Issue 55

Spring 2008

Editorial | Contents

Editorial

Sixty years ago Jewish life underwent a seismic shift. A people whose most profound practical, cultural and intellectual accomplishments were realised in conditions of dispersal over nearly two millennia, and who were still contributing to social progress across several continents, were overwhelmed by a new imperative - the creation of a Jewish nation state.

1948 was simultaneously an act of creation and destruction. During a war, Palestinian villages were razed to the ground, the people dispossessed and exiled and their land literally turfed over to 'socialist' kibbutzim. For Palestinians, a nightmare began that has endured for 60 years and is reaching a new intensity as poverty stricken Gazans battle mass starvation and disease.
In the aftermath of the Holocaust, few were willing to acknowledge the price that Palestinians paid. The fighters for the new Jewish state, pitting themselves against forces of a fading British Empire, commandeered the language of independence and freedom. They won support from Labour and Communist parties in the West and from leaders of the evolving Eastern block. Though as Mike Marqusee points out (page 12), not among Jewish and Arab communists in Iraq and Egypt. The claim by Zionists today that even the fiercest critics of a Jewish state before the war, recognised the new realities afterwards, was belied too by Bundist survivors of Nazism, whose conferences in Belgium in 1947 and America in 1948 opposed partition in favour of a binational solution (page 10) and declared that a Jewish state would not solve the problems Jews continued to face in the world.

On Israel's 10th birthday, the renowned Jewish Marxist, Isaac Deutscher, warned Israelis to, 'beware of being carried away by their new-fangled and already red-hot nationalism'. Their state was 'not above criticism: it is an earthly creation not a biblical sanctity'. Their future depended, he said ''on whether the Israelis are on guard against nationalist conceit and able to find a common language with the people around them'.

The devastating physical, psychological, and existential tragedy for the Palestinians has also been a political and cultural disaster for the Jews. The liberatory impulses that swept through Jewish life, bringing Jewish individuals and organisations to the frontline of so many struggles for social justice, were twisted, warped and ultimately subordinated to defence of an increasingly repressive state of Israel.

Jump forward to 1978: the calamitous results of the new master-servant relationship between a Jewish state and the Jewish people are evident all around. The state that proclaimed itself 'a light unto the nations' was collaborating on nuclear weapons technology with the ultimate pariah - apartheid South Africa. Meanwhile, in Argentina, thousands of oppositionists 'disappeared' in the struggles against the Junta, the proportion of Jews among them far greater than their proportion in the population. While America - and American Jewish leaders Ð looked the other way, this Junta was provided with arms and security expertise by Israel. Far from defending the Jews from the Junta, Israel was protecting the Junta from the Argentinian Jews.

The late 1970s was also the peak of a worldwide campaign for Soviet Jewry - not for their right to live as Jews in the USSR, nor for their freedom to emigrate to a country of choice, but exclusively for them to go to Israel, whether they liked it or not.

Here in Britain, as fascist forces reached their highest membership since the 1930s and minority communities including Jews suffered a dramatic rise in racist attacks, a broad-based mass anti-fascist movement was formed. But self-proclaimed 'leaders' of the Jewish community told Jews to stay away from the Anti Nazi League because some of its leading members were also anti-Zionist (page16). While Zionists might have been unnerved by the slogan 'Here to stay, here to fight', it was criminally irresponsible for Jewish leaders to divide the Jews from this movement that was breaking down racist barriers and stemming the fascist tide.

As a more right wing version of Zionism consolidated power in Israel, a right wing Jewish tendency was strengthening first in the USA and then in Britain. Exploiting the left's antipathy to Zionism and support for the Palestinians, it tried to shift Jewish opinion away from its traditional left/liberal mooring towards an aggressive neo-conservatism.

In 2008 Israel's 60th birthday is already being commemorated. We are not celebrating. When Israeli forces have withdrawn from the Occupied Territories, the Palestinians have self-determination, Israel is a state for all its citizens equally, and when Israel stops insisting that Jews around the world have to be 'ingathered' to the Jewish state or that Israel is the undisputed centre of Jewish life, we will have reason to cheer.

Isaac Deutscher understood that the Jews 'were conditioned by the circumstances of their existence to rise above the limitations of the nationalist outlook, to overcome the fetishes of state and empire'. We celebrate the fact that in the diaspora there are Jews who maintain this outlook along with their commitment to unite with others for universal human liberation.

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