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The
supreme irony of Israel’s recent re-invasion
of Palestinian towns in the West Bank is that its
incursions coincided with the anniversary of another
hopeless confrontation between an impoverished and
vastly outgunned population and a racist occupying
army-the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. In April and May
of 1943, a handful of Jewish socialists and militants
trapped in the crumbling Polish ghetto resolved that,
although they could not possibly defeat Hitler’s
war machine, they would go down fighting, inflicting
“maximum damage” in the process. The key
question for militants, one of the few survivors recalled,
was “How should we die?” Today it is the
Palestinian fighters in towns like Jenin, Ramallah
and Bethlehem who best epitomize the spirit of the
Warsaw resistance. The actions of the Israeli Defence
Forces, by contrast, confirm that the Zionist state
has adopted the bone-crushing tactics and the xenophobic
mentality of the most vicious Jew-haters in history.
The
founders of the Israeli state, from its very beginning
in 1948, have attempted to wrap themselves in the
legacy of the victims of the Holocaust. Zionists claimed,
for example, that the aim of the ghetto fighters was
to reach Palestine, and cited the example of the ghetto
fights to demonstrate that Zionism had resisted the
Nazis. Both claims were false: the Jewish Fighting
Organization (ZOB) went out of its way to ensure that
no preparations were made for refuge in the non-Jewish
neighbourhoods of Warsaw, for fear of undermining
the fighting spirit of its militants; and while a
handful of left-wing Zionists did fight valiantly,
the backbone of the resistance came from the left,
most of whom were anti-Zionist Jews: the left
had won a majority in every major Polish Jewish constituency
in the last pre-war elections in Poland. When ceremonies
marking the 50th anniversary of the Ghetto Fights
were held in Poland in 1993, Israeli Zionists refused
to take part unless the last surviving member of the
ZOB, Jewish socialist Marek Edelman, was excluded
from the platform. And in an unconscionable reminder
of how little the modern Israeli state can claim a
link to the Jews who stood and fought in the 1940s,
an IDF commander reminded his fellow officers on the
eve of the recent onslaught:
If
our job is to seize a densely packed refugee camp
or take over the Nablus casbah…without casualties
on both sides, [we] must before all else analyse
and bring together the lessons of past battles,
even…to analyse how the German army operated
in the Warsaw ghetto.
For
many people around the world, including young activists
attracted to anti-capitalism, Israel’s recent
atrocities are difficult to reconcile with its claim
to represent the descendants of those victimized by
the most horrific crime in the history of capitalism-Hitler’s
“final solution,” aimed at the physical
elimination of European Jewry. Some see the recent
events as an aberration, the result either of the
maniacal militarism of Ariel Sharon or of the new
excesses America’s allies are permitted in the
so-called “war on terror.” For socialists,
however, the roots of Israeli aggression run much
deeper: a colonial project founded upon the ethnic
cleansing of Palestinians, Israel’s essential
function over many years has been to frustrate-both
in its own interest and on behalf of western imperialism-any
attempt at democratisation in the region. Organized
terror on the scale seen in recent months has been
a recurring feature of that effort.
But
how did it develop that the descendants of those who
suffered such unspeakable horror under fascism could
contemplate the brutality now being inflicted, with
such enthusiasm, upon dispossessed Palestinians? The
answer lies in the triumph of Zionism as an ideology
that would come to dominate world Jewry in the aftermath
of the Holocaust. Israel’s rulers today proclaim
their “Jewish homeland” the realization
of a centuries-old longing for a return to Palestine,
but in actual fact Zionism remained, well into the
twentieth century, a messianic strain confined to
a small minority of Jews: the vast majority of Jews
(90% of whom resided in Europe and Russia) looked
to assimilation on the basis of equality, and not
physical separation, as a solution to their oppression.
Many fought alongside non-Jews in the left-wing and
working class movements in central and eastern Europe
and viewed the Zionists as a crackpot, reactionary
cult without any serious prospects for success.
The
rising tide of anti-semitism and an intensification
of nationalist feeling throughout Europe gave rise
to a new, political strain of Zionism in the
late nineteenth century that looked to the actual
setting up of a Jewish state. Its founder, Theodore
Hertzl, who had only several years earlier dismissed
the possibility of “return,” reacted against
the anti-semitism revealed in the notorious Dreyfus
trial (1895) by soliciting support among European
elites for the creation a Jewish homeland. In Hertzl’s
approach we can identify all of the essential features
of modern Zionism: its acceptance of the racialist
logic; its capitulation to-even collaboration with-anti-semitism;
and its organic dependence upon imperialism and alliance
with the powerful against the oppressed.
Far
from presenting itself as a formula for the liberation
of Jews, Zionism was based on a profound sense of
pessimism and despair. Hertzl absorbed the racial
outlook popularised in the pseudo-science of the day,
even describing anti-semitism as “an understandable
reaction to Jewish defects.” He accepted the
eternal inevitability of anti-Jewish prejudice, declaring
that during the Dreyfus affair he had “achieved
a freer attitude towards anti-semitism” and “recognised
the futility of trying to combat [it].”
Hertzl’s
attempt to win support for the Zionist project was
an explicitly colonial undertaking. After earlier
considering the establishment of “homelands”
in Uganda and Argentina, Hertzl settled upon the idea
of a Jewish homeland in the Middle East, retroactively
supporting the project with Biblical argument and
arguing, ominously, that Jews would there construct
“a rampart of civilisation in a sea of Arab barbarism.”
Naturally, it was not initially among the European
masses-Jewish or Gentile-that he sought support, but
among the imperial powers of the day who, even before
the discovery of oil in the region, shared his interest
in controlling and stabilizing the Middle East.
Thus
the list of public figures approached by Zionists
reads like a Who’s Who of European reaction.
Hertzl was a great admirer of Cecil Rhodes, the British
founder of white Rhodesia, and believed that “in
England the idea of Zionism, which is a colonial idea,
[w]ould be easily understood.” In Russia he met
with Wenzel Von Plehve, the interior minister who
had orchestrated pogroms against the Jews, and agreed
to squelch any criticism of the Tsar at the 1903 Zionist
Congress in return for Russian intervention with Turkey
in favour of the Palestine project. The appeal to
imperialism outlived Hertzl: his successor Chaim Weizmann
continued to solicit British support, particularly
important after the collapse of Ottoman rule in the
region. The Balfour Declaration declared British support
for a “national home for the Jewish people,”
an outcome recognised by Winston Churchill as “beneficial”
and “especially in harmony with the truest interests
of the British Empire.” And in their most despicable
act, Zionists in Germany sent Hitler a memorandum
seeking Nazi support for a Jewish homeland, declaring
that
Our
acknowledgment of Jewish nationality provides for
a clear and sincere relationship to the German people,
and its national and racial realities. Precisely
because we do not wish to falsify these fundamentals,
because we too are against mixed marriage and are
for maintaining the purity of the Jewish group…
Even
with imperialist support for their project, as late
as the 1930s Zionism had failed to win the support
of one crucial constituency: the mass of the Jewish
people themselves, still concentrated in Europe. Jewish
emigration to Palestine accelerated after Balfour,
but most Jews who did choose emigration as a means
of escaping the poverty and persecution they suffered
still chose overwhelmingly to emigrate westward-to
western Europe or, especially, the United States.
In Palestine itself, tensions arose between ardent
Zionist settlers and the native Arab population, tensions
that inevitably increased as Jewish demand for Arab
land grew.
Supporters
of the Israeli state today project backwards through
the mists of time an eternal antagonism between Palestinians
and Jews to justify Zionist militarism. Besieged by
hostile Arab neighbours throughout history, they argue,
Jews have been compelled to arm themselves to protect
against anti-semitic outrages directed at them by
Palestinians. In reality, Arabs and Jews had shared
the land of Palestine for centuries in peace until
right-wing Zionists began constructing an “Iron
Wall” of separation to subjugate the Arabs and
facilitate the influx of Jewish immigration from the
1920s onwards. Israeli journalist Tom Segev has recently
described 800 years of friendly relations between
Arabs and Jews in Hebron, and a recent history of
Jerusalem argues that 1300 years of Islamic rule in
the city had been marked by “tolerance of both
Judaism and Christianity.” John Rose has concluded
that “the virulence of European anti-semitism,
with its roots partly in the medieval Christian conception
of the Jew, had no echo in the Arab world.”
Two
key developments disrupted these relations and transformed
the Zionist dream into reality. The massive trauma
inflicted on European Jewry by the Holocaust cut the
ground from underneath the assimilationist argument
and elevated the appeal of Zionism among survivors:
as Rose writes “the world after 1945 did actually
appear to confirm the Hertzl prognosis.” In retrospect,
mainstream Zionist organizations behaved despicably
throughout the war: early on they attempted to cut
deals with the Third Reich; and even when the scale
of the horror became clear, they refused to criticize
their powerful patrons-the US and Britain-for failing
to rescue Jews being sent to the gas chambers. Leading
Zionists blocked attempts to allow refugees into the
US and western Europe out of fear that this would
upset their plans. But in the wake of the Nazi horror,
the pessimism intrinsic in Zionism matched the mood
of deep despair-understandable in the new context-among
Holocaust survivors.
Crucially,
the Zionist project at the end of the war complemented
the desire of the leading imperial powers, Britain
and especially the United States, to shape the post-war
world in their economic and strategic interests. Control
over the vast oil reserves in the Middle East demanded
that the imperial powers find a means of projecting
their military power in the region. With the acquiescence
of a United Nations dominated by the US, Palestine
was partitioned in 1947, with 55% of the land assigned
to Jews-then only 30% of the population-and the remainder
assigned to the large Palestinian majority. From this
point until today, the realization of Zionist aims
has been built upon the continued expulsion of Palestinians
from their homeland. Through the deployment of terror
on a massive scale-including the infamous massacre
of some 2-300 Palestinian civilians in the village
of Deir Yassin-700,000 Palestinians were driven out
of their homes into exile, and by 1949 Israel controlled
80% of Palestine. Those who resisted were denounced
as terrorists, but privately Israeli officials acknowledged
otherwise. David Ben-Gurion noted privately the truth
that “politically we are the aggressors and they
defend themselves.” He noted “an active
resistance by the Palestinians to what they regard
as a usurpation of their homeland by the Jews…
Behind the terrorism is a movement which though primitive
is not devoid of idealism and self-sacrifice.”
Then,
as now, Israel could not have gotten away with such
atrocities without the support of American imperialism.
Within three years of the founding of the Zionist
state, the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz spelled
out the role the new state would play in securing
US interests in the region:
The
feudal regimes in the Middle East have had to make
such concessions to the [Arab] nationalist movements…that
they become more and more reluctant to supply Britain
and the United States with their natural resources
and military bases… Strengthening Israel helps
the Western powers maintain equilibrium…in
the Middle East.
Israel is to become the watchdog. There is no fear
that Israel will undertake any aggressive policy
towards the Arab states. When this would explicitly
contradict the wishes of the US and Britain. But
if for any reasons the Western powers should sometimes
-refer to close their eyes, Israel could be relied
upon to punish one or several neighbouring countries
whose discourtesy to the West went beyond the bounds
of the permissible.
America’s
watchdog. That is the essential role that the state
of Israel has played throughout its history, and explains
why George Bush considers it such a crucial ally in
his so-called “war on terror,” continuing
to bankroll its military adventures and lauding the
war criminal Ariel Sharon as a “man of peace.”
Along with the reactionary Arab regimes, also supported
by Washington, Israel is poised to lash out against
any attempts by the Arab masses to challenge the string
of feudal dictatorships that exploit them. In defending
the world order further afield, Israel has made allies
of some of the bloodiest dictatorships in the world:
trading arms and nuclear intelligence with the apartheid
regime in South Africa and arming and equipping murderous
right-wing regimes in Central and South America, Africa
and Asia. One could hardly imagine a more insulting
testament to the Jewish victims of fascism in Europe
than allowing Zionism to bury its atrocities under
cover of the world’s outrage at the war crimes
of an earlier generation. The spirit of the Warsaw
Ghetto lives today in Jenin, not Tel Aviv.
The Author is a member of the Socialist
Worker's Party
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