WORLD WORLDWIDE ITALY News Journal Update - (en) Italy, UCADI #178 I-1 - The anarchist communists, the Jewish and Palestinian questions - Summary: (ca, de, fr, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

 

Premise. 1. The affirmation of nationalisms. 2. The Europe of homelands
and the birth of Zionism. 3. The Jewish component of the international
socialist, communist and anarchist movement. 4. The Balfour Declaration
(November 1917). 5. The role of "Jewish pan-syndicalism" in state
building. The Schoah and the " necessary migration". 6. The (necessary)
transformation: Israel guardian of the Arab Islamic world on behalf of
the West. 7. The peculiar institutional nature of the State of Israel.
8. The capitalist degeneration of the Jewish state.

Second section: 1. The people of Palestine. 2. Resistance to occupation
and expropriation: the responsibilities of the mandating countries. 3.
The exploitation of the Palestinian problem by Arab countries. The
question of the custody of the holy places. 4. The nationalist and
statist drift of the PLO. 5. Islamist degeneration as an instrument of
defense of the right to exist. 6. Hamas in Gaza and the West Bank.

The transfer of libertarian experiences to the people of Rojava

Introduction:
When in 1807 the Jews of Europe, summoned by Napoleon Bonaparte,
gathered in Paris on the occasion of the work of the Great Sanhedrin
with which Napoleon intended to negotiate the issuing of the organic
articles for the Jewish cult, similarly to what he had done with the
Catholic Church and the Protestant cult, the Jews of Europe who flocked
in large numbers, even from territories outside those of the Empire,
realized their large number and the fact that in these centuries of
diaspora many things had changed within of wandering Judaism.

The Sephardic Jews found that they were well integrated into the
processes of capitalist accumulation in the West and realized the
economic potential that the communities possessed thanks to the presence
within them of important financial figures who had taken advantage of
the ban on carrying out many professions and they were dedicated to
economic activities, running pawnshops, banking, commerce and medicine.
The Ashkenazi Jews, who had settled mainly in the German and Slavic
territories of central and Eastern Europe, became aware of their number,
of their diffusion over the territories, of the numerous and substantial
communities to which they had given life, often opposed by the other
components of the population. Within social and productive relationships
linked to agriculture, many of them still found themselves in the
condition of serfs, even if an urban and working-class proletariat began
to form, especially in the territories managed by the Habsburg empire.
Quite a few of them tried to fit into the rising bourgeois class and,
claiming their new status, aspired to undertake a military career and
carry out professions that were once closed to them.
Starting from the Parisian meeting which involved the leaders of the
communities, the idea began to emerge, in the face of the spread of
nationalism and the aspiration of the bourgeois classes to see their
traditions and customs recognised, summarized in the concept of
homeland, of giving life to a possible "Jewish homeland", reconstructing
the Jewish nation in those territories from which the Jews had been
expelled, in Palestine, realizing the prophecy of the return and
reconstruction of the temple.
However, the realization of this project was slow and bumpy, full of
setbacks, proof of which is that the measures resulting from the
adoption of the organic articles for the Jewish confession were followed
in 1808 by a Napoleonic decree restrictive of the freedoms granted to
citizens of the Jewish faith. However, the process of liberalization of
the social and living conditions of the Jews had been started and this
was seen with the progressive abolition of many ghettos which gradually
disappeared from the panorama of European cities to reappear with Nazism
as a place of temporary concentration of populations Jewish women to be
sent for extermination in the camps.
In the first half of the 18th century, the inclusion of the Jewish
components of populations in civil life experienced differentiated
solutions and situations depending on the state; we moved from liberal
legislation adopted in Holland to the maintenance of legislative
restrictions in many states born from the post-Napoleonic restoration in
Western Europe, while the restrictions on the social inclusion of Jewish
populations remained largely unchanged in Eastern countries, especially
in Central Europe and in the immense Russian territories where
integration actually did not occur. In the West, the Rome Ghetto was the
last to be abolished in Western Europe in 1870.
In the West, the years from the fall of Napoleon to the middle of the
century saw the inclusion of emancipated Jews in the social and
political life of the various states. The economic activities and
professions carried out by many of them allowed them to successfully
integrate into the bourgeoisie of various countries; some of them
distinguished themselves even more in commercial and banking activities,
becoming supporters of their respective governments, also in order to
gain social respectability. Often the role of these exponents of finance
was used to fuel anti-Semitism even if, considered as a whole of those
belonging to international finance, the Jewish component of finance is
equivalent to those having other origins or traditions.
This identification with the bourgeois classes, however, fueled in some
environments, especially those of the social left, distrust towards
people who desired and aspired to civil and military public positions,
and to become part of and integrate into the new dominant classes, which
boasted of their belonging to the nascent industrial, commercial and
financial entrepreneurship. Therefore, the mistrust towards a part of
the population, the Jewish one, was increasingly seen as a separate
faction of the population, which aspired to the recognition of its own
superiority, derived from the fact of belonging to an elected
ethnic-cultural-religious group, to which the professed religion
attributed a superiority deriving from divine recognition, due to
belonging "by blood".
In this situation, aversion towards Jews could only continue to grow and
in the following years there was no shortage of progroms in both Western
and Eastern Europe which targeted the Jewish population: several
anti-Jewish riots broke out in Germany in the 1830s , 1834, 1844, 1848,
and in the adjacent former Polish territories annexed to Russian rule
after the first partition of Poland. The so-called "residence area" was
created, outside of which Jews were forbidden to reside and progroms
took place in this territory both in 1821 and in the following years. In
the rest of the territory of the Russian Empire there were successive
waves of progroms in the period from 1821 to 1871 which also involved
the city of Odessa and the Jewish communities scattered across the
plains and along the large rivers where trade developed.
These waves of repression, often carried out with the support of the
police forces of different states, actually profoundly divided
communities based on their economic class position. The violence of the
State was directed towards the poorest sections of the population, so
that the nascent workers' and peasants' movement also suffered the
consequences. Among the victims of the common repression was born that
class solidarity which will see many Jews active part of the nascent
workers' organizations and committed to giving their contribution to the
formation of socialist, communist and anarchist ideas. Carlo Marx was
but one of the many Jews who gave their decisive contribution to the
formation of socialist, communist and anarchist organizations after the
diffusion of the famous Communist Manifesto of 1848. Of the consequences
of the class positioning of a relatively large and above all socially
" visible" of the members of the Jewish communities we find traces in a
discussed and controversial article by Michele Bakunin entitled To the
comrades of the Federation of the international sessions of the Jura of
February-March 1872[1]which to be read and understood must be
contextualized and placed in the framework of the controversy between
the anarchist and Marxist components within the International Workers'
Association to guide its politics.

Commenting on the positions expressed within the International regarding
the Franco-Prussian war, Bakunin forcefully criticizes the positions of
those exponents of the authoritarian wing of the International who had
expressed their support for Bismarkian statism, espousing the reasons of
Prussia: these they were apostrophized as belonging to a lobby, mainly
made up of members of Judaism, eager to thus obtain social inclusion and
acceptance in the living rooms of the German bourgeoisie.
As a defender of the Slavic peoples, Bakunin indicated German
nationalism as the main enemy of the workers and poor peasants of
Eastern Europe and saw in the ambition of a not insignificant part of
the Ashkenazi Jews of German culture to be recognized and integrated
into the bourgeoisie of the new Germany of the belonging to the class
enemy of these dispossessed masses. In arguing his reasons, Bakunin did
not fail to resort to the stereotypes of Slavic anti-Semitism (and in
this sense he is a child of his time and of Russian culture) and he
focused with particular insistence on his strong anti-religious
prejudices, on which his entire his philosophical-political conception
(summarized in the famous phrase: If God exists, man is a slave; but God
does not exist, therefore man is free ). In the Jews he saw the
custodians of a religious tradition, characterized by fanaticism and
intolerance towards other peoples and other cults, since they affirmed
the superiority of their one God over all others. For Bakunin the Jews
had been persecuted, but they had also been persecutors and intolerant.
As an atheist, which he was, he could only see in Judaism an acute form
of religious aberration, resulting in the doctrine of the "chosen
people", the sole and exclusive holder of his
selfish rights, destined by divine disposition to prevail over all
others and in spite of of all. Accustomed to a careful analysis of
classes, Bakunin did not miss the fact that especially in the countries
of Eastern and Central Europe, where the Jewish presence was very
numerous, in societies rigidly structured by classes and stratified by
classes and social roles, many Jews placed them in a petty-bourgeois
position, that of those who managed the poverty of peasants and the
landless, of small artisans, granting small loans, and often exploiting
the miseries of others, living on trade and feeding themselves with the
profits of their activities.
It is mainly against this stratification of class and social roles that
Bakunin lashes out, to denounce the aspirations of many Jews to become a
bourgeois class, to identify with power, with the State, reluctant to
rebel against exploitation. It is therefore that he directs his
criticism against this mentality, using the tools of the time, full of
anti-Semitism: his criticism realistically notes that the Jewish
communities were frowned upon because they held the monopoly of small
trade, and often of usury loans, they were filled with thrills of
short-term messianic expectation, of an eschatology that made their
redemption coincide with their religious affirmation, as a "chosen"
people, and placed them among the ruling class, inducing them to give up
rebelling and suing common with other exploited people.
A further underlying reason, not expressed in this letter, but often
referred to by Bakunin in his writings, then divided him from Judaism,
even from those of them who had embraced the cause of the proletariat:
the Jews' belief that the advent of emancipation from slavery would take
place through the return of the messiah and that it was inevitable, it
could only happen, a position ultimately shared by those of them - like
Marx - who espoused the cause of socialism and communism, who believed
that the new world it could only have triumphed and finally established
itself on earth, thanks to the very development of the productive forces.
Bakunin, as a sincere atheist, judged this eschatological belief to be
misleading and uneducational since he saw in will and reason, in direct
action, in revolutionary organization, the instrument of workers'
emancipation, believing that the emancipation of the exploited classes
had a individual voluntaristic component, where the role of the person,
of the individual, was of extreme importance and that therefore the
social revolution would have to be the work
of the exploited classes themselves and of single individuals and could
not come from above or from a prophetic plan or even thanks to
enlightened leader of a party. Bakunin, in fact, placed the individual
with all his rational potential at the center of action, trusting in
human beings as the sole creators of their future, in the absence of God.

[1]Bakunin had been harshly attacked by the Volkstaat, the organ of the
Party of German Socialist Democracy, whose editor-in-chief was Wilhelm
Liebknecht, and later also by the organ of the Geneva Federation,
L'Egalité (which was also the organ of the French Federation). Bakunin
had been accused of aiming for a "personal dictatorship" and therefore
felt hurt and exacerbated. M. Bakunin, To the comrades of the Federation
of the international sessions of the Jura, Complete works, Editions of
the magazine "Anarchism", Catania, 1977, vol. III, pp. 21 ff.[

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