Zionism and anti-Semitism Writeback

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nung's review of Tony Greenstein's pamphlet "Zionism - antisemitism in Jewish Garb' was almost as bad as the pamphlet itself. Both present a picture of Zionism as an evil conspir acy rather than as tragic ill. usion; their accounts have more in common with demonology than with Marxis the version lhe version of history they offer is of Zionism as a consciously reactionary group, seeking actively promote antisemitism, work together emites, and suppress Jew. ish resistance in order to achieve their aims.

For Greenstein and Horung, Zionists have alway ined up with anti-socialis TorceS. Aliindcalot. au evidence that there were contradictions in Zionism, that there was any more to it than this, are resolutely ignored. Thus, from Greenstein we don't learn about the left Zionists who fought side by side with Bolsheviks in the Russian Civil War [mentioned by Irotsky] or the Zionists who went from Palestine to fight in defence of the Spanish Republic.

And while we are told a lot about Zionist 'collaboration' with the Nazis, we hear nothing of the zionists who organised Jewish partisan groups in the forest. and ghettos of Poland including zionists from Palestine like Hannah Senesh who were parachuted into Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe specifically to organise Jewish resistance.

Zionist coraboration bout Nazis is based on: 1 Quotes from Nazi sources [hardly reliable on Jewish matters anyway], all some years before the Nazis decided on extermination as the 'final solution to the Jewish problem'. 2 The desperate behaviour of Jews faced with mass extermination. To argue that this is evidence of sinister conspiratorial deals between antisemitic Nazis and antisemitic Zionists is quite simply sick.

Moreover, there is hardly an indication as to the orig. ins and mass appeal of Zionism.

Both Greenstein and Comrade Hornung seem to want to obscure the fact that Zionism grew up among Jewish communities of Eastern Europe faced with a degree of murderous persecution almost unique to European history. Fifty years before Hitler, mass slaughter of Jews was a regular occurrence in Eastern Europe.

Thus Pinsker's 'AutoEmancipation', , quoted by Greenstein as evidence of Zionist racism towards non-jews, appeared in 1882, as a response to the Kishinev and Odessa pogroms, in which literally thousands of Jews were murdered. Greenstein ignores this. In the absence of this context, Zionism must indeed seem like a conspiracy.

Greenstein ignores the way in which the failure of the labour movement to fight antisemitism, and the support given to immigration controls by socialists anxious to prevent Jewish refugees from coming to Britain, lent plausibility to Zionist arguments.

Finally, Comrade Hornung takes Greenstein to task for ignoring the last ten years of Zionism. A similar complaint might be made agianst his own aceount of antisemitism.

Over the last few years, Jewish people have been killed all over Europe, sometimes by so-called 'communist' groups, acting in the name of anti-zionism. Fascist antisemites have made "Zionist conspiracies' a central part of their world view, and argued that anti-Jewish racism must be balanced against 'Jewish In order for convincingly claim to Jews that we, are anti-zionists and not antisemites, we have to fight hardest against real antisemitism. We have to purge our writing of comments which have the rhetorical flavour of antisemites. We have to understand sympathetically the Jews and aspirations of Jews. In his review Comrade Andrew Hornung fails to do all these things.

Jeremy Green [member of the Jewish • Socialists Groupl s Dear S.0,

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