This is a shortened version of the talk given by Jonathan Silberman at the “Contemporary Antisemitism” conference in Haifa, Israel, July 7-9. Silberman is director of Pathfinder Books in London and a leader of the Communist League in the U.K.
Jew-hatred and violence have been integral to the imperialist order, its crises and wars — from the end of the 19th century and costing the lives of 6 million Jews during the Holocaust. It will cost more.
Grasping this allows us to understand what’s necessary in combating contemporary antisemitism, and the threat today to Israel’s very existence as a refuge for Jews.
Hamas, whose Oct. 7, 2023, pogrom and its war on Israel in collusion with Tehran and its misnamed “axis of resistance,” must be defeated and dismantled. And Israel’s fight to prevent Tehran from acquiring nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles must be championed.
That’s decisive for Jews and for all working people. Victory will lay the ground for oppressed peoples in the Middle East of whatever ethnicity or religion to engage together in mighty revolutionary battles that can open the road to resolving the national aspirations not only of Jews, but of Palestinians, the Kurds and all toilers across the Middle East and North Africa.
My remarks focus on British imperialism — how the interests of Britain’s ruling capitalist families, not defense of the Jews, has always been, and remains, the axis of U.K. government policy in the Middle East.
This goes against the claim that London has long been a friend to the Jews, for which then Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour’s 1917 Declaration is invariably cited as “proof.” But his promise of a “national home” for the Jews in Palestine has never framed U.K. policy. Nor has Britain’s contrary promise made to landholding and emerging capitalist Arab leaders of a greater Arab nation, including Palestine.
Coming out of World War I, the Middle East was carved up between London and Paris in the secret Sykes-Picot deal, only made public by the victorious V.I. Lenin-led Bolshevik government in Russia.
It’s an important lesson. Pay less attention to what capitalist political leaders and governments say or promise, and more to what they do.
When the League of Nations handed the Palestine “mandate” to the U.K. in 1922, London used it to secure a “Pax Britannica” in the region, a “peace” of plunder and exploitation.
- It appointed Amin al-Husseini as Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Palestine’s most important political and religious post. This rich landowner and vile Jew-hater led pogroms in Palestine in 1920, 1921, 1929 and 1936. Then in Baghdad in 1941. From there he decamped to Berlin to join Hitler and the Nazis in World War II.
- Building on the 1905 Aliens Act, which limited entry to the U.K. of Jews fleeing pogroms in czarist Russia — also Balfour’s work — successive governments reduced Jewish immigration to a trickle.
- Thousands of Jews fleeing Nazi terror and Holocaust survivors after the war, were blocked by British armed forces from entering Palestine, detained and returned to miserable barbed-wire-fenced “Displaced Persons Camps” in Germany, Austria and Italy — or internment camps in Cyprus and Mauritius.
- Winston Churchill’s wartime government — well aware of the Nazis’ extermination course by Spring 1942 — rejected repeated calls to bomb the railway lines to the death camps.
At every step, London opposed the establishment of Israel.
Before the war, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain declared it’s better to “offend the Jews rather than the Arabs.” He was loyally acting for the U.K.’s rulers who saw their future tied to the sheiks, the Arab landlords and capitalists and their oil, and their regimes.
The postwar Labour government of Clement Atlee deployed 100,000 troops and police to Palestine and appointed Gen. Bernard Montgomery to lead the assault against the Jews. It backed the 1948 war against the fledgling Jewish state, channeling weaponry and intelligence to the invading Arab armies. It made Transjordan’s Arab Legion the most effective among them, providing troops and their battle commander, British Army Gen. John Bagot Glubb.
The U.K. only recognized Israel in April 1950, two years after it was established, and a year after its admission into the U.N.
The victor in the second imperialist world war, Washington, pushed the U.K. aside in the Middle East. But whether Pax Britannica or Pax Americana holds sway, imperialism has always acted at the expense of the Jews and of Israel.
What of the Balfour Declaration?
Note that the declaration was issued in 1917. The capitalist rulers in the U.K. hoped the declaration would win Jews in Russia away from the Bolsheviks.
London feared a victorious socialist revolution and the example it would set for working people internationally — including in the U.K.
Winston Churchill spelled it out in his article “Zionism vs. Bolshevism.” The majority of Bolshevik leaders are Jews, Churchill wrote. From the days of “Karl Marx, and down to Trotsky (Russia), Bela Kun (Hungary), Rosa Luxemburg (Germany) and Emma Goldman (United States), this worldwide conspiracy for the overthrow of civilization … has been steadily growing.”
The British rulers acted accordingly, spearheading the 1918 military invasion by 14 capitalist powers against Soviet Russia, backing the royalist “White Armies.” That these counterrevolutionary forces massacred over 100,000 Jews never stood in the way.
But the Bolsheviks, led by Lenin, acted decisively to draw the millions of workers and peasants to join the fight against Jew-hatred.
As the Bolsheviks led Russia’s workers and peasants, they promoted Jewish self-defense against attacks by the czarist police and reactionary Black Hundreds. They explained why the fight against Jew-hatred was in the interests of all the toilers. No nationality in Russia is so oppressed as the Jews, Lenin said. “It’s not the Jews who are the enemies of the working people — it’s the capitalists.”
Following the revolutionary victory, the Bolshevik-led government drew Jews into social life, encouraged a flowering of Jewish culture in Yiddish and appointed as the first head of the new state, Yakov Sverdlov — a Jew! They put an end to the pogroms.
So strong was Lenin’s leadership in combating Jew-hatred that, during the civil war, the counterrevolutionaries routinely referred to the Bolsheviks as the “Yid Party.” The Whites circulated an infamous poster depicting Red Army Commander Leon Trotsky as a Jewish devil.
After Lenin’s death, this Bolshevik continuity was defended by Trotsky in the face of the Stalin-led counterrevolution that revived antisemitic poison.
This history is recounted in Pathfinder’s The Fight Against Jew-Hatred and Pogroms in the Imperialist Epoch: Stakes for the International Working Class. Over the last couple of years this title has been a top seller as members of the Communist League take it and the Militant to discuss the key questions confronting the working class with their workmates, join picket lines, build social protests and go door to door in working-class neighborhoods.
Antisemitism need not be eternal. There is a course to eradicating Jew-hatred. Not by looking to the U.K. or any “democratic” imperialist power for a solution. Rather, by building proletarian parties to lead hundreds of millions to fight for workers power, uproot exploitation by capital, end all national oppression, and build a socialist world.