Submitted by a Jewish MDSO Member

Mordechai Anielewicz was a militant member of Hashomer Hatzair, an organization in the left-wing of the Zionist movement— though he never lived to set foot in Palestine. In 1943, he became one of the principal leaders in the armed uprising of the Warsaw Ghetto’s Jewish population against Poland’s Nazi occupiers. Fifteen days before being killed by the Germans, he wrote in a letter to another resistance member: 

“It is impossible to describe the conditions under which the Jews of the ghetto are now living. Only a few will be able to hold out. The remainder will die sooner or later. Their fate is decided (…) The dream of my life has risen to become fact. Self-defense in the ghetto has become a reality. Jewish armed resistance and revenge are facts. I have been a witness to the magnificent, heroic fighting of Jewish men in battle.”

Anielewicz’s celebration of Jewish violence is posited in opposition to a historic trope early Zionists were eager to challenge: that of Jewish passivity in the face of violent oppression. Chaim Bialik’s famous poem “In The City of Slaughter,” which criticizes the Jewish men of Kishinev for their helplessness during one of history’s bloodiest anti-Semitic pogroms, implies a similar notion. Max Nordau, one of the founders of the World Zionist Organization alongside Theodor Hertzl, advocated for “Muscular Judaism”: the physical and intellectual transformation of European Jews from being (according to his framework) unathletic and superstitious victims to being strong and scientifically-minded fighters — a sentiment which only gained traction with the rise of Cultural Zionism. The objective of organized Zionism within Europe in the early 20th century was essentially to break away from the Jewish religion and population as they had historically existed, and to transform them so as to affect an ultimate political goal of establishing a Jewish state. 

Some have used the Warsaw Ghetto as a reference for the ongoing subjugation of the Palestinians in Gaza, who continue to suffer under a brutal campaign of murder and ethnic cleansing perpetrated by the Israeli state. Like the Warsaw Ghetto, Gaza is a prison — completely encircled and isolated from the outside world, restricted from access to vital resources and basic necessities, subject to the authority of a ruthless, well-armed and genocidal hostile regime. In both cases, resistance fighters were drawn out of an array dominated by particularist and religious organizations — and in neither case did the ideological makeup of these organizations delegitimize their necessary resistance against a much greater enemy. The most potent content of this reference rests in its irony; the victims in the former case appear as the perpetrators in the latter.

In fact, the Israeli forces of 1948 that committed the initial mass ethnic cleansing referred to by Palestinians as the “Catastrophe” (Nakba in Arabic) included thousands of Jews who fled Europe in the wake of the Holocaust. Among them were many who had fought heroically as partisans against the Nazis in Europe, including characters like Abba Kovner — a Vilna ghetto fighter who, after WWII, attempted retaliatory mass murder against the German populace as part of a clandestine terrorist organization. They included many self-described socialists and communists under the umbrella of “Labor Zionism,” as well as Lehi, a far-right Zionist faction which had in 1941 sought a military alliance with Nazi Germany against Britain (then the colonial authority in Palestine), and whose leader, Yitzchak Shamir, later went on to become the Prime Minister of Israel in 1983 and again in 1986. 

The seeming contradiction at work here is just that — a seeming contradiction. Though there was at one point a wider array of utopian political tendencies within Zionism, these trends still shared the basic elements of Jewish particularism and nationalism. In the course of the development of the Israeli state, such ideological deviations gave way to the essential tasks of the Israeli state-building project: on one hand, the artificial creation of a nation from a pool of Jewish settlers from different nationalities who spoke different languages — on the other, the systematic removal of Palestinians from desirable territory through ethnic cleansing and genocide. 

The perpetrators of genocide in Palestine did not (and do not) commit these atrocities in their capacity as Jews, but in their capacity as Zionists — members of a political movement with its own particular origins and objectives. For Zionist organizations in Europe during WWII, the fight against German fascism was a matter of survival, and not necessarily a matter of principle. For Zionists in Palestine under the British Mandate, whose main state-adversary remained the colonial British regime, an alliance with Nazi Germany may have appeared practicable; the Germans had, after all, worked with Zionists to facilitate the deportation of thousands of German Jews to Palestine (see the Haavara agreement). The seeming irony of genocide victims going on to inflict genocide against others can be understood on this basis. They are against the extermination of Jews, but they are not against extermination in general; they wield it against Palestinians when it serves them.

The subordination of assumed principles to the needs of the state is a broad reality in imperialist society. For example, while the US state cites the right of Ukrainians to self-determination against Russian aggression as the basis for providing massive military aid to Ukraine, no such grace is extended to the Palestinians. Though Palestine has been systematically denied self-determination at the hands of a hostile colonial power, the US and Ukraine both side with Israel. The US supports Ukraine because of its strategic importance in the inter-imperialist struggle against Russia. US support for the ongoing genocide in Palestine, by the same token, is in service of the US’ strategic partnership with Israel — itself a forward operating base for US imperialism in the Middle East. Even as the death toll in Gaza mounts (at the time of this publication, fatalities have surpassed 10,000), dwarfing the number of Israelis killed in the October 7th attack, the US House recently passed a bill supporting Israel’s actions with 412/435 members voting in favor.

Though Zionism is a political movement separable both from Judaism and from Jews in general, the ideological baggage of decades of Zionist proliferation among American Jewish religious and cultural institutions has left its mark on many US Jews. The false equivalence between Jews and Zionists is a well-established staple of Israeli propaganda. It is on the basis of this lie that Zionists frame violent Palestinian resistance as a continuation of the Holocaust — falsely conflating anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism, maintaining that Israel is (impossibly) not a state made up of its real inhabitants but rather of the whole Jewish “people,” and continuing to claim that Jews can only be safe in a repressive colonial ethnostate. The result is as grotesque as it is (once more) ironic. Zionists have unintentionally managed to cheapen the historical experience of the Holocaust in the eyes of many — something Western journalists have recently proven all-too-eager to do (see the recent attempts to justify the Canadian Parliament’s praise for an actual member of the Waffen SS). Zionists have also blunted recognition for the very real ongoing rise in anti-Semitism, corresponding to the resurgence of far right and fascist movements in the US and Europe (which generally support Israel).

Thousands around the world, not convinced by the lies and distortions of the Zionists, have been marching in unprecedented numbers to support Palestine. Many prominent voices of opposition to the ongoing genocide are anti-Zionist Jews, following in a tradition as old as Zionism itself in opposing all genocide and national oppression. It seems however that in the US, no amount of overwhelming popular condemnation can shake US imperialism (now administered by Biden) of its special relationship with Israel. The righteous opposition of the people is met with brutal repression and state violence. Anti-Zionist American Jews are therefore being forced to witness a genocide committed in our name, funded and supported by “our own” government, against our will. We have, ironically, been put in the position of Bialik’s condemned witnesses. The final stanza of his poem reads:

What is thy business here, o son of man?
Rise, to the desert flee!
The cup of affliction thither bear with thee!
Take thou thy soul, rend it in many a shred!
With impotent rage, thy heart deform!
Thy tear upon the barren boulders shed
And send thy bitter cry into the storm.

From its inception as an organized movement, Zionism had ardent opponents in the international socialist movement, including in its ranks many Jews. As internationalists, they understood that while the revolutionary proletariat upholds the right of nations to self-determination, no nation or people has the right to oppress another. Today, national oppression, genocide, and war itself remain functions of the capitalist world system, as imperialist powers compete to dominate the globe. The working people, who form the overwhelming majority in the US and across the world, have nothing to gain from exercises in capitalist butchery. The task falls on us today not only to oppose genocide and defend the national rights of Palestine, but also to organize and work together to overthrow the imperialist world system which has made this genocide possible.