Thursday, November 07, 2024
Elder of ZiyonThe point of the reviewer is that Zionism was a "fringe movement" in Europe before World War II and Jewish socialists had completely different ideas on how to fight antisemitism:
Turn of the century Russia also faced a series of increasingly severe political crises as the ossified Romanov monarchy struggled to keep pace with a modernizing economy, a militant labor movement, and emerging national liberation movements. These tensions made Russia a tinderbox for antisemitism as Tsars Alexander III and Nicholas II attempted to displace popular frustration onto Jews. Tsarist propaganda drew on Christian anti-Jewish prejudice to portray Jews as either wealthy capitalists responsible for the world’s economic misery or, alternately, as socialists who threatened to tear apart civilization itself.Combined with poverty and legal discrimination, the experience of often brutal day-to-day antisemitism pushed Russia’s Jewish population toward three broad alternatives. A minority founded organizations promising a better life in an exclusively Jewish homeland. Far more, however, emigrated to developed capitalist countries.And to those who rejected the first two answers, the Bund offered a radical leftist political project that sought to end antisemitism by transforming society entirely.Zionists claimed that antisemitism would never be defeated, and argued that to live freely and in safety, Jews needed an exclusive homeland. Bundists rejected this as pessimistic and separatist and argued that it was necessary to fight racism and capitalism at the same time, by uniting working-class and oppressed peoples across national, religious, and ethnic lines. Contrary to Zionists, Bundists understood that the fate of Jewish people in Russia and Poland was bound up with that of the entire regional working class and all the ethnic minorities therein.
And the point of the article is:
[As] the number of Jewish people opposed to Zionism grows, it’s crucial that the Left revisits histories like those presented by Stone and Gluckstein in The Radical Jewish Tradition, both to undermine the Zionist conflation between Israel and Jews, and to outline a Leftist Jewish tradition.
I would argue that their statistics on the number of Zionists in eastern Europe is undercounted, sine they are comparing members of Zionist organizations with members of the Bund, and most Jews sympathetic to Zionism would not have necessarily joined organizations. My quick research found that perhaps 20% of Jews were Zionist in the 1920s compared to perhaps 15% who were Bundists.
But the bizarre part is how little self-awareness there is in this article.
The Bundists fought antisemitism by building solidarity with their fellow Russians, Poles and other workers.
How did that work out for them?
Did it protect them during the Holocaust? Did the socialist Poles come out in force to block Nazi deportations of Jews - or did they enthusiastically participate? How did the Jews fare in the Soviet Union under Stalin?
Now, if Zionism had successfully created an independent Jewish state by 1938, how many millions of lives could have been saved?
Even before Israel was created, and through the time of the British White Paper, some 400,000 Jews immigrated from Europe to Israel between 1900-1940, the heyday of the Bund. Meaning, Zionism saved 400,000 Jews from death.
How many did socialism save?
The article is positioned to say that socialism is a better alternative than Zionism in fighting antisemitism. By the most important metric - which one saved more lives - Zionism did far, far better than socialism did, although some socialist groups did speak out against Nazi antisemitism.
It is not a winning argument to say that there were hundreds of thousands of socialist Jews in Eastern Europe during the 1930s, when most of them were killed and their fellow socialists they thought they were in solidarity with didn't so a whole hell of a lot. (To be sure, some of the righteous Gentiles were socialists, like Irena Sendler, but I am not aware of any worker's party that make saving Jews a priority.)
The crazy part is that the Jewish socialists today still make the same argument that worker solidarity is the key to fight antisemitism. Yet are these people doing anything to fight antisemitism today? They only talk about far-Right antisemitism, but they condone - or embrace - the antisemitism of the Muslim world, Black antisemitism, and progressive antisemitism.
And if they argue that Israel is causing antisemitism, that is because of the socialists themselves, who are in the forefront of making antisemitism-as-anti-Zionism acceptable in Leftist circles.
The cluelessness is remarkable.
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