Left-wing Anti-Zionism in Western Societies

Abstract

Ever since political Zionism first emerged on the stage of history at the end of the nineteenth century, it has had its opponents as well as its advocates on the left. In the golden era of the Second International — that is, before 1914 — it was generally the Marxist as opposed to the ‘revisionist’ wing of social democracy, especially in Central and Eastern Europe, that stood in the forefront of opposition to Zionism as a political ideology and movement. Frequently, too, it was Jewish intellectuals, especially in Eastern Europe, who were most vehement in their rejection of Zionism, branding it as a clerical, obscurantist attempt to return the Jews to the ghetto or as a design to subjugate the Jewish masses to the retrograde nationalism of the Jewish bourgeoisie. Both Jews and non-Jews in the revolutionary Marxist movement tended to see Jewish nationalism in Lenin’s terms (derived from a polemic against the anti-Zionist Bund rather than against the Zionists!) as an absolutely ‘un-scientific’ and ‘reactionary’ idea whose purpose was to divert the Jewish masses from the class struggle. As Karl Kautsky and the Austro-Marxist Otto Bauer emphasised at the turn of the century, Zionism and Jewish nationalism stood in contradiction to the only truly progressive solution of the ‘Jewish question’ — namely, assimilation of the Jews in the classless society of the future to be created by socialist revolution.