Below are excerpts from the first chapter by Dave Prince in The Fight Against Jew-Hatred and Pogroms in the Imperialist Epoch: Stakes for the International Working Class. Copyright © 2024 by Pathfinder Press. Reprinted by permission.
In the years leading up to and during World War II, the dominant imperialist powers slammed the doors on all but marginal Jewish immigration. That was the course of Washington and London, led by Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Winston Churchill, and followed by the ruling classes of Canada, Australia, and others.
In the aftermath of the war — after Hitler’s genocidal extermination of 40 percent of the world Jewish population, six million human beings — the imperialist victors in Washington and London kept their own borders shut tight for three more years. They pushed more than 250,000 Jewish survivors into barely livable “displaced persons” camps in the defeated European countries of Germany, Austria, and Italy.
Where were the Jews to go?
Prospects for an extension of the socialist revolution in Europe were betrayed by the Stalinist regime and its national Communist Parties. … Proletarian victories in one or more of those countries could have stopped the human catastrophe of the Second World War. …
Israel became inevitable as a refuge for the Jews. But not a solution to Jew-hatred or pogroms. There is no safe haven for Jews in the imperialist epoch, anywhere in the world.
Defense of Israel’s right to exist is based on that history. It is a country that offers sanctuary to Jews, anywhere, anytime, in face of persecution and violence.
Only under such conditions will working people in Israel and the region — of Jewish, Palestinian, and other national origins — have the political space to build mutual trust and unity in common struggle. And such class solidarity, in turn, opens the road to forging a communist party, a proletarian party, capable of leading the working class and its oppressed and exploited allies toward a socialist revolution. …
The deepest abhorrence of the October 7 pogrom is found in the working class in the United States and elsewhere. It is there — not among privileged professionals and the middle classes, or on university campuses, where Jew-hatred is flourishing today — that communist workers find the greatest openness to the fight against the persecution of Jews. It is among working people that communists get a hearing on why the stakes for the labor movement in fighting Jew-hatred and pogroms are so great.