The Jewish people and all of humanity held hostage by genocidal Zionism
---- The only way to eradicate Zionism globally is by organizing aclass-based, anti-colonial, and anti-imperialist opposition at the
international level. To this end, it is essential that the cross-border
Jewish community work alongside political organizations throughout the
Middle East, where the social force of workers, and especially women and
dissidents, plays a fundamental role. From its origins, the nature of
the State of Israel is colonialist, genocidal, and apartheid, and its
existence and actions of dispossession and expulsion of the Palestinian
people are currently supported by imperialist powers, with the US and
Europe at the forefront. Zionism is nothing more than the implementation
of that ideology of terror and capitalist extermination against
humanity, this time with ultra-religious and racist overtones, seeking
to reduce the Palestinian people to nothing.
The Palestinian cause is therefore linked to the global anti-capitalist
and anti-colonial struggle today. Zionism, as the absolutely hegemonic
force in Israel, defended by imperialism and its strategic interests in
the Middle East, has become a political doctrine that has hijacked the
Jewish people themselves, and indeed all of humanity. Tracing the truly
class-based and internationalist opposition that has fought against
Zionism since its inception in the history of the Jewish community marks
an indispensable path for building this struggle today. Zionism has made
antisemitism its banner against any criticism of its genocidal project,
and yet, after the Palestinian people, Zionism's main enemy is any other
Jew who is not a Zionist. It uses the historical suffering of the Jewish
people to legitimize an oppressive colonial project against another people.
The origin of Zionism is rooted in a nationalist and colonial project.
Zionism emerged in Europe in the late 19th century as a branch of modern
nationalism within secular Judaism. European nation-states rejected
social communities that could not be included in their nationalist
ideals, thus initiating severe oppression of numerous peoples who
threatened to disrupt the national order. Not all of these communities
resisted by forming hegemonic political projects that sought to build
nation-states oppressing other peoples. However, in 1897, the World
Zionist Organization was founded, advocating for the creation of a
Jewish national state. Drawing on Jewish and rabbinic tradition, they
began to develop a political project of migration to the territory of
Ottoman Palestine, and later, the British Mandate of Palestine. Based on
the premise that the Jewish people constituted an ancestral nation, it
began as a colonialist project integrated into the nationalism of its
time, and therefore, as a project of domination by the competing
national bourgeoisies within capitalism. The waves of Zionist
colonization, or "Aliyah" in its Hebrew name, began, promoting
agricultural settlements with financial support from European Zionists.
They would achieve their main objective in 1948 with the creation of the
State of Israel as a supremacist project, and on the agenda of
capitalist imperialism as the main ally and destabilizer of the Middle
East since the second half of the 20th century.
These Zionist groups were initially a minority, and they exploited the
violent situations of anti-Semitic pogroms in Europe to justify their
national project as an emancipation. However, a majority of European
Jews favored the defense of the working class and revolution in the
countries where they lived, rejecting the idea of creating an Israeli
nation-state, which was a political project in the bourgeois and
colonial vein. Nationalisms always engender expansionist and reactive
responses that resulted in the creation of fascism, and Zionism has its
origins in this doctrine, framed within a higher level of capitalist and
imperialist exploitation.
The creation of the "Bund", the Jewish anti-Zionist and revolutionary
socialist opposition
In Eastern Europe, Jewish workers had been organizing themselves into
revolutionary groups since the mid-19th century, being especially active
in Tsarist Russia, where they were part of socialist organizations. The
General League of Jewish Workers was also founded in 1897, specifically
in Vilnius (Lithuania), bringing together Polish, Russian, Belarusian,
and Lithuanian Jews from across the Russian Empire, under the Yiddish
name "Bund."
This anti-Zionist Jewish movement was one of the most important leftist
organizations in paving the way for the outbreak of the Russian
Revolution of 1905, and many of its members were persecuted by the
Tsarist authorities for being both Jewish and socialist. The Bund
created a comprehensive network of self-protection against antisemitism,
closely linked to the development of a revolutionary socialist
emancipatory project. They organized schools, libraries, sports clubs,
and even healthcare centers that served the marginalized working classes.
This anti-Zionist Jewish organization joined the Russian Social
Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP), founded in Minsk, which was Marxist in
ideology. They held an internationalist position, viewing Zionism as a
profoundly nationalist project, while the Bund advocated prioritizing
the class struggle in territories with Jewish communities in Europe.
During the 1917 Soviet Revolution, they clashed with the Bolshevik
faction and were subsequently persecuted as an organization. In the
interwar period, some of their members joined the Kombund, communist
Jews who supported the new Bolshevik political order, although most
would later suffer torture or murder at the hands of the Stalinist regime.
The Bund became a significant force within the Jewish community in New
York and maintained its presence clandestinely in Lithuania and Poland.
In Poland, the Bund accused Zionist leaders of aligning themselves with
antisemitic positions during campaigns to promote the colonization of
Palestinian territory. The Folkspartei, a secular, social-liberal Jewish
party, also operated in Poland. Unlike the Bund, it did not advocate
class struggle but was equally opposed to Zionism. Organizations like
the Bund participated in the resistance against the Nazi Holocaust in
Europe during World War II, and many of their members were murdered.
Some of its survivors eventually succumbed to Zionist labor ideology and
formed colonizing entities in the territory of Palestine after the
creation of the State of Israel. Other former Bundists, who had managed
to go into exile, re-established organizations in Europe or America, but
they would never again possess the anti-Zionist strength they had
achieved in the first third of the 20th century. Zionism would exploit
the Holocaust to the fullest extent to advance its colonialist project.
Jewish communities that, in the second half of the 20th century,
positioned themselves against Israel and its apartheid in Palestine,
began to be accused by Israel of being self-hating Jews. This
persecution within the Jewish community itself by Zionism makes Zionist
ideology the main hegemonic antisemitic force aggressing against Jews in
the world.
The joint Jewish and Palestinian struggle in territory colonized by Israel
Initially, the first communist organization in Palestine was founded in
1919 by Jewish workers who had broken away from the "Poale Zion"
organization, a branch of labor Zionism. They believed that the Zionist
national objective was a deception of the Jewish community and that many
Jewish workers were being manipulated by Zionism into migrating to the
predominantly Arab territory. The Socialist Workers Party (SWP, in
Hebrew) was established and began denouncing Zionism as a reactionary
ideology in all its forms. They called for the unity of Jewish and Arab
workers against British imperialism, the backer of Zionism. However,
this Palestinian communist party, refounded in 1923, was later
Stalinized and officially transformed into the Communist Party of Israel
("Maki") in the 1930s. Furthermore, Stalin himself carried out
antisemitic persecutions in the USSR. Some Soviet satellite states would
supply weapons to Israel through members of that Stalinized communist
party, which played a prominent role in carrying out the Palestinian
Nakba in 1948.
In the late 1930s, the Revolutionary Communist League was founded in
Palestine, an anti-Stalinist organization composed of young Trotskyist
Jews, mostly exiled from Germany and other parts of Europe, who found
themselves completely displaced by European fascism. They were joined by
Arab communists like Jabra Nicola, who, after the end of the world war
and the Palestinian Nakba, became anti-Zionist and Marxist activists in
various European countries.
In 1962, Matzpen ("Compass" in Hebrew), an Israeli revolutionary
socialist and anti-Zionist organization, was founded and remained active
until the 1980s. It brought together Jewish and Arab activists with
diverse backgrounds in leftist movements and organizations in Israel. In
June 1967, they positioned themselves against the Six-Day War and the
new territories colonized by Israel in the Palestinian territories.
Their activists made contact through conferences with members of the
international New Left, even communicating with the Black Panthers in
the United States. They also established contacts with Palestinian
groups such as the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine
(DFLP) and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), which led the
Palestinian struggle in the 1970s. Matzpen would later dissolve into
multiple organizations representing different currents of Marxism, with
some of its original members subsequently participating in the First
Intifada.
Anarchism in Israel and contemporary anti-Zionist Jewish movements
Anarchism in Israel can be traced back to the beginnings of the kibbutz
movement, the communities and settlements of labor Zionism in Arab
territories since the first waves of Jewish immigration. Like Marxism,
anarchism has maintained a rather mixed, complex, and shifting
relationship with Zionism, influenced by international events.
Proudhonian ideas, and even those of Gustav Landauer, influenced some of
the early kibbutzim, the settlers of the Israeli kibbutzim. The
organization Hapoel Hatzair (translated from Hebrew as "The Young
Worker") published articles on Kropotkin and Tolstoy, claiming to follow
an anti-statist, anti-militarist, and pacifist line of cooperation with
Arab peasants. In reality, they were a branch of labor Zionism, not
representing a confrontation with Zionism as a colonizing project. Even
Joseph Trumpeldor, a Russian-born Zionist who declared himself an
anarcho-communist, proposed in the 1920s to build a "General Commune in
Palestine." The anarchist influence on these Jewish settlers was more
moralistic in nature, as they did not form an explicitly libertarian,
socialist, and anti-Zionist organization.
Following the Palestinian Nakba, anarchist activists positioned
themselves against Israel from the perspective of state formation, due
to its racist and colonialist implications. A few anarchist groups
emerged, publishing their own works, but they remained isolated and
largely disconnected from broader social and international struggles. It
was after 1967 and the aforementioned Six-Day War that anarchist
activists cooperated with Matzpen and collaborated in the creation of
the Israeli Black Panthers. Similarly, anarchist activists protested
within Israel against the 1982 Lebanon War, including Toma Sik, a
Holocaust survivor and prominent Israeli antimilitarist, who founded a
section within War Resisters' International (WRI).
Anarchism remained active in the 1980s as part of the Israeli punk
movement, as well as among conscientious objectors and draft resisters
who refused to participate in the repression of the First Intifada. A
short-lived Israeli Anarchist Federation was formed to protest police
brutality and the opening of the first McDonald's in Israel. In the
1990s, Israeli anarchism focused on anti-globalization protests and
animal rights struggles, helping to establish Anonymous for Animal
Rights (similar to the American organization PETA). Some Israeli
anarchist groups also joined post-leftist movement projects such as Food
Not Bombs and Reclaim the Streets. It was during the Second Intifada in
the 2000s that a new wave of organization emerged around the
International Solidarity Movement ("ISM") and Israeli anarchists
supported Palestinian actions against road checkpoints and street curfews.
In 2003, Anarchists Against the Wall (AatW) was founded as a direct
action group against the construction of the Israeli wall in the West
Bank, denouncing the ethnic cleansing and violence it entailed. The
group disbanded in 2010 after suffering severe repression at the hands
of the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF). Isolated anarchist groups
participated in the 2011 social justice protests in Israel (the
equivalent of the 15M movement or Occupy Wall Street). During this
decade, and particularly during the Covid-19 pandemic, anarchist
collectives in Haifa organized mutual aid projects and food distribution
during the lockdown. In recent years, young anti-Zionist Jews have
joined the Palestinian anarchist group Fauda, fostering cooperation
between Arab and Jewish activists against apartheid in Palestine.
Currently, there are few anarchist groups operating in Israel with an
anti-Zionist program capable of forming a hegemonic movement. And other
radical movements also largely fail to question Israel's nationalist and
racist character. However, in the protests that have been taking place
in Israel for the past two years, an "Anti-Apartheid Bloc" has formed,
with hundreds of activists demanding an end to the crimes committed in
Palestine, and a movement against military service in Israel.
Of particular note is Ilan Shalif, an Israeli anarcho-communist who
originally participated in Matzpen, also supported Anarchists Against
the Wall, and in the last decade attempted to promote Ahdut (translated
as "Unity"), an anarchist-communist collective. He currently maintains
that to stop Zionism, an internationalist and anti-imperialist force
must be formed against the Israeli elites; and that the Palestinian
cause is part of the struggle of the Global South against colonialist
projects.
Ángel Malatesta, militant of Liza, Anarchist Platform.
https://regeneracionlibertaria.org/2025/10/29/apuntes-historicos-del-antisionismo-entre-la-comunidad-judia/
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