By Norman Markowitz
click here for related stories: Middle East 2-07-06, 8:51 am
A comrade who is a sophisticated Marxist-Leninist asked me recently to try to deal with the question of "Zionism" theoretically. His point, which is a good one, was that criticisms and condemnations of Israeli policy and general attacks on "Zionist" ideology are routinely condemned as anti-Semitic by supporters of those policies. At the same time, there are both neo-Nazi and other anti-Semitic groups in Europe and the U.S and rightist groups in Middle Eastern countries, including the Palestinian group Hamas, who for different reasons have cloaked anti-Semitic ideology and policies in anti-Zionist rhetoric.
For Marxists, the first question that must be analyzed is that of nationalism. We should as Marxists understand and apply our own framework as historical and dialectical materialists and our own outlook as internationalists to the question of nationalism Marxism is internationalist, but socialist movements develop in a national context under specific historical conditions.
Marxism-Leninism adds to Marxism what is essentially a political science of society and an updating of global history. First, a theory of a revolutionary vanguard party. Second, a theory of a revolutionary workers state as a necessity for the establishment of socialism. And third a theory of new imperialism, developing at the end of the lives of Marx and Engels, rooted in a new form of capital (monopoly or finance capital born of the merger of bank and industrial capital) and its need to export itself globally in order to overcome the falling rate of profit created. This led directly to a massive increase capitalist exploitation of labor and natural resources as capital literally exported itself to both produce and find markets greatly expanded productive capacity
As a result of this new more extensive and intensive monopoly capitalist imperialism, there were from the late 19th century on profound dislocations throughout the world that both increased the number of and threatened directly peoples occupied by the colonial powers.
Also long oppressed minorities, such as the largely ghettoized Jewish minorities of the Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires, who were now literally the first to be pushed out (in contrast with the experience of minorities in the imperialist centers, who were more likely to become the last hired and first fired). The case of the African American minority, where what had been a chattel slave population was transformed rapidly into an internal colony whose majority was trapped in the semi-feudal sharecropping economy, was a special and extreme case of the super-exploitation in the new imperialism.
Dislocated sections of the middle and working classes in Britain and France were encouraged to migrate to India, Algeria, and other colonial possessions where they would have privileges over the indigenous population.
Diverse nationalist movements developed in response to these dislocations. Jewish nationalism had neither a territory to gain or an empire to offer it privileges in colonies as it took shape in the last decades of the 19th century. But the possibility of some exodus, some escape for horrendous conditions, could and eventually did influence sections of the Jewish masses, just as Marcus Garvey's Back to Africa movement influenced sections of the Black masses in the US, who had neither a territory to identify with or an empire to offer it settler privileges.
Nationalism was now much more complicated, as Lenin and those who became Marxist-Leninists (Communists) understood.
It remained true that nationalist ideologies, many Marxist and non-Marxist progressive thinkers would contend, have a long-term tendency toward exclusion and separation by stressing differences between nationalities and cultures.
However, the nationalism of the oppressed, of oppressed national minorities and of colonized peoples fighting against imperialism, had to be viewed differently from the chauvinistic nationalism of the oppressors, that is in Czarist Russia what Lenin called "Great Russian Chauvinism" and various chauvinist ideologies that sustained institutional racism either through exclusion or coercive assimilation. This was a theoretical distinction that separated Marxist-Leninists (Communists) from Marxist activists who continued to support Social Democratic parties and call themselves Social Democrats through the world, who saw the national question only in its antagonistic relationship to the class question.
The eventual collapse of the colonial empires after World War II and the development of the Cold War made it impossible not to see what should have been clear to anyone not blinded by anti-Jewish prejudice and what Communists more than Social Democrats should have seen - a major component of Jewish nationalism, both Yiddishist (East European Jewish cultural nationalism) and Zionist (Hebrew - settler-new Jewish state Jewish culture nationalism), was an expression of the nationalism of the oppressed. Both had radical socialist orientations that Communists particularly were now supporting in many countries emerging from colonialism.
Changing political situations and political needs rooted in the Cold War clearly and, perhaps, in the reality that anti-Semitism had not been eradicated in the Soviet Union (which as Czarist Russia had been its leading center until the revolution) merged in the now global and powerful Communist movement to undermine both a clear analysis and consistent stance toward the various currents of Jewish nationalism and their role in British colonial Palestine.
For example, early in the Russian revolutionary movement, Bolsheviks found themselves working with the Jewish Labor Bund, a Marxist Jewish workers organization that saw Jewish people as a specially oppressed group in the Czarist empire, even though Bolsheviks of Jewish background rejected completely the Bund's contention that Jewish people in the empire needed to maintain separate organizations as they struggled for a socialist revolution.
The Bund contended that Jewish workers and intellectuals should not simply join revolutionary groups like the Bolsheviks in the struggle for socialism, but work through a group like the Bund which would defend Jewish people as Jewish people with a distinct identity and culture while fighting to abolish capitalism and all capitalists, Jewish and non-Jewish.
After the revolution, figures in the left wing of the Jewish Labor Bund, as was true of left Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries, supported the Bolshevik revolution and in some cases became prominent figures in the new Soviet Union.
Bund supporters rejected the Zionist movement on the ground that Jewish workers had been in Russia and other countries for centuries and had to struggle for their liberation there. The Bolsheviks rejected the Zionist movement as an escapist distraction from the revolutionary struggle.
The Soviet Revolution sought to advance and protect the cultural rights of all peoples, and connected nationality to a considerable extent with territory. Coercive "Russification" was rejected, bilingualism and multi-lingualism encouraged, and nationality connected to constituent Republics, autonomous regions, etc.
This theory was broadly applied through the Comintern to various nationalities in multi-national empires and colonial regions, for example, the famous "black belt thesis" supporting the right of African Americans to establish an autonomous region in the deep South in what was the center of large plantation slavery. (This autonomous region would have been still part of a larger socialist USA as such regions existed for non-Russian groups who had been oppressed under the Czar in the Soviet Union). Unfortunately, the connection of nation with territory was in the case of African Americans in the U.S. and other cases of indigenous peoples in Latin America and other places significantly flawed as theory and unworkable as practice.
In the 1920s and 1930s, the Soviet state encouraged the development of Yiddish culture (itself a nationalist current with a progressive wing) among those Soviet Jews who wished to continue develop the literature and theater associated with the Yiddish language. The Soviets also established in Siberia an autonomous Jewish region Birobidjian, for those Jewish Soviets who would wish to live in such a region (very few did).
In British colonial Palestine, a Zionist movement which included a large left-wing influenced by the Soviet revolution developed. That this movement was anti-Communist and at odds with the Communist Party that came into existence in Israel is certainly true but unremarkable. It was also true that the left forces led by Nehru in the Indian National Congress in British colonial India were both anti-Communist opponents of the Communist Party of India and at the same time deeply influenced in their concepts of socialist planning by the Soviet Union. Soviet influence was both complex and extensive throughout the colonial regions that later came to be known as "the third world."
This Zionist left-wing in colonial Palestine built successful agricultural cooperatives (Kibbutzim) influenced by the positive developments of Soviet collective farms, organized Jewish workers and openly agitated for an eventual Socialist Jewish State. Others, including exiled European Jewish Communists and individuals like the humanist philosopher Martin Buber were part of what one might call a non-Zionist migration to British colonial Palestine.
While Buber and others advocated a "binational state" of Jews and Arabic people, the Zionist movement, including its substantial left-wing, had no real policy for the non Jewish citizens of a Jewish state, although the policy of expulsion and exclusion advocated by the rightwing of the movement and later implemented through both the effects of wars and the conscious policies of right-wing Israeli governments was not representative of the larger Zionist movement.
Now let us raise a very vexing theoretical question. Can a nationalism connected to a settler state be progressive?
In the traditional Soviet view, which connected nation with territory and saw settlements as an expression of imperialism, the answer would be no. However, modern nationalism should be seen as more complex than the analyses put forward in the Soviet Union immediately after the revolution.
Settlers have created nationalities and nations throughout the Western Hemisphere and for that matter through territorial expansion and settlements over long periods of time in Czarist Russia and other countries. Religion and ethnicity can become powerful expressions of an ethnocultural identity for many people, particularly for those oppressed in states that actively discriminate against them and/or restrict or seek to stamp out their cultural institutions (oppressed East European Jews, oppressed Kurds under Turkish, Iranian and Iraqi rule for example).
As people migrate into diasporas, their relationship to the regions, nations, and ethno-cultural groups from which they came do not disappear through assimilation. Modern capitalism makes the sort of diasporas in which European Jews found themselves in the late 19th and early 20th centuries increasingly the rule for peoples throughout the world and the questions of assimilation, cultural pluralism, and cultural nationalism addressed by Jewish minorities since the late 19th century the questions that Hindu, Muslim, East Asian and Latin American populations are forced to address in 21st century Diasporas today.
At the end of World War II, the Soviet leadership for the first time expressed qualified support for the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine. In practical political terms, this made sense.
Besides the devastating effects of the war in which the Soviet people (twenty-seven million dead, including Jewish Soviets) and the Jewish people of Europe (six million dead, a number comparable to the entire Jewish population of the U.S. today and roughly a third of the Jewish people of the world at the time) were linked, the Zionist movement was in a clear and direct way an enemy of British imperialism, which had been replaced by Nazi Germany is the USSR's and the global Communist movement's major enemy in 1933 and was about to be replaced by the US in that regard.
Unlike the masses and certainly ruling groups that the British imperialists were trying to leave in power in Iraq, Egypt, and Jordan as they retreated, the Jewish working class of British colonial Palestine, given its level of development and organization, was by far the most socialist and class conscious working class in the region. Although some may disagree strongly, David Ben Gurion was less a "creature" of the West the British advised Kings on the thrones of Iraq, Egypt and Jordan, or the Aramco-Saud family business known as Saudi Arabia.
As for Israel as a settler state, so were the U.S., Canada, Australia, Mexico and Czarist Russia for that matter. To paraphrase Tallyrand's famous comment about treason, national identity in reality is a matter of dates. There are no "pure national" territories (those not gained by conquest expansion, etc) as there are no "pure races."
The Jewish settlements inspired and organized by the Zionist movement had created what was a de facto Hebrew Jewish nation in British colonial Palestine by the end of World War II, whether you would call it Israel, Palestine, Judea, or whatever. At the end of World War II, for the first time the formation of a Jewish state in Palestine had broad support among the European left and also among Jewish people through the world while the forces opposed to the creation of such a state were in no position to prevent it.
The Cold War and the war that accompanied the proclamation of a Jewish state in Palestine and subsequent wars in which Israel allied itself to British and French imperialism (1956) and then occupied all territory given to Palestinians by the UN partition (1967) changed everything.
First, the Soviet Union rapidly after 1948 saw both Israel and the Zionist movement as a pawn of U.S. imperialism in its campaign to destroy the Soviet Union. The Stalin regime, then in its last years, launched brutal "anti-Zionist" purges in which many prominent Jewish Soviet citizens who had made substantial contributions to both the construction of the Soviet Union and its victory over fascism found themselves imprisoned and in the worst cases executed.
These purges provided very powerful ammunition for anti-Communists through the world for the "totalitarian theory," which equated the Soviet Union with the fascist states and the Stalin leadership of the USSR particularly with Hitler fascism. They also created great disillusionment among Communists of Jewish ethnic background in many countries, particularly the United States, where the CPUSA was under intense attack an its Jewish American activists in the arts, sciences and professions were often especially targeted by HUAC, the FBI, and various state and local political police agencies
It is or at least should be obvious that the "anti-Zionist" policies of the Soviet state stimulated anti-Jewish feelings and policies through the society which alienated Jewish Soviets, the second largest Jewish minority on earth after the U.S., encouraged significant numbers to seek immigration, and became the source of the anti-Sovietism that the policies were initially established to combat.
Once a Jewish state had been created, the Zionist "mission" had been in reality completed. What one might call "Utopian Zionism," the ingathering of all Jewish people in such a Jewish state was as impossible as a world revolution sweeping the world and establishing socialism in a short time. Most of the Jewish people of the world never contemplated emigrating to Israel and only severe repression would lead them to do so.
Israel has certainly developed further as a distinct nation since its establishment. The question now is to make Palestine in social-economic terms a viable nation and pursue a policy of development and peace for the whole region.
While it remains a self-proclaimed "Jewish state" Israel's laws which reflect its internal politics, actively discriminate against Conservative, Reformed, and Reconstructionist Jewish people, creating a situation where only secular Israelis and Orthodox Jewish Israelis can feel really comfortable. Thus, it is not only a "Jewish state," but a very peculiar one as it addresses the religious rights of significant numbers of Jewish people.
Its ruling groups after a long and tangled history granted citizenship rights to Arabic Israelis, who politically act in ways that are similar to Indian Muslims, that is supporting heavily the Labor bloc against the right-wing Jewish chauvinist Likkud bloc, the way the Indian Muslim minority heavily supports the Congress Party against the right-wing Hindu chauvinist BJP party.
We should first see Israel an advanced "third world" nation born of the collapse of colonialism and established first and foremost by people who were primary victims of European fascism and racism. We should analyze movements within the nation based on their class basis, their support for workers rights, for peace, and their resistance to global imperialism, in essence the way the Soviet Union looked at the Nehru and the Indian National Congress in the past and on other left nationalist movements which did not simply act in imperialist interests. Of course Israel will have to act very differently in its relationship to Palestinians for any of this to become real.
Israel's trade union movement and liberal democratic institutions of press, parliament, and judiciary, and the socialist ideas and institutions that are part of its history, along with its brutality and repression toward the Palestinian people. This history makes it a nation where, even under its special garrison state conditions, socialism not only has a future, but a nation whose future is tied to the future of the working people of Palestine, Egypt, Syria, and the other nations of the region.
Israel is a nation whose future is dependant upon its playing a positive role in regional development, not acting as a middleman for U.S. imperialism scapegoated by all other states in the region, including other allies of U.S. imperialism. The false dialectic between "Zionism" and "anti-Zionism" in effect makes it much harder for Israel to change its policies in its own interests.
Let me conclude this first stab at historical materialist interpretation of "Zionism" by saying that the term no longer serves any purpose and should be scrapped, just as the Comintern long ago rejected Marx's concept of an "Asiatic mode" of production because the concept had never really been developed in a scientific way and also served to undermine the campaigns of Marxist-Leninists to build Communist parties and anti-imperialist coalitions among the peoples of Asia.
It should be replaced by some concept Israeli nationalism or Jewish nationalism and then judged concretely in terms of its specific currents, their class content, what they represent within Israeli political life, for example, the present policies of Peretz and the Labor bloc as against the Likkud bloc, although that does not exhaust the categories.
Israel depends in a much more direct way on the Jewish Diaspora in the developed world than let us say India, or Italy, or China, but these and other nations large and small, have diasporas that are involved in the nation's they identify with, provide various forms of financial support to those nations, and also lobby against policies that they see as opposed to those nations.
The Israeli lobby is certainly both sophisticated and powerful in the U.S., but those who see it "controlling U.S. foreign policy" are as blind as people who see a tail wagging a dog.
Also, Jewish Americans are prominent in the labor movement, the peace movement, the broad left, and the movement for a peace in the Middle East that provided for co-existence between Israelis and Palestinians.
The right wing here and abroad has long condemned peace activists, defenders of the separation of Church and State, for that matter "white" defenders of Civil Rights as representing "Jewish interests" at the same time that large sections of the right have found it convenient since 1967 to supporting Israeli militarist and expansionist policies.
The concept of "Zionism" as a fixed idea and "anti-Zionism" as its opposite strengthens not only the Israeli lobby but the reactionary Likkud bloc in Israel for whom "Zionism" is what "Americanism" has long been for the rightwing in the United States, an ideological cloak for both their policies and the maintenance of their political power.
Our aims as Marxist-Leninists should be to foster internationalism, socialism and peace. Continuing to see things in terms of static ideological concepts like "Zionism" and "Anti-Zionism" does not serve that end. Like the "Asiatic mode of production" theory after the Soviet revolution and the globalization of the Communist movement, our special critique of Zionism, looking at it differently than other forms of nationalism, is not only flawed but counter-productive to advancing these goals, including the goals of social justice for the Palestinian people and the development of an internationalist policy for the region that will challenge the present crude militarist and imperialist policy of the Bush administration.
--Norman Markowitz is a contributing editor of Political Affairs and you may send him comments by at e-mail at pa-letters at politicalaffairs.net.