The journey of an anti-Zionist Jew: If I Am Not For Myself: Mike Marquesee: Review - PR9

Verso / 2008 / £16.99

When more than one hundred Jewish anti-Zionists had a letter published in the Guardian recently stating that, for them, the 60th anniversary of the establishment of the Israeli state was nothing to celebrate, they were assailed on all sides. The Israeli Ambassador to London called for their “ostracism”. One signatory, Haim Beresheeth, an activist in the Academic Boycott campaign received a Zionist post calling him a “kike” a virulently anti-Semitic term of abuse equivalent to “nigger” or “paki”.

One of the most frequent questions Zionists ask Jewish anti-Zionists is ‘what makes you Jewish’ as if a precondition of being Jewish is either an attachment to religious superstition or an idolatorous, state worship. Mike meets this head on at the beginning of the book, “According to both anti-semites and Zionists, I am objectively a Jew and will be a Jew whatever I believe or practice. For this reason the Nazis would have marked me out for persecution and extermination, and Israel marks me out as a potential recipient of privileges, a rightful inheritor of others’ land and resources …. my Jewishness is far more than the sum of others’ perceptions. It’s a locale where the self intersects with history, past and present.”

This book is therefore more than welcome. When I first set out 40 years ago as a Jewish anti-Zionist there were no role models. I felt alone, except for a handful of revolutionary socialists, most of whom avoided the question of Palestine. One of the most gratifying things today is just how many Jews are rejecting Zionism and taking an active part in campaigns such as that for a Boycott of Israel.

That Jewish identity, far from consisting of the Zionist myth of 2,000 years longing to ‘return’ to Palestine was at various times an anti-racist and socialist identity. It was the identity of young Jewish activists, such as Mike’s father, who went to Mississippi in 1964 to provide practical solidarity with Black people fighting against the Jim Crow laws and segregation.

Jewish identity included the fight of the Bund – the General Jewish Workers Union of Russia and Poland – in their fight against the pogromists and fascists. As Mike points out, from 1881 to 1914, when two million Jews emigrated from the Czarist empire, just 2% (45,000), chose to go to Palestine. For most Jews the “Promised Land” was the United States of America not Palestine.

It is unfortunate therefore that the majority of the book is taken up by a biography of Marqusee’s maternal grandfather, E V Morand. He is a good example of how a commitment to Zionism was in complete contradiction to socialism and working class solidarity. Morand was a labour activist who started off in the Tammany Hall wing of New York’s Democratic Party and ended up as one of the founders and stalwarts of the American Labour Party, the most successful left party in the US since Eugene Deb’s Socialist Party.

Morand was a committed anti-racist and militant anti-fascist at a time when Father Coughlin, the rabidly anti-Semitic Catholic priest was active. He was scathing about Bnai Brith (a Jewish community organisation) and its passive attitude to fighting anti-Semitism. Morand was also involved in campaigns such as the Scottsborough Boys, a group of young black men who became a cause celebre who were falsely accused of rape and who faced execution after being convicted by an all-white jury in Alabama.

Morand was also close to the American Communist Party. To the end he was a bitter opponent of McCarthyism, unlike the Jewish establishment. For him “Jewish identity had become a progressive essence, aligned with the cause of democracy, of America, of the Popular Front, of labor, of all victims of discrimination.” But Morand, like so many American Jews, capitulated to Zionist chauvinism, supporting a Jewish Palestine, oblivious of its effect on the indigenous population. Indeed when concern began to be expressed about the Palestinian refugees, Morand described it as just “another British ruse.” (p.208) In the wake of the Nazi holocaust, the Palestinians had become “a Nazi-like enemy”. To Morand, Jewish anti-Zionists “were the lowest of the low” (p.186).

Morand even argued that Israel “has the right to anticipate aggression and strike first to prevent a full-scale war” (p.191) anticipating its attacks against neighbouring states by half a century. Marqusee cites anti-Zionist Rabbi Elmer Berger who noted how his fellow Reform rabbis condemned the Vietnam War at the same time as they engaged in “the usual pretexts to justify Israeli militarism.”

Marqusee also recalls how Tony Cliff, leader of the International Socialists who came from Palestine, described “the beating of Arabs, throwing of petrol on the products of the fellaheen (peasants) who dare to offer their wares to Jewish customers and similar acts are everyday occurrences.” It could have been added that this was the action of the ‘socialist’ Zionists. Zionism, a variant of Jewish bourgeois politics, was capable of turning genuine radicals like Marqusee’s grandfather into foaming bigots.

Unfortunately Marqusee doesn’t make the obvious point that his grandfather illustrated the contradiction between being Jewish in a non-Jewish society, with social, political and economic interests of one’s own and being a Zionist, i.e. accepting a priori that one didn’t belong in non-Jewish society.

Morand was a passionate anti-fascist, he railed against immigration controls against Jews and demanded that the survivors of the Holocaust living in Displaced Persons camps be allowed to enter the US. Yet he was a supporter of the Zionist movement which vigorously opposed lowering the immigration barriers to Europe’s Jews, both during and after the war, and which saw the fight against fascism as useless, seeing anti-Semitism as a product of Jewish ‘homelessness’.

Marqusee’s parents too were both left-wingers, former members of the Communist Party who buckled under the McCarthyite inquisition. One of the formative events in Mike’s life was listening to a young Israeli soldier giving a talk and telling fellow pupils that Arabs went to the toilet in the street. Aged 14, Mike concluded that Israel too was a racist imperial state. But when he told his father this he barked out “enough already” and concluded that Mike had some Jewish self-hatred in him. Years later, after the massacre of two thousand Palestinians in the Sabra and Shatilla refugee camps in Beirut, by Israel’s friends the Phalangists, his father phoned him to say that Mike had been right after all.

There is much to recommend in this book, such as its emphasis on the fact that Zionism is a passing historical phenomenon and not the culmination of Diaspora Jewry’s existence. Particularly moving is his description of the attacks on anti-fascist Dorothy Parker, who could see no reason why, if she had opposed anti-Semitism, she should then turn a blind eye to racism simply because it came from Jews.

Likewise his description of the Prophets is well worth reading since Zionism prefers stories of Joshua and his slaughter of every man, woman and suckling child, to the prophets who “nearly all set themselves in opposition to the existing state, often not only warning of but wishing for its destruction.”

The most amusing section of the book is where Marqusee describes the different responses of anti-Zionist Jews to the charge of self-hatred. The humorist Larry David would quip that he might hate himself, but it wasn’t on account of being Jewish! Anti-Zionist historian Lenni Brenner’s response was that his ex-lovers would testify that the last thing he could be accused of was hating himself, whereas an unnamed activist had a simpler response – “I don’t hate myself. I hate you, you fucking bastard.”

The chapter on Diasporic Dimensions and the Moroccan Jewish community is well worth reading, as is his analogies between the dilemmas of the early Jewish communities in the USA and Britain and that of British Muslims today.

But Mike also demonstrates that his reformist politics have influenced his anti-Zionist politics. He refers to the oft-repeated question “Why should Jews be the only people denied the right to national self-determination?” and he then embarks on a tortuous explanation as to why the Kurds and the Tamils should not be allowed to form a separate state because in so doing, it would create difficulties with those who live alongside them and therefore throw up “awkward questions.” He even points to the Afrikaners and Zulus as an example of nations denied the right to self-determination as a reason for denying Jews this self-same right.

The obvious response to the above question would be that the Jews, just like the Afrikaners and Zulus do not form a separate nation. How, other than on a metaphysical level, can British, Argentinean, Indian and Yemenite Jews be considered part of the same nation? They neither speak the same language nor occupy the same territory. Even their religious customs differ. Likewise the Afrikaners whilst having, like the Israeli Jews, certain national characteristics, formed their identity primarily as a result of the oppression of others. The Zulus were only a nation in so far as Apartheid divide and rule allowed and promoted it. Mike forgets the words of one of the leaders of the French Revolution, Clermont-Tonnere that he quotes, that “everything must be refused to the Jews as a nation and everything granted to them as individuals.” (p.72).

Marxists have always accepted that nations such as the Kurds and the Tamils do have the right to self-determination, including forming a state if they so wished. We do not encourage separation from other peoples, but to oppose the right to form such a state would be to advocate national oppression. Instead, Mike Marqusee argues that the right to national self-determination depends on what type of nationalism it is: “The measurement must be – as for all other nationalisms – the democratic content of the national demand and the national identity in question.” (p.29) But this is gobbledegook. Yes the nationalism of Garibaldi was democratic, but 50 years later that same Italian nationalism threw up Mussolini. This is in the nature of nationalism. Its progressive phase is very short-lived as the property interests of the bourgeoisie surface.

The chapter on Diasporic Dimensions and the Morrocan Jewish community is well worth reading as are his analogies between the dilemmas of the early Jewish communities in the USA and Britain and that of British Muslims today. But the book suffers from a lack of rigorous analysis. It may be considered offensive by some to have a placard making a stark equation between the swastika and the Star of David but it’s not anti-Semitic. Likewise Marqusee’s statement that “for 2000 years the Jews have been persecuted as the crucifiers of Christ.” is in itself part of Zionist mythology. In the words of Abram Leon, it is an example of the Zionist tendency to transpose anti-Semitism to all of history as a means of avoiding analysing its different forms and stages.

Mike writes with passion as when he excoriates “the blindness of the majority of American and British Jews to the criminality of Israeli behaviour toward the Palestinians”. (p. 271) But the book is too ambitious and falls between two stools. It is a book whose whole is rather less than the sum of its parts.

Sat 04, October 2008 @ 13:12