their resistance to a 57 year occupation and 17 year siege. Israel has destroyed the whole civilian infrastructure of Gaza plus killing probably 50,000 by now. Only the sick, diseased minds of our imperial rulers, who turn the truth on its head could claim that Israel is the innocent party.

Biden claimed that ‘“I will always ensure that Israel has everything it needs to defend itself against Hamas and all its enemies”. You might imagine that Hamas had been occupying Israeli territory. What Biden and the imperialists are doing of course is supporting Israel’s right to occupy and terrorise Palestinians indefinitely. Of course Palestinians have no such right of self-defence despite the fact that it is they, not Israel which has been under occupation for over half a century.

October 7^th was certainly a shock to Israelis but the casualties were just half of those in Operation Protective Edge in the summer of 2014.  It is the idea of fighting back against one’s oppressors that so disturb Biden and Washington’s war criminals, who are no slouches when it comes to committing their own war crimes in Afghanistan, Iraq etc.

Germany has also condemned what it calls the “false equivalence”. Of course the German State is an expert when it comes to genocides so it is no surprise that they approve of the genocide in Gaza. Indeed given the expertise of Germany, having carried out the 20^th century’s first genocide in South-West Africa and then the holocaust what is surprising is that they didn’t offer their expertise to the Israelis. After all in 8 months Israel has only killed about 50,000 whereas Germany managed untold millions in the course of 6 years of war.

Perhaps Olaf Scholtz will dispatch the commanders of Germany’s army to teach the Zionists how to go about a really big genocide. Israeli Ambassador Tzipi Hotoveli spoke in October about killing 600,000 so clearly she and the German state must be disappointed.

Rule based order a la Americaine: for them, not for us... https://t.co/VDk7OxTIyo

— Ewald Engelen (@ewaldeng) May 21, 2024

 

Sunak, Biden’s little puppet, also condemned the issuing of warrants saying that it was "not helpful to reaching a pause in the fighting, getting hostages out or humanitarian aid in." I can’t remember him making similar comments when the ICC rushed out warrants against Putin for the Ukraine war. Perhaps I’m just being forgetful.

Biden said that ‘"What's happening in Gaza is not genocide. We reject that," Perhaps Genocide Joe would enlighten us as to how many Israel has to kill bearing in mind the Genocide Convention and Article II which defines genocide as

‘any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

(a) Killing members of the group;

(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;

(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its

physical destruction in whole or in part;

(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;

(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

The fact is that there is nothing that Israel can do which won’t meet with Biden’s approval because the United States is not in the habit of kicking its favourite watchdog too hard.

However I don't welcome the proposed prosecution of Hamas leaders. Clearly Karim Khan felt the need to be 'even handed'.

I don't support Hamas politically, after all I'm a Jewish atheist but Hamas is a resistance not a terrorist organisation. It was entitled to break-out on October 7 from the ghetto concentration camp that was Gaza. There is no equivalence between Hamas and the Israeli state, the fourth most powerful in the world, than there was between the Warsaw Ghetto Resistance and the Nazis. Let us bear in mind that the last Commander of the Warsaw Ghetto Resistance, Marek Edelman, made just such a comparison to the fury of Israeli leaders.

As John  Rose wrote in his Obituary for Marek Edelman on 7 October 2009

In the summer of 2002, Edelman, still going strong, intervened in Israel's show trial of the now jailed Palestinian resistance leader, Marwan Barghouti. He wrote a letter of solidarity to the Palestinian movement, and though he criticised the suicide bombers, its tone infuriated the Israeli government and its press. Edelman had always resented Israel's claim on the Warsaw Ghetto uprising as a symbol of Jewish liberation. Now he said this belonged to the Palestinians.

He addressed his letter to the Palestinian ZOB, "commanders of the Palestinian military, paramilitary and partisan operations – to all the soldiers of the Palestinian fighting organisations". The old Jewish anti-Nazi Ghetto fighter had placed his immense moral authority at the disposable of the only side he deemed worthy of it.

It was because Edelman criticised Israel for its treatment of the Palestinians that, despite it trying to co-opt the Warsaw Ghetto Resistance to the Zionist chariot, not even the lowliest clerk at the Israeli Embassy in Poland attended his funeral.  A state funeral in which the Poland President gave the address and at which there was a 15 gun salute.

Would the ICC have prosecuted the Polish Home Army for the Warsaw Uprising against the Nazis or the French Resistance? Of course not yet they undoubtedly committed atrocities. So too with Hamas. Even accepting that they committed some atrocities on October 7, they pale in comparison when compared to Israel’s crimes.

Hamas did not attack an Israeli hospital. They did not murder doctors and nurses. They did not bomb ambulances or schools. They did not raze universities to the ground nor did they attack synagogues.  Israel has razed dozens of mosques and churches to the ground, bombing St. Porphyrius Church in Gaza City, the world’s third oldest church.

Hamas did not torture its captives. On the contrary they praised their ‘humane’ treatment much to the fury of Israel’s practiced propagandists. Some even spoke of being treated like ‘queens’. When one Zionist told me on Twitter that they were suffering from Stockholm Syndrome I asked him why Palestinian captives didn’t suffer from the same syndrome! 

Hamas killed some 1139 people on October 7, 400 of whom were military. 38 children including 2 babies died. No one was beheaded, there was no organised rape, these are all discredited Zionist narratives. There are no victims, no forensic evidence and the witnesses to the allegations have confessed that they lied.

There is no evidence that Hamas deliberately killed children, still less babies. Indeed Israel killed probably a majority of Israeli civilians who died because of its Hannibal Directive.

Israel by contrast has killed at least 15,000 children. Slave revolts were far more bloody than Hamas's Uprising yet would we have condemned them and demanded the ‘right of self defence’ for the slave masters?

The United States is now threatening the court because it was only designed for African dictators and Putin. Not for them! This is the arrogance of imperialism. Their ‘rules based order’ is only for other people, never themselves.

And I learnt today that the so-called pier that Biden claimed was there to funnel aid into Gaza has been found to be channelling weapons to the Israeli state. Their lies are never ending.

Please do read Tarneem's heart rending description of what it is like to be fleeing from their genocidal army and having to keep moving whilst Biden & Sunak do their best to protect Israel's Nazi-like war criminals.

All the photos of people fleeing have been taken by Tarneem in Rafah. 

Tarneem has a Fundraiser - Please Contribute to It and Help get her Family out of Gaza

Tony Greenstein

 Life at War, part 2: Learning to Live with the Constant Uncertainty of Evacuation

Israeli forces have begun their ground offensive on Rafah and have seized control of the border, effectively cutting off lifesaving aid deliveries into Gaza, Palestine. The closure of Rafah crossing is simply a death sentence to everyone in Gaza. It’s a death sentence for thousands of injured and patients listed for medical treatment outside Gaza. It’s a death sentence for Gazans who want to evacuate and escape death. It’s a death sentence for patients waiting life-saving and critical surgeries by international medical teams, who won’t be allowed into Gaza. It’s a slow death sentence for many because soon there will be no food, essentials, or humanitarian aid. Food, fuel, medicine, and basic supplies are running dangerously low in Gaza.

Literally, hundreds of people are dying every single day. It’s a mental death sentence, I already feel further isolated from the rest of the world and literally trapped by military tanks from the southernmost point (Rafah crossing) to the northernmost point (Erez crossing) in Gaza. It’s a political death sentence to a so close agreement between Hamas and Israel. It will be used as a political tool and will impact the negotiations. Meanwhile, more Gazans & probably hostages will lose their lives. Of course, Israel, the US and Egypt lie as much as they breathe and say the crossing is open. It’s open in the sense that trucks can drop stuff in the long line of trucks, but the supply route is not open at all, it’s not safe to get trucks into Gaza from a zone full of military tanks!

I was speaking to Lama, my friend in Rafah, and that’s their story of multiple evacuation.

Lost Count

I don't even remember how many times we've had to pack up our lives and flee. It's become a cruel routine, a twisted dance of survival in a land that knows nothing but war and chaos. Each time feels like tearing open old wounds, reliving the trauma of displacement repeatedly. I’m from northern Gaza, I initially evacuated to a friend’s house in Jabalia, then to Gaza city. Then, both of our families evacuated to the middle area, then to Khan Younis and by the beginning of December 2023, we were in a tent in Rafah.

I wonder what people think when they read the word evacuation. Do people consider the psychological trauma inherent in the act itself?I left pieces of myself behind at every stop, memories, belongings – it's all scattered along the way. I left my photo album in the north, my camera in Gaza city, my laptop in the middle area and I have no memories of so many dear friends I have lost. But it’s alright because I still have my life.

Or do people think about the endless debates, the weighing of risks, and the collective anxiety over whether to stay or go, and if so, where to? Do they reflect on the logistical challenges, like the scarcity of available vehicles, which often leave us with no choice but to walk for miles on foot, carrying our mattresses and blankets on our backs. Are people aware of the financial strain imposed by the scarcity and high cost of fuel, making transportation prohibitively expensive? Or do they simply gloss over it as just another word in the endless stream of news about Gaza.

For me, “evacuation” isn't merely a word – it's a call to action, a stark reminder of my vulnerability and indignity we endure every day.And now, as Israel issues evacuation orders for eastern Rafah, we find ourselves once again thrust into uncertainty. "We must endure," I tell myself.

Inhumane Conditions

When we got to Rafah, we had no relatives there and couldn’t stay at someone’s house, so we ended up in a tent. We were late to receive help from aid organizations, so we had to make do with whatever we could find – wood beams, old clothes, bits of fabric, anything to give us some shelter. And the swelling demand for shelters and the lack of supply has sent prices for materials skyrocketing, we have spent all our savings by now. Before the war, we had a small tent in Gaza, mainly for our family gatherings at the beach. I wish I had brought it with me but who knew we’ll end up in a tent.

Our days now revolve around the ceaseless quest for survival, even the most basic necessities – water, food, sanitation – are luxuries beyond reach.

Water is like gold for us now. We wash ourselves and drink from a single bucket. I have been washing my clothes by hands for seven months now. Privacy is a luxury we can't afford. We're crammed together in tight spaces, and the communal bathroom is a daily queue. I’ve told I’ll get used to it but it's not easy when everyone knows your business. I literally want to disappear when I’m standing in line for the bathroom, but if I do, I’ll miss my turn.

Cooking is a hassle too. We must scrounge for firewood just to make a meal, and everything smells like smoke afterwards. I miss wearing or smelling perfumes. Our meals are meager and uninspiring, I haven’t had any fruit for months now, not eggs, not meat yet I’m thankful that we still have some food.

Hygiene is a distant memory, a luxury reserved for those who dwell in more fortunate place but not Gaza. There is sand everywhere, clinging to our skin and clothes like a relentless oppressor, even in our food.

We have endured rainy days; and as you can imagine our makeshift tent is not winterproof or waterproof. Our limited belongings have been soaked by rain multiple times.I remember nights of January when we’d be awake because there is rain leakage into the tent. We would have nowhere to go to except to stand up, stay awake until the rain stops, and then start cleaning. Now,we’re enduring scorching heatwaves, it’s like living in an oven. There are pests, including ants, lizards, and snakes. There are flies, and insects all over the place, while our fragile makeshift tent offering little protection from the forces of nature.

We fall ill with alarming frequency, our bodies weakened by malnutrition and exposure to all these circumstances. Yet, there is no respite from our suffering, no sanctuary! I once couldn’t even find a simple painkiller like Panadol in the pharmacies of Gaza.

Living in makeshift tents is a daily battle for survival, a relentless onslaught of deprivation and despair. We are the forgotten ones, the voiceless masses who cling to life with every ounce of strength we possess. There is no other option if you are a survivor so far.  Ijust hope our resilience knows no bounds and our strength never runs out.

We are now at Al Mawasi area in Khan Younis, and it is just another place without adequate shelter, food, water, and medical care. Just another city of tents and surely not safe at all. There is constant fear of airstrikes and shelling, never knowing when the next bomb will fall or if we'll be the ones caught in its path. We’ll have some bread and sleep on the street because it is too late, and everyone is already tired. Tomorrow, we’ll wake up to build another makeshift tent and start the suffering all over again.

Will It Ever Stop?

I often find myself wondering if this cycle of displacement will ever come to an end. Will I ever sleep on a bed again, instead of a mattress? Will I ever take a hot shower? Will I ever eat my favourite meal of Pizza and enjoy a cup of soda. Will my house in the north of Gaza be standing? Will there ever be a day when we can finally lay down our roots and build a future for ourselves without fear of it being ripped away?

Hope is a fragile thing in Gaza, a flickering flame in the darkness that threatens to be extinguished at any moment. We cling to it desperately, praying for a glimmer of light to guide us through the darkness. But perhaps the most unbearable part is the constant uncertainty, never knowing when the next evacuation will come or where we'll end up next. It's a cruel game of chance, played with our lives as the stakes.

Abram Leon, 26, leader of Hashomer Hatzair and then the Fourth International in Belgium, was Murdered in Auschwitz

Leon Explained in The Jewish Question – A Marxist Interpretation Why Anti-Semitism Arose and Where it Came From

As readers of my book will know, during the Second World War the Zionist movement was a Quisling movement that collaborated with the Nazis and went out of its way to obstruct rescue of Jewish refugees whose destination wasn’t Palestine.

By way of contrast Abram Leon, leader of the Fourth International in Belgium, died resisting the Nazis. Where, as in the Warsaw Ghetto, Zionists fought alongside Jewish anti-Zionists against the Nazis they did so not because they were Zionists but despite their Zionism.

Jewish Partisans Captured in Warsaw Ghetto

After the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising there was panic in Palestine. Dina Porat, Chief Historian at Israel’s Yad Vashem Propaganda Museum wrote that Melech Neustadt of the Jewish Agency Executive:

repeatedly implored the youth movement leaders in Palestine to save those still alive – even against their will – by issuing a directive that they were to leave immediately by whatever ways possible... The issue was whether or not the Yishuv was morally justified in instructing these comrades to abandon their communities, save themselves, and thereby stop the armed uprisings.... the numerous revolts in the summer of 1943 would ultimately deprive the Yishuv of the cream of Europe’s potential pioneering force... among the major youth movements in Palestine. Neustadt’s views prevailed and attempts to extricate the activists failed. They refused to leave. [Porat, The Blue and the Yellow Stars of David, p. 241]

A Zionist emissary arrived in Bedzin, a Nazi ghetto in Poland, in July 1943 after the Warsaw Uprising to persuade Frumka Plotnicka to leave. She replied that ‘I have a responsibility for my brethren... I have lived with them and I will die with them.’ The Zionist fighters, such as Antek Zuckerman and Zivia Lubetkin, refused on principle to leave. One can only admire the bravery and commitment of these young fighters who, given the choice between the fight against the Nazis in the Diaspora and the Arabs in Palestine, committed what in Zionist eyes, was a mortal sin. They chose the Diaspora.

One of the Palestinian emissaries, Yudke Hellman, described how in October and December 1939 he witnessed the return of Plotnicka and Lubetkin to German-occupied Poland and how he had tried and failed to persuade them to leave for Palestine. Frumka stood up and announced that her decision to return to Warsaw was final. [Yechiam Weitz, The Yishuv’s Response to the Holocaust, pp. 218-19].

Hayka Klinger, another fighter in Warsaw, who arrived in Palestine in March 1944, told the Histadrut Executive that ‘we received an order not to organize any more defence.’ [Porat p. 242] Klinger observed that

‘Without a people, a people’s avant-garde is of no value. If rescue it is, then the entire people must be rescued. If it is to be annihilation, then the avante-garde too shall be annihilated.’ [Edith Zertal, Israel’s Holocaust and the Politics of Nationhood, p. 33]

Never was the ethical and moral distinction between the Jewish diaspora and Palestine’s Zionist leaders clearer.

The Zionist leaders saw the risings in the ghettos as ‘a kind of betrayal of the overriding principle of the homeland.’ [Zertal p.34] Yet despite opposing the uprisings at the time, the ghetto fighters were ‘retrospectively conscripted’ into the Zionist terror groups. ‘We fought here and they fought there’ according to Palmach commander Yitzhak Sadeh. [Zertal p.26] Except that the Jewish partisans fought against the fascists whereas the Zionist militias fought with fascists.

This is why John Rose of the SWP was wrong when he argued that Zionism was not an obstacle to fighting against fascism. Rose wrote:

It’s true that when Hitler came to power some Zionist leaders stupidly thought that they could do a deal with him that would enable some German Jews to go to Palestine.

The Zionist attitude to the Nazis had nothing to do with ‘stupidity’ nor was Ha'avara, their trade deal with the Nazis, about enabling some Jews to go to Palestine. However I digress.

Abram Leon was born in Warsaw in 1918 and died in Auschwitz in 1944. Leon had been the leader of Hashomer Hatzair (Young Guard), a left-wing Zionist youth group, from 1936 till 1940 when he and 20 comrades broke from Zionism and joined the underground Trotskyist  organisation. He was arrested by the Nazis in June 1944 and tortured before being sent to Auschwitz where he died in September 1944.

Leon died at the age of 26 but not before he had written The Jewish Question – A Marxist Interpretation, which was written whilst leading the resistance to the Nazis. It is a remarkable work, not least because of the conditions under which it was produced.

Leon’s thesis in a nutshell was that unlike the myths spread by the Zionists and Orthodox Jewry, that the Jews survived because of their religion, the exact opposite was the case. He reversed the relationship. The religion survived because of the Jews. It was the specific social and economic role that Jews played in society, reflected as it was in their religion, which kept the religion going.

It was Karl Marx who had written in On the Jewish Question that:

Judaism has survived, not in spite of  history but because of it. (p.92)

Captured Jewish Partisans in Warsaw

Indeed where Jews did not have a specific socio-economic role as with the Jewish farmers in Sicily, they assimilated to the surrounding population.

Zionism has rewritten the history of the Jews and hence the history of anti-Semitism. Zionism, with its claim to Palestine, consists of a series of myths designed to appeal to the simplest of minds.

How many times did we hear during the attacks on Corbyn that anti-Semitism was a ‘virus’, a pathological and incurable condition. As one of the first Zionists, Leon Pinsker wrote in Autoemancipation:

‘Judeophobia is then a mental disease, and as a mental disease it is hereditary, and having been inherited for 2,000 years, it is incurable.

Pinsker was a doctor so he used the term ‘Judeophobia’ rather than anti-Semitism. But if a disease is incurable then there is no point in fighting it.  At best one seeks pain relief or palliatives.

Theodor Herzl, the founder of Political Zionism, was of the belief that the cause of anti-Semitism was the Jews themselves. Their fault was living in other peoples’ countries. The solution was therefore colonisation. In the Jewish State he wrote:

“The unfortunate Jews are now carrying the seeds of anti-Semitism into England; they have already introduced it into America.”

Leon demolishes this and other Zionist myths and shows how, as Jews fulfilled certain roles in  society – money lenders, tax stewards, usurers, traders, skilled craftsmen –anti-Semitism itself changed. Religious anti-Semitism expressed  class antagonism to the role Jews played in feudal society and was expressed as religious antagonism.

Leon’s great achievement was to situate the Jews in history. Instead of the Zionist myth of the expulsion of the Jews from Palestine in the wake of the destruction of the Second Temple, for which there is zero evidence, he showed how it was the Jews themselves who emigrated because Palestine was incapable of feeding its inhabitants.

In this the Palestinian Jews were not unique. Many people such as the Phoenicians and Armenians had followed similar paths.

Some 4 million Jews left Palestine in the first two centuries AD. Some 1 million of them were to be found in Alexandria alone, one of the great Hellenized cities in the Mediterranean. Like many people before them, the Jews became great traders and it was through trade and commerce that Jews survived.

Leon’s explanation of the Jews as a ‘people-class’ explained their survival. In the feudal era, a society based on production for use not exchange, groups who carried out particular socio-economic roles were seen as being different ethnically from the native population.

The Zionist idea of ‘eternal anti-Semitism’ is a way of avoiding difficult questions such as why the Jews survived and why there was persecution. It is really a reflection of the anti-Semitic stereotype of the ‘eternal wandering Jew’ which became a film under the Nazis.

Anti-Semitism constituted the class antagonism of different layers of feudal society towards the economic role that Jews played.

Thousands of Jews died in peasant revolts, be it at York, Norwich or at the hands of Chmielniki and the Cossacks in Poland from 1648 to 1657. However this was a peasants revolt against the role of Jews as Arendators, officials who leased land from the nobles and whose demands on the peasants were extremely exacting. 

Many of those who died were Jews but contrary to popular history it wasn’t just Jews who suffered. As Anna Reid wrote in Borderland: A Journey Through the History of Ukraine:

Wherever they found the szlachta, royal officials or Jews, they [Cossacks] killed them all, sparing neither women nor children. They pillaged the estates of the Jews and nobles, burned churches and killed their priests, leaving nothing whole....

But whereas anti-Semitism in feudal times came from the peasants and mendicant religious orders, with the Jews as in Poland, protected by the nobility and King, under capitalism anti-Semitism came from the State and the ruling classes. The best example until the Nazis was under the Czar whose Ministers deliberately instigated pogroms, creating the Black Hundreds for this purpose.

To the Zionists anti-Semitism was the property of all non-Jews regardless of class. Anti-Semitism existed because the Jews existed. As A B Yehoshua explained, the Jews were guests who used other peoples’ countries like hotels. [Jewish Chronicle, 22.12.89. ‘Diaspora a cancer’]

As Hannah Arendt observed

If it is true that mankind has insisted on murdering Jews for more than two thousand years, then Jew-killing is a normal, and even human, occupation and Jew-hatred is justified beyond the need of argument. [The Origins of Totalitarianism, p. 7] The Origins of Totalitarianism, p. 7,

Leon’s book went almost unnoticed until it was resurrected by French Marxist Maxime Rodinson in 1968 at the height of the Paris riots.

Leon’s main argument was that the Jews formed a ‘People Class’ – that they performed specific tasks in pre-capitalist society that bound them together as both a people and a class. Under feudalism this was very common. Not just the Jews but the Gypsies, Scots, Armenians and Chinese of South Asia, who were even called the Jews of Asia, also formed castes that attracted popular ire.

Where the Jews lost a distinctive socio-economic role they assimilated to the majority. To the Zionists anti-Semitism was common to all non-Jews. As Leon wrote (p.247)

Zionism transposes modern anti-Semitism to all of history and saves itself the trouble of studying the various forms of anti-Semitism and their evolution.[1]

In what is a short book, Leon gave a panoramic overview of the Jews historically. The book explains that the ‘Jewish Question’ was dying out in Western Europe with the advent of capitalism. The Jews no longer had any specific socio-economic role. They were assimilating to the majority population with the advent of Emancipation. It was only anti-Semitism in Russia and Eastern Europe, resulting in waves of migration by Jews westwards, that kept the Jewish Question alive.

Zionism was implacably opposed to Jewish Emancipation because they saw, correctly, that granting equal rights to Jews meant that they were no longer forced by the state to maintain a separate existence. In Israel today the fascist Lehava calls miscegenation , inter-racial sex, a holocaust. Israeli minister Rafi Peretz labeled intermarriage between American Jews and non-Jews as being “like a second Holocaust.”

Leon had but a very short life but in that very short time-span he produced  one of the Marxist classics which cuts through the mystification of Zionism in its treatment of both Jewish history and anti-Semitism .

I began by saying that Leon had started out as a Zionist in Hashomer Hatzair. In Palestine this was a political party which later became Mapam. Their strand of ‘Marxist’ Zionism had been founded by Ber Borochov, who was expelled from the Russian Social Democratic Party in 1901 for Zionism.

Borochov held that Jews could not take part in the class struggle in the diaspora because they had no relationship to the means of production. Their conditions of production meant that they were outside the class struggle. According to Borochov social structure of the Jews resembled an ‘inverted pyramid’ – too many rich Jews and not enough poor or working class  Jews.

It was only in Palestine where Jews could form their own society that it was possible for class struggle to break out. Borochov, who ended up supporting WW1 was wrong. It was precisely at this time, the end of the 19^th and beginning of the 20^th centuries that Jews were becoming part of the proletariat.

Marxist Zionism was always a cult that used sophistry to explain away colonialism. If Borochov is to be taken at his word then Socialist Zionists having allied with the bourgeois Zionists in order to create a Jewish State would then wage class war against them! The problem with this was that it was more likely to become part of the bourgeoisie in such a state.

We can see where this bankrupt theory has ended up. In the last Knesset Meretz, which was the descendant of Mapam, found itself in alliance with the far-Right Yisrael Beteinu and Yamina. In the 2020 elections Meretz, has been eliminated from the Knesset altogether. In 1949 in Israel’s first elections it obtained 19 seats.

The beauty of Leon’s book is that it at once provides an overview of Jewish history since ancient times and explains how and why anti-Semitism has persisted, albeit in different forms.  It demystifies anti-Semitism.

As Leon remarked in the section on Zionism and the belief in  2,000 years of exile:

In reality just so long as Judaism was incorporated in the feudal system, the “dream of Zion” was nothing but a dream and did not correspond to any real interest of Judaism. The Jewish tavern owner or “farmer” of sixteenth-century Poland thought as little of “returning” to Palestine as does the Jewish millionaire in America today. Jewish religious Messianism was no whit different from the Messianism belonging to other religions. Jewish pilgrims who went to Palestine met Catholic, Orthodox, and Moslem pilgrims. Besides it was not so much the “return to Palestine” which constituted the foundation of this Messianism as the belief in the rebuilding of the temple of Jerusalem.

We should not forget that Leon was writing at the height of the Nazi persecution, a persecution which claimed him in that death factory, Auschwitz. He wrote that one of the “ironies of history” was that

when the Jew was unassimilable, at a time when he really represented “capital,” he was indispensable to society. There could be no question of destroying him. At the present time, capitalist society, on the edge of the abyss, tries to save itself by resurrecting the Jew and the hatred of the Jews. But it is precisely because the Jews do not play the role which is attributed to them that anti-Semitic persecution can take on such an amplitude. Jewish capitalism is a myth; that is why it is so easily vanquished. But in vanquishing its “negative,” racism at the same time destroys the foundations for its own existence....

The irony of history wills that the most radical anti-Semitic ideology in all history should triumph precisely in the period when Judaism is on the road of economic and social assimilation. But like all “ironies of history” this seeming paradox is very understandable. At the time

Tony Greenstein

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[1]                                 Abram Leon, The Jewish Question - A Marxist Interpretation, p. 247.