Socialist Anti-Zionism: a chapter in the history of the left in Israel/Palestine (original) (raw)
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Shofar: , 2024
This article begins with a simple question: what is the situation of Jews today in socialist struggle? On this point, the article interrogates rhetorics of anti-Zionism, arguing that this strategy coincides with an abandonment of Left struggles against antisemitism, overlapping with the abandonment of universality and a materialist dialectic. Drawing principally on Jean-Paul Sartre's essay Anti-Semite and Jew, as well as Slavoj Žižek's critique of populist rhetoric on the Left, the article develops a materialist strategy for conceiving various forms of antisemitism on both the Right and the Left. The article takes inspiration from Marx's defense of universal human emancipation in his essay "On the Jewish Question," as well as Lenin's defense of national liberation and selfdetermination in the form of the political state, as a way to center the struggle against antisemitism in a materialist way, and in the context of extant global liberalism and capitalism. The position defended here does not abandon the question of Palestinian national liberation and selfdetermination in the form of a Palestinian nation-state. Rather, the article defends, in conclusion, the two-state option as a conduit for building a single, confederated, binational state in Israel-Palestine, as a materialist, internationalist, and socialist solution to the problems of antisemitism and Palestinian oppression in Israel and the West Bank. The article, however, calls for a return to a materialist analysis of antisemitism on the Left, via a critique of Left populist anti-Zionism.
That mainstream Marxism has a staggering track record of tolerating, excusing, and all too often itself propagating problematic attitudes toward Jews that gravitate toward, and in some cases themselves constitute, antisemitism is well known. 1 My intention in this chapter is not to reiterate this basic fact but to take stock of some of the implications of this insight and indicate some of the directions in which I would suggest scholars might look next in order to develop a deeper and more systematic understanding of why this might be the case.
Capitalism, the nation and societal corrosion: Notes on 'left-wing antisemitism'
Journal of Social Justice, 2019
The essay is in three parts. The first part (which includes the first three sections) contains historical reflections on the meanings of the concepts ‘left-wing’ and ‘right-wing’, relating them to the ideas of the French Revolution, and on the distinction between the three principal types of modern antisemitism, left-wing, right-wing and ‘conservative- revolutionary’. The middle part contains the main argument, beginning with the fourth section, which argues that Marx and Engels’ Communist Manifesto contains a dialectical view of capitalism that is not straightforwardly anti-capitalist. This is extended in the fifth section that discusses, in the perspective of the dialectic of capitalism and emancipation, anti-imperialism, cultural nationalism and the ethnicised concept of ‘community’ inherent in state-centric, bureaucratic multiculturalism. The third part of the essay (sections six to nine) begins with a discussion of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and then moves to some recent debates on cases of ‘left-wing antisemitism’ that are used to illustrate the main argument. It is concluded that ‘left-wing antisemitism’, like the nationalist antiimperialism that nowadays often provides its context, follows from a failure of anti-capitalists to embrace the corrosive effects capitalism has on enduring oppressive and exploitative societal structures that predate capitalism, such as patriarchy. Antisemitic forms of anti-capitalism refer by ‘Jewish capitalism’ to corrosive and exploitative capitalism, silently presupposing the possible existence of other, ‘non-Jewish’ types of capitalism imagined as productive, harmonious and peaceful. Antisemitic forms of anti-Israelism use ‘Zionism’ as a name of the world’s imperialist domination by ‘Jewish capitalism’ in this particular sense. The confusions involved in these issues lead to a blurring of the meanings of the very concepts ‘right-wing’ and ‘left-wing’.
August Grabski (ed.), Rebels Against Zion. Studies on the Jewish Left Anti-Zionism, 2011
Written by historians, political scientists and activists from a number of countries, the collection of papers in this book deals with the many different ways in which the Jewish Left has contested Zionism and the State of Israel. The book includes articles which illustrate how Zionism has been criticised by Communists, Trotskyists, Bundists, anarchists and other leftist radicals. These political trends were all minority currents in Jewish communities, and so too in Israel as well. The decline over time of Jewish left anti-Zionism does not justify coming to a verdict on whether its rich traditions have already reached the limits of their power to inspire new generations of activists and thinkers in Jewish communities, or whether it will eventually decline into nothingness. Reaching a verdict on this question becomes even more difficult given that, despite the current weakness of Jewish left anti-Zionist organisations, it is precisely the intellectual tradition of those organisations that has dominated the way in which the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is perceived by considerable segments of the international anti-globalisation movement and by organisations and movements to the left of the mainstream social-democratic parties.