by the Editorial Board
The ruling class would have us believe that Jews and Arabs have always been at war over religious differences in Palestine and that there can be no decisive conclusion to this war. This is a smoke screen to hide their own complicity in colonialism and genocide. Israel was not founded until 1948, but the Zionist project dates back to the late 1800s with Theodore Herzl.
Herzl’s argument for a Jewish state rested on a few assumptions: first, that it is enterprise and not labor which advances civilization and, second, that the countries in which Jews live would be better off without Jews. Hence we can see the anti-worker and in fact anti-Jewish perspective emanating from the first coherent argument for Zionism. Herzl had two places in mind to take over for the formation of a Zionist state: Argentina and Palestine. In his assessment, the natural resources of Argentina and the idea that ceding a portion of land to the enterprising Jews would benefit the existing colonial project in that country were appealing. However, being politically savvy, Palestine stood out as the better option of the two. In his own words:
“The very name of Palestine would attract our people with a force of marvelous potency. Supposing His Majesty the Sultan were to give us Palestine, we could in return pledge ourselves to regulate the whole finances of Turkey. We should there form a portion of the rampart of Europe against Asia, an outpost of civilization as opposed barbarism. The sanctuaries of Christendom would be safeguarded by assigning to them an extra-territorial status, such as is well known to the law of nations. We should form a guard of honor about these sanctuaries, answering for the fulfillment of this duty with our existence. This guard of honor would be the great symbol of the solution of the Jewish Question after eighteen centuries of Jewish suffering.”
From the very onset of Zionism, the Jewish State is conceived as a gendarme in the service of foreign powers, and this is precisely the case with Israel today and US imperialism. And the method of conquest was the same, reliance on the anti-Semites of the imperialist countries to promote Zionist transfer to the lands which they dominate. There are several racist positions inherent to Zionism, first the idea that Jews cause problems in non-Jewish countries, and secondly that Asia is or was “uncivilized.” Zionism cannot exist without racist views.
In 1897, Herzl initiated the World Zionist Organization (WZO) and held a congress in Basel, Switzerland in which a program was outlined. Key elements of the program were designed to promote settlement in Palestine while completely conflating Zionism and being Jewish. The myth that Palestine was a land without people and that the Jews were people without land was created and promoted. Palestine, which was not a land without people, was under the control of the Ottoman Empire, and Zionism, which was a completely European idea, emerges in the period in which Europe was generating massive colonial projects dominating Africa.
It is important to understand that capitalism was born drenched in the blood of the colonized people, that the colonial projects of the time when capitalism was new and revolutionary were placed in its war-bank and used to overthrow the feudal ruling classes of Europe; the invention of the steam engine and the European discoveries of the Americas were major assets to capitalist consolidation in Europe. While the most revolutionary of the bourgeoisie denounced colonialism, the majority sought to continue it, and the need to conquer new markets solidified the trajectory to colonialism in capitalism’s development into imperialism.
By 1901, Herzl headed the Jewish Fund, which centralized finances to begin buying land in Palestine as a way to form the basis of the colonial project. Part of Egypt and Uganda were offered to the Zionist project, and both were refused by the Zionists. It was decided by the Zionists in 1907 that their central plan was to colonize Palestine.
Capitalism had reached its final stage, its stage of decomposition, imperialism, and the tendency was to develop to world imperialist war. In the first World War, Britain took Palestine from the Ottoman Empire, putting them in a position as the colonial overlord to issue the Balfour Decree in 1917.
The Decree declared “a homeland” for the small Jewish minority in Palestine, most of whom were the early settlers following the WZO. The political ambitions of Britain were to use the Zionists to increase Jewish support for the imperialist war. At this time the imperialists were seeing a lot of success in drawing the oppressed to support their war and in using the opportunists of the social-chauvinist parties to do so.
The Zionist then set certain objectives: the creation of a Jewish national identity, even if this was completely false, in order to unite the various practitioners of Judaism in Europe, changing the conception of Jews as a religious community to the conception of Jews as an ethnicity; continue the process of colonization of Palestine; and associate in the public mind all Jews with Zionism, seeking to link each Jew with the colonialism of Palestine.
Things were not going so well for British imperialism at the time of the Balfour Decree, and Britain’s allies in the war were also having difficulties: the US had yet to really suffer the horrors of the war and Russia was facing the Great October Socialist Revolution led by the Bolsheviks. Its plans for “solving the Jewish problem” with the colonialism of Palestine would not bear immediate fruits. While the decree contended with the views of Zionist and anti-Zionist Jews, it did nothing to account for the national ambitions of the Palestinian people. Even the geographic and political boundaries of Palestine were not established by the Decree. It would not be until the second imperialist World War that the mass-scale Zionist colonization of Palestine could be advanced.
British and French imperialism betrayed the Arab nationalists who aligned with them in the first imperialist World War, resulting in the artificial partitioning of the region. Palestine fell prey to being an English colony after the fall of the Ottoman empire. After British colonization, over 100,000 Jewish immigrants, mainly from Europe, went to Palestine. During the second imperialist World War, this number only increased to over 600,000 by the end of the war.
Between 1922 and 1948, while Palestine was under the heel of British imperialism, Palestinians were denied the right to administer their own lands; however, Jews participated in English rule. The WZO was meeting its goal, and in 1948 with collaboration with the imperialist powers Israel was founded in the middle of Palestine.
Zionism and Nazi Collaboration
Leading up to the founding of Israel, during WWII the WZO was the only Jewish organization that the Nazi state in Germany would negotiate with. Other Jewish organizations which were rivals of the WZO centered opposing antisemitism in their platforms, while the WZO sought to relocate all Jews to Palestine, a useful demarcation for Hitler who sought to divide the Jewish population and eradicate them. When the Nazis took power, the Jewish organizations opposing antisemitism were all banned. The WZO took part in the segregation and ghettoization of Jews, insisting that Jews should voluntarily separate themselves from Germans, eschewing their own German nationality. Before the Nazi extermination policy was implemented, their policy was to seize Jewish property, rights and material goods, forming concentration camps, while promoting Jews to migrate to Palestine in collaboration with Zionism.
Zionists serving as Jewish authorities under Nazi rule regularly visited concentration camps with the blessing of the Nazis to select the youngest and richest Jews to relocate to Palestine. From the onset of Nazi rule, Zionists played the role of assistant, from forcing all Jewish organizations into one organization, to staffing the Gestapo, to pinning the yellow Star of David onto the prisoners.
Early on in the Nazi regime the Zionists helped the Nazis cross the international Jewish Boycott that was harming the German economy by working out an agreement between Nazis and Zionists to allow some very rich Jews to buy their way to Palestine, furthering the Zionist colonial project. Those taking part in the transfer agreement (Haavara Agreement) were allowed to buy mass quantities of German goods under boycott and take them to Palestine to serve the colonial project. This has been sanitized as an effort to escape persecution. In reality, the Nazis were able to export their goods via the Zionists who purchased them at an inflated rate filling the coffers of the corporate Nazi regime and the German imperialists. The Jewish proletarians were to be policed and tormented by Zionists, before being nearly exterminated by the Nazis.
It was not until it was politically advantageous to the Zionist project that they began to stop collaboration with the Nazis. This came about not due to opposition to the Nazis but due to needing the support of imperialists within the Allied Powers, and the task of getting more Jews to Palestine. The Jewish bourgeoisie in Palestine was in need of cheap labor and to increase the Jewish population, and the holocaust offered them a solution.
Before accomplishing statehood, the Zionists operated in collusion with any imperialist they could. Israel emerged in 1948 as a racially segregated theocratic regime.
Photo: British troops inspect a ship arriving in Haifa in 1948.
