University of Nebraska Press, 648 pages, $55
Imagine this: It’s the summer of 1947 and you’re a Communist or a fellow
traveler or a Socialist or another kind of anti-Stalinist. Despite
myriad differences with political rivals, you share the same basic
position on the question of Palestine. You insist that the United
Nations grant Jews a state alongside an Arab one. When the United States
balks at this proposal, you attend a rally or sign a petition or fume
at the State Department. In November you celebrate the United Nations’
vote in favor of partition, and six months later you curse the Arab
invasion of the newborn State of Israel.
And
when Israel emerges victorious, you hail the political resurrection of
the Jewish nation in the form of a vital socialist or proto-socialist
democracy. You might criticize some of Israel’s policies, but you do so
as a sympathizer — not as a Zionist necessarily, but as someone
impressed by Zionism’s achievements. If you are one of the few who
oppose Israel resolutely, then you probably belong to a fringe sect.
Such was reality, more or less, at the time of Israel’s creation.
A
different situation prevailed four decades beforehand. Prior to World
War I, nearly all socialists in Europe and the United States viewed
Zionism, to the extent they thought about it, as reactionary and futile.
But then again, they paid little attention to it. Early 20th-century
Zionism did not seem especially significant, certainly not a pernicious
force in the international arena. A shift occurred in 1917, following
the Balfour Declaration and the Bolshevik Revolution:
Soviet
leaders and Communists everywhere began to denounce Zionism as a tool
of British imperialism. But that was communism. Democratic Socialists
began to muster sympathy toward Zionism during the 1920s, enough to
welcome David Ben-Gurion’s party, Poale Zion, into the Socialist
International. When it came to Zionism, the interwar left was divided,
which should come as no surprise, because the left was, well, divided.
Today,
in the early 20th century, the picture again looks substantially
different. Most leftists — progressives, radicals, socialists,
anarchists — loathe Israel. Some do not. A scattering of leftists (and
most liberals) still sympathizes with the Jewish state, but they feel
beleaguered, defensive, even intimidated. To stand squarely and
comfortably on the left today is to believe that Israel is a racist,
imperialist country (“apartheid on steroids,” as a colleague put it to
me). Such anti-Israelism is not altogether new; it surged within the New
Left in the late-1960s and kept surging ever since, but, for many
years, anti-Israelism was met with vigorous counterarguments from within
the left. Noam Chomsky used to complain that pro-Israel bias pervaded
the left, which was a gross exaggeration but had some basis in reality.
That was then. Now, leftists accuse Chomsky of betrayal. They indict him
for placing tribal loyalties above professed political principles. Why?
Because Chomsky opposes boycotts of Israel and supports a two-state
solution that would permit Israel’s continued existence. Noam Chomsky:
Zionism’s fifth columnist.
The
left’s relationship to Zionism and Israel defies simple generalization.
It has, over the past century, evolved in various directions, just as
Zionism, Israel and the left itself have changed. Few scholars are as
qualified as The Hebrew University’s Robert Wistrich to write a
comprehensive history of this vexed relationship. Wistrich has published
extensively on European Socialists and their writings on Jews. Indeed,
“From Ambivalence to Betrayal: The Left, the Jews, and Israel” draws
from a number of Wistrich’s previous studies. Although not entirely new,
Wistrich’s impressive tome assembles a career’s worth of important
research. Anyone interested in the history of socialism and the Jews
must read this book.
Contemporary
left-wing anti-Zionism in Europe provides the point of departure. At
its obsessive, paranoid, bigoted worst, today’s anti-Zionism contains
only a tenuous connection to classical Marxism and its Enlightenment
values. It has become “the place where ‘Islamo-fascism’ merges with
‘Islamo-Marxism’ in an empty ‘progressivism’ without progress, driven by
a convulsive hatred of Western modernity, of Jews, of bourgeois
liberalism.” Chants of “Death to Israel,” “End the Holocaust in Gaza” or
“Hamas, Hamas, Jews to the Gas” reflect a profound ideological rupture.
Why, Wistrich asks, has the left betrayed its own intellectual and
political heritage? What went wrong?
Wistrich
opens with those questions, yet drops them immediately. Rather than
probe the discontinuities of left-wing anti-Zionism, Wistrich excavates
its roots in European socialism. Continuity becomes his main theme. Over
a series of case studies spanning 509 pages (not until the final 100
pages does he turn to the recent past), Wistrich examines the attitudes
and ideas of socialist thinkers and leaders regarding Jews,
anti-Semitism and Zionism. He presents disturbing evidence. Karl Marx,
in his youth, equated Jews with economic exploitation.
Russian
anarchist Mikhail Bakunin detested that “unique devouring parasite,”
that “bloodsucking people,” the Jews. Victor Adler, a founder of
Austrian Social Democracy, denounced “anti-Semitic incitement” but also
felt compelled to condemn “philo-Semitic incitement” in a show of
misguided evenhandedness. Adler and many of his comrades argued that
anti-Semitism would inevitably disappear in the future socialist society
“in which the qualities referred to, rightly or wrongly, as Jewish
would not ensure influence and power or a life of indulgence.” Into such
a society the Jews would completely assimilate, or, in Adler’s words,
the “wandering Jew” would wander “into his grave.” And there was the
problem of what might be called theoretical discrimination. Austrian
Marxists developed an innovative theory recognizing the national rights
of small nationalities living within the Austro-Hungarian Empire, but
denied those rights to Jews. Croats qualified as a genuine nation; the
Jews amounted to a moribund caste.
Wistrich
establishes a blemished record. Ambivalence, callousness, even
prejudice existed within socialist movements dating back to the mid-19th
century. Yet how should we evaluate the Socialist record overall?
Wistrich fails to say directly. His selection of case studies implies
that Socialists generally suffered from a special Jewish problem.
Austrian Chancellor Bruno Kreisky receives a scathing portrait for his
smelly innuendos about Polish Jews and his embrace of the Palestine
Liberation Organization during the 1970s. Fine. Yet Wistrich does not
see fit to grant French Socialist leader Leon Blum and Socialist
International chairman Emile Vandervelde equal attention for their roles
in supporting Zionism during the 1920s and ’30s. A 600-page,
“pathbreaking synthesis” ought to cast a reasonably wide net.
“From
Ambivalence to Betrayal” misleads in another way: It fails to situate
Socialists within the larger political contexts in which they operated.
To what extent were Socialist parties better or worse than other
parties? Wistrich mentions, here and there, the existence of right-wing
parties that agitated against Jews, but he does not adequately
underscore their differences from Socialists. A newcomer to the subject
could easily conclude from Wistrich’s study that Socialist parties were
anti-Semitic parties. In fact, the great social democratic movements of
Austria and Germany, for all their flaws, neither agitated against Jews
nor proposed restrictions on them. They stood for full civil and
political equality. No wonder, then, that Central European Jews, almost
entirely, voted for social democratic and liberal parties.
Wistrich
profiles several seeming exceptions. French Jewish intellectual Bernard
Lazare abandoned “self-hatred” and developed an anarchist brand of
Zionism in response to the Dreyfus Affair. German evolutionary Socialist
Edward Bernstein never minimized the seriousness of anti-Semitism and
even cooperated with Zionists. The theoretical journal with which
Bernstein associated, Sozialistische Monatshefte, published numerous
pro-Zionist articles. Even the quintessential revolutionary
internationalist Leon Trotsky moderated his opposition to Zionism in the
1930s and predicted with remarkable prescience the destruction of
European Jewry. In an appeal to American Jews, written in December 1938,
Trotsky warned: “It is possible to imagine without difficulty what
awaits the Jews at the mere outbreak of the future world war. But even
without war, the next development of world reaction signifies with
certainty the physical extermination of the Jews.”
Wistrich
treats Trotsky, Bernstein and Lazare as exceptions. Yet numerous other
exceptions, mentioned usually in passing, accumulate over hundreds of
pages, and the accumulation suggests a different possible account. The
broad outlines of this alternative version might look something like
this:
In
the 19th century, European radicals often employed anti-Jewish
vocabulary and concepts; however, as Marxian social democrats developed a
sophisticated analysis of capitalism and as they confronted right-wing
movements in the final third of the century, they began to take the
problem of anti-Semitism seriously, albeit within faulty parameters that
hampered understanding of Jews and their predicaments. At the same
time, Yiddish-speaking Jews in Eastern Europe and North America built
popular socialist movements that advanced various forms of Jewish
nationalism, Zionism among them.
The
rise of autonomous Jewish parties initially sparked conflicts with
general socialist parties such as the Russian Social-Democratic Workers’
Party, whose leaders failed to grasp the rationale for organizations
such as the Bund. Nonetheless, in certain important instances — for
example, the Bund’s relationship with the Mensheviks — tensions
eventually eased and led to cooperation. The Bolsheviks never stopped
condemning Jewish parties as nationalistic, but they nonetheless granted
nationality rights to Jews after 1917. The Soviet government also
outlawed anti-Semitism, and the Red Army quashed the mass slaughter of
Jews by counter-revolutionary forces during the Civil War. In 1948, the
USSR and Soviet bloc countries lent crucial diplomatic and military aid
to Israel, which they soon replaced with crude anti-Semitic campaigns.
Yet despite drastic shifts in Soviet policies, some Communists in the
West retained sympathies for Israel and decried anti-Zionism. (A
powerful statement by Austrian Communist Bruno Frei appears in
Wistrich’s 1979 anthology, “The Left Against Zion.”) Meanwhile, postwar
European social democrats gave consistently strong support to social
democratic Israel. In the proposed narrative sketched here, blemishes
would remain, but not for the purpose of an overall indictment.
The
post-1967 hostility toward Israel still requires explanation. What went
wrong, as Wistrich asks at the book’s outset? The rise of Arab
nationalism and, later, Islamic fundamentalism, the rightward drift in
Israeli politics and the ongoing occupation of the West Bank all have to
be taken into account. Exceptions and counter-trends also require
recognition. For even today, intellectuals, journals and organizations
of the left continue to warn against anti-Semitism, oppose boycotts and
insist on Israel’s right to exist. Within the anti-Israel movement
itself, fissures and rifts have surfaced, as witnessed by Chomsky.
A
less selective, more complex and judicious history of the left, Jews
and Israel remains to be written. In the meantime, “From Ambivalence to
Betrayal” gives readers much to consider.
Tony
Michels is the George L. Mosse Associate Professor of American Jewish
History at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He is author of “A Fire
in Their Hearts: Yiddish Socialists in New York (Harvard University
Press, 2005) and editor of the recent “Jewish Radicals: A Documentary
History” (NYU Press).
Read more: http://forward.com/articles/165232/lefts-love-hate-relationship-with-zionism/?p=all#ixzz2BhQq4SU5
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