A History of Zionism (80 page)

The Soviet attitude towards Zionism has remained consistently hostile. Originally it was rejected as a tool of British imperialism. Later, Moscow’s alliance with the Arabs made a firm anti-Israeli policy imperative. But there is every reason to assume that the Soviet attitude would have been negative even if considerations of foreign policy had not been involved. It would have been unthinkable to permit several millions of Soviet Jews to emigrate to Palestine, as this would have been tantamount to an open admission of the failure of the Soviet nationalities policy. Thus the Jewish problem in the Soviet Union has remained unsolved. While assimilation is still the aim, the conditions for making this policy a success do not exist. Consequently, the appeal of Soviet Communism has declined among Jews both within Russia and outside. Of the many Jewish Communists in the west who gave enthusiastic support to the Soviet cause in the 1920s and 1930s, few were those who did not leave the party in disappointment. The official Communist case against Zionism, once advocated with so much ardour and conviction, no longer presents a serious ideological challenge.

Whatever Trotsky’s quarrel with the old guard Bolsheviks, he did not disagree with their policy towards the Jews. Like them, he regarded Zionism as a wholly reactionary phenomenon. He showed little interest in the problem, and while he commented on a great many issues in world politics at one time or another he hardly ever dealt with Jewish affairs. One of the few exceptions was an article in
Iskra
in 1904 in which he called Herzl a shameless adventurer and referred to the ‘hysterical sobbings’ of Zionism. Towards the end of his life he slightly modified his position. Recent experience had taught him, he said in an interview in 1937, that his old hopes for assimilation had been over-optimistic. Perhaps the Jews did need a territory of their own after all, even under Socialism. But it would probably not be Palestine, and in any case the whole problem would hardly find a solution under capitalism.
*

Some of Trotsky’s disciples took a greater interest, and while they made no significant theoretical contribution (for their views, too, were based on Kautsky), their opinions have a certain historical relevance, for they later influenced the New Left in its anti-Zionist outlook.
*
The chief Trotskyite ideologist on Zionism and the Jewish question was the Belgian Leon, a former member of a Socialist-Zionist youth movement. Unlike most other Marxists who dealt with the problem, he was familiar with the writings of the theoreticians of labour Zionism. Having reached the conclusion that Zionism, not excluding its extreme left wing, was incurably reactionary in character, Leon invested considerable efforts in refuting it: other national movements in Europe had been closely linked with the ascending phase of capitalism, whereas the Jewish national movement appeared on the scene only after the process of the formation of nations was approaching its end. Far from being a result of the development of productive forces, Zionism reflected the petrifaction of capitalism. Capitalist decay was the basis for the growth of Zionism, but at the same time it was the reason for the impossibility of its realisation.
†
Judaism had been indispensable in pre-capitalist society but capitalism had destroyed the social bases on which Jews had for centuries maintained themselves.

There is little in this that could not be found in earlier Marxist writers, not even the far-fetched thesis that economic developments in Europe compelled the Jewish bourgeoisie to create a national state in order to develop its productive forces. For this is more or less what Borokhov had predicted, but in contrast to Borokhov, Leon regarded this as a regressive development, for the Jewish question could be solved only after the victory of world revolution. Once world revolution had prevailed, once capitalism had been overthrown, the national problem would lose its acuteness. For national-cultural and linguistic antagonisms were only manifestations of the economic antagonisms created by capitalism. Leon seems not to have been particularly concerned about the advent of fascism, for the ‘very exacerbation of antisemitism prepared the road for its disappearance’. Fascism, he predicted, would accelerate the proletarianisation of the middle classes.
‡
Leon was arrested by the Germans a year or two after these lines were written and died, like millions of other Jews, in a Nazi extermination camp.

Zionists paid little attention to the views of Leon and other Trotskyite ideologists, for wherever they differed from Kautsky and the Bolsheviks they offered no startling new insights. Even in West Germany, where the New Left devoted much time to the study and critique of Zionism, it did not go much beyond the traditional arguments of anti-Zionism such as those voiced before the First World War by the (‘bourgeois’) Anti-Zionist Committee.
*
Shorn of the ideological underpinnings (Kautsky, Lenin, Horkheimer-Adorno) it always amounted to proving that Arab nationalism was progressive whereas Jewish nationalism was evil. More attention was devoted by the Zionists to the strictures of Isaac Deutscher, perhaps because, unlike the Trotskyite and New Left writers, he was a well-known literary figure who reached a wide public and who, because of his background, was bound to know more about the subject than they did. Deutscher too regarded Zionism as a profoundly reactionary movement, but he admitted that the Bolsheviks had taken an over-optimistic view of the chances of solving the Jewish problem. At one stage in his career he engaged in public heart-searching, writing in 1954 that he had abandoned his anti-Zionism, which had been based on his confidence in the European labour movement: ‘If instead of arguing against Zionism in the 1920s and 1930s I had urged European Jews to go to Palestine I might have helped to save some of the lives that were later extinguished in Hitler’s gas chambers.’
†
The Jewish state, he wrote in this moment of weakness, had become an ‘historical necessity and a living reality’. But he still believed that basically Zionism was a reactionary force and it did not therefore come as a surprise when, after the Six Day War and shortly before his own death, Deutscher made a bitter attack on Israel in which he argued (as he had done forty years earlier) that Arab nationalism was progressive while Jewish nationalism was reactionary, that Israel represented neo-imperialism in the Middle East, preached chauvinism, etc.
‡
Zionism had worked from the outset for a purely Jewish state. Marxists should not allow their emotions and the memories of Auschwitz to drive them to support the wrong cause.

Deutscher’s instinctive rejection of the Jewish national movement went deeper and was in a way quite unconnected with the conflict between Israel and the Arabs. All the Jewish geniuses throughout recent centuries, he wrote in his credo, the great revolutionaries of modern thought such as Spinoza, Heine, Marx, Rosa Luxemburg, Trotsky, and Freud, had been heretics. They had all found Jewry too narrow, too archaic and too constricting. It is interesting to compare this list of non-Jewish Jews with Kautsky’s (Spinoza, Heine, Lassalle, Marx), and with Otto Bauer’s (Spinoza, Ricardo, Disraeli, Marx, Lassalle, Heine). They all looked for ideals and fulfilment beyond Judaism. They had in common their rootlessness and their vulnerability. They were the natural protagonists of cosmopolitanism, the advocates not of nation-states but of internationalism. It was the paradoxical consummation of the Jewish tragedy that the decay of bourgeois Europe had compelled the Jew to embrace the nation state.
*

The composition of Deutscher’s hall of fame is open to dispute, and it does seem a little far-fetched to equate Freud’s and Heine’s attitude towards their fellow Jews with Trotsky’s and Rosa Luxemburg’s. These two failed precisely because they were ‘rootless Jews’ and did not realise the depth of national feeling in Germany and Russia which made it quite illusory to pursue an internationalist policy. Trotsky wrote in his autobiography that nationalist passions and prejudices were incomprehensible to him from his earliest childhood, that they produced in him a feeling of loathing and moral nausea. Rosa Luxemburg complained to a friend (Mathilde Wurm) in 1917: ‘Why do you come with your special Jewish sorrows? I feel just as sorry for the wretched Indian victim in Putamayo, the Negroes in Africa … I cannot find a special corner in my heart for the ghetto.’ This in a way was an understatement of her position, because like some other Jewish revolutionaries she showed symptoms of that familiar phenomenon, Jewish self-hatred. It is difficult to imagine that Lenin, an internationalist second to none, would have referred with such dismay to ‘special Russian sorrows’. Deutscher, theoretically at least, was aware of the dilemma; after all he does mention the vulnerability of the cosmopolitan Jew. But he had no clear answer for the perplexed Jewish revolutionaries of his own time. Deutscher’s opposition to Zionism was based in the last resort on the liberal critique of the Jewish national movement. The erstwhile follower of the Galician Rabbi of Ger emerges as a modern, Socialist, protest rabbi unshaken in his belief that the world is moving away from national sovereignty and the nation-state towards internationalism, and that the message of the world of tomorrow, the message of universal human emancipation, is the one which Jews should retrieve, not their misplaced enthusiasm for parochial nationalism. The belief in a specific Jewish spiritual mission is replaced by a purely secular credo. But the message of internationalism is not pronounced with the same measure of conviction as in the works of the Socialists before 1914. It was easier then to be optimistic in this respect than after 1945. Deutscher must have felt that his strictures against the evils of nationalism might conceivably influence some Jews, but he cannot have been confident about their effect on the Russians, the Chinese, or other nations, ‘Socialist’ or non-Socialist. It was easier to denounce Zionism than point to an alternative, for the prospects of the non-Jewish Jew acting as pioneer and apostle of internationalism in an intensely nationalist world were clearly not very promising.

What has been said of the liberal-assimilationist critique of Zionism applies
a fortiori
to the Socialist-Communist view. Marxists put great emphasis on economic factors in explaining antisemitism, but they agreed with liberalism in regarding assimilation as desirable, and rejected Zionism for trying to impede this inevitable process. Such a vision did not lack consistency; it certainly entailed fewer complications than the Zionist endeavour. Its main weakness was that it was a hopeful vision of the distant future which did not provide clear answers for the present. The Marxist appeal to Jewish toilers and intellectuals to share in the class struggle in their native countries was not practical politics in Germany in 1933, and it has encountered obstacles to a greater or a lesser degree everywhere. Zionists share the regret of Marxists and liberals that the emancipation of the Jews has encountered so many unforeseen difficulties. They might further concede that it was a historical misfortune that the Jewish national movement appeared so late on the historical scene; the emergence of a Jewish state in the nineteenth century would have faced fewer problems. They will accept the view that the nation-state is not the final goal of human history but only a transitional stage. But while it lasted, what were the Jews to do in those countries in which assimilation was just not possible?

To this vital question there has been no convincing answer by the left-wing critics of Zionism. They could argue, as some did, that the problems of individual nations have to be subordinated to the higher interests of the world revolution, and that seen from this vantage point, the Jewish problem was not the most important. The Jews were expendable. Other nations too had come and gone in history. Persecution, the slaughter of millions of Jews, was a regrettable episode, but the revolutionary Socialist is concerned with the future of all mankind. What does the future of a small people matter in the global context? Zionists are unlikely to be impressed by this argument, for more than one reason. Those advocating abstract internationalist principles are usually influenced by the interests of the nations to which they belong. Furthermore, Zionism rejects as unreasonable the demand that the Jews should subordinate their national aspirations to the higher interest of the future ideal world state — which may (or may not) come into existence one day, and may (or may not) be superior to the present order.

Zionism can be subjected to trenchant criticism from different points of view. But as a national movement and a
Weltanschauung
its validity can neither be proved nor refuted. As far as antisemitism is concerned Zionism has a strong case. Its analysis has been more fully confirmed by recent history than the predictions of the anti-Zionists. History will in due time provide an answer to the question whether Zionism has been a success or failure in political terms. But
Weltgeschichte
is not the
Weltgericht.
The survival and prosperity of the state will not by itself demonstrate the justice of the Zionist cause, just as its failure would not prove its injustice.

*
O. Oergament (ed.),
Graf Leo Tolstoi über die Juden
, Berlin n.d., pp. 18, 23.

*
Alfred Rosenberg,
Der staatsfeindliche Zionismus
, Hamburg, 1922, pp. 62–3.

*
Karl Landauer and Herbert Weil,
Die zionistische Utopie
, Munich, 1914, p. 80.

*
Max Nordau,
Zionistische Schriften
, Cologne, 1909, p. 258.