Old Articles about anti-Zionism and Zionism by Jewish Communists

These are old articles about Zionism, from the Marxists International Archive.

I’ve been posting here and there, noting that Communists were anti-Zionists, including the large Jewish membership within different communist and socialist parties and organizations.

I’ve tried to stick to material published before, or relatively contemporary to 1948 and the establishment of Israel. It’s important to note that most of these anti-Zionist positions were prior to seeing what the state of Israel eventually did.

Finally, on the grounds of the first principles of democracy, the Socialist movement must oppose the formation of a Jewish State in Palestine. In Palestine the Jews form an insignificant proportion of the population which mainly is Arabian, and which would bitterly and rightfully resent and fight against the robbery of their land. Let Palestine be free to determine its own fate and let it have its independence by all means, but it would be then an Arabian and not a Jewish State.

The Call, 27 June 1918, p. 3

Leon Trotsky: On the Jewish Problem (1937-40)

Andrew Rothstein, Zionism

Sultan, On the Communist Approach to Zionism

Emma Goldman, On Zionism

Ben Hall: Comment on Articles on Zionism (April 1944)

Lenni Brenner: Zionism in the Age of the Dictators: Hitler Looks at Zionism

Jewish Social Democrats and Zionism (1918)

Palestine Socialists: Zionism – An Outpost of Imperialism, Open Letter to Labour Party Conference by a Group of Palestine Socialists

Karl Minter: Whither Zionism? Whither Jewry? – II (March 1943)

Ber Borochov – Selected Essays in Socialist-Zionism – (leader of Poale Zion, a Polish social-democratic Jewish Zionist Labour Party. Note that contemporary and later socialists repudiated Borochov and Poale Zion.)

Winston Churchill: Zionism versus Bolshevism

But if, as may well happen, there should be created in our own lifetime by the banks of the Jordan a Jewish State under the protection of the British Crown, which might comprise three or four millions of Jews, an event would have occurred in the history of the world which would, from every point of view, be beneficial, and would be especially in harmony with the truest interests of the British Empire.

– Winston Churchill, Zionism versus Bolshevism, 1920

Post 1948 Texts

https://www.marxists.org/subject/jewish/kuhn-galicia.pdf – Rick Kuhn – The tradition of Jewish anti-Zionism in the Galician socialist movement

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/history/articles/chimen-abramsky-zionism-bolshevism

https://forward.com/opinion/386480/its-time-to-admit-that-arthur-balfour-was-a-white-supremacist-and-an-anti-s/ – Yousef Munayyer – It’s time to admit that Arthur Balfour was a white supremacist — and an anti-Semite, too

https://www.haaretz.com/jewish/2013-06-30/ty-article/.premium/this-day-zionisms-first-political-assassination/0000017f-dc30-db5a-a57f-dc7a40570000

https://www.americanprestigepod.com/p/re-post-a-history-of-modern-palestine

Context

General Jewish Labor Bund – The General Jewish Labour Bund in Lithuania, Poland and Russia, generally called The Bund or the Jewish Labour Bund, was a secular Jewish socialist party initially formed in the Russian Empire and active between 1897 and 1920.

Poale Zion – was a movement of MarxistZionist Jewish workers founded in various cities of Poland, Europe and the Russian Empire at about the turn of the 20th century after the Bund rejected Zionism in 1901.


Posted

in

by

Tags: