WORLD WORLDWIDE ITALY News Journal Update - (en) Italy, UCADI #178 I-4 - The anarchist communists, the Jewish and Palestinian questions I. - The Balfour Declaration (November 1917) (ca, de, fr, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

 

We can identify in the Balfour declaration of November 1917, with which
the British government, holder of the mandate on Palestine entrusted to
it by the United Nations, undertook to facilitate the creation of a
national headquarters for the Jewish people in Palestine, incorporating
this commitment into the statute of the mandate, the date of the
beginning of that process - very slow and gradual - which induced many
militants of the class struggle, the majority of whom spoke Yiddish
language and culture, to identify, in the possible solution of the
Jewish question, the context in which to realize at the time themselves
the aspiration to build a more just society and their ideals of
realizing socialism and a classless society.
It must be considered that the project of building a Jewish state,
supported by international Zionism, is a capitalist project that must be
placed within the framework of nationalism and the equation between
people and state. It starts from sharing the idea that a community that
has a culture, language and traditions in common must be able to have
its own exclusive territory and has the right to establish its own
institutions, constituting a nation. It is thus customary to identify
the homeland as the territorial, traditional and cultural context in
which the affective, moral and political experiences of the individual
develop, as they belong to a people or a community. Considering that the
Jewish people had been expelled from their land by decision of the
Romans and had been diluted in the world through forced migration, a
diaspora that had no equal in the experiences of other peoples, the
search for a territory in which to settle is - as we have seen - the
subject of discussion since the mid-19th century, so much so that
multiple possible solutions to the problem are identified and pursued,
on the initiative of different actors.
One of the solutions hypothesized in the period between the two world
wars was identified in Albania. Zoug, king of Albania, is asked to
welcome the Jewish diaspora into his country; the country then had a
relatively small population. The arrival of the Jews - it was said -
would bring wealth and development to the country. Although it seemed
that the project did not displease the sovereign, this idea soon failed
and was paradoxically taken up elsewhere on the initiative of the Vichy
Republic and with the support of the Nazis. The French colony of
Madagascar was identified as the place to deport the Jews so that they
could set up their own state, knowing that they would die there due to
disease and climate; this at the same time that their physical
elimination was actually being done, through the so-called final
solution of the Jewish problem, adopted since 1938 by Nazism.[5]
More realistically, the Jewish settlement in Palestine had its own path
which became more substantial after the second Aliya (emigration for
religious purposes to the holy places of Judaism) coming mainly from
Russia. These were predominantly populations strongly influenced by the
socialist, communist and anarchist movements that had developed in
today's territories of Poland, Belarus, northern Ukraine and today's Russia.
Even at different times, similar projects were hypothesized, identifying
places in the Belgian Congo, Italian Libya and Argentina where the Jews
could rebuild their nation, emigrating with the sole result of giving
life to shreds of communities which then survived over time.

More concretely, sharing the socialist ideals of equality in work for
the community, in 1909 some of them founded the first kibbutz in
Degania, south of Mount Ehilam, near Lake Tiberias,[6]giving life to an
within which every single individual committed himself to working for
everyone else, receiving in exchange, instead of money, only the fruits
of common labor, thus avoiding the community from falling into the hands
of a consumerist and mercantile society. It is not secondary that this
structure was established in an area where agriculture was at pure
subsistence levels and that, thanks to the technologies and knowledge
adopted and introduced by the promoters of the initiative, it produced a
business structure characterized by high productivity, obtaining a good
economic result, thus acting as a showcase and demonstrating that the
experiment could be successful.
The ideological influence in the construction of this model of social
and productive organization is evident and has its roots in the
communist and anarchist creations of libertarian municipalities that had
arisen in previous years almost everywhere in the world, but above all
in Latin America, in territories considered on the margins of capitalist
control, as attempts to build a productive and social fabric alternative
to the capitalist one. These experiences had been repeatedly and widely
reported and publicized in Yiddish -language newspapers and propaganda
pamphlets to the point of becoming the common heritage of entire
populations, but after a few years they had failed.
By analyzing previous experiences, there were those who came to the
conclusion that one of the causes that had led to the deterioration of
the communities established in the past was the extreme cultural and
political heterogeneity of those who participated in the experiment.
Even if the hypothesized community structure envisaged the assembly
structure and the taking of collective decisions after an extensive
debate which should have involved all members of the community as a key
and characterized element of the political organization and therefore
the presence of a continuous dialectical tension was structural among
those who took part in this experience it was believed, however, that
the element of common belonging to Judaism was perhaps the necessary
cultural element of cohesion to act as an indispensable cement of the
nascent community and it was decided to exclude the element constituted
by the populations indigenous people from participating in the experience.
In this way the hypothesized community became exclusive and excluding,
certainly not in dialogue with those different from itself, but above
all it introduced the contradiction constituted by the need to quickly
resort to paid labor to meet the economic needs of the settlement, and
in doing so reintroduced the laws of the market which originally
declared that it wanted to expel. The criterion of equality as a
distinctive character in all those who were part of the community was
thus broken, which, in order to survive, entered into a relationship
with the outside world through a relationship of subordination,
constituted by existence of paid work.
Despite the progroms and the growth of anti-Semitism, the repression of
the class movements of workers and peasants, harshly repressed because
of their struggles, induced not a few militants of the class struggle to
decide individually to give their contribution to the Jewish cause with
the prospect of bringing their contribution to the project of building a
new and supportive society, orienting it towards a secular and community
vision of the future society, in which the elements of religious and
ethnic belonging were overcome and amalgamated, thanks to the superior
sharing of a vision of an egalitarian class which, through the
construction of economic and participatory structures, managed
collectively, allowed all those who were part of it to enjoy equal
rights and to be subject to the same duties of solidarity and
friendship, in sharing a life common. But in 1917, at the height of the
First World War, the third Aliya
began[7]: under the British Mandate, Jewish immigration to Palestine
accelerated: in the 1920s alone, almost 100,000 Jews immigrated to the
area, compared to just over 5,000 non-Jews. The result was to bring the
Jewish population to Palestine from 83,000 units in 1915: The world war
attenuated the flow bringing it to 84,000 units in 1922 (compared to
590,000 Arabs and 71,000 Christians). But already in 1931 the Jews were
175,138 (against the 761,922 Arabs and almost 90,000 Christians), and
became 360,000 units by the end of the 1930s.[8]The Zionist movement, in
order to give concreteness to the realization of the construction
project of the new production structures, decided to reserve
participation with full rights only to the Jewish component of the
population.

The choice, fought by many militants of the class struggle, became
definitive when in 1920 the Qeren ha-yesod ("Base Fund", known as the
Fund for the construction of Palestine) was established in Palestine,
which began its activity, fueling a migratory flow organized by the
Jewish Agency from 1919 to 1929, with capital and investments from the
USA. This initiative led - as has been said - to the transfer of 100,000
Jews to Palestine, who turned their business towards purchasing and
cultivating as much land as possible, starting to exclude the native
Palestinian populations from agricultural work, who until then had been
widely used as labor.
The growing acquisition of land by immigrant Jews could only occur
because they had capital made available by the international Zionist
movement. but because they are favored by the current legal systems of
ownership, possession and assignment of land. It must be considered that
according to British law applied in the Palestinian territories after
the granting of the mandate, a large part of the local population did
not own the land, but according to customary law they only owned the
plants that were grown there and consequently many lands used by Arab
farmers were under British law ownerless. They could then be purchased
from Jewish settlers, from their frontmen or from the Jewish Agency.
This element, purely juridical, combined with the rules by which the
assignments were made, the fact that by decision of the Jewish owners
the land had to be worked only by Jewish farmers and could not be sold
or sublet to non-Jews, removed the only source of sustenance and work to
many pre-existing Arab settlements, favoring Jewish settlements and
producing the progressive expulsion of the native inhabitants or in any
case reducing them to paid workers.
Soon the settlement of Jewish settlers in the territory became so
intense and pervasive that in 1925 the Hebrew University was inaugurated
in Jerusalem, confirming an ever-increasing cultural presence; at the
same time it was decided to establish an elective assembly and an
executive with the task of directing the politics of the Ishuv, that is,
of the Jewish community of Palestine.
But the real key to preparing the birth of a Jewish state in Palestine
was the establishment in Haifa in 1920, to protect Jewish work, of a
trade union organisation, the Histadrut, (the confederation of Jewish
trade unions). It was brought to life by intellectuals and young workers
from Eastern Europe, Ashkenazis, who had escaped the anti-Semitic
pogroms unleashed on several occasions in the Polish and Western
territories of the old Tsarist empire. They were animated by socialist
ideals, financed by the World Zionist Organization, led by the liberal
Chaim Weizmann, and by the Jewish Agency for Palestine: in other words
the proletarian component of Judaism offered the mass of emigrants who
brought popular demands, while the capital came from the bourgeois
classes with a strong nationalist ideological characterization. This
meant that within the migrant population and its organizations a clash
took place between the left-wing component which intended to keep entry
into the organization open to the native inhabitants of Palestine, or
rather to non-Jewish populations, even as paid workers and the liberal
and right-wing component which instead reserved union membership and its
protections exclusively for Jews.
The right-wing component of workers' Zionism prevailed: the major
theorist of this line was David Gordon (1856-1922), whose doctrine was
shared and made operational by two pragmatic leaders of the right wing
of workers' Zionism Berl Katznelson (1887- 1944) and, above all, Ben
Gurion (1886-1973), first secretary of the Histadrut, who conquered the
majority of the trade union organization under the slogan "From class to
nation".
This meant that the Histadrut carried out functions that we could define
as pre-state, organizing its own production structures, agricultural
cooperatives, building and managing homes, schools and hospitals,
welfare services, credit institutions, opening its ranks only to Jewish
settlers who they immigrated to Palestine, in the belief that class
solidarity should be accompanied and supported by common ethnic and
religious belonging. The trade union activity of defending the wages of
members and especially of non-Jewish workers employed by Jews, in that
phase, constituted a completely secondary concern for the trade union
organization as well as for the production units that it promoted in the
form of kibbuz and which would - paradoxically - had to constitute the
employer part.
Since then the left-wing components within the union will continue to be
present, but they will always be a minority and increasingly residual,
and even within the kibbutz the management and existential orientations
of the settlers will begin to change, the very philosophy that guided
them and he organized life. The libertarian component which had
initially been a non-secondary part of this experience, inspiring and
conditioning its characteristics, abandoned it and returned to an
internationalist vision of the class struggle, shifting its militancy to
the trade union and political movements of the individual countries in
the where the militants resided, abandoning Palestine and giving an
active contribution, which had never stopped, to the individual trade
union and political movements throughout the world. Believing that a
specifically Jewish national option constituted a choice in favor of
purely bourgeois interests and principles, he sided in favor of
proletarian internationalism and sociopolitical integrationism on
exclusively class bases.
Naturally, as these management choices of the Zionist and religious
right strengthened in the Histadrut, the conflicts with the
Arab-Palestinian population grew and worsened, until the serious crisis
of 1936-39.

[5]On 3 July 1940 the Reich Foreign Ministry presented its proposal: the
new deputy head of the ministry's Jewish affairs, Franz Rademacher
(under Martin Luther), proposed in a document the deportation of all
Jews in Madagascar where they would live under German surveillance as a
guarantee in case of complications with the American Jewish community.
The "Madagascar plan", which revived old hypotheses of deportation to
the island from the 20th century and the 1930s of Polish and French
origin, seemed feasible, in view of the final victory believed to be
imminent over Great Britain, and was disclosed at a diplomatic level.
The cession of Madagascar by France to Germany as a "mandate" was
discussed and there were talks with Italians and Romanians. Adolf
Eichmann spoke of the transfer of four million Jews to an unspecified
country, and Hans Frank also spoke on July 12, 1940 of the entire
"Jewish tribe" evacuated to Madagascar. Heydrich agreed on the need for
a territorial solution and Hitler also spoke in August of a complete
"evacuation" of the Jewish people after the war.

[6]A Hebrew word that indicates "assembly" (as well as "collection",
"union", "grouping" of people) in the sense of conscious union, sharing
of reciprocity, responsibility and a different idea of community, the
latter no longer deriving from the exclusive birth and growth in an
environment delimited only by the family, and therefore by the
territorial group to which one belongs, but rather by an unprecedented
awareness of oneself and others. "Doing together", producing,
discussing, deciding, are not only the idealistic and moral but above
all political shell of the individual.
[7]. The third Aliya, between 1919 and 1923, involved the entry into the
country of approximately 35,000 Polish and Russian Jews, mostly linked
to three political movements of a Zionist nature. The first of them was
the Hechalutz ("the pioneer") of Joseph Trumpeldor (1880-1920), Zionist
pioneer, active in the formation of the Jewish Legion of the British
army, who died in Tel Hay during an Arab attack. Hechalutz was in fact
the name taken by some federative groups of young Jews from the Diaspora
who, from 1880, began to prepare their members for immigration to Eretz
Israel by educating them in manual labor, accustoming them to community
life and teaching them Hebrew. After the First World War the World
Zionist Organization financed its activities.
[8]On this occasion the Zionist movement considered the British Mandate
on Palestine the first step for the future creation of the Jewish state.
The Hagana was formed, a clandestine paramilitary formation that took on
the task of defending the Jewish settlements in Palestine. Keren Ha
Yesod was founded, the fund that collected contributions from all over
the world for the establishment of the Jewish state. It was decided that
the Hebrew language, codified by Eliezer Ben Yehuda in 1890, would be
the official language of the new state. In 1922 the League of Nations
confirmed the British Mandate over Palestine.

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