The Left, Zionism and Israel, 1897–2014

Debates over the national rights of the Jewish people have exercised thinkers and parties associated with the Left from the mid-19th century onwards. This trend strengthened with the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948. Despite once offering unyielding support, since 1967 the major source of political and ideological hostility to the world's only Jewish state has largely emanated from the Left.

Today, too, most of the Western support for the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement also comes from individuals and groups who identify with the political Left. Indeed it is sometimes assumed that there has always been a natural affinity between progressive politics and support for hardline Palestinian nationalism. This view is badly mistaken.

In this opening chapter we show that the Left has always held a wide spectrum of ideas concerning the Zionist ideal, the legitimacy of a Jewish national homeland and the precise means of solving the near-century-long conflict in Israel/Palestine.

To be sure, many progressive groups ridiculed Theodore Herzl's pioneering formation of the Zionist movement in 1897, and strongly opposed Britain's 1917 Balfour Declaration proposing the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine. But equally, many leading Left figures supported both Jewish settlement and the Zionist goal of creating a Jewish state in mandatory Palestine. Later, almost the entire international Left, whether communist or social democratic, supported the creation of Israel in 1948.

Left support for Zionism and Israel has declined significantly since Israel's victory in the 1967 Six-Day War and its ongoing occupation of Palestinian territories. However, today there exists a substantial difference between the majority of Left groups, which favour a two-state solution and reject the West Bank settlement project, and the minority of anti-Zionist fundamentalists who would seek to deny Israel's very existence. As we shall see, it is mainly the latter group who endorse the full agenda of the BDS movement.

Left attitudes to Zionism pre-1948

Prior to World War One, the international socialist movement was not sympathetic to Zionism. Major figures such as Lenin, Stalin and the influential Czech-German Marxist theoretician Karl Kautsky were all strong critics of the Zionist movement. In general terms, this opposition reflected the Left's hostility to any form of distinctive Jewish national or group identity, whether in its Zionist or Bundist (a secular, socialist European movement founded in the late 19th century that emphasised the common culture of the Jewish people and Yiddish language) forms.

Opposition to Zionism existed for a number of reasons. First, from a philosophical point of view, Zionism was viewed as a counter- revolutionary force that allegedly abandoned the struggle for Jewish rights in Europe, and instead ceded victory to right-wing anti-Semites who wished to rid Europe of the so-called 'Jewish question' by forced emigration. By contrast, the Left believed that the global triumph of socialism would end all forms of racial hatred including anti-Semitism.

A second argument reflected self-interest. Most European left-wing groups included a significant number of Jewish members whose activism was seen as vital to the success of the class struggle, whether social democratic or communist in trajectory.

A third, ostensibly practical, argument held that Zionism had little chance of success given the extent of Arab hostility towards a Jewish homeland in their midst and later the perceived perfidy of British imperialism. A review of Herzl's 1896 book The Jewish State in the German Socialist press, for example, described the plan to create a Jewish State in Palestine as 'bizarre' and 'utopian'. Another late 19th-century socialist writer dismissed the Zionist project as 'a movement created by a nucleus of romantic intellectuals by which a nation that is no longer living presents itself for the last time on the scene of history before disappearing definitively'.

It should also be remembered that at this time the Zionist movement enjoyed the support of only a small minority of Jews, such as the European activists of the Poale Zion socialist–labour organisation and Herzl's liberal grouping. The chief opposition came from the Jewish Labour Bund centred in Poland which viewed labour Zionism as a potentially significant rival for the allegiance of the Jewish working class. The Bund opposed Zionism as a reactionary diversion from the task of fighting anti-Semitism and defending Jewish rights in the diaspora.

But anti-Zionism was also influential within mainstream Jewish establishment groups, religious (Orthodox and reform) or otherwise secular. Many Jews appear to have regarded Zionism as an extremist movement with utopian, if not politically dangerous, objectives. They feared that support for the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine would provoke dangerous accusations of dual loyalties. Additionally, there were other competing non-territorial Jewish nationalist movements that demanded national autonomy within existing European states. Some religious Jews did not believe in, and remain opposed to, the idea of Jews establishing a form of government in the Land of Israel without the divinely inspired intervention of a Messiah (Moshiach).

Yet even at this early time there was a socialist exception to the anti-Zionist orthodoxy. The source was the Sozialistische Monatshefte, the magazine of the German revisionist socialists, which was ideologically opposed to the orthodox Marxism espoused by the leading theoretical journal of German social democracy, Die Neue Zeit. This revisionist magazine, which was published by an East Prussian Jew, Josef Bloch, critiqued the Left's assimilationist perspective, recognised Jewish national rights, and published positive reports of Zionist communal settlements in Palestine.

The issuing of the Balfour Declaration in 1917 during World War One and the establishment of the British mandate over Palestine provoked a major increase in Jewish support for the aims of Zionism. It also impacted positively on key sections of the socialist movement, which now viewed Zionism as a practical movement with some prospect of success. Additionally, the horrific pogroms perpetrated upon Eastern European Jews during and immediately following the Bolshevik Revolution of the same year demonstrated to many European socialists that anti-Semitism could not suddenly be eliminated by revolution or cultural assimilation.

To be sure, the Bolsheviks and subsequently the Soviet Union and the Communist International (later known as the Comintern) consistently opposed Zionism on...