I had my criticisms of Ted Grant and Socialist Appeal, but I considered it free of the taint of anti-Semitism – until now. You see, our position on Israel-Palestine was obviously absurd, but was distinct from the overtly racist position of the SWP, which has no problem with the ‘reactionary’ Israeli working-class being driven into the sea by fascistic terrorists wielding bazookas and Korans. At least we held that the Israeli workers also had revolutionary potential, had a right to live as citizens of Palestine and should link up with oppressed Palestinian workers to create a Socialist Federation of Palestine. This, we held, would secure the rights of both groups. Granted, it as an utter impracticability, not least because the Israelis do not wish to become a minority in a binational state (as would surely occur if this was implemented), and the Palestinians are quite clear in their desire to kill all the Jews and drive them into the sea. When I was merrily chanting with my ex-comrades ‘From the river to the sea’ at the Al-Nakba demonstration of 2019, I was entirely unaware of its anti-Semitic undertones. In theory, calling for a binational state is not anti-Semitic, according to Marxists. In practice, however, a one-state solution would necessarily involve the elimination of the Jewish state. Many left-wing idealists, in their ignorance, probably see the former as eminently practicable and ‘fair’ to both sides. They may not be anti-Semitic, but they are certainly naive. Others advocate a one-state solution knowing full well that this would be a setback for the Jews in Israel, but since they regard the Jewish presence as illegitimate, they wholeheartedly embrace this position as being in line with their anti-Semitic prejudices. Distinguishing between those who support it out of naivety, and those who support it because they are anti-Semites, is never going to be easy, though I like to be charitable.
However, I have since come across a loathsome 1967 article Ted Grant wrote on the Six-Day War, a statement put out by the entire Militant EC about the events of that fateful year in Middle Eastern history. This part of the article popped out to me:
The outbreak of anti-Semitism in Europe, especially in Nazi Germany, and murder of millions of Jews, resulted in the panacea of Zionism gaining support among large sections of the Jews, especially the refugees surviving in the concentration camps.
Thus the crime of anti-Semitism led to the crime of Zionism. The thrusting out of the Arabs was grist to the mill of the reactionaries in the Arab states. For the first time, anti-Jewish feeling appeared in the Arab world and was used by the feudal reaction to try and maintain its position. The immigration to Palestine during the last 20 years has been an immigration of mainly Oriental Jews (after the first wave of immigration from the West). Thus, the historical irony of the Jewish state.
In these sentences, Grant commits the singularly repulsive act of equating the ‘crime’ of the Holocaust, and the immense suffering that resulted from that, with the ‘crime’ of the Jews founding an independent state as a haven from anti-Semitic persecution. How utterly disgusting. How loathsome and abhorrent. And this is not merely Grant’s personal opinion – since this was an official EC statement, we can take this as the official position taken by Militant at this time.
Whatever problems Israel has, and whatever criticisms can be made of the Zionist project, the one thing which no one in their right mind should even think of doing is equating Israel or any of its actions with the horrific, genocidal program of extermination that the fathers, mothers, grandfathers, great-grandfathers etc of present-day Israeli people were subjected to by the Nazis. To put Ben-Gurion, Dayan, Begin, Peres etc in the same league as Hitler, Himmler, Goebbels, Hess, et al is self-evidently absurd, insensitive and shows an astonishing ignorance of history. Note the inflammatory use of the word ‘crime’ – as if successfully establishing the world’s only Jewish state after 3000 years of statelessness, persecution and pogroms, in a tiny corner of the Middle East, was some world-historical evil, up there with the Holocaust, the ravages of Genghis Khan or the extermination of the native Americans. Truly incredible. Moreover, when he talks of ‘Zionism’, one can safely assume that he is not just talking about the State of Israel’s establishment, but the whole process leading up to it. The founding of the Zionist movement by Herzl, the waves of Jewish emigration, the painstaking planting and settlement in Palestine in the decades leading up to independence – all of that constitutes ‘crime’!
As if that were not enough, Grant makes the sensational claim that anti-Semitism in the Arab world made its ‘first appearance’ only after Israel’s foundation. This fantastic lie flies in the face of everything we know about the Jews in the Middle East prior to Israel’s creation. They were, for the most part, second-class citizens, existing on the margins of society. One can point to a few Jews who thrived, but they were always a minority, living at the mercy of a capricious Arab majority. The original Zionists from Europe who came to Palestine as immigrants were very early on victims of anti-Semitic persecution by the Arabs. No sooner would the Jews found a village or a settlement than an Arab gang would turn up to beat up and kill the inhabitants and destroy their work. Martin Gilbert, in his 1999 history of Israel, gives several examples of this sabotage throughout the period of pre-1948 immigration:
Also founded in 1878, by religious Jews from Safed who wanted to earn their own livelihood, and not be dependent on charity, was the village of Rosh Pinah. Lacking funds and experience, and frequently harassed by the Arabs from nearby villages…
-Martin Gilbert, Israel: A History (London: Black Swan, 1999), p.4 (italics mine)
And again:
Among those who moved from Jerusalem to the growing number of Jewish villages and settlements was Abraham Shapira. He had been born in Russia in 170 and was brought to Palestine by his parents when he was ten, When, in 1890, he moved to Petah Tikvah, he found that Arab farmers were pasturing their flocks on the Jewish fields, damaging the crops. Shapira set up a guardsmen’s group which drove off the intruders and maintained the security of the village, enlisting the help of local Bedouin as well as of young Jewish settlers.
In 1890 another Jewish village was founded in the coastal plain. This was Rehovot…After a decade of effort, and frequent attacks from the neighbouring Arab villages in which blows would be struck, property damaged and trees cut down, success came and the village grew, helped by the arrival of Jewish immigrants from Yemen.
–Ibid., p.9 (Italics mine)
And again:
The use of exclusively Jewish labour at Sejera created tensions with neighbouring Arab villages. At Passover 1909 Arabs from several of these villages murdered a number of Jews, ‘simply’, as Ben-Gurion, who was then working at Sejera, recalled, ‘because they were Jews.’
–Ibid., p.27 (Italics mine)
When WWI broke out, the Ottoman Empire cracked down on Zionist activism, expelling Zionists (including Ben-Gurion, then a law student in Constantinople) from the Ottoman Empire in their thousands, at the same time as Arab candidates for the Ottoman Parliament were agitating against Jewish immigration. Ottoman repression culminated in the expulsion of Jews from Jerusalem and Jaffa at Passover 1917.
The British Mandate saw anti-Semitic feeling grow in response to Jewish immigration to Palestine, with Arab riots and attacks on Jews becoming increasingly deadly and violent. The British made half-hearted attempts to restrain Arab anti-Semitic violence, whilst the Jews sought to retaliate. Deadly massacres and riots took place in 1920, 1929 and 1936-39. The extremist Zionists formed groups like Irgun and the Stern Gang to launch reprisals against the Arabs in retaliation for Arab terrorism. When the Peel Commission drew up a proposal for a partitioned Palestine in 1937, the Jews accepted it, but the Arab representatives rejected it, insisting on an indivisible Arab Palestine (or, in the case of the King of Jordan, a Palestine that was part of his kingdom). The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem made a pact with Hitler during WWII, and expressed their mutual loathing of the Jews in private conversation. Across the Middle East, there was widespread sympathy for Nazi Germany. In Iraq, a palace coup in 1941 temporarily toppled the pro-British government and replaced it was a pro-German one. Arab nationalists like Aflaq made no secret of their fascist sympathies.
Remember, Ted Grant assured us that anti-Semitism didn’t exist in the Middle East until Israel’s creation. He was either utterly ignorant, or lying. Note how these Trotskyist cult leaders always make pronouncements on these complex subjects – of history, politics, economics or philosophy – that are utterly categorical and said with an air of complete certainty and conviction. Just think of how many members of Militant read nonsense like this and took it as the definitive history of the Middle East!
When Grant refers to the ‘thrusting out’ of the Arabs from Palestine, he overlooks the fact that this was as a result of a war that the Arabs started, in their bloodthirsty bid to drive the Jews out of Palestine and wipe them off the map. Thankfully, they failed. Incidentally, none other than the world’s premier ‘workers’ state’, the Soviet Union, was instrumental in helping Israel gain independence. Stalin dragooned the Czechoslovakian government into sending arms to the Israel Defence Forces. The Jews defended themselves from what would undoubtedly have been a second Holocaust (indeed, Holocaust survivors were in the ranks of the IDF) and for Grant to equate the successful prevention of a second Holocaust with the actual Holocaust is positively monstrous. Even after the war ended, Israel maintained a substantial Arab minority, so by no means all of the Arabs were ‘thrust out’, and Israel sought peace with its Arab neighbours. They wouldn’t get peace for many more years.
What is truly disgusting is the victim-blaming. The implication is this: if only the Jews had not had the temerity to found their own state in their ancient homeland – then they would not have provoked the anti-Semitism from the Arabs. The inconvenient truth is that the Arabs needed little excuse to be anti-Semitic, since anti-Semitism is well-ingrained in Arab culture and, tragically, the Muslim faith.
Double Standards
Natan Sharansky invented the ‘three Ds’ test for whether criticism of Israel is anti-Semitism. Does it involve demonisation, double standards or delegitimisation? If it involves any of those, then you are dealing with an anti-Semite, not a good-faith critic of Israel.
Ted Grant was guilty of all three of these in that loathsome extract I just quoted. He demonises Israel by calling Zionism a ‘crime’ and equating it with the ‘crime’ of the Holocaust. He also delegitimises it in the process. But he is also guilty of the most incredible double standards. For it was Grant, who, following on from Trotsky, extended the concept of ‘workers’ states’ to all sorts of countries outside the USSR. The Eastern Bloc countries, Communist China, Castro’s Cuba, Baathist Iraq, Baathist Syria, Nasserist Egypt, Mengistu’s Ethiopia – all of these were brought under the category of ‘workers’ states’. They were deemed ‘progressive’ because they had nationalised the means of production and implemented some form of planned economy similar to the USSR, but criticised for suppressing workers’ democracy. Grant’s idea was to give ‘critical support’ to these states, whilst pushing against the bureaucracy that he accused of manipulating the masses for their own ends. Yet no such ‘critical support’ is forthcoming for Israel, in spite of the fact that Israel was ruled for decades by a socialist Labour Party, which implemented social-democratic policies that tremendously boosted the living standards of Israeli workers (both Israeli Jews and Israeli Arabs). There were free and fair elections. Trade unions were strong, gender equality was strong, Arabs and Jews were equal under the law, and people were happy and secure. Yet Israel did not count as a ‘workers’ state’ for Grant. In spite of these achievements, Zionism was written off as ‘reactionary’ and ‘imperialist’. Meanwhile the Arab nationalist regimes that engaged in ethnic cleansing and genocide, that promoted anti-Semitism, that promoted anti-Kurdish and anti-Persian racism, that suppressed all democracy, that prohibited free trade unions and launched imperialist wars on a regular basis (the 1967 Six-Day War, the 1973 Yom Kippur War, the Syrian invasion of Lebanon in 1976, the Iran-Iraq War of 1980-88, the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1991) were seen as imperfect but otherwise heroic ‘workers’ states’ by Ted Grant. That is to say, despite the ‘Stalinist’ or ‘Bonapartist’ leadership, they were a step in the right direction and regimes which Marxists should support under certain circumstances.
This is a truly incredible use of ‘dialectics’. Taking Trotsky’s preposterous logic to its logical conclusion, Grant ended up labelling all sorts of entities that were of doubtful merit ‘progressive’ (albeit in a qualified sense), whilst scorning the Middle East’s most progressive state. Why? What is it about a Jewish state specifically that is reactionary and evil, when far worse regimes can be found across the Middle East? If Israel is guilty of injustice towards the Arabs, it has done no worse than any of its neighbours – indeed, it has treated its minorities much better. Indeed, for decades Arab countries have deliberately kept their Palestinian refugees in camps, to use as propaganda against Israel, and treated them abysmally, whilst Israel has sought to house all its inhabitants, both Jewish and Arab.
It is anti-Semitism to say that the Jews, out of all the nations in the world, should not have the right to self-determination in their own state. It is anti-Semitism to single out Israel and Jewish Zionists for condemnation, when Marxists have happily given support to other movements of national self-determination which are arguably less deserving. Look at the enthusiastic support given by Socialist Appeal to Scottish independence, for example.
For a clue to the singling out of Jews in this way, we should look no further than a recent article published in 2019 by James Kilby, a full-timer for Socialist Appeal, on anti-Semitism and Israel.
Zionists point to the right of nations to self-determination – a right that Lenin and the Bolsheviks in Russia enthusiastically supported – to justify their approach.
Marxists have always stressed that the right to self determination is a basic democratic demand. However, whether each particular national struggle for self-determination is progressive (and therefore should be supported) depends on the concrete circumstances. Above all, a key factor is whether it would advance or hinder the cause of the working class worldwide in its struggle for socialism.
As Marxists pointed out, in the early 20th century there was no Jewish nation in the traditional sense, in that the Jewish people lacked a common territory, language, etc. Instead, Jews were scattered in towns and villages all over Europe, the Middle East and, increasingly, the Americas. Such self-determination could not be achieved simply by the Jewish people obtaining territorial independence from an oppressor nationality. It would require the mass migration of Jews into a common territory, as advocated by the Zionists.
So there we have it. The Jewish right to self-determination is less legitimate than that of other rights because Jewish people aren’t really a nation.
This definition of nationhood is ridiculously schematic and utterly arbitrary, and flies in the face of objective facts. The facts is that over 3000 years, Jews have preserved a separate identity, culture and heritage, despite being dispersed over many territories. Many people identify as Jewish despite not speaking Hebrew, or believing in Judaism, or living in Israel. Anti-Zionists gloat that only a minority of Jews live in Israel (something Ted Grant noted in his article), suggesting that Israel’s right to represent the Jewish ‘nation’ is utterly illegitimate. Yet every nation has a diaspora of people living outside its territory. In the case of the Jews, the unique history of Jewish settlement means that most Jews do not live in Israel, but most Jews still identify with Israel and see its existence as a positive thing. They may not consider themselves Israeli, or identify with Israel over their home country, but they feel a kinship with the country, just as many first-generation immigrants or members of an ethnic diaspora feel a kinship with their country of origin. We consider this to be understandable in the case of other ethnic groups, but when Jews feel the same way, they are accused of ‘dual loyalty’ – an incredibly racist allegation. It is perfectly possible for a British or an American Jew to feel a primary loyalty to the country where they live, whilst also sympathising with his or her fellow Jews who may live elsewhere, particularly in the case of the State of Israel.
If Israel is to be regarded as an ‘artificial’ nation-state, in the way that Grant and his followers suggest, then it is no more artificial than all of the surrounding Arab ‘nation-states’ that were created after WWI when the British and French partitioned the former territories of the Ottoman Empire. Was there a Jordanian ‘nation’ prior to Sykes-Picot? Or an Iraqi ‘nation’? Even the Palestinian ‘nation’ is an utter invention, created after 1948 as part of the propaganda wars waged by the Arabs to delegitimise Israel’s existence. Even the Grand Mufti, seen as a founder of Palestinian nationalism, was really more of an Arab nationalist. His interest was less in an independent Palestinian nation than in a Palestine free of Jews and inhabited by Arabs only. During the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, the Arab countries involved quarrelled over what share of Palestine each nation would get. The King of Jordan wanted the whole territory, and the Palestinians of the West Bank actually made an agreement with him under which they would be annexed to Jordan. Jordan maintained the West Bank until 1967, losing it in the Six-Day War to Israel, which has occupied it ever since. Palestinian nationalism is an entirely twentieth-century creation. Meanwhile, Jews have had a special connection to Israel for thousands of years, and Jews have had a continuous presence in Israel/Palestine since that time.
Also, Kilby states that the right of self-determination must be subordinated to the consideration of whether it advances the cause of socialism or not. Only a Marxist is likely to agree that nationalist aspirations should be subordinated to the fantasy of a world socialist revolution, and only a Marxist would be arrogant enough to assume that they know what is in the ‘best interests’ of the whole world’s working-classes, assuming that the working-class has one homogenous, universal, transnational interest.
Jews and Marxism
Ted Grant himself was Jewish, as were Tony Cliff, Isaac Deutscher, Leon Trotsky, Karl Marx himself and other prominent Marxists. Does this mean Grant could not possibly be anti-Semitic? Of course not. Jews can be anti-Semitic. Gilad Atzmon is living proof of that. That is not to say that all Jews critical of Israel are self-hating, but it is absurd to pretend that Jews, too, cannot, unwittingly or otherwise, encourage anti-Semitic attitudes. Centuries of persecution has caused some Jews to internalise the negative attitudes towards their fellow Jews. It is understandable, but should still be sharply criticised. Cliff may have been a Palestinian Jewish immigrant, but the party he created happily aligns itself with Jew-hating Islamofascists – and they do not appear to see the contradiction. Pointing to a minority of Jewish anti-Zionists does not give you a free pass on anti-Semitism, just like Trump showing off his few black supporters does not prove that he is without racist attitudes towards black people.
The basic Marxist attitude towards Jews and Israel has its roots in Marx’s own musings on Jewishness. In his infamous On the Jewish Question (seen by some as proof that Marx was a self-hating Jew), Marx responded to Bruno Bauer’s assertion that Jews could only win full political emancipation by abandoning their distinct religious identities and becoming citizens of a secular state. Marx also desired the end of a distinct Jewish identity, but disagreed with Bauer’s solutions. For Marx, the essential differences between individuals could never be removed simply by creating a secular state that gave liberal rights to its citizens. All it did was hide those differences. The Jews could only gain emancipation by fighting for the emancipation of all mankind from the distinctions created not just by religion, but by property, i.e. class. Marx would of course go on to develop his ‘class analysis’ of society, arguing that the working-class alone carried the key to the liberation of the entire human race. Within European Jewry, there was a fierce battle between those Jews who championed the old ways – tradition, custom, heritage – and those who argued that the Jews should assimilate into European society and seek to dissolve their separate Jewish identity into a universal, humanist identity that involved fighting for the emancipation of all men and women who were persecuted. Many of these people were attracted to Marxism, seeing it as an escape from the constraints of their Jewish heritage, even though Marxism itself betrays its apocalyptic, Judeo-Christian origins. Trotsky and other Jewish Marxists proudly boasted of their internationalist credentials, and distanced themselves from their fellow Jews.
Much to the disappointment of Jewish Marxists, Marxism has demonstrated its failure everywhere it has been tried, whilst Zionism has triumphed, establishing a state that is the envy of all its enemies and has made immeasurable contributions to humankind. Indeed, the crowning achievement of Marxists – creating the world’s first workers’ state in Russia – fell to the ravages of Stalinism and with it the recrudescence of anti-Semitism. The most disgusting anti-Semitism was utilised by Stalin in his war with the Jewish Trotsky and other Jewish rivals. Stalin eliminated all of the Jewish cadres in the Communist Party – Trotsky, Radek, Zinoviev, Kamenev – and replaced them with his cronies, most of them Russians. Stalin’s pact with Hitler in 1941 made possible WWII and the Holocaust. Indeed, one could go as far as to say that had Communism never happened, the Nazis would not have been able to seize power, using the fear of Communism many Germans had to justify their reign of terror. Perhaps there would have been no Holocaust in the first place, and therefore no need for Israel. The Soviet ‘doctors’ plot’ of 1951-53 saw a ramping up of anti-Jewish hatred, as the doctors implicated were of conspicuously Jewish origin. The USSR reversed its pro-Israel foreign policy, and disseminated anti-Semitism worldwide, supporting the cause of the Jew-hating Arab nationalists in the Middle East and funding far-left terror groups which wanted to wipe Israel off the face of the map. Soviet Jews were harshly persecuted and refused permission to go to Israel. They were accused of ‘Zionism’ and dual loyalty. The Communist Eastern Bloc disseminated anti-Semitism and persecuted its Jewish populations. In Poland in 1968, state-sponsored anti-Semitic hatred forced thousands of Jews out of the country. Leszek Kolakowski, whose wife Tamara was Jewish, was one of the many people forced to leave.
The Soviet Union boasted that it had ‘solved’ the national question and eliminated feelings of national separatism. Ted Grant would often repeat this boast to his followers. This was a barefaced lie. Golda Meir saw that it was a lie when she visited Moscow in 1948:
The street in front of the synagogue had changed. Now, it was filled with people, packed together like sardines, hundreds and hundreds of them, of all ages, including Red Army officers, soldiers, teenagers and babies carried in their parents’ arms. Instead of the 2,000-odd Jews who usually came to synagogue on High Holidays, a crowd of close to 50,000 people was waiting for us.
For a minute, I couldn’t grasp what happened – or even who they were. And it dawned on me. They had come – those good brave Jews – in order to be with us, to demonstrate their sense of kinship and to celebrate the establishment if the State of Israel.
Within seconds, they had surrounded me, almost lifting me boidily, almost crushing me, saying my name over and over again. Eventually, they parted ranks and let me enter the synagogue; but there, too, the demonstration went on. Every now and then, in the women’s gallery, someone would come to me, touch my hand, stroke or even kiss my dress. Without speeches or parades, without any words at all really, the Jews of Moscow were proving their profound desire – and their need – to participate in the miracle of the establishment of the Jewish state, and I was the symbol of the State for them.
I couldn’t talk, or smile, or wave my hand. I sat in that gallery like a stone, without moving, with those thousands of eyes fixed on me. Now we were together again, and as I watched them, I knew that no threat, however awful, could possibly have stopped the ecstatic people I saw in the synagogue that day from telling us, in their own way, what Israel meant to them.
-Gilbert, Israel: A History, pp.226-227
As Golda Meir got up to leave the synagogue after the service, she was mobbed by cheering Jews, such that she couldn’t even get back to her hotel. Thousands of Jews had come, in defiance of Stalinist persecution, to show their support for the Jews of Palestine, then battling for their existence as a state. When Golda Meir attended the Day of Atonement service ten days after this, she recalled that when the closing words of the service, ‘Next year in Jerusalem’, were repeated, ‘a tremor went through the entire synagogue.’ (Ibid., p.228)
If the USSR was so progressive, why it is that from 1971-1996, more than 750,000 Soviet Jews fled to Israel in one of the largest emigrations in Israel’s history? (Ibid.) Why did they desert the workers’ state for the reactionary, imperialist entity so loathed by Marxists? Were all of those people supporters of imperialism, racism and oppression? Or were they rather escaping those things, to the one state where they knew they would be welcome?
How can Marxists have the gall to say, in the face of their manifest failure to secure for the Jewish people the emancipation they so craved, and in the face of the vicious anti-Semitism which historically Marxist states have encouraged, that only Marxist socialism can vanquish the disease of anti-Semitism and bring the Jews the liberation they so desire? If I were a non-Marxist Jew, I would be outraged at this patronising and historically unfounded assertion. To add insult to injury, these Marxists then denounce the majority of Jews who sympathise with Zionism and Jewish self-determination as ‘racists’ and ‘imperialists’, and some even equate them to their Nazi tormentors.
The Marxist left, Jewish Marxists especially, are living in a fantasy land. They are bitter over the failure of their hopes and dreams, bitter that Jews have decisively rejected Marxist socialism in favour of Zionism. In the twentieth century, when Zionism still seemed something of a pipe dream, Jews were more drawn to revolutionary socialism. But now that Zionism and Marxism have both been tested in practice, only one of these has fulfilled its promise to emancipate the Jewish people. The other has cruelly betrayed and let down the Jews of the world, yet, in their arrogance, Marxists believe that the Jewish workers of the world will and should still rally to them! At least the Cliffites are honest enough to see that the Israeli working-class will never opt for Marxism, hence their giving ‘critical support’ to loathsome terrorist groups like Hamas that want to wipe the Jews off the map. It is the logical conclusion of the long rivalry between Zionism and Marxism. Increasingly, Marxists are starting to look like sore losers where the Jewish Question is concerned. It is no surprise, then, that left anti-Semitism is increasing.
If I were a Jew, I am not sure I would want to be on the left at the moment. Increasingly, the question of Israel is being made into a litmus test. It is becoming more difficult to be Jewish, and pro-Israel, and yet on the left, as so many Jews in the Labour Party have discovered to their cost. There is only one Jewish Marxist I can think of who made an attempt to empathise with the Jews over the situation they found themselves in after WWII, with Marxism discredited and the Holocaust appearing to vindicate the cause of Zionism – Isaac Deutscher. In a 1958 essay, he discussed the plight of being a ‘Non-Jewish Jew’. Deutscher tried to honestly reckon with the world-historical disappointment that Marxism had proven to be to Jewish people. Deutscher called on his fellow Marxists to accept the reality of Israel as the necessary outcome of Jewish persecution and the unique evil of the Holocaust. Yet even whilst he empathised with those among his fellow Jews who had chosen the path of Zionism over international socialism, he clung to his Marxist delusions, concluding with a warning to his fellow Jews about the supposed obsolescence of the nation-state, and fretting that Israel’s creation had coincided with a period in human history when the nation-state was ceasing to be progressive. Deutscher never fully embraced Zionism. It was a necessary but regrettable detour from the path mankind was beating to the sunlit uplands of socialism, in which Deutscher maintained a rock-solid faith.
Conclusion
If I were a Marxist, especially a Jewish Marxist, I would show the humility that Deutscher was able to show in his 1958 essay, and I would be very careful when saying anything disparaging about Zionism. The idea that Jewish identity could be dissolved into a left-wing internationalism has been falsified by history. Many Jews who stayed in Europe to fight Hitler and bring about the socialist paradise perished in the Holocaust. If they had been Zionists, and if they had succeeded in making Aliyah, they would have lived, and made an inestimable contribution to humanity. Deutscher had those people on his conscience. What a decline there has been, from honest Marxist intellectuals like Deutscher and Thompson, to charlatans like Woods, Grant, and Cliff! ‘Oh Hamlet, what a falling off was there!’
Ted Grant was guilty of anti-Semitism in his attacks on Israel. His credulous followers are in danger of uncritically repeating his anti-Semitic formulations unless they educate themselves on the complex history of Israel-Palestine, and indeed, the wider Middle East. The same goes for other people in Trotskyist cults like the SWP which similarly demonise Israel, delegitimise its existence and apply double standards when discussing Israel that they would not do with any other group. It also applies to people on the far-left in general, who loathe Israel with such passion yet know so little about its history.
Israel should be criticised like every other state. Israelis do not always approve of what their government does, and quarrel bitterly with each other over the way forward for their country. The founding of Israel was followed by a decades’-long bitter split between the Revisionists, or right-wing Zionists, and Ben-Gurion’s followers. Ben-Gurion and the Revisionist leader, Begin, loathed one another, and Ben-Gurion refused to cooperate with the Revisionists or let them into government. To this day, there are ‘liberal’ and social-democratic Zionists in the tradition of Ben-Gurion and more right-wing Zionists in the tradition of Begin. One of these wings is much more sympathetic to the Palestinians than the other, but they are both lumped together as Zionist imperialists and fascists by far-left ignoramuses. There is a distinction to be made between legitimate criticism, and moronic abuse and anti-Semitism. You have seen an example of the latter here.