In the IMT, I was always taught that Lenin and Trotsky had conducted a heroic battle against anti-Semitism, and that it was revived by the evil Stalin as part of the ‘bureaucratic counter-revolution’ that reversed many of the ‘gains’ of the Russian Revolution. I had no idea of the Bolsheviks’ early efforts to stamp out any trace of a separate Jewish cultural, religious and spiritual life – indeed, to eliminate the very notion of a Jewish identity altogether. And in doing so they were helping by a load of ‘useful idiots’ – zealous Jewish Communists who persecuted their fellow Jews thinking it would win them approval from on high. This brilliant article from Tablet Magazine explains:
Of course, Judaism has always been uncool, going back to its origins as the planet’s only monotheism, featuring a bossy and unsexy invisible God. Uncoolness is pretty much Judaism’s brand, which is why cool people find it so threatening—and why Jews who are willing to become cool are absolutely necessary to Hanukkah-style anti-Semitism’s success. In the days of Antiochus, this type of anti-Semitism needed those boys who voluntarily underwent painful genital surgery to prove that Jews weren’t the problem—just the barbarity of Jewish law. During the Soviet era, it needed proud internationalists to prove that Jews weren’t the problem, just the repulsive chauvinism of Jewish national identity—including what we now call Zionism.
The Soviets actually went one better. In 1918, they created an entire branch of their government solely for cool Jews, whose paid job was to persecute the uncool ones. This was called the Yevsektsiya, or the Jewish Sections of the Communist Party, and in their brief and bloody lifespan, one finds the origins of today’s supposedly novel concept: Jews who are of course not anti-Semitic (how could they be? they’re Jews!), but simply anti-Zionist. In the course of not being anti-Semitic and being simply anti-Zionist, the Yevsektsiya managed to persecute, imprison, torture, and murder thousands of Jews, until their leaders were themselves purged.
Yevsektsiya-style anti-Semitism, or Hannukah-style anti-Semitism, always promises Jews a kind of nobility, offering them the opportunity to cleanse themselves of whatever the people around them happen to find revolting. The Jewish traits designated as repulsive vary by country and time period, but they invariably contradict the specific values that the surrounding culture has embraced as “universal.”
…As a Yiddish literature scholar, I had encountered the Yevsektsiya as a glum footnote in my studies. But I discovered its details only recently in a fashion similar to my seventh-grade discovery of Menelaus, through a dusty old book—a 1972 volume by the historian Zvi Gitelman, with the ostentatiously boring title Jewish Nationality and Soviet Politics: The Jewish Sections of the CPSU, 1917-1930. It was a history of the Yevsektsiya, and the story it reported in arid academic prose could not have been more bizarre.
The ostensible purpose of the Yevsektsiya was to spread Communist ideology to Russia’s Jewish masses, among whom there were few Bolsheviks in 1917. Russia’s Jewish revolutionaries had mainly been Bundists (socialists), Mensheviks or Trotskyists, who failed to back the winner, Lenin. As for the vaunted Jewish “masses,” most were Yiddish-speakers from small towns, many of which were devastated during World War I. Such people were a suitably desperate proletariat, but the Communist Party needed Yiddish-speaking insiders to help them see the light.
At first, there were so few Jews among the Bolsheviks that the party had to rely on two Norwegian Jews with dictionaries to create Yiddish-language propaganda. But after the Russian Civil War in 1918-1920 left upwards of 70% of Jews without any regular income, and after the pogroms of that period left upwards of 50,000 Jews dead, Bolshevism at least offered steady government jobs.
Some Jews who joined the Bolsheviks were genuine idealists. Some, after the extreme anti-Semitic violence of the Civil War, may have unconsciously followed the classic strategy of “court Jews,” cultivating ties to the regime as a way of protecting the community—and themselves. And some, aware of the community’s late arrival to Bolshevism, may have wanted to prove that they were even better Communists than everyone else. In any case, as Gitelman’s book put it, “The Jewish sections [Yevsektsiya] betook themselves to the task of destroying the old order with a zest that cannot be explained by enthusiasm for Bolshevism alone.”
Destroy it they did. The Yevsektsiya first eliminated the kehillas, or traditional Jewish community organizations in Russia’s towns and cities, by legally abolishing them. When that didn’t work, they burned kehilla offices down. Russian Jews at the time could be forgiven for thinking that this zeal was simply part of the new order’s intolerance for religion; after all, churches and mosques were often targeted, too.
But by 1919, the Yevsektsiya resolved at their annual conference that shutting down traditional Jewish institutions was insufficient. Their mission now was to destroy all Zionist activity—a category that extended from political organizations to sports clubs. Nor did the Yevsektsiya drag their feet. Within a few weeks of the conference, they had successfully raided the offices of every Zionist association in Ukraine and arrested all of their leaders. Elsewhere in the USSR, they arrested thousands more.
The Yevsektsiya’s next move was to destroy the Hebrew language in the Soviet Union, which they accomplished by shutting down all schools that taught Hebrew, regardless of their affiliation, and by harassing Hebrew-language artists like the renowned poet Chaim Nachman Bialik and the celebrated actors of the Habima Theatre, all of whom escaped to Palestine. Habimah fled during an overseas tour; Bialik, along with other important Hebrew writers, obtained exit visas as a favor from Bialik’s friend, the Russian author Maxim Gorky.
This anti-Hebrew strategy was designed by the Yevsektsiya leader Moyshe Litvakov, who was himself a former Hebrew writer and Zionist, and who was once known for his enormous personal library of Hebrew books. Litvakov was also the editor of Emes, a Yiddish-language version of Pravda, which frequently ran invented news stories of rabbis who were sexual predators. Eventually Litvakov would complain that Emes was “too Jewish.”
The Yevsektsiya set up new Jewish schools with instruction in a Sovietized Yiddish with a literally anti-Semitic orthography, in which Yiddish’s many Hebrew-derived words were given new spellings that erased these words’ ancient origins. The schools, whose curricula included indoctrination on the evils of Zionism, were spearheaded by a Yevsektsiya leader named Esther Frumkin. A granddaughter and former wife of rabbis and a daughter of a Torah reader, Frumkin was also instrumental in the closure of remaining rabbinical schools in the USSR. When all this proved inadequate to convert the Jewish masses, the Yevsektsiya even staged show trials on the High Holy Days, in which “witnesses” appeared in costumes to denounce Judaism and Zionism. One such trial was held in the very same hall where Mendel Beilis, victim of czarist Russia’s last blood libel, had been tried less than 10 years before of murdering a Christian child and using his blood to make matzo.
For American Jews who have internalized their grandparents’ tales of Purim-style persecution, this litany of humiliation might seem almost boring—until we consider that it was all enacted by Jews. The Yevsektsiya leaders were scrupulous about making sure that this deluge of enmity came exclusively from Jews, so no one would mistake the new regime for an anti-Semitic one. On the contrary: this relentless campaign was entirely well intentioned, liberating the Jews from their own worst qualities. By their lights, the Jews of the Yevsektsiya were far better Jews than the ones they mercilessly hunted down.
Gitelman’s book doesn’t delineate the grisly ends of most Yevsektsiya leaders, because in 1972 little was known beyond the fact that they were “purged.” Twenty-five years ago, however, the opening of Soviet archives revealed the sordid details of each person’s fate—who by bullet, who by Siberian labor, who by torture, who by a prison hospital’s lack of insulin. (Gitelman and other historians have written many books in the years since, covering these details and much more.) At the time, one of my Yiddish teachers, musing on the Yevsektsiya’s short-lived reign, wondered aloud about what people like Litvakov and Frumkin were thinking as they languished in prison or suffered in gulags until their deaths. Did they ever feel remorse? Did they ever understand the enormity of their crimes?
Good questions, but now I have a different one. When my seventh-grade Hebrew-school teacher told me about those boys in the gymnasia of Judea, I was baffled as to why anyone would do such a thing. But now, as I consider them along with the Yevsektsiya’s purged leaders and so many others who made similar choices, I wonder something else: Did they ever, in their lives lived out in pain, find the integrity they so desperately wanted?
So much for Lenin and Trotsky, the great anti-racist heroes. The next time some Trotskyist cultist tries to tell you that Marxist anti-Semitism was entirely due to ‘Stalinist degeneration’, bring up the Yevsektsiya. Chances are they will never even have heard of it. I was never told about it when I was a member of the cult. If they do know, chances are they might have enough shame to criticise it but still blame it on the ‘objective conditions’ of civil war. Why, in the face of this terrible history with Jews, should any Jewish worker put their faith in a socialist utopia to end anti-Semitism? If history is any guide to go by, what Marxists mean by socialism putting an end to anti-Semitism is Jews giving up their unique identity as Jews, and dissolving it into a universalised proletarian internationalism. After all, there cannot be any anti-Semitism if Jews no longer exist as a distinct entity. That was certainly the logic of Karl Marx.
Of course, many Marxists will still protest that, even if there have been abuses here and there, and even if Marx and others did not have the most enlightened views on race or Jews in particular, Marxist ideology is still the best weapon against racism because of its focus on class solidarity across all races. How can we be racist, ask Marxist ‘anti-Zionists’, if our problem is just with corrupt Jewish capitalists and the State of Israel, not Jewish people as a whole?
Here is the problem with this facile ‘class analysis’. Any attempt to make a rigid distinction between ‘Jewish workers’ and ‘Jewish capitalists’ is bound to fail, for the simple reason that, as with so many other peoples and cultures, the bonds of communal, cultural and religious solidarity within the Jewish community, both in individual countries and worldwide, transcend any reductionist view of ‘class struggle’. One might deny that it is anti-Semitic to call Israel a creation of the ‘Jewish-Zionist bourgeoisie’, as Gerry Downing and other Marxists (including the IMT) argue, because, after all, we are talking specifically about Jewish capitalists, not Jewish workers. It cannot be an anti-Semitic trope if we are only talking about some Jews, and not all Jews, surely? Of course, this ignores the fact that there was no capitalist logic behind Jewish businessmen like the Rothschilds investing in the creation of Israel, like Marxists would argue – it was done entirely for philanthropic reasons and because of sympathy for their Jewish kin trying to resettle their ancient homeland. So the Marxist paradigm breaks down there, if only because Marxists generally deny that capitalists can behave in a genuinely humanitarian fashion. It also revives ugly anti-Semitic tropes about Jews controlling the world with money, and overlooks the fact that the many Jews who went over to Palestine as part of the Zionist project were largely peasants and workers, who even went so far as to set up communes (the famous kibbutzim) in which they attempted to build a model socialist society.
Now how do Marxists reconcile (a) considering Israel to be a project that only serves the interests of an avaricious Jewish-Zionist bourgeoisie, in alliance with other capitalists around the world, and (b) the fact that there were Jewish peasants and workers who supported Zionism, and that most Jews support it today, including most Israeli workers? Here, their ‘anti-Zionism’ must necessarily spill over into anti-Semitism, since they end up condemning the overwhelming majority of Jews of ‘complicity’ with what they regard as ‘fascism’, ‘racism’, ‘colonialism’ and ‘imperialism’, and even blaming them for the desire of others to murder them. Which is invariably what happens.
There is no way for Marxists to be ‘anti-Zionist’ without being anti-Semitic. Zionism has won, and Marxism has lost, and the Jewish Question has been solved, to the satisfaction of most Jews. Israel now exists and Marxists must accept its right to exist, or admit to being anti-Semites who are willing to run roughshod over what actual Jews (not imaginary, proletarian socialist Jews) want, in order to attain the ultimate goal of a society without meaningful distinctions, even if this involves wiping out the living embodiment of Jewish self-determination from the face of the earth and dissolving Jewish identity into a proletarian internationalism that Jews do not want anymore than anyone else on the planet. In the light of what is happening to the Uighurs in China at the hands of their (still nominally Communist) government, the issue of cultural self-determination and its incompatibility with Marxism as it currently stands is not something to be taken lightly.
The argument that because most israelis or even most jews support zionism, that anti-zionism necessarily becomes antisemitism is just not strong bruv. It is the same logic as “most workers support capitalism, therefore socialism is anti-worker”. The reality is that condemnation of a concept, a system, a worldview, does not mean condemnation of the people who believe in that worldview, at least not when they hold it for lack of information, because an idea that someone believes in is not an inalienable part of that person. Seeking to educate and inform people, and by persuasion seek to change their mind is a different thing to opposing those people’s existence and attempting to end it.
Contrast this with material systems like capitalism or zionism, which force people through violence to live as the system dictates or not live at all. To be perfectly honest, this conflation of jews with zionism, it seems to come from the same position of identity politics you’ve elsewhere excoriated as the reason you left the Labour party.
It is bizarre that you should point to China for a parallel example of self-determination, and not to the apartheid state run in the very country of Israel that you discuss. As much as this commentary of yours is directed at marxists, it speaks much more directly to Palestinians, the people who are actually affected by the system and policy of zionism that you support. Their ethnic cleansing and expulsion from their native land by settlers is something you treat as perfectly fine and acceptable by your silence, and simply saying “zionism won”.
‘The argument that because most israelis or even most jews support zionism, that anti-zionism necessarily becomes antisemitism is just not strong bruv. It is the same logic as “most workers support capitalism, therefore socialism is anti-worker”.’
Is it? Zionism is not just any belief system. It is about the right of the Jewish people to self-determination in their ancient homeland – a right which Marxists happily support in the case of many other nations and peoples. However, they make a special exception for Jews, even denying that Jews constitute a nation. Indeed, this animus towards the idea of a separate Jewish identity goes back to Marx himself. How is this not anti-Semitic?
‘The reality is that condemnation of a concept, a system, a worldview, does not mean condemnation of the people who believe in that worldview, at least not when they hold it for lack of information, because an idea that someone believes in is not an inalienable part of that person.’
As I have already explained, Zionism is not just a belief system in the way that a religion might be, or in the way a political ideology might be. Zionism is about the right of the Jewish people to self-determination in their ancient homeland of Israel. It is as essential a part of being Jewish as Chinese nationalism is to being Chinese, American patriotism is to being American, etc.
It is ironic that the far-left, of all people, would take this position on Zionism, when they happily accuse anyone critical of Islam of ‘Islamophobia’ and equate it to racism. Yet in the case of ‘anti-Zionism’ (which goes beyond criticism of a religion, but denies an entire national group’s right to exist as a free people in its own state, both secular and religious Jews), people on the left cannot see how this is blatantly anti-Semitic. It is very obvious to everyone outside your ideological bubble why this would in fact be the case.
You are being disingenuous when you say that condemning Zionism is not condemnation of the people who believe in it. Jews who support Zionism are constantly rounded upon for being complicit in ‘genocide’, ‘racism’, ‘apartheid’ etc. Jewish students on university campuses are abused for supporting Israel. Anti-Zionist academics rant about a ‘Zionist conspiracy’ in which pro-Israel Jews are supposedly complicit. Anti-Zionism inevitably becomes anti-Semitism, by the force of its own logic. If this was happening to Muslims in place of Jews, you would be denouncing all this as abominable racism. When it concerns Jews, on the other hand, you are silent. On this very blog, I showed examples of articles in which the IMT alleged that Jewish Zionists were guilty of ‘provoking’ anti-Semitism for supporting Israel, had distorted the truth of the Holocaust to legitimise Israel and shut down criticism of the Zionist project, and were European colonisers without any indigenous, ancestral connection to the land. All this constitutes anti-Semitism in the guise of ‘anti-Zionism’.
You are also being incredibly condescending when you talk about ‘educating’ and ‘informing’ – as if Jews who support Israel are somehow ill-informed about what they support. If anything, Zionists have a stronger knowledge of the Israel-Palestine question than far-left ignoramuses who mouth off about ‘apartheid’ with no understanding of the complex history and politics of that part of the world. As we speak, I am reading Martin Gilbert’s magnificent 1999 book on Israel, from its founding to contemporary times. I bet it is a book you have never read, and will never bother to read, because you would rather get all your information from groups like the IMT – propagandistic articles filled with blood libels against Israel and complete distortions of the historical record, as opposed to detailed, scholarly works by recognised historians (as opposed to quacks like Lenni Brenner and Ilan Pappe).
‘Seeking to educate and inform people, and by persuasion seek to change their mind is a different thing to opposing those people’s existence and attempting to end it.’
Bullshit. You want to destroy Israel in place of another state where Jews will be a minority, as part of the ‘anti-Zionist’ agenda. As such, you will, whether you like it or not, bring about the destruction of Jews’ existence as a separate people and a free people in their own homeland. The Jews will become a minority at the mercy of a vengeful Arab majority in a binational ‘Socialist Federation’, which, as we all know, will culminate in genocide and ethnic cleansing on a horrific scale. That is why no one believes in a ‘one-state solution’ except utopians, fantasists, Jew-haters and other cranks.
Jews will never agree to become a minority in their own homeland, so you are wasting your time with this talk of a ‘Socialist Federation’. At least the SWP are honest, have given up on the Israeli working-class and have come out for Hamas and Islamic Jihad.
‘Contrast this with material systems like capitalism or zionism, which force people through violence to live as the system dictates or not live at all.’
The violence is entirely the fault of the Arabs who have consistently refused to accept the existence of a Jewish state and have tried to wipe it out numerous times, supported by the far-left.
‘To be perfectly honest, this conflation of jews with zionism, it seems to come from the same position of identity politics you’ve elsewhere excoriated as the reason you left the Labour party.’
Most Jews identify as Zionists, so I am not ‘conflating’ anything, I am making an objective observation about what Zionism is and its relationship to Jewishness. You can’t separate the two, no matter how hard you try. There are a fringe minority of far-left Jews who parade their Jewish identity (‘As a Jew’) in order to legitimise their racist attacks on their fellow Jews who are Zionists, and they allow people like you to hide behind them and spew anti-Semitic garbage. They represent the Jewish people about as much as the Nation of Islam represents black people. If you think that most Jews, by supporting the right to self-determination in their ancient homeland, are somehow complicit in ‘racism’ and ‘apartheid’, then that is anti-Semitic, whether you like it or not. You would never deem it ‘racist’ for Chinese people to exercise their right to self-determination (even though the Chinese government is behaving abominably towards its minorities as we speak). You would never deem it racist for Egyptian people to enjoy self-determination in their country (even though the Egyptian government is run by a ruthless dictator). Yet in the case of Israel, you do not simply criticise certain Israeli policies, but want the country to cease to exist altogether.
Nor do I accept that Zionism is a form of ‘identity politics’. I understand ‘identity politics’ to be part of what we now understand as ‘intersectionality’, which is pretty far removed from the idea of national self-determination as understood by the mainstream. There may be Jewish Zionists who are also intersectional leftists, but I am not one of them. As a matter of fact, I find intersectionality abhorrent. This does not prevent me from supporting the Jewish state.
‘It is bizarre that you should point to China for a parallel example of self-determination, and not to the apartheid state run in the very country of Israel that you discuss.’
I brought in China as an example of a state which does not have its right to existence challenged, even though it is doing abominable things. China is, as we speak, committing genocide against part of its population. Funny that you don’t call them an apartheid state.
‘As much as this commentary of yours is directed at marxists, it speaks much more directly to Palestinians, the people who are actually affected by the system and policy of zionism that you support. Their ethnic cleansing and expulsion from their native land by settlers is something you treat as perfectly fine and acceptable by your silence, and simply saying “zionism won”.’
It is not their ‘native land’. Most Palestinians are descended from Arab immigrants from the rest of the Middle East. It is the Jews who are truly indigenous to Israel. The Palestinians are about as indigenous to Israel as I, a second-generation British African, am to Britain. The settlements are a legitimate part of Israel’s goal to secure for itself defensible borders and reclaim that portion of Judea and Samaria which is part of the Biblical homeland of the Jews, where some of their holiest sites are located, and where much of the land is being purchased entirely legitimately by the Jews moving in. The Palestinians had several opportunities to have their state, and have refused them all. They are entirely to blame for their plight.
By the way, if you are so outraged about ethnic cleansing, where are the IMT’s articles calling for a ‘right of return’ for Jews expelled from Arab lands in 1948? Where are the IMT’s articles denouncing the Uyghur genocide? Where are the IMT’s articles calling for a ‘right of return’ for all those Germans expelled from Eastern Europe after WWII? Oh that’s right – nowhere to be found.