From Yiddishland to Palestine – A Case for BDS – Part 1

Several years ago I did a talk on a “materialist”¹ case for the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement (BDS). This talk strove to align the fight for Palestinian self determination and history with that of Jewish self-determination and history based on the voices of revolutionary Jews living in “Yiddishland.” It highlights their perspectives on Zionism, the erasure of those perspectives, and the historical circumstances that led the world (and many of those same Jews) to rewrite colonization as emancipation and self determination.

Part 1 explores a bit of the history of “Yiddishland” before diving into the colonization of Palestine in Part 2.

 

Zionism and Israel are often held up as the ultimate aspirations of Jewish people for a homeland; the pinnacle of Jewish values and achievement. A 2019 letter to the editor opposing socialist city council candidate Ellie Hamrick called Zionism “a core tenant [sic] of Judaism. Israel serves as a refuge and a beacon of hope for 14 million Jews around the world living in the current era of drastically increasing instances of antisemitism.”³

On the other hand, supporters of BDS⁴ point out that this “self-determination” comes at the expense of the self-determination of Palestinian people. So what we’re left with, ostensibly, is to judge between the rights of self-determination between two people. One, a supposedly “enlightened” group of predominantly white bringers of civilization who suffered massive trauma over generations, and the other being branded as backward savages, a “non-people.”⁵

Since cataloging the subjugation and extensive abuse of the Palestinian people daily is a task that is covered extensively⁶ this two part article will try to take a historical materialist look at what led us to this situation, to an international competition between “Jewish People” (as claimed by Zionists) and Palestinians as well as supporters of BDS (gentiles as well as “self-hating” Jews⁷)⁸ Before we get into that though, here’s what I recall of the ideology I was taught in Hebrew School:

Jews were exiled from the land of Israel and have been forced, through hate and oppression, to live in exile for hundreds of years. That hate manifested in a multitude of ways, culminating in the Holocaust in which 6 million Jews were systematically killed intentionally by a deliberately antisemitic state. This genocide also resulted in the displacement of millions of other Jewish refugees that no other country wanted. Instead, western powers, and many Jews, suggested that Jewish people need a state of their own so that a tragedy such as this can never happen again. After much debate, everyone settled on Palestine, the historic home of the Jews and so Zionists were then given license to establish the State of Israel.

However, the Arab nations did not take kindly to a Jewish presence on their borders and so attacked Israel, which was forced to heroically defend itself. After the Holocaust, Israel desires only a peaceful home for Jewish people and yet must continually defend itself against anti-Semitism to this day, now from its Arab neighbors, who, like everyone else, simply hate Jewish people.

My memory of Hebrew School, possibly a little suspect

The major takeaway is Jews being painted as the perpetual victims. Perpetually hated and yet powerless to act against that hate. Israel itself always seemed like a tragic story rather than a power capable of protecting all Jewish people from the world’s limitless hate. So, it was with a bit of a wonder but a strange lack of surprise that I discovered that this story had some…missing pieces. It’s not that these things were incorrect; the history of Jewish oppression was spot on as one might imagine. The missing bits come into play around, unsurprisingly, Zionism, and more surprisingly, around Jewish identity itself. Elie Wiesel put it like this in his novel, The Testament:

Between a Jewish businessman from Morocco and a Jewish chemist from Chicago, a Jewish rag picker from Lodz and a Jewish industrialist from Lyon, a Jewish mystic from Safed and Jewish intellectual from Minsk, there is a deeper and more substantive kinship, because it is far older, than between two gentile citizens of the same country, the same city and the same profession. A Jew may be alone but never solitary…

Hélène Elek, a revolutionary Hungarian Jew, however, had this to say:

I do not feel Jewish when I meet an orthodox Jew from Poland, for example. I tell myself that I have nothing in common with him. In Hungary, the Jews were assimilated, which I was very happy with. But I was never ashamed of being Jewish … You are a Communist first, and being a Jew comes second. You can be a very good Jew without Judaism.

What’s important here is something that should be obvious to anyone who has had their identity generalized into its popular conception. That this plurality of opinion and this rich and varied history is downplayed, denied, and sometimes even completely omitted in service of racism, empire, colonization, and yes, capitalism — this time, realized in Israel.

Note: Of this plurality of opinion which includes Jews from oft-unspoken places (read: anywhere but Europe and the United States), I’m only going to be able to focus on Ashkenazim as that’s who I am and are predominantly who did the colonizing.

---

During the years preceding the Holocaust, of the 11 million Jews in the world as a whole, the Russian Empire and nearby regions held more than 5 million⁹. Jews in this region faced massive persecution for centuries, some of the worst being the the Pogroms which were most eloquently described by Leon Trotsky in his book 1905.¹⁰ Go ahead and read the first few paragraphs.

Throughout this persecution, though, Jews experienced the same dramatic transformation in their material conditions as gentiles, that is, non-Jews. Capitalism was churning through the population, transforming tradesmen and peasants into workers and dragging them off to factories. Jewish workers ended up concentrated in the handicraft sector of production.

Antisemitic policies that were already isolating Jews into communities outside of the rest of the proletariat kept Jews isolated from non-Jewish worker organizations¹¹. Despite the isolation, the continued poverty and antisemitism spurned the development of particularly radical Jewish organizations like the General Jewish Labour Bund and Poale Zion¹². Many just joined the local communist movements. Bronia Zelmanowicz, a Jewish Marxist from Poland, talks about her radicalization:

We were poor, but there were people poorer than us. My mother was known for her goodness, and a constant procession of hungry, sick and wretched people descended on us. When mother was unable to help them, she sent us children to the better-off households to beg for food and money. I saw then what real poverty was. These children of six or seven sold dough-nuts illicitly in the street, who were caught and beaten by the police. And so I very soon began to ask myself: how can God permit such injustice? I started going to public libraries and reading socialist literature – Marx, Plekhanov, etc. – and I came to the conclusion that the only way to achieve justice in this world was to struggle¹³.

Bronia would go on to participate in various revolutionary organizations throughout Yiddishland.¹⁴ Her story reflects the shared experience that led to the birth of a strong militant Jewish movement, forming as a result of both capitalist exploitation and massive antisemitism that saw whole villages razed on a whim.

On the other side of the continent in Western Europe, in the wake of the French Revolution, Jews won some emancipation¹⁵. Things were not all roses however, as the 1894 trial of Colonel Albert Dryefus, aka “The Dreyfus Affair” illustrated to the scrappy journalist Theodore Herzl. Antisemitism had been on the rise since the publication of “Jewish France” by Édouard Drumont, who would continue to stoke public antisemitic sentiment for some time. The common tropes were parroted: economic liberalism was blamed on some rich Jew (Rothschild), Jews were blamed for the death of Jesus, and the usual white, racist, notions of Aryan supremacy. Antsemitic riots would soon follow and continue throughout the Dreyfus Affair, led by Drumont and his nationalist followers. These caused some Jews to conclude that antisemitism could not be eliminated. Some, like Herzl, took this a step further:

I achieved a freer attitude toward antisemitism, which I now began to understand historically and to pardon. Above all, I recognized the emptiness and futility of trying to ‘combat’ antisemitism.¹⁶

The demographics of Jews in Western Europe was far different from that of Eastern Europe. France had 86,885 Jews, England: 250,000, Spain: 5,000, Italy: 34,653, and a few thousands in other places for a total of less than 500,000 Jews as compared to Eastern Europe’s millions.¹⁷

So a combination of factors lead Western European Jews, in general, to have a somewhat different outlook from their Eastern cousins. Having achieved a degree of assimilation meant that not as many of them had a persistent need to organize in the way Yiddishland Jews did until the rise in antisemitism during and immediately preceding the Dreyfus Affair.

At the same time, workers organizations were not particularly strong in Western Europe, so while Zionism was growing in both regions, an absence of leadership on the left and a lack of material need, combined with generally smaller Jewish communities, caused Western Europe to turn toward Zionism more intensely than in Eastern Europe. Zionism was not a purely Western European phenomenon, however. While Theodore Herzl is often credited as the “founder” of Zionism, its history is much older. Zionist organizations numbering from a few members to upwards of 20,000 like Poale Zion existed throughout Europe. The character of many of these organizations, however, was more movement oriented than Herlz’s vision.

If Joseph Marco Baruch’s experience is any indication, it was difficult to win Jews over to a mass movement to colonize Palestine as a Jewish state. Baruch traveled throughout all of Europe trying to build this movement, actively opposing Herzl, calling his Zionism “largely devoid of Jewish content¹⁸” and primarily dependent on wealthy Jews and Gentiles both financing the project¹⁹. Indeed, Herzl was able to self fund much of his efforts²⁰. Through his class position, he was able to influence the formation of a sort of bourgeois Zionism that had the financial capital and imperial backing to finance at least the initial stages of colonization²¹.

---

For more reading on this part of the story, check out the footnotes and references. In part two we’ll take a look at what was going on in, supposedly, “the land without a people” and make, what I feel is, the “Yiddish” case for BDS.

>>Click here to read Part 2

1. The author of this piece uses the technical terms of “materialist” and “historical materialist” throughout the article. “Materialist” is a philosophical position which understands matter, not ideas about matter, to be the foundation of reality. “Historical materialism,” then, is a materialist approach to understanding history. The author uses the latter term in the Marxist sense, i.e., in the way Karl Marx and subsequent Marxists developed a particular approach to historical materialism. [Editorial Board]
2. For a little more information about this song and it’s translations, check out Ein Hod’s piece and Psoy Korolenko & Daniel Kahn’s YouTube video. Since so much of this history was lost, it’s unclear what the original source of this piece or into which languages it was actually translated. I like to think that, given the cultural, historical, and often material connectedness of Jews in Yiddishland, that this could have become a semi-international call against the pull of Zionism.
3. https://www.athensmessenger.com/comment/letters_to_the_editor/letter-hamrick-has-issues-in-council-race/article_92ab2d25-8e41-5b7 6-a524-bdbb44e378cb.html 
4. https://bdsmovement.net/
5. Google “a land without a people for a people without a land” and you’ll find a lot of debate about whether or not this phrase is really all that bad. This tends to come down to how you define “people”. Is it “people”, as in human beings, or is it “people”, as in a ruling class, a state, or a nation. We tend to prefer the former definition. Check out Lane Silberstein’s “The Dialectic of Assimilation” for a deeper dive on some of this.
6. Abunimah, Ali. The Battle for Justice in Palestine. , 2014. Print. (and elsewhere)
7. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2009/oct/05/self-hating-jew-antisemitism
8. For readers who would like an in-depth look at the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Ali Abunimah’s The Battle for Justice in Palestine, and Steven Salaita’s Uncivil Rights, Palestine and the Limits of Academic Freedom are great reads.
9. Roughly around 1904, although the exact date is difficult to nail down. From Revolutionary Yiddishland, Alain Brossat & Sylvie Klingberg, pp. 1
10. https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1907/1905/ch12.htm#n1
11. Brossat, pp. 32
12. The legacy of Poale Zion, partially as a result of their right-wing participating in the World Zionist Organization, is unfortunately the legacy we find ourselves in today.
13. Brossat, pp. 44
14. Brossat, pp. 44
15. http://www.isreview.org/issues/24/hidden_history.shtml
16. http://www.isreview.org/issues/15/israel_colonial.shtml
17. Germany is being left out of both numbers as it’s reasonable to see it as in both Eastern and Western Europe.
18. Daccarett. 1890s Zionism Reconsidered: Joseph Marco Baruch, pp. 3
19. ibid. pp. 2
20. ibid. pp. 22, as well as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodor_Herzl
21. Regan, Bernard. The Balfour Declaration, pp 53.