WORLD WORLDWIDE ITALY News Journal Update - (en) Italy, UCADI #178 I-2 - The anarchist communists, the Jewish and Palestinian questions I. - The Europe of homelands and the birth of Zionism (ca, de, fr, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

 The revolutions of 1848 marked the affirmation of nationalism in Europe

to give life to the Europe of nations and homelands. The conflicts of
the beginning of the second half of the 18th century are characterized
by the struggles for the independence and national unity of Italy,
Prussia, Belgium, Greece and for the downsizing of multi-ethnic empires
such as the Habsburg one which in 1867 was transformed in
Austro-Hungarian. The latter tries in vain to counteract the nascent
nationalisms through a reform of its institutions, inaugurating a
multi-ethnic and multi-religious legislative policy that will lead to
the growth of regional autonomies in the different territories of the
empire and the issuing of laws that allow the different cults to
organize themselves and to operate freely: it is no coincidence that the
Constitution of 1867 recognizes freedom of worship for all religious
minorities. This process will reach its culmination with the first
European law on freedom of Muslim worship in 1912 for the territories of
Bosnia and Herzegovina belonging to the empire.
In other countries, however, persecutions, including Jewish ones,
continued with ferocious determination, in Poland as in Russia, in
Romania as in Ukraine, in the Baltic countries such as Bulgaria and in
the rest of the Balkans. In fact, the integration of the Jewish
component of the populations into the various state structures did not
occur and progroms continue to take place in many states of Western and
Eastern Europe.
At the end of the century, latent anti-Semitism also took on more modern
forms in Austria-Hungary: in 1891 Karl Lueger founded the Austrian
Christian Social Party which made anti-Semitism one of the
characteristic features of its Statute, giving rise to a creeping policy
of marginalization of Jewish component of the population, although
significant.
But even more evidence of the growth of hostility against the Jews was
the explosion in France in 1894 of the Dreyfus affair which brought to
light the profound anti-Semitism of French society and divided the
country and national and international public opinion: Afred Dreyfus
French official of religion Jew was accused of espionage and treason for
having transmitted secret documents relating to the French army to the
Germans, on the basis of false evidence, artfully constructed in the
circles of the French secret services. The trial divided French society
and the clash between the different factions, even if it ended with a
definitive sentence in 1906, continued to divide world public opinion.[2]
The poisoned climate, pervaded by fears and prejudices towards Judaism,
created by the Dreyfus affair, constituted the ideal humus for a studied
provocation by the tsarist secret police, which constructed the false
"Book of the 7 Elders of Zion" which hypothesizes the existence of a
Jewish-Masonic conspiracy developed to control the world and undermine
the world order, putting States and Nations in crisis; the pamphlet
becomes the bogeyman raised by anti-Semitism to terrorize bourgeois
public opinion.
The provocation, cleverly constructed, will be successful above all in
Russia, and will spread fear in Europe and throughout the world for
everything that Judaism, the supposed controller of international
finance, will be able to do, to upset the world order and influence the
life of nations and of all humanity. The existence of a diabolical plan
of subversion is presented as the fruit of dark plots and becomes the
propaganda manifesto of right-wing parties in every country, fueling the
climate of hatred towards Jews, especially towards those of them who try
to fully fit in title in civil society and aspire to be part of the
bourgeoisie.
If the victims of the discredit campaign are the emancipated Jews, those
who try to conform to the bourgeois by showing themselves to be more
realistic than the king, within bourgeois society, the hatred solicited
and cultivated against them is unloaded on the mass of poor Jews who
they constitute a significant part of the peasant and industrial
proletariat. The progroms involve entire communities, peasant villages,
workers' unions, sowing terror. Thus, last but not least on the scene of
nationalism, the Zionist movement arrives, starting from an initiative
by the Hungarian journalist Theodor Herzl who organized the World
Zionist Congress between 29 and 31 August 1897 in Basel. Around two
hundred delegates participate - including 17 women, from 17 different
nations - representing around seventy organisations. On the agenda is
the development of a Zionist project for the creation of a state that
would give a homeland to all Jews.
The convening of the Congress came only after Herzl's project was
rejected by Jewish bankers and philanthropists, such as Baron de Hirsch
and the Rothschild family, who had been asked to finance a sort of
Jewish Commonwealth, by politicians and governments: everyone did not
seriously consider supporting the Jewish cause. The reluctance with
which finance and politics looked at Congress gave the initiative a
popular, liberal and democratic character which influenced the
activities of the Zionist movement in an initial phase. The Congress was
attended by representatives of all currents of Judaism: conservative,
Orthodox and reformed.
Three trends emerged from the debate:

the first - practical - saw in the agricultural colonization of
Palestine the means to restore to the Jews their human dignity and to
assert effective rights on the territory in the future, and found its
instrument in the Qeren qayyemeth le Yisra'el («Permanent Fund for
Israel», known as the Jewish National Fund), created in 1901 for the
purpose of purchasing land in Palestine;

the second trend, ethical-religious, which fought for a return to
tradition and the rebirth of a national spirit and of the cultural and
religious values of Judaism;

the third trend, the political one, aimed to obtain the granting of an
international 'charter' which authorized and protected Jewish
immigration to Palestine

The Jewish congress ended with the foundation of the World Zionist
Organization and the adoption of the Basel Program which in its
principles established that "The aim of Zionism is to create a home in
Eretz Yisrael (literally the Land of Israel, or the region which,
according to the Tanakh and the Bible, was promised by God to the
descendants of the Jewish people), for the Jews under the protection of
the law and recognized internationally". Therefore, it was decided to
encourage the settlement of Jewish farmers, artisans and producers in
Eretz Yisrael; to create unitary Jewish organizations to support the
project, in compliance with the laws of the countries of residence; to
strengthen and develop the promotion of national sentiment and Jewish
national consciousness; to carry out convincing work with the
governments of the respective states to achieve the objectives of Zionism.
The debate that took place at the Conference, which also took place in
broad daylight and with the participation of observers outside of
Judaism, was presented as further confirmation of the existence of a
plan aimed at impacting the world order, conditioning it with the weight
of money and finance, through a plutocratic-Masonic alliance aimed at
carrying out the project to the detriment of all nations, taking away
from them the resources and means necessary for their own development.
As is known, the seed of racial hatred, sown, managed and cultivated
with attention and skill, will end up producing its horrible fruits with
Nazism which was able to operate precisely because these opinions and
feelings were shared on a social level and were anything but isolated,
they exploited the fears and unsatisfied needs of the masses, offering a
convenient scapegoat to justify the existence of the perpetuation of
capitalist exploitation of man by man cultivated by all States.

[2]The literature on the Dreyfus case is very extensive and easily
available and therefore we do not believe we need to give an account of
it. The same can be said about the "Book of the 7 Elders of Zion", a
creation of the tsarist secret service.

https://www.ucadi.org/2023/11/05/i-comunisti-anarchici-la-questione-ebraica-e-quella-palestinese/
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