From ‘War Commentary, For Anarchism’, Mid-April, 1944, London, UK

Zionism has become reactionary because instead of being a scheme for immigration, as many at first thought it would be, it became a scheme for colonization, and therefore of imperialism. If there are now differences between imperialism and the more impatient nationalists, we may see it parallelled in South Africa in the struggle between Smuts and imperialism on the one hand and Malan and the Afrikaander Nazis on the other, who certainly cannot be termed “progressive” by their “friends at court”.

We hear many voices in this country urging that the scheme for a totalitarian Zionist State in Palestine should be helped to succeed because it would assist the Jewish people to a homeland of their own. It is pointed out that in so vast a portion of the world they are persecuted and need a haven of refuge. With this we are not disposed to agree, for these plans are suggested for after the war, when presumably it is taken for granted that persecution and anti-semitism will continue. This may well be the case, but it is the duty of all to prevent this state of affairs by making the social revolution that will end persecution for all peoples, which is not only a more humane, but an easier, task, than rooting thousands and millions from their native homelands and settling them in a few miles of desert knowing full well of the dissension of those already there.

The greatness of the Jewish people never made itself manifest when it was an imperialism, a compact tribe of warriors inspired with the idea of a God personally responsible for fighting its battles against all the nations of the world, framing severe penal codes for itself and despising the rest of the world. Nor was it manifest in the years it was constricted to the ghetto and forced into trade and usury. Its greatness came with the Diaspora, in its spreading civilisation amongst the nations; most of all when the French Revolution broke down all barriers, and its apostles of freedom arose like Heine who were cosmopolitans and not narrow nationalists. Fortunately no Revisionist racial bar prevented Freud, Spinoza, Zamenhof, Mendelssohn, Einstein, Marx and others from merging their gifts among the nations.

Palestine Riots

From ‘War Commentary, For Anarchism’, Mid-April, 1944, London, UK

Trouble is once again threatened in the “Holy Land”. It is reported that members of the “Hagana”, the illegal New Zionist movement of “Revisionists” (Jewish Fascist organisation which claims some 70,000 members) are carrying out secret military manoeuvres in the desert by the Dead Sea, and their extremists are once more active.

The list of explosions and attacks in the past few weeks cannot be overlooked. It seems as if the extreme Zionist nationalists hope to provoke Arab-Jewish disturbances during the occasion of the Passover holidays, in order to rally the Jewish community there to their fascist programme.

Liberals in this country and more especially in America seem quite inept at realising the essentially fascist nature of the Revisionists, though it could not be clearer if they had used the name and done with it. Only the association elsewhere of fascism and anti-semitism prevents that. Apart from being a secret military organisation that drills its members in preparation for the taking over of power; apart from being extremely nationalistic and desiring a State in which one race only shall be the herrenvolk, the Revisionists have a completely totalitarian programme, and though they have long since forsworn their earlier praise of Mussolini, the imprint of fascism bears itself upon their reason for existence, their aims for getting power, and the manner in which they propose to run their State.

Many British soldiers have seen this in the past few years; without necessarily being supporters of British imperialism themselves they have marvelled at the nature of this opposition, imagining fascism could not originate among even the reactionaries of a race that had suffered so much from it in other forms. It is not progressive anti-imperialism that impels the Revisionists to attempt to bar from synagogues Jewish soldiers in the British Army, as has happened in some instances, according to the tales of soldiers arriving home. Even “Christianity” does not go that far!

In the struggle between British imperialism and Revisionism there is no choice we can make. Nor do we support the bourgeois Arab nationalists, forever safeguarding their own position without considering the interests of the masses: who bargain away Arab lands with the richer Jewish community and hope to get it back by political jerrymandering with the authorities.