Socialist Zionist Beliefs Colin Shindler

Socialist Zionist Beliefs

Colin Shindler observed in What do Zionists Believe? that "Zionism is seen in pejorative terms today…At worst, 'Zionist' is used as a term of abuse, an epithet to be hurled at anyone who does not see the Israel-Palestine conflict in monochrome.

As always, Colin Shindler has hit the nail bang on the head in these terms of his about the problems attached to the term Zionist. It has been used as a term of abuse with equal relish by the anti-Semite along with expletives about Jews. Unlike earlier anti-Semites, today's variety gets to cloak themselves in an artificial distinction between Zionism and Jews. This essay attempts to put into perspective some of this by examining Zionism as an ideology of liberation.

In the examination, it will be readily apparent that the haters can not attack one without attacking the other. Zionism, even in its Socialist Zionist variety, is in an organic unity with traditional Judaism in almost all respects. These include not just the return to Zion, but also all of the high ideals of Judaism that have fired humanity's imagination now for 3800 years and were rekindled in the year of 1948 with Israel's recreation. This revolution (and this word is not in any way an exaggeration) goes on with as much or more effect of the other revolutions of the modern era. Only anti-Semitism tries to rob us of our part of in the struggle for liberty, equality and fraternity.

As Syrkin saw in his time, the Jewish people certainly have been the victims of massive oppression. This is part of the general human experience of oppression whose origin is to found in the lack of equality and economic privileges that are a native to the modern class structure. Unfortunately, Jews have so often been socially and politically powerless.

The goal of this essay will be to examine a solution to this problem and also will analyse the emergence of Socialism-Zionism before 1914. Although Syrkin sees most of the problem, it has to be analyzed through the eyes of others in the Socialist-Zionism movement as well to complete the picture. As we shall see later, Borochov saw that while the Jewish situation shared much with other sectors of humanity, it had some special qualities to it due to the uniqueness of its oppression as a nationality. This then requires the positive nationalism of Jewish people to be fulfilled on the way to realizing the socialist ideal.

What is missing (and is so politically incorrect today) is an analysis of Zionism as a revolution. There are many reasons that can be pinned on this, mainly having to do with anti-Semitism. However, this type of analysis is hardly new. Rather it is as old as anti-Semitism, including the Greek and early Christian varieties. As such, this author will attempt to analyse the problem in the revolutionary context of Socialism-Zionism. The fact is that the extreme leftist and rightist critics of Israel and Jews in general join in the same anti-Semitic diatribe, many times without knowing it. In the tradition of progressive revolutionary analysis and the Hegelian dialectic, an understanding of Socialist-Zionism in the development of the Yishuv prior to 1914 and the Great War is necessary.

From the historical perspective, the best way to empower the disenfranchised Jewish people is to rediscover the kibbutz movement and resurrect it without the same mistakes. Much of what came before 1914 came before the onset of British Imperialism and is an interesting incubator of what Zionism might have become if it had been allowed to develop in the womb of the Ottoman Empire. However, this approach is one of counterfactual history. The fact is that the War happened. What is necessary is to identify and recover the tendencies of Socialist Zionism that can be adapted to the present situation in Israel today.

Ironically, the Zionist Revolution is much larger in sweep that any other in world history. All others are eclipsed by Israel's liberation and humbling of the superpower of Egypt. Certainly, revolutions in the U.S., France, Russia, China and Iran were larger in the numbers of people involved. However, the uniqueness and freshness of the ideas of liberation in the story of the Exodus never seems to die, as Jews the world over who sit around the Seder table can assert. The problem with being the first is that the trailblazer is usually forgotten in the transition as their ideas percolate and develop in other related movements. How often is the state of Israel compared to the United States, instead of the other way around? Did not the Pilgrims find inspiration, consolation and sustenance from the Jewish scriptures as they went to the New World to found the New Israel? In such a context, is it a surprise that Judaism does not always equal Thomas Jefferson, or Robespierre or Tom Paine? Does anyone analyze Marx or Engels as Jews and how this heritage shaped their ideas (even though they hated Judaism and the idea of a Jewish commonwealth)? Is it a surprise that Swerner and Goodman's Jewish origins are forgotten as they were dumped into a common grave with Cheney in Mississippi in 1965 in the Civil Rights struggle? Revolutionary activists in the modern era, including Islamic revolutionaries never acknowledge that the first revolution for religious freedom occurred under the Maccabees more than 1500 years before the Reformation and Luther's 97 theses. The Jewish component is always the one forgotten in the development of ideas, but always a component in vilification.

As in the American Revolution, Israel's Zionist Revolution succeeded in freeing the Jewish people from the imperialism of the mighty British Empire. Certainly, there is rarely an example of people anywhere that only three years before had gone through a genocide so unparalleled in human history that it has become a byword for human depravity. British Imperialism was defeated in fire and blood spilled from the veins of heroic Palmach, Haganah and Gadna Youth Veteran's. This revolution was fired by the Socialist Zionism which was unique in that the Jewish people had neither a real working or peasant classes given the fragmentation of Diaspora. However, overnight this Socialist Zionism fired the imaginations of the modern Israelis and guided them in their battle for the acquisition of their historical destiny in Palestine as a Middle Eastern people returning from their Western exile. It also fired the hopes for utopia and translated this Messianic ideal into the modern context as the modern state of Israel is pressured to compromise its existence the U.S. And the rest of West who seek to balance their energy needs of the backs of the Jewish people who struggle to continue their existence there.

The crucible of this Socialist-Zionism can be found in the pogroms of 1882-1885 in Russia. Jews were blamed for the assassination of Czar Alexander II and the continuing damage had a profound effect upon the Jews of Russia, in particular the Maskilim who were disillusioned by the attitudes of non-Jewish intellectuals who were solidly anti-Semitic and cheered on the crowds. These assimilationist Jews were woken up from the illusion that they had been accepted into Russian society whose elite elements now spit them out. It had not been advantageous to be "Russians of the Mosaic persuasion." These Maskilim (Reformniks) adopted Jewish nationalism as an alternate ideology and so was born a secular nationalism dedicated to returning to Zion. Small garinim (aliyah groups) were then formed to facilitate the movement to Palestine, with the support of some Rabbis whose communities had been destroyed.

How does Socialist Zionism differ from the "political Zionist" tendency of Theodor Herzl and Chaim Weizmann? Socialist/Labor Zionists believed that the Jewish state would not simply by appealing to powerful states such Britain. Instead, they believed that this state would be initiated through the efforts of Jewish workers settling in Palestine and building the state via the genesis of a Jewish society that was progressive. This society would be based upon rural kibbutzim and moshavim with an urban proletariat of Jews.

One of the first forerunners of the Socialist Zionists was Moses Hess. Hess was an early proponent of socialism and contemporary of Marx and Engels. However, unlike Marx and Engels, his socialism was moral. He could not stomach dialectical materialism. His philosophy was a precursor to Zionism. At the time of his living in Germany, he became familiar with the rise of German anti-Semitism. Although a pantheistic follower of Spinoza, he took an interest in Judaism. Almost prophetically, he understood that Germans would never tolerate a Jewish national renewal which he believed was necessary to deal with the rising anti-Semitism.

For this reason, Hess published Rome and Jerusalem in 1861. In the book, he sees history as a play of class and race struggles. In the tome, he calls for the establishment of a socialist commonwealth of Jews in Palestine. The model would be the emerging national movements in Europe as the way to combat anti-Semitism and promote Jewish identity in a modern world.

There is much to the assertion by Nachman Syrkin that the Jews have persisted in history because the performed a socio-economic function that other peoples did not want to do or could not do. In his 1898 "The Jewish Problem and the Socialist Jewish State, " Syrkin lays out these ideas. Regarding this, Syrkin argued that a classless society and national sovereignty were the only means of solving the Jewish question completely. He felt that this social revolution would be the key to the normalization of the Jewish condition. With this in mind, he argued that the Jew must therefore join the proletariat as the only way to end class struggle and redistribute power justly. Since the bourgeoisie betrayed the principles of liberalism, then Jews must be the torchbearers of Socialism.

While Syrkin is many times seen as working on his own, however he had predecessors and contemporaries who had a huge impact upon Zionist Socialism.

This included Aaron David Gordon, a Zionist ideologue who functioned as a spiritual force behind practical Zionism and Labor Zionism. A native of Troyanov, Russia, he was a founder of the Hapoel Hatzair and his movement set the tone for Zionism for many years to come.

According to Gordon, Jewish suffering was traceable to the abnormal state of Jews in the galut (diaspora) that were denied the participation in creative labor. As a cure, he promoted physical labor to spiritually uplift Jews. This experience of labor linked the person as an individual to hidden spaces of both nature and being which could be turned into spiritual vision, Jewish poetry and as spiritual life. He believed work in the land was sacred for both the individual and the Jewish people. Agriculture would unite the Jewish people and give justice to its existence there. War would not acquire the land, but working it would. By the Jewish people going back to the land, they were returning to their natural state of order with its natural rhythms of work. The people would not then be involved in something artificial. Rather, they would be involved in organic, mystical whole.

He preferred organic connections to nature and to society. He saw these bonds such as family, community and nation as vital and held that they were higher than the bonds of state, party and class. Above all, Gordon believed in practice over theory. He was an intellectual that experienced the troubles of the working class and united with them in the process.

In the case of contemporaries, we have a great example in the form of Yosef Trumpeldor. Trumpeldor's career and exploits and his commitment to building a Jewish homeland in the land of Israel to liberate the Jewish people is well-known, but it needs to be told in context. What is very necessary and usually not examined is who was his intellectual inspiration and inspired him to become involved in the kibbutz movement. This influence was also very key in the development of the philosophy of many other Socialist Zionists.

Trumpledor was born in Pyatigorsk, a city in Russia's northern Caucasus. The military influence initially came after his father Wulf Trumpeldor was conscripted into the czarist army for twenty five years. In spite of Wulf's lengthy Army hitch and the virulent anti-Semitism of the Czarist Army, Yosef's father maintained his Jewish identity and influenced his son to take pride in being Jewish. Like many of the Jews of the Caucasus, these Asian Jews grew up fiercely proud of their Jewish heritage.

After graduating from the gymnasium high school, Trumpeldor enrolled in the university where he studied dentistry. As a young man, he was continually disturbed by the persecution of Jews throughout Czarist Russia and the promotion of the image as a coward who would not defend himself. What bothered him even more was that this stereotype went completely unchallenged. As he became aware of the World Zionist Congress, he immediately became enthralled with Zionism as a movement. He became convinced that a national renaissance in Palestine for the Jewish People was absolutely necessary.

He was deeply influenced by the views of a non-Jew, but a person not engaged in anti-Semitism by the name of Peter Kropotkin and by a farming commune that he had seen. He then connected the ideas of anarchist communism with aliyah to Eretz Yisrael and a future Jewish yishuv. An anarcho-syndicalist, Kropotkin was enamored by the agricultural commune as a way of reforming the life in the Russian countryside and bettering the lives of the peasants. This fired the imagination of Trumpeldor and his contemporaries who then saw the anarcho-syndicalist agricultural kibbutz as the model of the new Jewish society in the land of Israel. Probably, the success of the kibbutz movement was the best and only example of Kropotkin's philosophies. Trumpeldor took these teachings to heart. Trumpledor's was in the Russian Army during the Russo-Japanese War where he was promoted and decorated ultimately acquiring an officer's commission from the hand of the Czarina herself.

However, the Army was not going to provide his career. He was married to Zion. Trumpeldor then recruited a group of Halutznim (pioneers) to travel to Eretz Yisrael and found a kibbutz. As he studied law at the University of St. Petersburg, he organized a Zionist youth group that met in Romni, Ukraine. He then led his first group to Israel in 1912 to kibbutz Degania. After attending the thirteenth World Zionist Congress in Vienna, he began to develop his anarcho-syndicalist network of socialist kibbutzim. He declared himself an anarchist-communist and a Zionist. He wanted and worked for the goals of a communal society and rejected central government.

The Turks deported Trumpeldor in 1914. He and Zev Jabotinsky established the Zion Mule Corps to help fight the Turks on behalf of the British. The rest of his experiences during and after the War are after the chronological scope of this essay.

Prior to Trumpledor's death in the defense of Tel Chai, Jabotinsky and Trumpledor were united in their political sympathies. His commitment to Zionism, like Trumpeldor's arose out of the pogroms of Russia. After the terrible pogrom of Kishinev in 1903, the news correspondent Jabotinsky was sickened and walked the devastated ghetto reflecting on how the tragedy happened. Suddenly, a small piece of parchment from a Torah Scroll had two visible Hebrew words on it: Eretz Hokhria-"strange land." Like an epiphany, Jabotinsky was struck with the dichotomy of Jewish existence in the diaspora. He concluded that the Jewish people would never rest securely in a foreign land.

Jabotinsky then devoted all of his writing skills to promoting Zionism. Like Trumpeldor, he organized self-defense groups in Russia and fought for Jewish rights throughout the country. Jabotinsky was elected to the Sixth Zionist Congress, the last Congress that he went to. The War introduced him to Trumpeldor and the concept of fighting for Jewish rights by fighting on the side of the British against the Turks.

Another Socialist-Zionist was Ber Borchov. Borochov called himself a "Marxist Zionist." He was expelled for his Zionist beliefs from the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party prior to the party's split into Bolsheviks and Menshiviks. This led him to help found the Poale Zion Party. This "Labour Zionist" Party supported the Russian Revolution in 1917. The events of the Revolution split the Poale Zion into the Mapai (later evolving into Labour and "One Israel") and the further left Mapam (now Meretz). Many members of the Left Poale Zion joined the Bolshevik Party after 1917 and were very busy and prominent in the Communist Party's "Jewish Section" ("Yevsektsia") that was involved in destroying Jewish communities and resettling them on agricultural settlements Crimea and Ukraine and later the "Jewish Republic of Biro-Bidzhan. The Yevsektsia was dissolved in the 1930s and the ex-Poale Zionists in the Communist Party were largely wiped out in the Stalinist purges. His ideas on class struggle and nationalism energized the Marxist kibbutz movement.

His Socialist-Zionism largely posited many similar ideas to Syrkin's, but he expanded upon this with proof texts from Karl Marx. He saw the Jewish people as having the same problem that many oppressed nationalities do. Due to the political oppression, the economy and markets do not develop in a normal manner. For this reason, the bourgeoisie and proletariat do not develop exactly according to Marx's predictions. They need to then develop a positive nationalism that will bring them along the road to the realization of socialism.

Borochov did not deal with the issue of Marx's anti-Semitism.

As noted earlier, Marxist anti-Semitism was a major incentive for the establishment of Socialist Zionism as a separate movement. It would be well for a moment to consider the sources of this anti-Semitism. Historically, it came from little known tracts like Marx's entitled On the Jewish Question or A World Without Jews published in 1843. Marx who was a Hegelian was anti-religion in general and anti-Semitic in particular. All throughout On the Jewish Question, Marx exhibits a contempt and hatred for Jews and Judaism that would not be equaled for a century in Nazi Germany at Nuremburg.

While many leftist professors have dried up a lot of ink arguing over the level of Marx's anti-Semitism, his words were used extensively by leftist anti-Semites as a justification of their position. Philosopher Dagobert Runes, the publisher of A World Without Jews in English after the Soviets published it in English during the 1950's, Runes publishes the anti-Semitic filth in an attempt to clean it out of the halls of Socialism. It is necessary to consider a short excerpt from A World Without Jews:

Money is the zealous one God of Israel, beside which no other God may stand. Money degrades all the gods of mankind and turns them into commodities. Money is the universal and self-constituted value set upon all things. It has therefore robbed the whole world, of both nature and man, of its original value. Money is the essence of man's life and work, which have become alienated from him. This alien monster rules him and he worships it.

The God of the Jews has become secularized and is now a worldly God. The bill of exchange is the Jew's real God. His God is the illusory bill of exchange… The social emancipation of Jewry is the emancipation of society from Jewry (Marx).

The Hegelian dialectic and Marx's negative attitude towards the bourgeoisie pale in comparison to his attitudes about the Jewish people and by extension himself. Despite page upon page of spin, it is impossible to stay away from the reality of what he said. In Freudian slips that speak volumes, he accuses the Jews of doing exactly what he is doing, that is reducing reality to a material one sole. In addition, he more than hinted that the only solution to the Jewish question was the final one. Is it any surprise that the Socialist Zionist ran from their fellow Jew like they would from a wildfire?

What were the intellectual influences of these Socialist Zionists in Russia? Already, it has been noted that the influence of Borochov was Marx, despite his anti-Semitism.

We have already mentioned Peter Kroptkin, the father of Russian anarcho-syndicalist communism. He advocated a communist society free from central government. His ideas on cooperation in his book Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution were written in direct opposition to Charles Darwin's ideas of competition and survival of the fittest in evolution. As a scientist working for the Russian Geographic Society, he observed that animal species that survived best helped each other. This influenced his later ideas on with reference to Anarchism and the communal farm society that he advocated to bring this natural order into human society

Probably the most mystical of the Socialist-Zionists was A.D. Gordon and his influence was the most mystical in all of Russia, Leo Tolstoy. Certainly, Gordon was the Israeli Tolstoy. Tolstoy's beliefs on Christian anarchy left a deep impression upon Gordon. Tolstoy literally believed in the Golden Rule and in a close relationship with God that caused him the reject the Russian Orthodox Church. His nonfiction work, The Kingdom of God is Within You takes its title from Luke 17:21 which declares that the Kingdom of God is within each person and is made there and is translated into reality by the literal realization of the Golden Rule. To Tolstoy the peasants were the real people and he was concerned with their poverty and well being.

While the Zionist anarchists were a factor, they remained on the sidelines. Their contributions were important, but institutionally they did not achieve traction because they operated outside of institutions.

Philosophical rumination is not enough. As usual, what is needed is a solution to the problem. What do supporters of Israel do in the face of calls to destroy Israel? How does one deal with statements of opponents of Jewish nationalism who call Israel a failed state and equate it with apartheid South Africa?

Instead of taking foreign leaders to the Yad Vashem, the Jewish and Israeli leaders need to take them to and show them the symbols of Jewish connection to the land of Israel, such as the Kotel. Israelis and the Jewish people must assert their rights as indigenous peoples of the Middle East who have been as much or more the victims of Western imperialism. The Zionist struggle, as pointed out by Syrkin and Borochov, is an anti-imperialist struggle that is aimed at liberating the land of Israel from the rule of foreigners. This struggle is justified by its demand for the Jewish people's right to self-determination in their own country.