By Justin Randell
Where does anti-Semitism come from? The first point to make is that anti-Semitism has changed over time.
Throughout much of Jewish history, many Jews have been traders and money lenders. This is primarily because of the geographic position of Palestine, which was situated between the two great economic and cultural centres of ancient times. Abram Leon points out in his book The Jewish Question: "Syria and Palestine were the highways for the exchange of goods between the two oldest centers of culture of the ancient Mediterranean world: Egypt and Assyria."
The land Jews inhabited forced many to migrate. Karl Kautsky explained: "The Jews in Palestine were the possessors of a mountainous country which at a certain time no longer sufficed for assuring its inhabitants as tolerable an existence as that among their neighbours. Such a people is driven to choose between [banditry] and emigration. The Scots, for example, alternately engaged in each of these pursuits. The Jews, after numerous struggles with their neighbours, also took the second road." Seventy-five per cent of all Jews lived outside of Palestine by the time Jerusalem was conquered by the Romans around 70 AD.
The geographic situation of Palestine explains both the Jewish emigration and their role as merchants and traders where they settled. This is important because the role of Jews as merchants and money lenders from very early in their history was the cause of the anti-Semitism of the ancient and medieval epochs, and conditioned the form that this anti-Semitism took.
Prior to the development of capitalism, society's wealth was produced primarily for use, not for exchange on the market. Trading was a peripheral aspect of the economy. Jews who were engaged primarily in trading occupied a position outside the normal sphere of economic life.
Both the ruling and oppressed classes had an ideological distrust of traders and merchants, and although there is some variation in the forms of anti-Semitism throughout these epochs, they come from the same source.
However, traders were also indispensable. The ruling classes needed merchants to bring goods from other areas or to provide loans for maintaining armies. During the Roman Empire, the Jews held a privileged position, able to form a community apart in which they were able largely to govern themselves, and had laws protecting them.
During feudalism Jews occupied their strongest position within the economic life of the world. During the 10th century, Jews had almost complete control of all trade between the eastern and western worlds.
This important economic position meant that the anti-Semitism of pre-capitalist times was never as severe as that during the rise of capitalism, and never had as its aim the complete destruction of the Jewish people.
As the market developed, however, the rise of native merchant and industrial classes in western Europe from the end of the 12th century displaced Jews from their position as traders, and forced more and more to exist simply as money lenders.
Anti-Semitic pogroms
With the rise of capitalism, the Jews of western Europe were either assimilated into the rising bourgeois class (a small minority of the richest Jews), or subject to horrendous persecution. In this period the first Jewish ghettos were established in Italy and Germany, and persecution and occasional massacres of Jews took place in many areas of western Europe. This led many Jews to flee to eastern Europe, where feudal relations still dominated.
However, with the spread of capitalist relations to eastern Europe, the Jews' economic position was again threatened. Eastern European society, especially after the abolition of serfdom in Russia in 1861, found itself in crisis. Feudalism began to decay rapidly, but eastern European capitalism was weak, distorted in its development and unable to expand rapidly enough to absorb the dislocation resulting from the disintegration of feudal relations.
The influx of peasants into the cities and towns began to make the position of the Jews untenable. Poverty-stricken peasants flocking to the cities in search of jobs saw Jews as competitors in a restricted labour market. The big landowners and capitalists sought to divert the discontent of non-Jewish workers and peasants from themselves toward a convenient scapegoat. This resulted in anti-Semitic riots and pogroms.
As a result, some 3 million Jews left eastern Europe mostly for western Europe and the US. Their arrival coincided with a worsening of conditions for the middle classes, which were threatened with bankruptcy by the rise of powerful capitalist monopoly corporations in the West. The ruling classes lost no opportunity to divert the discontent of ruined small capitalists onto Jewish immigrants. The result was a rise in western European anti-Semitism in the last quarter of the 19th century.
Rise of Zionism
The Zionist movement arose in the late 1800s as a response, by a minority of the Jewish middle classes, to this new wave of anti-Semitism. Zionists held that anti-Semitism was inevitable as long as Jews lived among non-Jews. The Zionist leaders sought to end persecution of Jews by forming a separate, exclusively Jewish state.
The idea of creating a Jewish "national homeland" was raised in 1882 by Leo Pinsker in his pamphlet The Self-Emancipation of the Jews. In 1895 Viennese journalist Theodor Herzl expanded on the theme in his book The Jewish State. In 1897 Herzl chaired the first congress of the World Zionist Organisation in Basel.
The Zionist movement was founded on the claim that Jews constituted a single nation. But neither then nor now do Jews constitute a single nation; Jews around the world share a religion, not a nationality.
A Jewish "national state" could be created from just two sources — either out of the imperialist countries, or from a colonial territory.
If Jews had constituted oppressed national groups like the Irish, Scots and Welsh in the United Kingdom, then a movement for Jewish national self-determination would have been directed against the imperialist ruling classes of countries where Jews lived.
Instead, Zionism had to seek the support of one or another imperialist nation, by selling the idea that the establishment of a Jewish homeland would be in its interest. Thus Herzl petitioned the Russian tsar, the German kaiser and the British monarch to support a Jewish state in Palestine. In return, Herzl promised these rulers Jewish backing for their imperial aims in the Arab east. In a letter to the Duke of Baden in 1898, Herzl declared, "With the Jews a German cultural element will enter the East".
Creation of Israel
A central plank of Zionist ideology is the claim that the Jewish people have a historical claim to Palestine. This myth is based on the idea that the fall of Jerusalem to the Romans in the year 70 AD was the cause of the dispersal of the Jewish people.
However, three-quarters of the Jewish population lived outside Jerusalem before the conquest by the Romans. The indigenous Jewish community was gradually absorbed by neighbouring populations during the following centuries, just as were the Philistines, the Phoenicians, the Nabateans, and other ancient tribes of the region.
As Abram Leon observed, "Zionism sees in the fall of Jerusalem the cause of the dispersion, and consequently, the fountain-head of all Jewish misfortunes of the past, present, and future ... Zionism has never seriously posed the question: Why, during these two thousand years, have not the Jews really tried to return to this country?".
In 1917 the British government issued the Balfour Declaration, declaring its support for the establishment of a "national home for the Jews in Palestine".
The Zionists' desire to establish a Jewish state in Palestine dictated their policy toward the indigenous inhabitants. Generally, when European settlers came to colonial countries, their aim was to exploit the wealth of the country, including the labour power of the inhabitants. The Zionists, however, wanted not just the resources of Palestine, but the country itself.
The Arabs were not to be exploited economically, but expelled. An independent Palestine would have put an end to the Zionist plan of establishing a Jewish state at the expense of the Arab majority. While supporting British rule over Palestine, the Zionists proceeded to construct a "society within a society". A policy of "Jewish labour" and "buy Jewish" was established.
Throughout the period of British rule, the Zionist colonisers confronted the Palestinians as a foreign invading force, intent on ousting them from their own country, opposing Palestinian independence, fighting alongside the British army, opposing land reform. This process, initiated in 1917, culminated in 1948 with the establishment of the Israeli colonial-settler state.
After World War II, the Zionist organisations came into armed conflict with the British, who tried to hold on to Palestine as a colony instead of supporting the creation of the Israeli state. The Zionist forces turned to support from the United States.
Although some Zionists try to portray their conflict with the British as an anti-colonial struggle, it was really a conflict between two thieves. The establishment of Israel in 1948, with the full support of Washington, was made possible only by the expulsion of 900,000 Palestinian Arabs from their homeland and the confiscation of their land.
The UN's decision to partition Palestine violated the right of the Palestinians to national self-determination. Palestine Liberation Organisation chairman Yasser Arafat observed in his address to the UN General Assembly in 1974, "This General Assembly, early in its history, approved a recommendation to partition our Palestinian homeland ... The General Assembly partitioned what it had no right to divide — an indivisible homeland ... Furthermore, even though the partition resolution granted the colonial settlers 54% of the land of Palestine, their dissatisfaction with the decision prompted them to wage a war of terror against the civilian Arab population. They occupied 81% of the total area of Palestine, uprooting a million Arabs."
Another justification used for the Zionist colonisation is the Nazi holocaust. Zionists argue that the massive and horrendous nature of the Holocaust was the impetus for the desire amongst Jewish people to create Israel. It's true that without the Nazi attempt to exterminate Europe's Jews, the Zionists could not have won the "near universal allegiance of Jews". However, the Zionist colonisation of Palestine began long before the rise of Nazism in Germany.
Zionist ideology claims that only an exclusively Jewish homeland can secure the Jews from anti-Semitism. Nathan Weinstock replied: "Zionism is based on the assumption that the concentration of the Jewish masses in a national homeland would insulate them from anti-Semitism ... But it is an illusory solution. Aside from the fact that at most it could only provide a partial answer to the Jewish problem (since more than four-fifths of world Jewry live outside Israel) it ignores the fact that the fundamental roots of anti-Semitism lie in the worldwide crisis of capitalist society. If a new wave of fascism were to arise, there is no reason why its racist policies should mysteriously stop short at Israel's frontiers. After all, if Hitler had conquered Palestine, would he have exempted Palestine Jewry from the gas chambers?"
So while the Zionist movement has created a separate Jewish state, it has not provided a solution to anti-Semitism because its fundamental causes under capitalism still exist. While there still exists a capitalist class willing to use any means to divide the working class, the Jews can never be secure against the threat of another Holocaust. This is why socialists believe that fighting against anti-Semitism requires opposition to Zionism and support for the self-determination of the Palestinian people.