Self-determination is wherever we live

Thanks for inviting me.

On demonstrations I’m in awe of people whose placards convey powerful slogans in two or three words. Mine just get wordier, like this one:
Zionism dispossesses, oppresses and kills Palestinians
It harms and oppresses Jews too!
Liberate the Palestinians and Jews from Zionism!
Nineteen words: more a leaflet than a slogan.

The need for Palestinians to liberate themselves from Zionism is beyond urgent. But Zionism also does immense harm to Jewish communities, to Jewish life and history, our sense of identity, and the possibility of a creative Jewish future in harmony with others fighting for social justice.

I did not become an anti-Zionist though, from a Jewish identity crisis, or initially out of a deep awareness of the Palestinians’ plight. That followed soon after. I became one because I am antiracist and antifascist to my core.

My mum in the East End, my dad in the immigrant quarter of Toronto, both experienced “in your face” fascist antisemitism in the 1930s. I imbibed antifascism from them, and from my zeyde (grandfather), Syd, an amateur boxer, who boasted to me about bashing blackshirts in the East End. Antifascism was a family value!

In my teens I saw the film “I was a teenage werewolf”. Full disclosure: for a few years I was  a teenage Zionist. What first shifted me? My antiracist, antifascist experiences in the era of Rock against Racism, the Anti-Nazi League, and the Asian Youth Movement. Their slogan, “Here to stay. Here to fight”, was the opposite of what Zionists demanded. Asian youth asserted their rights to full equality, demanding to live without fear, get equal treatment, and flourish culturally.

Late 1976 I joined the Jewish Socialists’ Group which combined a critical approach to Israel with militant antiracism and antifascism and a class-based approach to challenging the Jewish establishment.

When the fascist National Front was menacing minorities in inner city areas, the JSG threw itself into Britain’s largest post-war mass movement against racism and fascism. Many young Jews did so, but so-called Jewish community “leaders” told Jews: “Stay away from the Anti-Nazi League”, because Leading members of the ANL were anti-Zionists. I remember the JSG’s founder insisting this was nothing to do with Zionism; they just wanted to keep young Jews away from the left.

He remembered the Board using the same tactics in the 1930s, before Israel existed, against Jews like him in Manchester, combatting Mosley through the Young Communist League. In both cases radical Jews disrupted the Jewish establishment’s view of where Jews should stand in relation the British state.

That class-based approach has gone missing. We need it. Many anti-Zionists today only consider the Board of Deputies and Chief Rabbi as adjuncts of the Israeli state. It’s more complex than that. The Board was created in 1760: political Zionism not until 1897. Even then, Britain’s Chief Rabbi Adler described Zionism as “an egregious blunder”. Until the late 1930s the Board of Deputies was itself led mainly by non- and anti-Zionists, who feared that supporting Jewish state nationalism undermined their British patriotism, weakening their demands for full equality here.

Before the Holocaust, Zionism was a minority opinion among Jews in Britain. It became hegemonic in Jewish life especially from the 1950s to the 1970s. After the Holocaust itself, it was survivors languishing in DP camps for years, who no western countries wanted, that pulled Jews closer to Zionism. Zionism then twisted that concern of one Jewish community for another into a one-sided oppressive relationship that subordinated the needs of diaspora Jews to the Israeli state’s agendas. Jews need to liberate themselves from that.

The first “Jerusalem Programme”, in the early 1950s, demanded “ingathering the exiles” (labelling diaspora Jews as “exiles” rather than citizens of their countries). It encouraged aliyah, to the new state, which means “ascending”, as if being a diaspora Jew was a shameful lower status. New Jewish schools were established in Britain that assumed Jewish life, Jewish identity, Hebrew culture, Israel were synonymous. We are meeting today in the Rose Lipman Hall, named after a longstanding Jewish Labour Party figure in Hackney: she was also my headteacher when I attended Clapton Jewish Day school. I was supposed to come out of that school believing in God and Zionism. I don’t know if I paid too little attention or too much!

The second “Jerusalem Programme”, in 1968, sought to turn a generalised empathy with Israel among diaspora Jews, into an absolute imperative. This has done enormous harm to Jewish life and identity. It proclaimed the “centrality of Israel” in Jewish life, describing Zionism as the self-determination movement of the Jewish people. It isn’t, and never was. Seventy-seven years after Israeli independence, most Jews (including  630,000 Israelis) do their Jewish self-determination elsewhere – in London, Berlin, New York, Ankara, Melbourne, Kiev, Sao Paulo, Warsaw…

I’ll be in Warsaw this week and will revisit the Polin museum of 1,000 years of Jewish life in Poland. One room in its permanent exhibition highlights the end of the 19th century: Jews suffering under Tsarist rule, but radical ideas promising liberation and self-determination spreading. Territorial self-determination in Palestine was just one idea among several. Most Jews rejected it in favour of other ways to build better lives for Jews. Anti-Zionism was invented by Jews, though we don’t own the copyright!

Zionism’s strongest Jewish opponent in East Europe was Bundism – a secular, socialist, anti-nationalist ideology, which saw a brighter Jewish future only in conditions that promised a brighter future for humanity. Bundism and Zionism held completely opposite values: optimism versus pessimism; internationalism versus nationalism; integration versus isolation and evacuation. Bundists accused Zionists of worshipping the same ethno-nationalist values as regimes that oppressed Jews and other minorities. My favourite slogan exhibited elsewhere in Polin Museum says: “Bund builds, Zionism destroys!”

Today’s debates about “Jewish self-determination” are so impoverished, referring only to territorial self–determination in a fortress state, that dispossessed and expelled as many Palestinians as possible, then denied self-determination to Palestinians who remained in the Jewish-supremacist state.

Henryk Erlich, a Bund leader in Poland, wrote in 1938: “Zionists regard themselves as second-class citizens in Poland. Their aim is to be first-class citizens in Palestine and make the Arabs second-class citizens." Also that year, he wrote, with chilling foresight: “We are not a chosen people. Our nationalism is just as ugly … and has the same inclination to fascist debauchery as the nationalisms of all the other nations … if an appropriate opportunity arose, Jewish nationalism would show its sharp teeth and nails.”

Those Jews who shout loudest today about “Jewish self-determination” do nothing to enhance creative, diasporic, Jewish self-determination. Instead they defend a genocidal ethnocracy and despise self-determined Jews like us who denounce Israeli racism and fascism.

Zionism's “Israel first” policy makes Jews vulnerable and divides us from our natural allies.

Argentina, late 1970s, thousands of political opponents of the Junta are “disappeared”. Jews were 1% of the population but 12% of the disappeared. That Junta was armed to the teeth by Israel. In apartheid South Africa, the most progressive Jews joined the ANC. A Jewish member of its armed wing told me how Jewish establishment bodies passed names and addresses of Jewish activists to the Nazi-supporting Apartheid authorities.

While Zionists were ethnically cleansing and erasing Palestinian villages during and after 1948, Zionist ideologues were busy downgrading and erasing longstanding Jewish diaspora cultures and languages, and knowledge of powerful Jewish alternatives to Zionism from earlier decades. In our liberation struggle we should cherish and renew those histories, cultures and languages.

Months  before the Nazi invasion of Poland, the anti-Zionist Bund won massive victories among Jewish voters in major Polish cities, not least because they led the fight in the 1930s against antisemitism from Polish fascists. Zionists and the religious were absent from that, though, in the ghettoes, Bundists, Communists and left Zionists united in armed anti-Nazi resistance.

The Holocaust decimated the Bund. Its post-war presence has been marginal and suppressed, but its philosophy of non-territorial, diasporic, self-determination, of doykayt  (here-ness), its fundamental critique of Zionism and all nationalism remains absolutely pertinent in 2025.

Some anti-Zionists fall into the Zionist trap of accepting the centrality of Israel and only focusing on Palestine-Israel and on what we are against. We need to define what we are for. If we embrace our diasporism we can be stronger, more effective advocates and co-protesters for justice for Palestinians, and for all oppressed peoples, but also active creators of a joyful, radical, counter-hegemonic force in Jewish life, organically linked with the struggles of other minorities here and now.

Globally, more Jews are speaking out against Zionism today than at any time since 1948 but to sustain that, we need an embracing vision of what our alternative is, or could be.

That placard I mentioned at the start – I should show you the other side:
Be a Bundist
not a Zionist!