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An excerpt from, "The Forgotten History of the Jewish, Anti-Zionist Left" By Sarah Lazare, Jacobin, July 21, 2020:
Sarah Lazare spoke with Benjamin Balthaser, an associate professor of multiethnic literature at Indiana University at South Bend. His recent article, “When Anti-Zionism Was Jewish: Jewish Racial Subjectivity and the Anti-Imperialist Literary Left from the Great Depression to the Cold War,” examines the erased history of anti-Zionism among the Jewish, working-class left in the 1930s and ’40s. Balthaser is the author of a book of poems about the old Jewish left called Dedication, and an academic monograph titled Anti-Imperialist Modernism. He is working on a book about Jewish Marxists, socialist thought, and anti-Zionism in the twentieth century.
He spoke with Lazare about the colonial origins of modern Zionism, and the Jewish left’s quarrel with it, on the grounds that it is a form of right-wing nationalism, is fundamentally opposed to working-class internationalism, and is a form of imperialism. According to Balthaser, this political tradition undermines the claim that Zionism reflects the will of all Jewish people, and offers signposts for the present day. “For Jews in the United States who are trying to think about their relationship not only to Palestine, but also their own place in the world as an historically persecuted ethno-cultural diasporic minority, we have to think of whose side we are on, and which global forces we want to align with,” he says. “If we do not want to side with the executioners of the far-right, with colonialism, and with racism, there is a Jewish cultural resource for us to draw on — a political resource to draw on.”
Sarah Lazare: Can you please explain what the ideology of Zionism is? Who developed it and when?
Benjamin Balthaser: A couple of things need to be disentangled. First of all, there is a long Jewish history that predates the ideology of Zionism that looks at Jerusalem, the ancient kingdom of Judea, as a site of cultural, religious, and, you can say, messianic longing. If you know Jewish liturgy, there are references that go back thousands of years to the land of Zion, to Jerusalem, the old kingdom that the Romans destroyed.
There have been attempts throughout Jewish history, disastrously, to “return” to the land of Palestine, most famously, Sabbatai Zevi in the seventeenth century. But for the most part, through much of Jewish history, “Israel” was understood as a kind of cultural and messianic longing, but there was no desire to actually physically move there, outside of small religious communities in Jerusalem and, of course, the small number of Jews who continued to live in Palestine under the Ottoman Empire — about 5 percent of the population.
Contemporary Zionism, particularly political Zionism, does draw on that large reservoir of cultural longing and religious text to legitimize itself, and that’s where the confusion comes.
Modern Zionism arose in the late nineteenth century as a European nationalist movement. And I think that’s the way to understand it. It was one of these many European nationalist movements of oppressed minorities that attempted to construct out of the diverse cultures of Western and Eastern Europe ethnically homogenous nation-states. And there were many Jewish nationalisms of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, of which Zionism was only one.
There was the Jewish Bund, which was a left-wing socialist movement that rose to prominence in the early twentieth century that articulated a deterritorialized nationalism in Eastern Europe. They felt their place was Eastern Europe, their land was Eastern Europe, their language was Yiddish. And they wanted to struggle for freedom in Europe where they actually lived. And they felt that their struggle for liberation was against oppressive capitalist governments in Europe. Had the Holocaust not wiped out the Bund and other Jewish socialists in Eastern Europe, we might be talking about Jewish nationalism in a very different context now.
Of course, there were Soviet experiments, probably most famous in Birobidzhan, but also one very brief one in Ukraine, to create Jewish autonomous zones within territories that Jews lived, or elsewhere within the Soviet Union, rooted in the Yiddish idea of doykait, diasporic hereness, and Yiddish language and culture.
Zionism was one of these cultural nationalist movements. What made it different was that it grafted itself onto British colonialism, a relationship made explicit with the Balfour Declaration in 1917, and actually tried to create a country out of a British colony — Mandate Palestine — and use British colonialism as a way to help establish itself in the Middle East. The Balfour Declaration was essentially a way to use the British Empire for its own ends. On some level, you could say Zionism is a toxic mixture of European nationalism and British imperialism grafted onto a cultural reservoir of Jewish tropes and mythologies that come from Jewish liturgy and culture.
Lazare: One of the underpinnings of modern Zionism is that it’s an ideology that represents the will of all Jews. But in your paper, you argue that criticism of Zionism was actually quite common on the Jewish left in the 1930s and ’40s, and that this history has been largely erased. Can you talk about what these criticisms were and who was making them?
Balthaser: The funny part about the United States, and I would say this is mostly true for Europe, is that before the end of World War II, and even a little after, most Jews disparaged Zionists. And it didn’t matter if you were a communist, it didn’t matter if you were a Reform Jew, Zionism was not popular. There were a lot of different reasons for American Jews to not like Zionism before the 1940s.
There’s the liberal critique of Zionism most famously articulated by Elmer Berger and the American Council for Judaism. The anxiety among these folks was that Zionism would basically be a kind of dual loyalty, that it would open Jews up to the claim that they’re not real Americans, and that it would actually frustrate their attempts to assimilate into mainstream American culture.
Elmer Berger also forwarded the idea that Jews are not a culture or a people, but simply a religion, and therefore have nothing in common with one another outside of the religious faith. This, I would argue, is an assimilationist idea that comes out of the 1920s and ’30s, and tries to resemble a Protestant notion of “communities of faith.”
But for the Jewish left — the communist, socialist, Trotskyist, and Marxist left — their critique of Zionism came from two quarters: a critique of nationalism and a critique of colonialism. They understood Zionism as a right-wing nationalism and, in that sense, bourgeois. They saw it as in line with other forms of nationalism — an attempt to align the working class with the interests of the bourgeoisie.
There was at the time a well-known takedown of Vladimir Jabotinsky in the New Masses in 1935, in which Marxist critic Robert Gessner calls Jabotinsky a little Hitler on the Red Sea. Gessner calls the Zionists Nazis and the Left in general saw Jewish nationalism as a right-wing formation trying to create a unified, militaristic culture that aligns working-class Jewish interests with the interests of the Jewish bourgeoisie.
So that’s one critique of Zionism. The other critique of Zionism, which I think is more contemporary to the Left today, is that Zionism is a form of imperialism. If you look at the pamphlets and magazines and speeches that are given on the Jewish left in the 1930s and ’40s, they saw that Zionists were aligning themselves with British imperialism.
They also were very aware of the fact that the Middle East was colonized, first by the Ottomans and then by the British. They saw the Palestinian struggle for liberation as part of a global anti-imperialist movement.
Of course, Jewish communists saw themselves not as citizens of a nation-state, but as part of the global proletariat: part of the global working class, part of the global revolution. And so for them to think about their homeland as this small strip of land in the Mediterranean — regardless of any cultural affinity to Jerusalem — would just be against everything they believe.
As the Holocaust began in earnest in the 1940s, and Jews were fleeing Europe in any way they possibly could, some members of the Communist Party advocated that Jews should be allowed to go to Palestine if you’re fleeing annihilation and Palestine is the only place you can go that is natural.
But that doesn’t mean you can create a nation-state there. You need to get along with the people who live there as best as you possibly can. There was a communist party of Palestine that did advocate for Jewish and Palestinian collaboration to oust the British and create a binational state — which, for a host of reasons, including the segregated nature of Jewish settlement, proved harder in practice than in theory.
In any case, the Jewish left in the 1930s and ’40s understood, critically, that the only way Zionism would be able to emerge in Palestine was through a colonial project and through the expulsion of the indigenous Palestinians from the land. In a speech by Earl Browder, chairman of the Communist Party, in Manhattan’s Hippodrome, he declares that a Jewish state can only be formed through the expulsion of a quarter-million Palestinians, which attendees thought was very shocking at the time, but it actually ended up being a dramatic undercount.
Lazare: You wrote in your recent journal article, “Perhaps the single most pervasive narrative about Zionism, even among scholars and writers who acknowledge its marginal status before the war, is that the Holocaust changed Jewish opinion and convinced Jews of its necessity.” You identify some major holes in this narrative. Can you explain what they are?
Balthaser: I would alter that a bit to say I’m really talking about the communist and Marxist left in this context. I grew up within a left-wing family where opinion was definitely divided on the question of Zionism — yet, nonetheless, there was a pervasive idea that the Holocaust changed opinion universally, and everyone fell in line as soon as the details of the Holocaust were revealed, Zionist and anti-Zionist alike.
It’s undeniably correct to say that without the Holocaust there probably would have been no Israel, if just for the single fact that there was a massive influx of Jewish refugees after the war who would have undoubtedly stayed in Europe otherwise. Without that influx of Jews who could fight the 1948 war and populate Israel just after, it’s doubtful an independent state of Israel could have succeeded.
However, one thing I found most surprising going through the Jewish left press in the 1940s — publications of the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party, the Communist Party, and writings by Hannah Arendt — is that even after the scope of the Holocaust was widely understood, their official position was still anti-Zionist.
They may have called for Jews to be allowed to resettle in the lands from which they were expelled or massacred, with full rights and full citizenship, be allowed to immigrate to the United States, or even be allowed to emigrate to Palestine if there was nowhere else to go (as was often the case). But they were still wholly against partition and the establishment of a Jewish-only state.
What is important to understand about that moment was that Zionism was a political choice — not only by Western imperial powers, but also by Jewish leadership. They could have fought more strenuously for Jewish immigration to the United States. And a lot of the Zionist leaders actually fought against immigration to the United States.
There were a number of stories reported in the Jewish communist press about how Zionists collaborated with the British and Americans to force Jews to go to Mandate Palestine, when they would have rather gone to the United States, or England. There’s a famous quote by Ernest Bevin, the British foreign secretary, who said the only reason the United States sent Jews to Palestine was “because they do not want too many more of them in New York.” And the Zionists agreed with this.
While this may seem like ancient history, it is important because it disrupts the common sense surrounding Israel’s formation. “Yes, maybe there could have been peace between Jews and Palestinians, but the Holocaust made all of that impossible.” And I would say that this debate after 1945 shows that there was a long moment in which there were other possibilities, and another future could have happened.
Ironically, perhaps, the Soviet Union did more than any other single force to change the minds of the Jewish Marxist left in the late 1940s about Israel. Andrei Gromyko, the Soviet Union’s ambassador to the United Nations, came out in 1947 and backed partition in the United Nations after declaring the Western world did nothing to stop the Holocaust, and suddenly there’s this about-face. All these Jewish left-wing publications that were denouncing Zionism, literally the next day, were embracing partition and the formation of the nation-state of Israel.
You have to understand, for a lot of Jewish communists and even socialists, the Soviet Union was the promised land — not Zionism. This was the place where they had, according to the propaganda, eradicated antisemisitm.
The Russian Empire was the most antisemitic place throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, before the rise of Nazism. Many of the Jewish Communist Party members were from Eastern Europe, or their families were, and they had very vivid memories of Russia as the crucible of antisemitism. For them, the Russian Revolution was a rupture in history, a chance to start over. And, of course, this is after World War II, when the Soviet Union had just defeated the Nazis.
For the Soviet Union to embrace Zionism really sent a shockwave through the left-wing Jewish world. The Soviet Union changed its policy a decade or so later, openly embracing anti-Zionism by the 1960s. But for this brief pivotal moment, the Soviet Union firmly came down in favor of partition, and that seems to be what really changed the Jewish left.
Without this kind of legitimation, I think we are all starting to see the Jewish left such as it exists return back in an important way to the positions that it had originally held, which is that Zionism is a right-wing nationalism, and that it is also racist and colonialist. We are seeing the Jewish left return to its first principles.
An excerpt from, "Jews and Nuclear Weapons" Harvard Divinity School, 2018:
The NPT is a global agreement signed by nearly every nation to stop the spread of nuclear weapons. Since its ratification in 1970 only four countries have never signed, and three have atomic weapons today: India, Pakistan, and the Jewish state of Israel. Israel, home to nearly half of the world’s Jews, was created in 1948 following the Holocaust. Since then, Israel’s neighbors have declared war on the state several times for complex reasons that include Israel’s occupation of Palestine and anti-Semitism. Thus, haunted by memories of the Holocaust and surrounded by hostile neighbors, Israel refused to sign the NPT and began their own project to build an atomic bomb. With help from France, they did so in the 1960s. Israel has always refused to confirm or deny the existence of their stockpile, but it is widely known that by 2014 they had at least 80 nuclear warheads.
Today, while the vast majority of Jews agree that using nuclear weapons should be a last resort, many Jews, especially in Israel, have religiously justified possessing them. Surrounded by hostile neighbors, Israeli Jews often believe that the survival of the Jewish state is dependent upon having the bombs as deterrents. They cite Jewish law in the book of Exodus which prohibits Jews from allowing oneself to be killed, arguing that eliminating atomic bombs would be tantamount to committing suicide as their antagonistic neighbors would take advantage of their weakness. With strong social memories of the Holocaust, they believe that the fear of nuclear retaliation will ensure that a genocide of the Jews will never happen again. In fact, Israeli rabbi Pinchas Peli has argued that, “if anyone has the right to possess nuclear weapons… Israel is the country that should irrefutably have that right. It is, after all, the only state that is threatened openly and constantly with total destruction.” However, other Jews have argued that while Israel should keep their nuclear arsenal, it is still clearly immoral, so Jews must “choose the lesser evil,” between having the bombs and being destroyed. In short, many Israeli Jews believe that if they were pacifists, “they would have long since been dead.”
In fact, Israel’s stockpile itself is often described in religious terms. For example, in the Six Days War in 1967, a secret plan was drawn up—though not executed—to detonate an atom bomb in Egypt if Israel seemed poised to lose the war. It was named “Operation Samson” after the character in the Biblical book of Judges who pushed over the support columns of a temple, killing himself and his enemies. Similarly, an Israeli system to intercept incoming warheads is called “David’s Sling” after the weapon King David used to kill Goliath in the book of Samuel.
An excerpt from, "Occultation in Perpetuum: Shi'ite Eschatology and the Iranian Nuclear Crisis" (PDF) By Dr. Ze'ev Maghen, Bar-Ilan University, May 1, 2007, Pg. 25 - 30:
A few paragraphs must now be devoted to the "Hojjatiyyeh" society, another by-word which - together with its cognate "Mahdaviyyeh" - has been tossed around endlessly by pundits, politicians and even professors ever since the accession of Ahmadinejad. Former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, for instance, regularly makes much of this organization in speeches and interviews - despite his abject dearth of knowledge on the subject- comparing it, inter alia, to the Branch Davidian cult of David Koresh:
I was looking for an analogy to try to explain to Americans what it is that is so dangerous about Iran acquiring nuclear weapons. You remember those crazy people in Waco, Texas? ... the Hojattiyyeh is that kind of cult. It's the cult of the Mahdi, a holy man that disappeared a thousand years ago. And the president of Iran believes that be's supposed to - that he was put here on Earth to bring this holy man back by inaugurating a great religious war between the true Muslim believers and the infidels. And millions will die in this Apocalypse, and the Muslims will go to heaven .... Ahmadinejad, the president of Iran, is first trying to develop nuclear weapons and then going about his mad fantasy of global conflict.There are more fundamental mistakes in this passage than we have time to enumerate, but one of them, at least, should be addressed. Far from being composed of radical messianists who seek to usher in the· apocalyptic millenium, the Anjoman-e-Hojjatiyyeh, founded in the mid-twentieth century by Shaykh Mafunud-e-Halabr, was and remains an ultra-conservative association devoted to the suppression of a particular latter-day messianic movement that claims that the Hidden Imam is already here: the Baha'i. It advocates, in perfectly traditional, orthodox Twelver fashion, the pious and passive practice of"awaiting" the Savior, but specifically discourages and condemns as heretical any active effort to hasten his arrival. The organization's name does indeed derive from one of the many titles of the Hidden Imam - .al-Hujja, "the Proof' - but this title was deliberately chosen from among all the others in order to signify the Hojjatiyyeh's staunch opposition to any involvment in the political affairs of this world ("[the appelation hujja] emphasizes the religious and spiritual aspects of [the imam's] function, as opposed to [designations like] al-Qa 'im or Safzib a/-'Amr which convey his role as the ideal ruler of Islam who will restore Islamic justice to the world"). Indeed, so apolitical, non-radical and anti-messianic are the ideas of this group that it viewed Khomeini's doctrine of the Guardianship of the Jurist (velayat-e-faqih), together with the revolution it helped engender, as essentially ghuluww phenomena, a position which led to their official disbandment in 1984. The reason that the Hojjatiyyeh are associated with the slogan mahdi biyii, mahdi biyii! (Savior, come, Savior, come!) is because the members of this organization chanted this slogan immediately after the revolution specifically in order to undermine the popular feeling that the lmam was already present in the person of Khomeini. It's actual import was: "the Savior has yet to come, the Savior has yet to come!', Netanyahu and the hundreds of other speakers, journalists and analysts who facilely bandy about the name Hojjatiyyeh and exploit it to depict the new Iranian government as living on the faultline between this world and the next could not have gotten it more wrong.
. . .Messianism is a mushy term and a nebulous phenomenon. Even if the Final Redeemer and eschatological scenario of a given religion has been effectively defused as is the case in Twelver Shiism- there will always be individuals and groups that place a greater emphasis on such aspects than does the mainstream. In Shi'ism, if those individuals or groups go too far they have been and will be suppressed. But Ahmadinejad has not gone too far in that sense. His "messianic" acts and statements are as normative as dropping a message for the mahdi down the well of the Jamkaran mosque. Defanged messianism can and does co-exist quite comfortably with conservative religious tradition (the Jamkaran mosque is located in Qom). All pious Shi'ites pray for the return of the Hidden Imam just as all pious Christians pray for the return of Jesus and all pious Jews for the arrival of the mashiah. That does not mean that they run their lives or their polities based on this vague and distant wish.
This paper has argued that messianism or mahdism is not a potent force within Shi'ism, and therefore not a genuine factor in the foreign policy of the Islamic Republic. This does not mean that American and international pressure on Iran to halt its nuclear program should be ceased; it means that it should be increased sevenfold. Were the Iranian leadership truly convinced that the Eschaton was around the comer, no amount of sanctions or threats of military action would be effective. Since they are not in the least bit convinced of this, such measures - if pursued with resolution, . wisdom and consistency (unlike the current state of affairs)- are likely to produce significant effects. Mass martyrdom might be acceptable to certain elements in the regime, but slow economic strangulation leading to intolerable levels of popular discontent are anther story. As long as we persist in buying our own hype about the dangerously irrational and apocalyptically oriented Islamic Republic, we will continue to fear the Iranians more than we should, and this fear will paralyze us.
Other-worldly Messianism does not drive present-day Iranian policy. Nevertheless, when Ahmadinejad - or Khamene'i, or Mesbap-e-Yazdi, or Jannati, or Daviidi, or others - talk about the Hidden Imam and publicly pray for his return, this is more than mere lip service or the expression of some undefined longing connected to the far distant future. There is another, more metaphorical and less metaphysical level upon which mahdism operates in today's Islamic Republic. It consists of a very this-worldly set of aspirations involving Iran's burgeoning power and Islam's ideological and political (and eventually military) ascendency. The statements and speeches made by Iran's leaders in connection with the Hidden Imam's advent are almost invariably accompanied by their own translations and interpretations, which taken together boil down to the strong sense of mission and momentum afforded them by the original revolution and by recent international developments. They believe that Iran is going to raise up the humiliated head of the the Islamic world and preside over the process whereby its superior spiritual and moral (and political) system undermines- with or without the help of the sword (but most likely with) - the decaying edifice of the debauched and enervated West. And just as the original set of Shi'ite clerical achievements detailed throughout this essay and climaxing in the revolution of 1979 required the suppression of ecstatic, other-worldly messianism, so the this-worldly ''messianism" evinced by an ambitious Iran today requires the avoidance of another type of apocalyptic eventuality: nuclear conflict. For Iran to launch a nuclear weapon on any target would mean the end of her precious ''messianic" dream of spreading Islam throughout the world under the aegis of Twelver Shi'ism; it would mean the end of Iran.
The implications for American and European policy of this reassessment of Shi'ite Iranian messianism are rife, but not on the nuclear level: there, as I have stated, other extremely compelling reasons exist for denying Iran the bomb, even though messianism is not one of them. The most important implications of the this-worldly Iranian-Islamist messianism I have just described are, to my mind, found in an area usually ignored by Western thinkers and policy makers. The greatest danger to the West posed by Iran and Islamism in the long run is neither a nuclear nor even a military danger (though these dangers exist and must not be ignored) but a cultural-ideological danger. Iran and its far flung fundamentalist allies perceive the West as weak, disunified and decadent - and they are right. Monistic Islam becomes more sure of itself every day; pluralistic, post-modern "'America and Europe (and Israel) become less sure of themselves every day. It is this trend which must be reversed if liberal civilization is to have a chance at survival. Preventing nuclear proliferation is a piece of cake compared to that task.
