Message from Joanne Kuniansky, Socialist Workers Party candidate for governor of New Jersey, to July 11 rally in Washington, D.C.
The Socialist Workers Party calls for unconditional recognition of Israel as a homeland for Jews. We urge unions and all organizations of workers and the oppressed to join actions like today’s rally to protest growing antisemitic violence and bigotry in the U.S. and elsewhere.
Establishment of the state of Israel was made inevitable by the Holocaust, with the slaughter of some 6 million Jews, and refusal by the capitalist rulers in Washington, London and elsewhere to open their borders to Jews seeking to flee Nazi persecution both before and during the second imperialist world war and then its horrific aftermath. Israel has existed as a refuge for targets of Jewhatred for almost 75 years.
“There is nothing that compares to the Holocaust,” said Cuban revolutionary leader Fidel Castro in a 2010 interview in Atlantic magazine. Political figures across the Middle East should acknowledge “the ‘unique’ history of antisemitism” and try “to understand why Israelis fear for their existence,” he said. We agree with these words by the central leader of Cuba’s socialist revolution, which is an example for working people everywhere.
The Socialist Workers Party combats Jew-hatred as we organize to help lead the working class to take political power into our own hands and establish a workers and farmers government. Making a socialist revolution here and worldwide will open the door to fight to end all forms of capitalist exploitation and oppression once and for all.
Today we see acts of Jew-hatred both from rightists and middle-class liberals and radicals. On the left there are actions raising the Hamas slogan, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”— free of Jews, they mean. We urge working people to oppose these actions as a deadly danger to advancing the class interests and solidarity of all workers and toiling farmers in the Middle East — Jews, Palestinians, Arabs, Kurds and others.
At times of rising economic and social crisis, the capitalist rulers resort to antisemitism to scapegoat Jews and divert ruined middle-class layers and demoralized workers away from the class struggle. As we said in a 1938 resolution, the year we took the name Socialist Workers Party, class-conscious workers have “the duty of exposing the real aims of the capitalists, hidden behind the smoke-screen of anti-Semitism and thereby inoculating the masses against the poison,” as well as “mobilizing the real defense of the persecuted Jews, a defense of necessity based on the might of the organized working class.”
That remains our guide today.