anti-zionism

In October 1979, while he was locked up by the Hassan II government in the Kenitra prison, the Jewish Moroccan Marxist thinker and organiser Abraham Serfaty wrote a text about one of his main political educators, Abdellatif Zeroual, who had died under torture 5 years earlier. Serfaty had been arrested, alongside Abdellatif Lâabi, in 1972, because of his involvement in the Marxist-Leninist organisation Ilal al-Amam [Forward]. The two men were only freed in 1991. One of the lessons Zeroual had taught him, Serfaty writes, was the meaning of concrete proletarian internationalism. This meant that while the task of the Moroccan Left was to organise the Revolution within the Moroccan borders, this task was never to be detached from the broader Arab Revolution.[1] This lesson would remain central to Serfaty’s theory and praxis. Indeed, as an Arab Jew, he attached a great importance throughout his life to the national question as an important component of the wider international struggle.

This piece is being made available as a preprint edition of the double-volume Marxism and the Critique of Antisemitism special issue of Historical Materialism. Further additions will still be made before then. The final published version of this text will be made available on the Brill website in the coming months. We ask that citations refer to the Brill edition.All Illustrations are by Natalia Podpora.

Born in 1926 in Casablanca – a city about which he wrote a study in 1988[2] – in a Jewish family, Serfaty entered the Moroccan Communist Party, which was led by another key figure among Arab Jewish Communists – the Algerian born Léon-René Sultan –, as soon as 1944. Later, during a stay in France, he also entered the French Communist Party (PCF), of which he was a member from 1945 to 1949. It was during World War II that Serfaty had his main political education. Indeed, while the antisemitic laws of the Vichy Regime targeted Moroccan Jews, Serfaty’s anticolonialism crystallised. As Alma Rachel Heckman writes: “Figures such as Abraham Serfaty represented a new generation of Moroccan Jews whose political consciousness had been shaped by the war years.”[3] Indeed, it is worth nothing that Serfaty was no exception and that a number of important Arab Communists were Jewish, such as the already mentioned Léon-René Sultan, or the anticolonial communist activist Edmond Amran El Maleh, who worked closely with Palestinians throughout his life.

While being a member of the Moroccan Communist Party, Serfaty did not follow the PCF’s conciliatory line regarding colonialism and national independence and committed himself to the struggle for Moroccan independence. Serfaty got a diploma in engineering from the famous French University École des Mines and reflected a lot on issues of development and on the continuity of neo-colonial economic relations in Morocco. While he could have chosen a convenient career as an engineer, he chose the political path and struggled against the poor conditions of the Moroccan working class (e.g.: he supported the miners’ strikes in Morocco).

Serfaty was also interested in a range of international issues beyond Morocco’s borders, such as the revolutions in Vietnam, China, or Cuba. Even if it would be worthwhile to write a whole article about his anti-imperialist and proletarian commitment, we will focus here on a particular issue at stake in Serfaty’s involvement: his political reflections on the relationship between Palestinian liberation, Zionism and the “Jewish Question”. In the text that follows, Letter to the Damned of Israel (published in 1982), Serfaty reflects on antisemitism, anti-Zionism, as well as on the oppression of both Palestinians and Jews by Zionism. Insofar as this Historical Materialism issue is organised around the question of Marxism and Antisemitism, this article is key for several reasons:

• Beyond his anti-imperialism, the issue of Zionism was crucial for Serfaty as a Jew – and connected to his fight against antisemitism. His reflections on Zionism were significant because they helped him to think about the meaning of Arab-Jewishness, the specificity of the social conditions of Arab Jews, and their specific class position within the Israeli society.
• He considered Zionism as a specifically European phenomenon and perceived Arab Jews as a potential internal threat to Zionism.
• This focus on Serfaty’s political thinking is crucial in order to avoid erasing Arab-Jews from Jewish history and from the analysis of antisemitism – or to confuse them into a “universal” Jewish people (which tends to means, in practice, to collapse them into the history of European Jews).

As such, Serfaty’s relationship to Zionism, as well as the fact that his being Arab and his Jewishness played a role in his harsh critique of Zionism – a critique grounded on Jewish texts as well as on the tradition of Arab Judaism – can help us to bring an different perspective to some of the issues raised by today's political debates on anti-imperialism, as well as on the connection between Antisemitism and Zionism. As such, the main question that will guide this introduction to Serfaty’s text is to understand to what extent Serfaty understood “identity” as a social category instead of as an abstract and individualist category – not only the “Jewish identity” of Arab Jews in Israel but also their identity as Arabs. 

While the question of “identity politics” is often dismissed by the European and US radical Lefts, Serfaty’s political reflections on these issues can offer some important contributions to our understanding of the intimate connection between issues of “identity” (Arab and Jewish in this case), anticolonial struggles, and class struggle. Indeed, Serfaty’s understanding of “identity” had nothing to do with many contemporary understandings of this concept. Because “Jews”, “Arabs”, “Sahraouis”, etc. were racialized both by the colonial power and the colonial social structures, their “identity” was built on such a racialization. This is exactly why, as we will see, Serfaty did not conceptualise “Jewish identity” as a universal one, but speaks instead of “European Jews” and “Arab Jews” – the social situation of the latter being very different because of its origins within colonial social conditions. Hence, according to Serfaty, “in the countries of the third world – and this is especially true in Arab countries – one cannot dissociate the problem of the class struggle from the question of identity”.[4] From this analysis also emerged Serfaty’s answer to the so-called “Jewish Question”, which he argued was to be found in anti-Zionism, as well as in the history, culture, and class positions of Arab Jews.

Ethnicity and Autonomy: From Sahara to Palestine

As a Moroccan, Serfaty was surrounded by debates touching upon the issues of ethnicity, colonialism, and the need for national autonomy. In 1985, three years after the publication of Letter to the Damned of Israel, while he was in jail, Serfaty had access to Cuban journals thanks to a comrade whose mother was Spanish. In one of these journals, Serfaty read a contribution by a guerrillero from Guatemala who argued that the indigenous question was crucial to the wider revolutionary struggle.[5] While we do not have further information about this specific article, it is clear that his interest in it was part of a wider engagement with the national question, ethnicity, and related questions.

During the same period, Serfaty also read the work of Mikhaël Elbaz, a Jewish Moroccan anthropologist who wrote extensively about Jewish Immigration. Several years later, Serfaty published a book based on discussions he had with Elbaz. In it, Elbaz explains that while he was teaching at Laval University (Quebec) in June 1984, he received a letter from political inmate n°19 559: Abraham Serfaty.[6] In this letter, Serfaty discussed some of Elbaz’s work and asked him about materials in order to continue his reflexion on Arab Jews in Israel. While this correspondent would prove infliential, Serfaty’s interest for national and ethnic questions dates back to several years earlier.

Indeed, already in the early 1970s, Serfaty – along the above-mentioned Lâabi – participated in the building of the Marxist-Leninist Moroccan organisation Ila Al Amam[7] which was the only Moroccan political organisation that explicitly supported the right to self-determination for the Sahraoui people. According to Serfaty, Sahraoui national consciousness was the result of a two-way process:

• The struggle for decolonisation which saw the rise of a common interest – against French colonialism – between Sahraoui tribes and the Moroccan people.
• The post-independence dismantling of the Sahraoui Liberation Army by the Spanish and French armies, with the logistical support of the Moroccan state. This process, called operation “Ecouvillon” [Swab], had the consequence of triggering the mass exile and dispersion of the Sahraoui people. Serfaty compares this 1958 dispersion of Sahraoui people to the 1948 PalestinianNakba. However, he writes, exactly as theNakba, the Sahraoui exile also contains the seeds of the rise of the Sahraoui people as an autonomous, self-aware and organised people.[8] In his marvellous study on the Saharan question, Ahmed-Baba Miské argues that the leader of the pro-monarchist Istiqlal [Independence] party Allal El Fassi played an important role in the Moroccan claims on Sahara, stressing the contradictions that can exist within a national liberation movement, which can struggle against colonialism on the one side (France) and deny the right to autonomy to another people (Sahara) on the other.[9] Serfaty was similarly very aware of this contradiction and argued that a struggle for decolonisation has its own political and social contradictions, and that is not a linear process. As we will see below, the question of contradictions in a colonial situation was critical in Serfaty’s analysis of Arab-Jewishness in Israel.

Based on these analyses, Serfaty was also critical about Pan-Arabism because it ignored the questions of minorities (Sahara, Berber, etc.). While the text presented in this special issue aims to illustrate on Serfaty’s analysis of Zionism and of the “Jewish Question”, his engagement with questions related to national and ethnic minorities remains important in order to grasp Serfaty’s ideas about Arab Jews. In her book The Sultan’s Communist, Alma Rachel Heckman writes that “[i]n the 1960s, Abraham Serfaty, a fellow Jewish Communist, proclaimed his “Arab-Jewish” identity as a way of underscoring his Moroccan patriotism.”[10] Hence, one could say that his criticism of the Moroccan Makhzen [Regime] was deeply influenced by his “Arab-Jewishness”, a social identity that helped him to grasp the issues of minorities within an analysis of the wider social context.

As mentioned previously, Mikhaël Elbaz helped Serfaty to reflect on these questions. In the book they wrote together, based on their epistolary discussions, Serfaty tells Elbaz that the link between ethnicity and class struggle in the Third World was a crucial issue for Moroccan leftists because of the Berber question in Morocco. According to Serfaty, the denial of the Berber reality by national movements in Morocco and in Algeria was one of the main sources for their respective post-independence troubles. Indeed, he argued that because of the French strategy regarding Berber people in Morocco – isolating them from the broader Arab population – the vast majority of the national movement considered the affirmation of the Berber identity as imperialist and complicit with the French colonial power. This was also a point of disagreement between Serfaty and a significant part of the Moroccan Left. For example, in 1958-59, an insurrection in the Moroccan Rif region was suppressed and this repression was backed by every single Moroccan political party, including the Communist Party.

It is in the context of his reflexion about the Arab Nation and its minorities, that Serfaty’s engagement with the disaster that Zionism represented – not only to Palestinians but also to Arab Jews – should be understood. Indeed, he argues that prior to the foundation of Israel there were no problems between Jews and Muslims in Morocco. However, he also rejects the idea that conflicts between Moroccan Jews (some of which were Berbers) and Muslims did not mechanically derive from the foundation of the Zionist state. Rather, they emerged as an effect of the political decisions supported by the Muslim and Jewish Moroccan bourgeoisies. The bourgeoisie and the commercial petite-bourgeoisie saw an opportunity of getting rid of their “poor Jews” – especially the Jewish peasantry of the Atlas Mountains and of South Morocco – who became the favourite target of the Zionist recruiters who were “recruiting” Moroccan Jews in order to send them to Israel.

In his discussion with Elbaz, Serfaty takes the example of a meeting between the Moroccan National Movement and the World Jewish Congress at Aix-les-Bains (France) in August 1955, regarding the departure of 45 000 Moroccan Jews between September 1955 and June 1956. He writes:

The poorest and the most vulnerable became the target of recruiters with the tacit, if not explicit, backing of the bourgeoisie, both Jewish and Muslim, who got rid of this authentic Judaism.[11]

While these Jews were ripped from their land in Amizmiz, in the villages of the Atlas, or in the Moroccan South in the 1950s, the biggest turn came with the 1967 so-called Six Day War. Indeed, Moroccan Jews were ripped from their country in June 1967. This was both due to the promotion of Zionism by the Jewish bourgeoisie of Morocco but also because of the racist politics of the majority of the Muslim bourgeoisie of Morocco who, beginning in 1961, literally “sold” Moroccan Jews to Zionism – in Serfaty’s words. The process of immigration by Moroccan Jews to Israel was, thus, not a simple effect of Zionist policies or propaganda, but a consequence of antisemitism in Morocco – largely promoted by the bourgeoisie. It is worth nothing that this does not mean that the lower classes were free of any prejudices against Jews, but that their ability in influencing the latter’s lives was much more limited. Hence the Zionist project worked hand-in-hand with anti-Semitism in Morocco, an issue to which we return below.

The Social Specificity of Arab-Jewishness

From childhood, Abraham Serfaty’s father had explained to him, especially when going to the synagogue, that Zionism was antithetical to Judaism – an idea that we also find in Letter to the Damned of Israel. But a large part of Serfaty’s reflexion on the Jewish question was developed while he was accompanying his father, who had health issues, in a Parisian clinic, in May 1969. It is in this clinic that Serfaty discovered and read Marxist thinkers that were not discussed in Morocco – he read, for example, Karel Kosik’s Dialectics of the Concrete, as well as Althusser, Ernst Bloch and Lucien Goldmann. It is also during this stay that he really thought about the so-called Jewish Question. In a book written with his wife Christine Daure-Serfaty,La Mémoire de l’Autre [The Other’s Memory], he writes that Kosik,[12] Marx’s text on the Jewish Question, as well as a number of readings on Arab Judaism. helped him to better situate the Jewish Question in Europe on the one hand, as well as Moroccan and Arab Judaism on the other. At that time, he hadn’t read Abraham Léon’s book, On the Jewish Question, which he later considered to be a masterpiece of analysis, whilst also recognising the validity of Maxime Rodinson’s critiques.[13]It is also during this period that Serfaty discovered the work of Emmanuel Levyné, with whom he later exchanged letters, as we will see below.

Serfaty stressed the fact that while Israel was presented as a state founded by “their Jewish brothers”, Zionists were, in reality, the oppressors of Arab Jews and denied the specificity of their identity. Zionism was originally a European ideology, Serfaty writes, and its effect on Arab-Jews was to deny the specificity of their history:

Zionism is contrary to the glorious history, spanning more than a millennium, of Arab and Mediterranean Judaism, which was historically forged in symbiosis with Islam within the Arab civilization.[14]

One of Serfaty’s main ideas was that there is no homogeneous Jewish people – he asked Arab Jews: “Do you form one people with your oppressors?”[15] By oppressors he meant European Zionists. Indeed, he refused to inscribe Arab Judaism in an imagined general History of Jews, with a homogeneous “Jewish subject”.

However, Serfaty did not consider Arab-Jewishness as an abstract identity. The issue of identity was very concrete to him and he criticised the progressive forces that despised engaging with it. Regarding Arab, and more specifically Moroccan, Judaism in the 1950s – the period in which, as we have seen earlier, Zionism ripped Moroccan Jews off from their country – Serfaty categorises poor Moroccan Jews into three main groups:

• A group that is still rooted in a “two thousand year old past”;[16] a past made of peasant communities from the Moroccan mountains. This group is an integral part of arabo-berber society, which forms the deep reality of Maghreb.
• The second group is made up of traditional urban communities – working in small businesses and handicraft.
• The third group consists of the proletariat and semi-proletariat from Casablanca – a product of colonial misery.

Serfaty writes that these groups were organised around two main structures: the Moroccan rabbinate, an older ideological and cultural organisation, and the “Israelites Communities”, a social structure made-up by the colonial power, supported by the middle class and the big bourgeoisies. Hence, Moroccan Jews coming from the lower classes were socially torn between the ancient tradition and organisation of Arab Judaism and another structure shaped by the colonial power and the local bourgeoisie. While the Moroccan rabbinate attempted to struggle against Zionism – which it considered in contradiction with the Jewish religion (Serfaty refers especially to the 1952 Rabbis Council organised in Rabat, as well as to a letter written by the President of the Rabbinic Court from Meknès in May 1952) – it was not powerful enough to prevent the denial of Morocco’s ancient Arab-Jewish tradition by the alliance between the Jewish and Muslim Moroccan bourgeoisies, the French colonial power and, later, Zionism. The assault on traditional identities among Moroccan Jews was led by both antisemitism at home and by Zionism (from) abroad.

In his Letter to the Damned of Israel, he stresses the fact that Zionism was a critical tool in the attempts to rip Arab Jews away from their past – and their specificity. Looking at Arab Jews in Israel, Serfaty argues that the difference between them – who come, for a large part, from the working class – and the European Jews, is the attachment to the Jewish religion. Indeed, Serfaty argues in the 1980s, secularism is much stronger among European Jews – and the religious attachment is stronger among Arab Jews. A direct consequence of this is that Arab Jews are more likely to vote for the Likud Party – an Israeli right-wing Party, whose religious references are more numerous – than for the socialist and secular Ma’arakh.

In sum, the consequences of Zionism on Arab Jews could be seen as contradictory but it is this contradiction that explains the specific position of Arab Jews in Israel. Indeed, Arab Jews are ripped from their traditions – including religious ones – but, in the same movement, the manipulation of the Jewish religion is pushing Arab Jews towards the more right wing Zionist political movements. Should Arab Jews then, Serfaty asks, reject the Jewish religion in order to struggle against Zionism? This question is even more relevant since within the Israeli State, the only political forces struggling against Zionism are Marxist ones – political forces in which religion plays a minimal, if any, role. He answered with an emphatic “no”. Revolutionaries’ duty was to analyse the deepest social reality in order to grasp the seeds from which the struggle could develop. In the case of Arab Jews, Serfaty writes, this deep reality was in contradiction with the immediate reality. He asserts that one should first take into account the level of cultural oppression of Arab Jews within the Zionist entity.

The first thing that was, according to Serfaty, deeply anchored into the Arab Jewish popular masses – and that was crushed by Zionism – was the awaiting of the Messiah which had mainly been formalised through the Zohar (the foundational work of the Kabbalah). Serfaty writes that while they were facing oppression, awaiting the Messiah was a kind of light for Arab Jews. It was the already existing light in the present, of a future where God’s Kingdom will be established on Earth for every human being. Serfaty especially stresses the fact that Jews should contribute to preparing for this Kingdom wherever they are – something that was opposed to the Zionist colonial project; a project that needed to “import” Jews from abroad.

Hence, Serfaty insisted that the spirit of the Kabbalah and especially of the Zohar was the claim that the exile would not end with immigration to Israel – since, in doing so, Jews were separated from their culture and traditions. The Jewish settlement in Palestine, and later in Israel, was not understood as a “return” but as the true exile. Serfaty notes, therefore, that Zionism is a negation and a “monstrous perversion” of the Zohar.[17] While he was not a believer himself, he underlines nonetheless in a lot of his texts that in the Arab World there cannot be a difference between people who believe and people who do not believe in God. The only difference should be between the people on one side of the social order, and the reaction on the other side.

Several years before the publication of Letter to the Damned of Israel, between 1969 and 1972, he exchanged some letters with the anti-Zionist specialist of the Kabbalah Emmanuel Lévyne – whose work was very important in Serfaty’s eyes.[18] In one of these letters, written in 1970,[19] Serfaty writes that an important effect of Capitalism in Europe was that the values of Judaism were betrayed and distorted by the “exploiters of Humanity”. In this very same letter, Serfaty writes to Lévyne that the historical period that they are living in (the 1970s) was not so much a time of erasure of national specificities, but a time of fulfilment of those specificities. Therefore, he argued, the struggle against capitalism should take these specificities into account – the anti-capitalist struggle could not be successful if it tried to erase cultural and religious differences. A similar idea is to be found in another great anti-Zionist Marxist Jewish figure of that time – a European one this time: Maxime Rodinson. He defended the idea “that the only barrier to socialism in Muslim countries would be to put in place anti-Muslim policies”.[20]

The issue of the “Promised Land” was also central in Emmanuel Lévyne’s work, which again found echoes in Serfaty. Indeed, according to Lévyne, Zion was the Land of God, and in order to enter it one should renounce the desire to possess it. Hence, Levitism was opposed to political Zionism – because the colonisation of Palestine was never present in Jewish religious texts.[21] For Lévyne, as well as for Serfaty, Judaism had nothing to do with the colonisation of Palestine. However, in linking these two questions, the European and Arab Jewish bourgeoisies presented the colonization of Palestine as the main solution to the “Jewish Question” – and worked, sometimes, hand in hand with local antisemitism (whether in Europe or in Arab countries). It would rid them of Jews at home, allow them to lay claim over their goods and wealth, while simultaneously reinforcing dominant social relations and imperialism across the region.

Emerging from Serfaty’s analysis was the claim that Jews in the revolutionary struggles in the Arab world should not be understood as the “Jewish people”, understood to be outsiders in relation to the wider national community, but rather as simultaneously Jews and an integral part of the national community (the Moroccan one, in the case of Serfaty). It would be a mistake to try to “unify” Jews in a homogenous people by negating their national specificities. The letter to Levyne where Serfaty develops these ideas is especially interesting because, while Serfaty and Levyne had important disagreements (not least on the question of socialism for instance), they agreed on the importance for Jews to participate to the anti-zionist struggle. They did so both because it was an anticolonial struggle but also because Zionism participated in the destruction of the specific identities of both Jewish culture and Jewish communities.

Arab-Jews as a Threat to Zionism

It is because of this contradictory position that Serfaty considered Arab Jews as a potential threat to the existence of the Zionist state. There was, Serfaty argues, a fundamental contradiction between Arab ethnicities, which are oppressed in Israel, and the Zionist structure of the Israeli state. Hence Arab Jews should be aware not only of their “Jewishness” but also of their Arab identity. Arab Jews could participate in the building of a political movement that might break the Zionist structures from the inside. As a consequence, the social group of Arab-Jews – and especially of poor Arabic Jews – appeared to him as a weak link in the Zionist edifice.

The fact that anti-Zionism is of crucial importance for Jews – and especially for Arab Jews – is a recurrent theme in Serfaty’s writing. This was, for example, visible in 1969 when the Moroccan journal Souffles published a whole issue on the Palestinian Revolution. This issue contained an important paper written by Serfaty on Moroccan Judaism and Zionism. This article is historical in natures and returns to the themes of the life and culture of Jews in Morocco, and on the disaster that June 1967 represented, not only for Arab Jews but also for the Moroccan nation as a whole. Serfaty argued that the future of Moroccan Judaism as well as of Morocco itself are deeply connected to the future of Palestine. The struggle for the liberation of Palestine contains, in this view, alwaysper se an international dimension. RegardingSouffles, it is interesting to stress the critical role Serfaty played in the politicisation of the journal, a process in which these questions were paramount. Andy Stafford notes:

It was the arrival of Abraham Serfaty, mining engineer and trade union activist, on the committee of Souffles in 1968 that heralded the hardening of the journal’s politics and the consequent split three years later.

In his two-part piece in 1968 (in Souffles, no. 12 and nos. 13/14) Serfaty brought a Marxist rigour to the debates over culture and scientific progress in the journal. The triumphalism of the West – Israel – over the Arabs in the 1967 war had now pushed the journal towards a Marxist, militant intellectual, position (…).[22]

In the first extensive study on Souffles, Kenza Sefrioui writes that the issue of Palestine constituted a pivotal point in the politicisation of the journal. It was also the starting point of huge disagreements within the editorial board, especially on the role “cultural issues” should have in its pages.[23] However, Sefrioui also writes that Souffles was a political project from the very beginning (the journal was created in 1966), even if it expressed itself in the form of cultural analysis during its three first existence years of existence.

In their introduction to the English Anthology of Souffles-Anfas (Anfas being the Arabic language counterpart toSouffles, founded in 1971), Olivia C. Harrison and Teresa Villa-Ignacio write that the journal played – despite its modest print run – an important role in establishing a transnational intellectual dialogue with other key Third World actors:

The journal was instrumental in establishing transnational dialogues between writers, artists, and activists from Africa, Asia, and the Americas. It published seminal works by tricontinental writers and political activists, such as the Haitian writer René Depestre, the Syrian poet Adonis, and Amilcar Cabral, the leader of the struggle for independence from Portugal in Guinea-Bissau, as well as key revolutionary and postcolonial texts, such as the ten-point program of the Black Panthers or the Argentine manifesto for a Third Cinema. Frantz Fanon, the theorist of decolonization and prophet of postcolonial disillusionment, was a particularly important interlocutor for the journal’s founding members. Heeding Fanon’s call to leave Europe behind, Laâbi advocated for what he called “cultural decolonization,” a process by which Moroccan writers and artists would break with stagnant French models and Arabic canons in order to forge new artistic forms and literary languages in dialogue with the rest of the decolonizing world.[24]

Andy Stafford also highlights this transnational dialogue in insisting on Souffles’ Tricontinental entrenchment: “Morocco became in the late 1960s, for a short period, the pivotal space […] for tricontinentalist ideas to take hold and be propagated. As with all pivots, sections of the Moroccan Left did as much to absorb and process the radical ideas emerging from Havana after January 1966 as to re-expedite them throughout the Arab and Muslim world”.[25] It is not putting it too strongly to say that if Souffles lost the important role it had played in this crucial political space, it was because of Serfaty’s involvement with the journal. This is not to undermine the role of the founders of the journal or of other important figures. However, Serfaty’s involvement brought an explicit Marxist framework to the journal and, as Stafford puts it, started the process of the “de-tricontinentalisation”[26] of Souffles – the orientation on Workers and Strikes “was to come at the expense of international coverage”.[27] However, Serfaty also played, as written above, an important part in putting the Palestinian question at the centre of Souffles – as well as a Jewish critique of Zionism.

Thus, as shown by his engagement in Souffles, as well as in the vast majority of his texts, the Palestinian issue was crucial to Serfaty’s political thought, not only as a way to fight settler colonialism but also as a way to stress the intimate bond between antisemitism and Zionism, which worked hand-in-hand and led, as a consequence, to the growing marginality of Arab-Jews in both their historical and Israeli societies. Because of this, Arab-Jews should play a central role in the anti-Zionist struggle.

Serfaty was opposed to the use of the expression “oriental Jews” (which included not only Arab Jews but also Jews from Iran or India) especially because the huge majority of these “oriental Jews” were, in fact, Arabs. Beside the fact that their cultural traditions were not the same as those of European Jews, it was important to him to stress the fact that Arab Jews were also Arabs. To achieve its mythical goals, Zionism had to crush Arabs. Hence, Serfaty writes that in order to make Arabs disappear Zionists do not hesitate to use the methods of genocide, like the massacres of Palestinians carried out in Sabra and Shatila (1982), but also before, in Deir Yassin (1948), Qibya (1953), or Kafr Qassem (1956). For the Israeli settler colonial project to succeed, the Arab has to become a sort of Untermensch and, as such, Arab Jews who are not just Jews but also Arabs, cannot escape this social condition. Hence, being Jew and Arab did not only mean being part of a long tradition and culture but did also mean that one had a specific social position inscribed into the social relations of (post)colonialism. While it is undoubtedly true that Arab Jews were not the victims of massacres like those meted out against Palestinians, their condition was not the same as the condition of European Jews living in Israel either.

Serfaty insisted on the fact that, in Israel, Arab Jews were treated as “schwartz”. Orit Bashkin writes that the “Arab culture of Iraqi Jews, as well as that of Jews from other Middle Eastern countries, was perceived as primitive and degenerate. In addition, it was racialized: these Jews were sometimes called kushim, shhorim, and schwartzes (derogatory terms meaning “black”) to signify their foreign and non-European racial identity”[28] This “schwartz” non-European racial identity meant that Arab Jews in Israel were forced into less qualified jobs, that their dignity was denied in society, and that they were used as cannon fodder for the Israeli army as well as for Israel’s colonial project. This was underlined by the fact that, as Serfaty puts it:

Zionism [is a] racist and chauvinistic ideology born from the crisis of Judaism in Eastern Europe at the End of the 19^th century, in a context of European colonial expansion and is the contrary of every single tradition (…) of European Judaism.[29]

Hence, the fact that Arab-Jews were both necessary to the Zionist project but also had a lower social condition – a sort of internal antisemitism – made them, in Serfaty’s analysis, the weak link of Zionism. As a social group, they could sharpen the social contradictions within the Israeli state. However, in order to become an autonomous political force capable of challenging Zionism, Arab Jews had to become conscious of their identity – which was not a double identity but a unified identity based on their social conditions. In sum: Arab Jews living in Israel were both oppressed by Zionism but were also a tool of oppression of the Palestinian people – as Israelis and potential members of the Israeli army. The most exact terms to describe them was, according to Serfaty, as a “colonial minority”. But it is also this colonial minority, which he argued could become the best ally to the Palestinians.

Serfaty had participated in discussions with the Israeli Left – especially with Matzpen [Compass], the radical socialist Israeli Party, and the Israeli Communist Party. He acknowledged that the Israeli Left had a brave and difficult struggle to engage in. But he also added that this Left had to fulfil its commitments – which also meant committing to Arab-Jews as potential allies in the struggle against Zionism. This meant that Matzpen could not, for example, recognise both the unconditional right to resistance against occupation and, at the same time, decide to only support organisations of the Palestinian resistance which acknowledge the right to self-determination for the Israelian people. In Serfaty’s writings in the 1970s, the possibility for a part of the Jewish masses to liberate themselves from Zionism was intrinsically linked to the development of the Palestinian Revolution but also to the development of the Arab Revolution. Therefore, both had to be supported by Jewish activists.

For Serfaty, Jewish emancipation and the liberation of Palestine were linked – but it relied on the development of a higher level of consciousness among Jews living in Israel, and especially Arab Jews. On the issue of political consciousness, Serfaty developed his ideas over the years and, in the early 1990s, he wrote that one should not oppose “conscious” and “not conscious” ideas – using Paulo Freire’s idea that there is always an intuition inside an oppressed person, even if this person is overruled by oppression. Hence, consciousness was not something brought from the outside but it was the crystallisation of the “sensuous knowledge” – Serfaty used Mao’s concept. This is why a coherent project grounded on objective contradictions was needed in order to transform existing sensuous knowledge into a rational one. This was the role of Arab Jewish activists within Israel.

Simultaneously, Serfaty reflected on the Palestinian struggle. In his view, it was not only important for Arab Jewish activists in Israel to work on developing a revolutionary project, but it should also be articulated within the strategic project of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO). Hence, he argued that the PLO should incorporate within its strategy the resistance of oppressed Arab Jews in Israel. Regarding the different options within the Palestinian resistance, Serfaty was very clear about his position: the only project which could objectively answer the issues raised by the Zionist occupation of Palestine was the project led by Fatah, who wanted to build a democratic Palestinian state. Serfaty was opposed to the two-state solution. Not only was it impossible to achieve it, but he was also concerned for the future of Arab Jews in the Zionist state.

However, in the specific context of the early 1980s, he was clear that the first political step was a limited one and was for the Palestinian resistance to build its own state in the West Bank and in Gaza. This did not mean, however, that this Palestinian state should recognise the Israeli one. The second step was to politically divide the enemy forces from the inside, in the Israeli state but also in western opinion. In the context of the time, it was impossible for the Jewish population of Palestine – except for small groups of activists – to support the project of a Palestinian democratic state. This is why an intermediary step was needed in Serfaty’s opinion. This step was the building of two coexisting states based on the principles of secularism and democracy for all their citizens. Serfaty did not explain how to move from this intermediary step to the final goal. The only thing he stressed was that one cannot expect from the oppressed Palestinian or from Arab Jews to renounce revolutionary violence. His main political conclusion was that in fighting for this intermediary step without renouncing the armed struggle, it was possible to convince an important part of international opinion as well as of the Jewish Israeli population and to move to the next step: the liberation of Palestine and, with it, the liberation of Arab Jews in Palestine. 

The importance of Serfaty’s work today is critical. As accusations of antisemitism are used systematically to dismiss any critique of Zionism, the confusion between antisemitism and anti-Zionism has never been greater. Serfaty’s powerful commitment to the simultaneous struggle against both antisemitism and Zionism – a struggle which for him was always rooted in both anti-imperialism and the concrete analysis of identity formation amongst the oppressed – serves as an important intellectual guide for all of us today.

References

Bashkin, Orit 2017, Impossible Exodus. Iraqi Jews in Israel, Stanford, California: Stanford University Press.

Elbaz, Michaël and Abraham, Serfaty 2001, L’insoumis. Juifs, Marocains et rebelles, Paris: Desclée de Brouwer.

Harrison, Olivia C. and Villa-Ignacio, Teresa (ed.) 2016, Souffles-Anfas. A critical Anthology from the Moroccan Journal of Culture and Politics, Stanford, California: Stanford University Press.

Heckman, Alma Rachel 2021, The Sultan’s Communist. Moroccan Jews and The Politics of Belonging, Stanford, California: Stanford University Press.

Lévyne, Emmanuel 1973, Le Royaume de Dieu et le Royaume de César, Beyrouth: Le réveil.

Miské, Ahmed-Baba 1978, Front Polisario. L’âme d’un peuple, Paris: éditions rupture.

Nadi, Selim 2018, ‘The Thinker and The Militant’, Translated by Joe Hayns, available at: <https://www.historicalmaterialism.org/blog/thinker-and-militant&gt;

Sefrioui, Kenza 2013, La revue Souffles 1966-1973. Espoirs de révolution culturelle au Maroc, Casablanca: éditions du Sirocco.

Serfaty, Abraham 1977, Lutte antisioniste et révolution arabe, Paris : Quatre Vents Editeurs.

Serfaty, Abraham 1992a ‘Marxiste, décidément’ in Abraham Serfaty 1992, Dans les prisons du roi. Ecrits de Kenitra sur le Maroc, Paris: Messidor/Editions sociales.

Serfaty, Abraham 1992b, ‘La jeunesse militante marocaine’ in Abraham Serfaty 1992, Dans les prisons du Roi.

Serfaty, Abraham 1992c, ‘Mouvement ouvrier et révolution au Maroc. Le rôle du prolétariat de Casablanca’ in Abraham Serfaty 1992, Dans les prisons du Roi.

Serfaty 1992d, ‘Adresse aux damnés d’Israël’ in Abraham Serfaty 1992, Ecrits de prison sur la Palestine, Paris: Arcantère.

Serfaty 1992e, ‘Le sionisme : une négation des valeurs du judaïsme arabe’ in Abraham Serfaty 1992, Ecrits de prison sur la Palestine.

Serfaty 2018, ‘ ‘En tant que juifs antisionistes’ – Lettre d’Abraham Serfaty à Emmanuel Lévyne’ available at: <http://revueperiode.net/en-tant-que-juifs-antisionistes-lettre-dabraham…;

Stafford, Andy 2019, ‘Tricontinentalism in recent Moroccan intellectual history: the case of Souffles’,Journal of Transatlantic Studies, 7, 3: pp. 218-32.

Rodinson, Maxime 2017, ‘Préface’ in Abraham Léon 2017, La conception matérialiste de la question juive, Geneva: éditions entremonde.

[1] Serfaty 1992b, p. 14

[2] Serfaty 1992c, pp. 158-69.

[3] Heckman 2021, pp. 67-8.

[4] Serfaty 1992a, p. 244.

[5] We do not have any information about this movement but it was probably the Ejército Guerrillero de los Pobres.

[6] Elbaz & Serfaty, 2001, p. 14.

[7] While we do not have the space here to develop on Ila Al Amam, we still have to say a few words about it. The starting point of this organisation was a theoretical debate held at Serfaty’s house. A leader of the Moroccan Communist Party asked Serfaty to host a meeting with Moroccan intellectuals and two PCF cadres. Hence, in April 1968, around fifty academics, writers, and politicians from several sections of the Moroccan Left came to Serfaty’s house, along with two important guests from the PCF. While the debate started on the topic of Althusser, it quickly shifted on the topic of Western culture’s inadaptability to handle the political issues faced by the Third World. As a heated debate ensued between the different persons present at the event, one of the two PCF cadres stated that this argument was to be found nowhere in the world except in China, and that Moroccan communists had to oppose the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Serfaty presents this debate, and especially the misunderstanding of the non-European reality by French comrades, as the starting point for the creation ofIla Al Amam two years later, in 1970.This organisation emerged as a split from the Parti de la Libération et du Socialisme (Socialism and Liberation Party (PLS), the former Moroccan Communist Party). Serfaty wrote several texts about this organisation, but a complete study is missing.

Brahim El Guabli gives a useful short description of Ila Al Amam : “In the case of Morocco, which I know best, the Marxist-Leninist movement, which also emerged as a response to the failure of the Moroccan Communist Party under the leadership of Ali Yata to disengage itself from Soviet domination and from its enthrallment with the monarchy in search of a dearly won recognition, sought to create the cultural conditions for the political revolution of proletariat. Since 1970, these groups formedIla l-Amām (Forward!) under the leadership of Abraham Serfaty, a Moroccan Jew, and Abdellatif Laâbi, a novelist and poet, and Abdellatif Zeroual, a philosophy teacher, and others. This revolutionary group congregated around the avant-garde social, cultural and political magazine Souffles/Anfās. In addition to its political engagement, Souffles/Anfās launched a “linguistic guerilla war” – to borrow Mohamed Khair-Eddine’s phrase in another context – on the Arabic language, which remained petrified in its classical moulds. After the brutal arrest and torture of hundreds of its members inside Morocco between 1972 and 1974, the movement mainly survived among the Moroccan diasporas. Upon the release of the majority of its leaders in the early 1990s, current and former members of the Marxist-Leninist organization have been the driving force behind the human rights movement in Morocco. Its members were also among the foremost producers of prison literature.” Mahdi Amel and Brahim El Guabli, February 1, 2018 [online].

[8] Serfaty 1992, p. 180.

[9] Ahmed-Baba Miské 1978, p. 51.

[10] Heckmann 2021, p. 1.

[11] Elbaz and Serfaty 2001, pp. 93-4.

[12] Serfaty was especially interested in Kosik’s chapters on the Metaphysics of Culture and on the Philosophy of Labor. Both chapters helped him to understand the fact that culture was rooted in the material history of humans. It is after having read Kosik that Serfaty started to reflect on the issue of cultural memory – especially concerning Moroccan Jews exiled in Israel.

[13] Rodinson 2017, pp. 9-60.

[14] Serfaty 1992d, p.3 translation.

[15]Serfaty 1992d, p.5 translation.

[16]Serfaty 1977, 16.

[17] Serfaty 1992e, p. 60.

[18] According to Serfaty, Lévyne was, at that time, a crucial person in the transformation of Judaism from a tribal religion to a universalistic ethic. It is through Lévyne’s work that Serfaty understood the Kabbale and the way it is deeply in contradiction with Zionism.

[19] Serfaty 2018 [online]

[20] Nadi 2018 [online].

[21] Lévyne 1973, p. 64.

[22] Stafford 2009, p. 225.

[23] Sefrioui 2013, pp. 92-3.

[24] Harrison and Villa-Ignacio 2016, p. 1-2.

[25] Stafford 2009, p. 218.

[26] Ibid, p. 224.

[27] Ibid., p. 224

[28] Bashkin 2017, p. 6.

[29] Serfaty 1992d, p. 32.

“However intense the hostility between Israelis and Arabs, no Arab has the right to feel that his enemy’s enemy is his friend, for Nazism is the enemy of all the worlds’ peoples.” Mahmoud Darwish

“Left-antisemitism” and “Muslim-antisemitism” are the two prevailing variants of the general discussions about antisemitism. We cannot consider these framings merely as “polemical” - that would assume a certain exceptionality – because they have come to present a common conduct in contemporary political public sphere. It matters that Palestine solidarity/critique of Israeli settler colonialism are the main issue that these frameworks relate to. There is a particular dictionary for the racialised other (depending on regional context “the” Muslim, Black, Arab, Maghrebi) or political nemesis as state subject (“the Leftist”), that dares to be unapologetic in its anticolonialism. Offered through a pre-packaged and ready-to-use villain figure - the Holocaust denying Arab speaking protagonist, the Muslims sharing a vigorously anti-Jewish culture, the dodgy Marxist shadily preoccupied with Israel - discourses on antisemitism often rely on Islamophobic and redbaiting tropes. When both tropes are in turn linked to a political conflict that is situated at the sharpest end of contemporary imperialism – antisemitism provides a normalised approach deployed by state politics, and more than ever detached from grassroots politics.

The term antisemitic indexes easy to remember formulae, attached to immoral qualities, that suffices for these kinds of peoples and their monolithic cultures. This was confirmed at a time when an edited collection about revolutionary posters from Palestine, curated for Lumbung Press, was being prepared. These posters were part of anti-colonial and progressive struggles and as a group we were intrigued and excited by the material in front of us.[1] Our activities ensued amidst an upsetting controversy over the supposed antisemitism surrounding Documenta fifteen exhibition in Germany. In retrospect, it seems unquestionable that the terms according to which we ascribe meaning and symbols related to visuals have fundamentally changed. In the light of what we know now (solidarity for Palestine is officially denounced and successfully problematised by the adoption of IHRA policy and banning of BDS across educational and art institutions and the highest political echelons), the poster collections would be interpreted in the now familiar hegemonic and negative way: as antisemitic. “Anti-anti-antisemitism” (denying the reality of antisemitism or refusing to fight the reality of antisemitism) and antisemitism function as negative metonyms: is like an empty-yet-deadly signifier. It creates permanent scandals, destroys reputations, and dismantles organisations, the moment antisemitism is gestured, its already too late: it is an adaptable and all-encompassing gesture that says it all. We don’t have to put matters in context, no need to consider the historic weight of imperialism or how the lasting impact of colonialism plays into contemporary racist systems and sentiments. It therefore does not matter that in the 1950s antisemitism was not a cause but a product of conflict in the region; nor does it matter that many Jewish progressives or Arab Jews do not fit this framework. Neither is an ethical contract that could (at least) provide some discursive accountability when using ugly normative labels, deserved. And it certainly has no value if a similar definitional option with regards to racism is meanwhile denied to other victims of everyday (Islamophobia) and state (Deradicalization) racism, these are (at best) second-class citizens that orbit outside a moral space: undeserving subjects with no concrete stake to protect.

This piece is being made available as a preprint edition of the double-volume Marxism and the Critique of Antisemitism special issue of Historical Materialism. Further additions will still be made before then. The final published version of this text will be made available on the Brill website in the coming months. We ask that citations refer to the Brill edition.All Illustrations are by Natalia Podpora.

There is much to unpack here. My contribution here should in part be read as a review essay of The Arabs and the Holocaust by Gilbert Achcar (2010). Despite its meticulous display of how Antisemitism arose against the backdrop of Israeli state terror and regional conflicts it is rarely referred to in contemporary debates.[2] This book develops a strong set of arguments against the notion of ‘Arab anti-Semitism’. By re-engaging it now, we can push against the orientalist representations of a single Arab/Muslim discourse regarding Palestine/Israel. Achcar already called the then (frankly shocking) new development of IHRA in his book in 2010. It would be an untruth to claim the major backlash that followed a decade later was acknowledged then for what it would become. The belated introspection is therefore helpful because it provides historical understanding of important intellectual interventions that pushed against broader regression. That progressive intellectuals challenged a reactionary tendency within Arab political discourse that entertains Holocaust-denial, confirms that societies are liable to a changeable ideological pendulum which fluctuates in response to political formations, militarisation and social inequalities. This is contextualised around a decline of educational system and repression of free press that started in the 1970s, and when the left underwent repeated defeat.[3] The political vacuum was filled by a noticeably increasingly presence of reactionary forces backed by former colonial powers and (more prominently after the 1979 Iranian revolution) the US. But even when their parameters were declared irrelevant during 1980 and 1990s postmodernism or End of history paradigms, progressive intellectuals tirelessly analysed the political-economic role of imperialism and capitalism or how social relations produce political subjectivities. Achcar identifies two important historical and contemporary dynamics that shifted towards Holocaust topics. Firstly, political regression (especially anti-left crackdowns) saw the destruction of institutional workers and students’ movements and their institutional infrastructures in the wake of postcolonial dictatorships undermined emancipatory progressive universal values for humanist advances. Especially after the loss of progressive Nasserism that brought along reactionary wave that saw the PLO ousted from Jordan and expelled from Lebanon. This matters because Palestinian revolutionary forces had grown into a progressive political force over those years, becoming an intellectual transgressive reference point for the whole Arab speaking region of West Asia and North Africa. The political devastation of 1967 and 1982 created an intellectual retreat. The impact of its role as a progressive bastion weakened considerably. A decline can radiate across the region and far beyond precisely due to its disproportional importance.

The second dynamic that marks the Holocaust debate is the 1948 Nakba, while the history of Palestinian colonialism goes back further this moment which catalysed crucial political-cultural transformations should not be underestimated. The creation of the state of Israel dealt a heavy blow to the main ideological currents. While certain Islamists had allied with imperial forces (most) communist party members followed the political zigzags of Stalin. The fact that the latter hardly engaged helps explains the gap in archival material from that period. The traumatic events led a massive exodus that bore the longest and largest refugee population to this date. But the Nakba is either denied or ridiculed in Israel, and largely excluded from most Euro-American curriculum. Especially because it is unresolved it is not a matter of the past, the denial of the Nakba provokes another denial. Like an open wound that doesn’t close, this liminality provides an important explanation of the political refusal to use the term ‘Israel’ for instance. It is important to appreciate that, for many and especially those in forced exile in refugee camps still hoping to return, that this implies acceptance of the loss oftheir (street, house, estate, farm) Palestine.

Taken together, the double standards regarding the right to self-determination/violent repression of progressive movements produces different horizons; allowed the loss of an important progressive archive.[4] In a twisted logic: if recognising the Holocaust means accepting a settler-colonial racist state, then the holocaust will be questioned. But also, this is part and parcel of the way Arab, Israeli and Jewish left subjectivities has been relatively easy to deform and flatten. Going back and forth between the present and the early/mid-70s of these posters, confronts us with the choices, duties and intentions. To be clear, this article is not invested in cultural analysis or philosophical understandings of aesthetics, yet via the posters I branch out to these broader questions. We revisited these posters collectively - each bringing up different historiographic aspects. While taking serious culture in terms of understanding, interpreting and feeling material artefacts that carries a profoundly emotional resonance, refutes the erasure of essential parts of our collective histories. It occurred to me that this, the expunging of our different radical histories is an important yet often missing piece of the puzzle. In fact, because context matters even more when we consider the erasure of progressive and Arab Jewish radicals, I include figures such as Serfaty in helping me make sense of the present political positions.

As the criminalisation of Palestinian solidarity at major events like Documenta fifteen shows, indignation is racially codified. That is why riots, anger and rage are qualified as an inferior feature. But in particular they are about the wrong kinds of victims. This is not only a Palestinian issue. Every historical moment or political context has a deserving and non-deserving class. When mass protests and expression of anger erupted in the USA in 1950s and 1960s they were reduced to “race riots” by a “mindless mobs”. Martin Luther King answered that riots are ‘the language of the unheard'.[5] This is important because it reminds us that even if censored and pushed out of view, those at the receiving end of the silencing know otherwise. Ordinary people across the world are intuitively on the side of the oppressed because they see right through the dehumanisation that they themselves also experience. This is why community opinion public opinion is almost the opposite of state alliances with Israel, and why these inversions can be mapped onto the schism between position of most of the Global South and that of the Global North. That the broader audiences know instinctively where it stands makes this manoeuvring even more necessary. In the words of Fanon: ‘to wreck the colonial world is henceforward a mental picture of action which is very clear, very easy to understand and which may be assumed by each one of the individuals which constitute the colonized people.[6] Palestinians’ plea is dehumanised. To follow on from Martin Luther King “What is it that America has failed to hear?” what is the reality that the Lumbung community at Documenta fifteen conveyed that fell on deaf ears? The conditions in Palestine are enraging according to any objective or subjective measure, by removing a moral threshold through the antisemitism index, legitimate rage can be reduced to violence. To be deemed irrational and uncivilised as theLetter from Lumbung community in response to the report of the ‘scientific advisory panel’ of Ducumenta fifteen put painfully clear:

The report equates critique of the current violent actions of the Israeli State with hatred. … We reject it categorically. We refuse the intentional political manoeuvre that aims at separating struggles and dividing them from each other—dividing us from each other. We stand together, unconditionally and without hesitation.

Todays’ manifestation of racism is not different from what Martin Luther King notes about riots in the USA or Fanon about the colonised rage. Consider Fanon reflecting on his Concerning Violence “This book should have been written three years ago …But these truths were a fire in me then. Now I can tell them without being burned”. Wallerstein discussed this meaning:To be sure, he was an angry man and one who used angry language, but it was in fact a very controlled anger. […] the very opposite of spontaneous and unreflecting anger.  We recognise a pattern. Bigotry and Islamophobia makes it easier to project onto Muslims/Islam heavy charges (vengeance, enemies of freedom, paths to violence, rejection of modernity), to then render them unworthy of sympathy.[7] As the attacks on the Lumbung community and the Reprint exhibition at Ducumenta fifteen was raging in the background, I was pulled to a set of posters that displayed the kind of visual indexes (Swastika, Star of David, Kalashnikov, blue and white of Israeli flag) that according to racialised framework I outlined, can only mean the condoning of Nazism, proof that Arabs, Muslims, (or their leftist supporters) are Holocaust deniers. Without uncritical valorisation, I engage with this tough conundrum through the poster collections, their historical timeframe suddenly brought to light their relevance.

To unwrap this, I first build (Section 1) on Achcar’s The Arabs and the Holocaust (2010). Albeit ignored in debates aboutanti-antisemitism ornew antisemitism, the book provides depth and context.[8] Undoing the dehumanisation is a crucial part of the undoing of the continuous violence that enables it. Concealing the violence and injustice of settler colonialism also maintains the ideological paradigms and cultural frames beneath it. To understand this dynamic, we need to also recognise the construction of a Palestine-radical left-Muslim as the all-encompassing subject of what the liberal mainstream is not. This requires consideration of the influence of structural racism and Islamophobia (Section 2). It shows that the “anti-antisemitism” signifier is an ideological construction that has little or no contribution to the struggle against antisemitism. Anti-Jewish racism and Islamophobia form two sides of the same coin. Conversely, the revolutionary posters convey a didactic message that, whilst certainly also attractive, strike an important balance pedagogy and aesthetics, I appreciate them as both material and vernacular objects. Their style, colours, chants reflect the radical 1960s, some of the posters show how struggles evolve, develop, and elapse. As the emergence of a New Arab Left and revolutionary guerrilla movements are crucial transformations - the negation of the right-wing clichés of reactionary movements or intolerant individuals that are always emphasized in discussions about people from the region - I attempt to unwrap their temporal situatedness (Section 3 and 4). Rekindling with this legacy is an antidote against historical amnesia and hopes to push against the dominant frame of antisemitism. This article tries to make sense of our particular conjuncture with regards to antisemitism. I propose that to do so we also need come to terms with the erasure of a left epistemology that had emerged from the region in the 1970s. Serfaty offered important class analysis of Jews and a perspective about local Judaism that is invisible in the debates about antisemitism. Pushing against this will help to explain that a flattening of complex histories and (Arab, Left, Jewish) subjectivities is a condition in the defence of Zionism (Section 5). Progressive Jewish interjections about liberation politics in general and also Palestine, are belittled precisely because they penetrate the hegemonic framework.

I. Arabs and the Holocaust

The current political contestation is the product of more than a century of history making. The region’s response to Israel has to be understood as one linked to military occupation and violent land appropriation, and it is a response discursively shaped by a state that always and primarily defines itself as Jewish state. Achcar contextualises religious/political positions about Jews and Judaism in a furthermore important history of European anti-Semitic racism which has a centuries-old fantasy-based hatred of the Jews. And shows this is different from a relatively more recent hatred about Israel felt among Arabs.[9] He untangles progressive Arab interventions and progressive liberation politics, from the reactionary forces that did entertain anti-Semitic tropes.[10] He shows how leftist politics and radical shaped movements across key historical moments; from the opportunities they seized to the limitations they faced.[11] The book at once exposes anti-Arab racism and develops strong arguments against the notion of a pervasive ‘Arab antisemitism’. He insists that what is referred to as the ‘New’ antisemitism is not a timeless continuation of anti-Jewish opinions being accredited to Islam, but - albeit fuelled by the Arab-Israeli conflict - this is a deeply ingrained anti-Jewish tradition in Christianity antisemitism imported from Europe.[12] He quotes the pro-Israeli scholar Harkabi For Arabs and Muslim anti-Semitism is not a cause but a result;[13] and orientalist Bernard Lewis: “For [European] Christian anti-Semites the Palestinian problem is a pretext and outlet of their hatred”.[14]

Judaism and Islam share many similarities through more than seven centuries Islamo-Judaic civilisation between West Africa, Southern (Iberian) Europe and West and East Asia. Judaism is artificially coopted into Christianity and employed as a paradigm by states that merely seven decades ago had the most systemic industrial destruction of its Jewish people. This is not to deny anti-Jewish stereotypes or racism, past or present (and he names and shames Arab Holocaust deniers), but to reiterate why the sentiments in the region stems from colonial projects and hardly exist as a concept before WWII.  We have to account for how (ethnic, religious, cultural) minorities are subjectified, racialised, and politicised in any given dominant social relation. Nonetheless, despite the insignificant role in Nazi politics among Arabs, thousands of pages have been written about Arab collaboration with Nazism. The entry on al-Hussaini in the Encyclopaedia of the Holocaust is much longer than that of Goebbels, Himmler and Eichmann. If we pause for a moment and process this, it is actually shocking for the cruel reality is that al-Hussaini’s propaganda – however imprudent – had no real impact before, during or after the Nazis were in power. Achcar distinguishes between opportunists, ideological apologists and those acting deliberately. Achcar engages the important study Philip Mattar that tackled the recurring claim that Amin al-Hussaini – the Mufti of Jerusalem– wholeheartedly identified with the Nazis. Al Hussaini is sometimes described as a proponent or supporter of the mass murder of Jews. And even if there was "fascination from a distance", al-Hussaini’s tactics were the exact same [just in reverse][15] as that of Churchill who said I would ally with the devil himself against Hitler. The point is that these are not “Arab” or “Muslim” positions, butreactionary views or conservative coalitions.

 The Palestinian posters show a much more complex picture, and thereby help us reclaim a part of history against dehumanised and ahistorical distortion. It is essential to pause and look back. Not only to reclaim a part of history, but also, to appreciate the posters for how it teaches us about a collective and progressive heritage that has weaved valid criticism of Israel and Zionism with progressive anti-racism from the 1960-70s. The Tokyo and Brussel collections posters survived from one of the richest intellectual episodes of our regions; they are cutting-edge in terms of progressive politics that still radiates through them. The openness was created both by the very fresh experience of anti-colonial resistance, inspiration by ongoing liberation struggles (Palestine, Vietnam, Cuba, Angola, Guinea-Bissau and Mozambique). The emerging Left movements – with its critical position in trade union and student movements would put them in stark opposition with many of the conservative (postcolonial) states. Many transgressors – feminists, trade unionists, students, and artists – questioned the social order and debated the strategies and tactics for a truly emancipatory project, including questions about identity, minority communities. Those same intellectuals also discussed the difference between Judaism, Zionism, and Israel while these historic episodes should not be romanticised, the impacts of those debates were far more transgressive exactly because they were part of actual political mobilisations and thinking about both the means andends of revolutions. This is why thesubjective flattening and the purging of progressive histories from public memory is crucial with regards to contemporary recollections of earlier eras. The waning of transgressive paradigms and fading of revolutionary horizons is a crucial presentiment of the shift during the 1990s during which the political forces and ideological dynamics worsened with the restructuring into a ‘new world order’, the acceleration of the 2^nd Intifada was the background of this contradictory periods imbued with protest. And this is how the Holocaust discourse transformed in the 1990s into a stable political ecology, as discussed by Achcar; a new imperial context (First Gulf war, September-11, Second Gulf war) evolved to the disparaging Muslims as thereal theonly thetrue perpetrator of antisemitism in the Global North. But this ‘enemy within’ helped mask European anti-Semitism. This is why it is unsurprising that the controversy of Documenta fifteen happened in Germany.

In Germany where Dokumenta was held, this has particular consequences. According to legal scholar Nahed Samour, in Germany who is considered a threat to society is so racialised and triggers exceptional legal measures reserved for the ‘potentially dangerous person’.[16] In Europe, the issue of antisemitism is directly linked to Israel via the history of WW2. Both have grown as closely linked to Islamophobia. Lean shows in The Islamophobia Industry the many overlapping characteristics across campaigns, blogs, pressure groups between Islamophobic, right-wing Zionism and evangelical Christians, the latter ardent supporters of Israel and not only for Old Testament/Biblical reasons.[17] This is why a double layered racism consisting of cultural dehumanisation and historic erasure (later in this paper) are at the centre of my analysis.

II. Anti-antisemitism as the sacramental stage for Islamophobia

The merging of Israeli colonial objectives with the ‘War on Terror’ meant that the Palestinian liberation struggle was reduced to ‘counter-insurgency’. This is code for horrific practices behind house demolitions, detention of all men of a certain age, and the targeting of civilian spaces and populations.[18] This context encouraged a deepening of anti-Arab sentiments that itself could feed off of anti-Muslim racism. Because the extreme violence is also followed by much louder anti-war protests, the construction of a pro-Palestine-Left-Muslim as everything the liberal mainstream is not, becomes even more instrumental for dehumanisation. Meanwhile, the ‘War on Terror’ allowed Israel to push forward, and ‘conflict’ eclipse all possible international policy frameworks about the Second Intifada. Equating Palestine with terrorism rationalises Israeli colonial occupation more easily. From this follows that the life of a Palestinian or Muslim should not be represented as moral equivalence, as a ‘militant’ it appears less valuable: the wrong kinds of victims for who neither empirical fact nor moral objectivity are relevant. And when dispensable: bombing cities, assassinating journalists; detaining children; entertaining fascists; inviting far-right leaders; tolerating Holocaust deniers, are not red-lines.[19]

As Lean (2017) notes (via Khaled Hroub), how Hamas’ views and analyses of Jews and Zionism evolved, it had dropped its 1988 Charter and adopted a more explicit inclusion of the Holocaust narrative and supported the proposition to include the history of the Holocaust in school curriculum.[20]  But none of this is typically mentioned. Besides a denial of a colonial context, the reason for this absence relates to the familiar pattern of projecting the other is against change. When the other isstatic it allows for the continuation of racist articulations of the (uncivil) ‘other’. The biased dynamic produces reactionary societal norms such as in the demand that ethnic and religious minority communities condemn what society at large fears; in fact it has become the key ritual that governs national security. The reality of post-9/11 is mapped onto systemic racism, which also continues from what the Stop-and-Search treatment of mainly young black men. Framing Muslims as a security liability has produced an tacit acceptance that the state must keep the public safe from harm by disciplining potential terrorists, represented as the Muslims including determining their ideas along moral measures that delineate culpability. This is why calls to condemn haunt us; follows us; threaten to overwhelm us; silence us as put by Qureshi.[21] As part of the broader ‘hostile environment’ there has been a deepening of suspicion of (assumed to be) Arabs and Muslims. The policing of especially black and brown subjects has turned into a disturbing direction by how the ‘duty to report’ engender a culture of “snitching” though. As the authors of the letter from the Lumbung Community collective stated ‘This [newly crossed] line marks a racist drift in a pernicious structure of censorship. […] For months we have continuously faced smearing attacks, humiliations, vandalism, and threats in major media outlets, as well as in the streets and in our spaces. […] What is even scarier is the normalized dismissal of these actions’.[22] The racism feeding such debates fully legitimates the refusal to assume responsibility for acts by individuals and apologies on command. Moreover, it’s a set-up because we cannot speak without first verifying our humanity.[23]

But what is this humanity? If it is already decoded as someone already a potential terrorist, radical, antisemite, etc. what remains? In the UK, the focus on deradicalization, and surveillance transpired clearest with Prevent (2016), and this opened the door to IHRA (2020), and together these allowed for a climate in which we saw the submission of the National Union of Students in the UK (NUS) through the Tuck report (2023).[24] After such policies were (forcefully) imposed in higher education as an ideological tool and aggressively enacted through threats of withdrawing funding to universities (legislated imposed Tory MP Williamson under Boris Johnson was meekly adhered to by many VCs) more critical work has emerged. As I show below, the same Islamophobic stigma that operates here also prohibits that Swastikas being decoded as a condemnation of the violence of settler colonialism and precludes David star as the reference to a state rather than religious community. As mentioned later, these are (moral) comparisons that are not allowable in any case. Is this all about fighting racism and battling anti-semitism? This supposed calling out of ‘anti-anti-semitism’ begins to depend on a particular definition as the crux of what came to be a new ‘truth’ about the fight against antisemitism. This imaginary perception contradicts reality and is more about Israel than about Jewish people. Perhaps that’s why, deep down the discourse demonstrates onindifference according to Lapidot.[25] He demonstrates that it focuses on a certain perception of Jews, and even in its official focus on hatred toward Jews, there is no real relation to real Jews.[26] Moreover:

[S]omething inessential, beyond love and hate, beyond anti- and philo-. The anti-anti- is in this sense, beyond binary logics, where negation of negation means affirmation, a double negation that means stronger negation, anti-anti- that is more negative—not to say more exterminatory—than anti-.[27]

In his extensive engagement with the scholarship of anti-Semitism, he argues that the division between anti-Semitism and Islamophobia - between Arab and Jew - that has been generated is further reproduced in the notion “anti-anti-Semitism”. This makes sense because targeting specifically hate against Jews helps: “to uphold the division between Jew and Arab, between Jew and Muslim is to reproduce the origins of racism and at once”.[28] Citing Judaken, Lapidot argues that anti-antisemitism merely reverses the “dictums of antisemitism without problematizing the axiology and doxology that underpin antisemitism.”[29] In other words, there is perhaps a whitewashing of the past and clearly a disconnect “between the history of anti-Semitism and the current struggle against it.”[30]

Yet, the fact a lot of “anti-anti-semitism” critique mimics what it seeks to resist is not random for it clearly serves to close off any critical debate.[31] As Qureshi testifies, his completely legitimate – in fact necessary – attempt to put events within wider historic context and proposes to understand what prods the actions of someone like “Jihadi John” (Mohammed Emwazi, a British Muslim who joined ISIS in Syria in 2014). This was immediately assume as agreeing with said action. This is bizarre but that’s also why it’s so important not to regard it haphazardly. As seen with the organisation Cage that Qureshi was part of and with the scandals over Documenta fifteen; these framings are extremely functional to policies that have the power to invalidate organisations and indict individuals. It is not unimportant that this particular ideology serves to silence especially those that are standing in solidarity with Palestine. Organising the politics of silencing is a simply way to describe the outcomes of policies like Prevent and IHRA. Overextending the category of antisemitism to include anti-Zionism complements official Israeli state strategy. The workings of ideology take particular root with a concept like “new antisemitism”. But not only does it obfuscate empirical evidence as Salaymeh agrees with Lapidot, she identifies this as part of a longstandingcoloniality trinity.[32] Put differently, caricaturing opposition to colonialism as “new antisemitism” is not essentially colonial butbecomes colonial when they are universalized and forced upon colonized peoples. It is crucial to understand Israel as a settler-colonial state and in turn as part of an imperial power relation via Europe and North America as key allies because as a universalizing ideology, coloniality asserts both its applicability and its superiority over colonized epistemologies.[33] In earlier research Salaymeh demonstrates this mechanisms when the distinctions between antisemitism (prejudice or discrimination against Jews), anti-Zionism (opposition to the ideology of Zionism), and criticism of Israel are deliberately muddled. To understand the extent of its tenet she focuses not on the more self-evident IHRA, but on the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism (JDA) which came up as an alternative definition that included those with anti-Zionist views. But despite its oppositional stance to IHRA. And yet, the effort failed because JDA in essenceshares a similar colonial theology, taking the secular ideology underlining this approach further: it essentially generates both Judeophobia and islamophobia.[34] The concept of Judeophobia may be both transhistorical and transcultural, but it does not have essential or universal characteristics because both knowledge and intention contribute to the situatedness of Judeophobia. Thus, the expectation that what may be Judeophobic is something natural or static is false because it relates to local framings, experience and histories. This is crucial because the argument that only Jews should define antisemitism justifies these claims.

Likewise, if Jews should not be asked to criticize Israel, then they should not be asked to support Israel and if from this could follow that it is wrong to regard Zionism a Jewish conspiracy, then it follows that it is equally wrong to allege that anti-Zionism is an antisemitic conspiracy. This argument around authorship and representation, echoes the debate about discursive ownership of the classification of oppression, in the UK this is often cited in relation to the Stephen Lawrence racist murder trial and it has been exploited in the debate about anti-semitism too.[35] For, as Salaymeh argues, since there are dissenting opinions within identity groups about what is offensive, members of identity groups cannot create a consensus on what the group considers offensive. What one individual identity group considers prejudicial may be itself prejudicial against another group as the qualification of BDS asantisemitic is also clearly demonstrates this is not only an example of racist reductionism directed towards (pro-) Palestinians, but also against anti-Zionist Jews. In this paradigm, the settler-colonial occupation of Palestine can be normalised and instead of being identified as an urgent problem relegated to the mundane.[36] Social fears and desires for security are exacerbated to empower the broader dynamics of colonial states, and normalize the violent oppression of colonized peoples. Popular fear of new antisemitism or censorship of anti-Zionism must be situated within wider “national security” fears. While Global North states heighten fears in order to justify their security measures, it mainly benefits the (elites of the) military industrial complex.[37] This is a consequence of the combined effect of exaggerated fear in the global North combined with the normalized colonial violence in the Global South, as Salaymeh adds. Since this resonate with the fear during the decolonisation eras of the 1960s/1970s, the wars following September-11 must be reassessed through this earlier experience. Especially as the climate of protest and a new generation of movements meant a rediscovery of early revolts.

III. Anticolonial Constellations

The temporal moment of the radical left – including the aforementioned leaps in progressive intellectual traditions – had social implications. One of the most influential ideological strands in the region’s politics has been (secular) Arab nationalism. This had important consequences for the political theories that structure the political strategies. Nasserist’s mostly rejected the explanation that an international Zionist movement controlled the US; Israel was considered the ‘imperialist base in the heart of our Arab homeland’. This anti-imperialism was appealing and gained popularity, and this is why the ‘Nasser = Hitler’ dictum began to be deployed. It should not surprise that in Western hegemonic historiography (if at all) Nasser is most likely be mentioned slanderously and numerous cases taken out of context. Nasser had publicly repudiated the ‘throwing Jews into the sea’ mantra and consistently identified imperialism as the key enemy. One such case is the major outcry when Nasser authorized the death sentences against two Egyptian Jews in 1955. Achcar puts the conviction in context of a large-scale terrorist operation prepared by Israel that included spies.[38] The critique of capital punishment is legitimate but it must be remembered that Egyptian Muslims convicted of espionage were also executed, oppositional communists suffered this fate later, and the judicial killing of the Rosenbergs, two American Jews for communist conspiracy in the United States saw a different uproar. The different frames of reference employ ethical baselines that are lopsided and therefore insincere.

Putting anti-colonial demands and political-economy above culture meant targeted Arab lackeys too, as Nasser said ‘… Arab leaders say Israel and the Jews. They are afraid to say England’. This independent spirit emerged at the background of a progressive Arab intellectual mindset in the 1970s. Pointing to this difference between the political Right and Left program is essential against false essentialism. Palestinian intellectuals developed some of the most radical analyses concerning antisemitism and the place of Israel after decolonisation, taking pains to differentiate between Jews and Zionists. These were also part of heated debates and disagreements, but they were discussed openly often in magazines and during events. Numerous progressive Arabs disprove the idea that it is “impossible to see Jews as victims while you are victimised by them”. Achcar offers in a discussion of Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish statements (cf. epitaph) “Nazism is the enemy of all the worlds’ peoples”. Its vision was a democratic, secular, state for all inhabitants. Heated debates were discussed openly. The deep frustration with the international silence nurtured for the political Right and conservative forces diverted widespread resentment about the imperial carving up away from (materialism) imperialism andtowards (culturalism) Jews. Progressive thinkers were a bigger threat to the Zionists (and later Israel and Israel’s allies) than any reactionary conspiracy theory. Israel’s liquidation campaign of progressive political cadres and actively helping to crush left-wing movements. Meanwhile this was backed by Western states who also supported right-wing dictators subservient to them, the hugging and handshaking of dictators that entertain anti-Jewish conspiracy is testimonial.

Somehow it is understandable that this era – one could even argue the most progressive till date – is hidden. Where comprehending the globally connected era we live in used to make sense in reference to progressive justice and transgressive rebellion, it became filtered through the negative. The assassination policies globally in 1960/70s meant the near complete decimation of the revolutionary left (I refer here to black radicals in USA, left political parties and trade unions in South American West Asia, North Africa) and has resulted in a historic amnesia, is unsurprising. The balance of forces in which the left operated were extremely contradictory: eventually the progressive left was unable to develop because of the counter-revolutionary violence. Progressive thinkers were a more significant threat than any reactionary conspiracy theory; people like Abu Iyad and Ghassan Kanafani were assassinated. It inhibits a vision that is in tune with certain balance of forces and political order. That is why we should consider the rejection of antisemitism (at least in part) more a modality than a principle through which antisemitism is given discursive and political meaning. Relating this to the posters with Jewish Symbols convey the political contradictions and represent the uneven awareness they inhibit. the statements and their representations on these posters have meanwhile changed too – for better or worse – what do both sides of the paradox tell us about the current political state of affairs? In some an anti-Zionist gesture while in others, it collapses Jews with Israeli murder. The aesthetic symbols in the circulation of political culture that marked these radical ideas are important for how it transcends across movements and to reverberate from the specific to inspire the general.

IV. The Mediation and Rediscovery of Progressive Arab epistemology

The reason I tie this artwork to the debates about Zionism and antisemitism raised by Arab radicals in the 1960s/70s but occluded in mainstream historicising, is that the inspiring images that are also deliberately erased. I kept returning to some of the configurations on the posters, my reflections on the Palestinian revolutionary posters (and the sentiments they concurrently reveal and conceal) changed in light of the extreme conflation of antisemitism and anti-Zionism and the endless assaults on Palestine solidarity that occurred around the same time. The examples I selected from the poster archive replicate the contradictory debate in different ways. these visuals mediate the political contradictions of symbols and their interpretations. On poster 1 we can see a swastika, with the word “Fascism” superimposed on a bleeding background and a fedayeen profile (holding a Kalashnikov and wearing a kuffiye) composed on the right bottom space. In the circular area of the enlarged S just above the swastika is a Star of David. Poster 2 depicts three David Star figures - each with an image corresponding to the words Expansion, Oppression, Occupation. And on poster 3, Jews not Zionists hovers over a picture of two Jews in orthodox attire, walking in what seems like East Jerusalem, above it the framed slogan Zionism is Racism. The texts are in English, Arabic and Hebrew. While poster 3 conveys a progressive pedagogical meaning with Jews, not Zionists, poster 1 and 2 seems conflate a religious symbol with a political ideology.

If we look again, the combination of the colour blue and the lines suggest it is a reference to the flag, the flag of Israel. This suggests the accusation pointing to a violent (the blood drops dipping) settler-colonial state. On poster 1 and poster 2 the symbol is also referencing that of the state’s flag. The visual choices and aesthetic placements are projected with a proxy message. Even if the conflation of Judaism and Zionism connote bigotry, it is not a given that the design pointed to a community. Why would the design per-se point to a religious group and not a nation-state? As discussed in Section I, there certainly was also ignorance. My assessments of these visuals lie precisely in its ambiguity. Like all movements, these posters are products of their time, with strengths and limitations that are in turn specific to their conditions.

An important explanation of the deterioration of the principal rejection of anti-Semitism there also lies in the political failures lead to intellectual defeatism. But another example of Achbar’s study of left-wing archives that helps here is the reversal; rather than minimising the Holocaust, Arabs began employing it. Edward Said tirelessly pointed out how the popularity of antisemitism was a reflection of ideological regression for the important transformations of the 1990s. Political defeat in the broad sense, but also the historical injustice of Palestinians in particular, became a breeding ground for the acceptance of European antisemitism. The warm reception for the French Garoudy and his holocaust denialism was added cultural significance when he converted to Islam.[39] Progressive Arab intellectuals explicitly rejected to grant Garaudy legitimacy and argued that his pseudo-intellectual critique has done great damage to the Palestinian cause in Europe. This kind of new politics added to the simplistic interpretations of the Jewish David star and the “Zionism = Nazism” slogan on the posters. Whilst in fact these expressions are often-misconstrued because underlying them are fascinating reminders of longer history of a thinking Arab communists devised in the 1930s against anti-Semitism. In the equation in the slogan “Zionism = Nazism”, the left called for equal aversion for both. The Nazi genocide was not disputed in mainstream Arab discourse. This progressive intellectual stance was correctly summarised as a rejection of competition between tragedies. Crucially though,competing is not the same ascomparing. And yet the attempt to compare has grown into one of the strongest contentions: the in-comparability of the Holocaust.

Alost any comparability – be it aesthetic in the form of swastika or discursive in the use of the term – is now akin to antisemitism. In this anti-intellectual approach neither intention nor context is relevant. To return to Achcar, trivializing Nazi references has a longer history. David Ben Gurion calling Menachem Begin ‘another Hitler’ and Leibowitz called IDF soldiers ‘Judeo-Nazis’ during the First Intifada as Achcar documents. Numerous leftists and outspoken (Israeli) Jews also get the label ‘anti-Semite’ in smear campaigns. This all meanwhile devalues the history of anti-Semitism. But comparing and relating does not need mean that we to flatten our histories and subjectivities. Indeed, it is important to differentiate between the plan to wipe out a population because they resist imperialism or are an obstacle to an expansionist settler colony; and the industrial mass murder to satisfy a vicious desire born of ethnic hatred for theuntermench; wiping out Jews, and Roma, Sinti for the fantasy of breeding a pure race. But sometimes the layers of different stories overlap and certain experiential aspectare analogous, this is not a controversial historic fact. A native population disappearing through killing and forced exile, the Nakba was a genocidal extermination, I believe that is why Darwish added to the aforementioned quote: ‘It is not overly severe to say that the Israeli Zionist behaviour towards the original people of Palestine resembles Nazism’. Why is drawing at parallel offensive? Such an approach is both anti-intellectual and turns historical episodes into metaphysical events. The Holocaust was a terrible act of human beings against other human beings, a historical event, and therefore as Sociologist Zygmunt Bauman argues it must be compared.[40] Besides claiming this comparative ontology, the linking of oppressions is a transgressive act mediated by the poster. Yet, to state what is by now the obvious: doing this in the context of Palestine/Israel became extremely controversial and itself an act of antisemitism.

This tells us that over time new political modalities have allowed a very selective subjectivity and ideology to correspond to the moral credibility of certain struggles which may even contribute to its moral claims to disappear. In the singular narrative of the antisemitic Arab or monolith reactionary Muslim, a dynamic, living and breathing, epistemology is categorically denied. Hence, what needs to be subverted or at least made visible, is the epistemology that underlies the discourse of Semitism as Lapidot argued above. The challenge is not only to remember the Jew and the Muslim, but to access Jewish and Muslim memories, where Jewish and Muslim do not only exist as Christian others, as “Semites.”[41] Indeed, comparisons between Judeophobia and Islamophobia result in political controversies in the global North precisely because they challenge the Eurocentric and colonial notion of Jewish exceptionalism and highlight liberal legalism’s contemporary protection of colonial (Zionist) Jews.[42] Comparing themselves to Jews is both an emotional motive and tactical source among Muslim communities in Europe, yet this explanation is overwhelmingly ignored as part of a strategy as a result of the dehumanization Muslims. As Salaymeh argued, contemporary European states do not recognize anti-Muslim expressions as hate speech because they are not forms of discursive violence against global North states or their colonialism.[43]

In a sense, I consider the posters as mediators of the contradictory realities and uneven progresses that were specific to their conditions. These posters are like artefacts that provide small slices of a complex history, inhibiting certain ambiguities which have flattened out over time. They hark back to a context in which resistance movements produced ideological transformation with ground-breaking debates a new epistemology embedded in notions of liberation and freedom. I tried to understand why this transgressive knowledge is so hard to find. The disappearance of political movements was necessarily removed from universal ideological visions reproduced. The additional erasure concerns the subjective antizionist Jew and Arab Jew. I realized they are a missing piece of the puzzle, as profound figures of the Left they need to be deleted from collective and political memories. This includes revolutionary thinkers and historical figures such as Mehdi Amel, Mehdi Ben Barka and Abraham Serfaty. And especially the latter is crucial to our discussion about anti-semitism. Thankfully, the progressive shifts emergence, with the Arab uprisings and major protest movements in recent decade, has meant a rediscovery for new generations.

V. Historical Amnesia: The other Jew

My brothers, my sisters, I am writing to you from the depths of this prison where I am held, in the same country from which you were chased. It is now twenty or thirty years since the lies of the Moroccan Jewish bourgeoisie pulled you into the trap that is Zionism. The discriminatory and racist politics of the majority of the Moroccan Muslim bourgeoisie did the rest, even whilst you were under the supposedly protective tutelage of the Moroccan regime, itself nothing but a feudal subjugator reinforced by the racist brutalities of the police. Since 1961, this regime never hesitated to sell you off to Zionism (Abraham Serfaty, Letter to the Damned of Israel. 28 September 1982).

As witnessed during the preparation and then opening of the Dokumenta fifteen exhibition, the convergence of Palestine with antisemitism is a habitual - if not deliberate reference. In this atmosphere we can better understand German law enforcement going as far as prohibiting Palestinian solidarity protests, arresting those carrying Palestinian flags. This is related to familiar pattern whereby the experience of the Jew is the definite polemic. Section 3 shows that people who engage in discussions about Palestine/Israel often experience this formulaic trait that renders them antisemitic. Sometimes it is explicit, at others more subtle as when a critical opinion is countered with ‘As a Jewish person I [am shaken, upset, disappointed, offended]’. This is echoed in the rushed condemnations and accusations of pro-Palestinian art exhibitions and a warped interpretations of the revolutionary posters as antisemitic. Of course, the first question is, which Jews? With endless examples of Jewish critics, organisers and Palestine supporters, there clearly is a highly selective method in the application of this rule. Enzo Traverso has discussed that putting Jewish sufferings into a unique historical place and antisemitism in a separate European legal cadre is also about obscuring European responsibility. How does the repositioning of European industrial violence onto Palestine, implicate antisemitism? There are two levels at play to inverse the burden from the message to the messenger behind the assumption that only Jewish people can reflect on policies or opinions related to Israel. This is what Lapidot, Salaymeh and others reject (Section II). But if it was up to pro-Israel opinions, the antiracist and revolutionary chapter of Jews is all but forgotten.

At the start of this essay, it was stated that an open-minded ideology becomes a buffer against analytic reductionism or political short-cuts. But intellectual regression of progressive movements and emergence of chauvinist personalities compels the disappearance of such radical constellations. This amnesia includes versions of erasure. One is cultivated with the disappearance of the progressive intellectual Arab theory and praxis. Even though a less biased historical reading teaches us about these radical movements as discussed above.

The dismissal of a transgressive legacy - in all its ambiguities - erect an essentialist profile of an antisemitic culture at the expense of this revolutionary constellation on a second level. Nazis, fascism and counter-revolution killed millions of working-class peoples, decimated progressive cadres, and prevented the materialisation of important humanist visions and transgressive alternatives. Here I consider this decimation to be part and parcel of the denial of Jewish diversity that includes revolutionary legacies. Jews were integral to movements for justice, either as part of national liberation or in opposition to their oppressive rulers, kings and sultans, and often the prominent personalities of the 1960s generation. Whether Abraham Serfaty (in Morocco), Henri Curiel (in Egypt), Daniel Timsit (in Algeria), or, Daniel Bensaïd (son of Algerian Jews in France), who belong to the revolutionary left and voiced strong opposition to the displacement of Palestinians from their land and regarded Zionist representatives who were encouraging local Jews to leave with distrust. To fully understand the complexity of Jewish Arab regional affinities we need to take a step back to consider how the colonial power. They established the bases for fractures in Arab society across religious lines and divisions with Amazigh identities through official censuses.

The position of Jews in the region shifted both with the creation of the state of Israel and with colonialism, but both dynamics were played out together in the way Jews were considered by British colonial powers as allies in Middle East imperialism or by the French colonial powers as potential settlers in Algeria as they were outnumbered by those they aimed to rule. Through the legal orders and material statuses of the Cremieux Decree Algerian Arab Jews were given French nationality and thereby turned into extensions of the colonial project.[44] They constructed outrageous racial categories to divide indigenous populations and while it caused enormous damage in the years that followed this serve as an important example of how colonisers positioned Jews - ‘lifted up’ into French civilisation or in direct opposition to the majority of indigenous Muslim populations – but that far from liberating Algeria’s Jews this segmenting and segregating along ethnic, religious, and geographical lines where eventually its own breakdown.[45] Meanwhile, France could simultaneously oppress Jews in the metropolis while ‘freeing’ them in Algeria. As Englert succinctly put it: “They were to be used as both a stick against the Algerian Muslims and a shield behind which to hide the motivations for the violence and oppression of the French colonial state.”

These pre-existing conditions that allowed the state of Israel to further exacerbate divide and rule both in terms of extracting Arab Jews who became settlers and in harming Arab social and cultural stability. This is deployed on different levels supporting states that rival with Arab states for regional dominance with military backing or alliances with minority groups were cultivated – and the current normalization deals with Arab states are the clearest outcome of Israel’s goal for acceptance of its existence in the region. Ethnic divide and rule are sometimes downplayed as ‘conspiracy’, but those who have been under colonial rule know how common this was (and still is) and that is why Cremieux should be studied alongside the 1950s policy known as the Alliance of the periphery. Developed by David Ben-Gurion (first Prime Minister of Israel), Israel began to develop close strategic alliances withnon-Arab partners in the region (through legitimate national questions) for its own foreign policy strategy. This was primarily utilized towards Turkey, pre-revolutionary Iran and Imperial Ethiopia (including Eritrea). As Takriti discussed with regards to a particularly strong Kurdish-Palestinian affinity, this “peripheries strategy” weakened the Arab sphere on which Palestinian liberation ultimately depended.[46] There are important implications in the long run, even when they don’t reflect popular opinion. We could say that this continued with top-down normalisation policies that flourished in recent years. But it was in essence a marriage of convenience, thus even while not build on genuine sentiments it successfully counteracts (united) opposition of Israel.[47] This has been difficult to maintain where official normalisation agreements between states are popularly rejected. A more contemporary digital manifestation of Israeli Hasbara, is not unique and has been a consistent part of these histories of divide and rule, propaganda; political distraction; sowing internal division.[48]

One of the context-and-language specific, yet systematically ignored is the use of Jew. For Arabs who have lived with Jews for centuries ‘Jew’ was the common reference, not a slander. This is in part because the Israeli politicians, generals, civilians who legitimise massacres, expulsions, house demolitions, consistently call Israel a Jewish state. This argument will not be accepted because of the stubborn image of the peoples of this region as forever anti-Semitic. Although easily ridiculed for being a false apology, ‘Jew’ became the norm because there was no Israel. But the erasure of local Jews is another reason that “their” hatred of Jews as a primordial fact is problematic in a region where the Jews are part of the “them”. In the proposition by Abraham Serfaty theArab Jew is the subversive subject from within the region, one that rejected Zionism. Our region knew and still has deeply rooted Jewish communities that were allied with or led progressive and socialist movements. Several scholars (Nadi, Guebli, Heckman, Englert) provide a rich collection of studies and while there is no lack of scholarship, this is less so in popular knowledge and the absence of this Arab Jew allows for senseless matters to makes sense. I therefore share the point by Nadi that we should not allow the erasure of a specific Jewish view from Arab analysis of antisemitism and we should neither confuse them into a universal Jewish people (which effectively means European).[49] We have a choice to amplify dissident voices and what we learn collectively may take us forward. Here, it is not about a unique or exclusive essence, but to understand how formations of community and identity are part and parcel of emancipatory politics; of the productive possibility to join against a shared oppressor whilst holding onto communal conditionality. Serfaty argued that not Moroccan-Jew but the notion Zionist-Moroccan was the real paradox. Whyshould we leave their homes to settle in someone else’s, Abraham Serfaty asks as he regarded Moroccan Jews asexiles in Israel. And he continues inLetter to the Damned of Israel (28 September 1982):Do you form one people with your oppressors? What insult! […] They forced you to leave the land of your ancestors for your current exile.

Conflicts between Moroccan Jews (Arab and Amazigh) and Muslims did not only occur with the establishment of Israel because it also connects to a social hierarchy and political economy of racism. Muslim and Jewish Moroccan bourgeoisie often supported the politics behind Israeli recruitment of local Jews. Prejudices against Jews were promoted by the bourgeoisie and adopted by others. Moroccan Jews were torn from their country (especially since 1961) both through racist politics and Zionism. Chauvinist conceptions of identity had to be dealt with head-on based on principles. Zionist mobilisation of Arab and Amazigh Jews was part of a broader debate about the place of minorities on the radical left. Ethnic recognition and cultural equity, whether Jews, Sahraoui, or Amazigh, are a basic condition of progressive epistemology. This could not be relegated to an after-thought and certainly not covered-up by an abstract ‘Pan’ one-fits-all identifier.

A social analysis was crucial according to Serfaty, the exploitation and division allowed by class society means "[T]he big commercial and petite-bourgeoisie to get rid of the poor Jews – especially the Jewish peasantry of the Atlas Mountains and of South Morocco – who became the favourite target of Zionist recruiters, to resettle them in Israel. Regarding the departure of 45000 Moroccan Jews between September 1955 and June 1956 […] the poorest and the most vulnerable became the target of recruiters with the tacit, if not explicit, the backing of the bourgeoisie, both Jewish and Muslim, who got rid of this authentic Judaism”.[50] The Moroccan left conceptualised the different ways in which Palestine was deeply connected to local, regional and global politics through which it became a crucial issue as El Guebli put it.[51] Serfaty’s lifelong dedication to anti-colonialism and anti-imperialism. His participation in trade unionism and his opposition to the King of Morocco were intricate to his Arab-Jewish heritage. Zionist erasures of local Jews is appalling and a logic that dictator King Hassan II applied to Serfaty himself. He immediately exiled him on the false charge of Serfaty never being Moroccan but “actually” Brazilian, the moment he was released in 1991. At stake is a recovery of a rich heritage that avoided the marginalisation of minorities, the broader debates about identity and affinity is part of the universalism of Arab progressivism. Most progressive Jews from the region considered Zionism a European phenomenon. The social condition of Arab Jews is also constructed by from colonial and social conditions. The extent to which Serfaty’s antizionism related to his reflections shaped his analyses about the social conditions of Arab Jews and the Arab subject as the main threat to Zionism. This political thinking is crucial for an analysis of antisemitism. To confuse them into a “universal” Jewish people (which means, in reality, European Jews) shows why Serfaty understands “identity” as a social category rather than a liberal (individual) or cultural category and focused ostensibly on the class basis of “identity politics”. To him it was a critical error for pan-Arabism to ignore the question of minorities, especially since Zionists were the oppressors of Arab Jews that also denied the specificity of their identity as Arabs.[52] These approaches were of course dangerous to the opportunist and conservative status quo and the capitalist ruling class and made visible how reactionary forces used Palestine as a fig leaf. As Al Guabli attests it was “not just a critique but also a forward-looking project to give a new meaning to the left and its anticipated revolutions”.[53] When Serfaty speaks of “European”, “Arab”, “poor”, “rich” [Jews] he did not address “Jewish” as a sort of universal identity, he refuses a homogeneous “Jewish subject” that collapses Arab Judaism in the general History of Zionism. Their radical left politics was also part of a “strategy for Jewish inclusion in national liberation politics shed light simultaneously on Jewish politics in Morocco and the wider MENA region and on the phenomenon of Jewish leftist politics more globally” as Heckman argued.[54] Unconditional support for the self-determination of the oppressed was a significant development that proved crucial. This is why Serfaty committed himself to the struggle for Moroccan independence, Saharan self-determination and Palestine liberation.[55] But there is a different option.

Therefore, the erasure of a particular Jewish revolutionary Internationalism is also at stake, thus a positionality that is neither limited to the Arab-only, nor standard Euro-American historiography.[56] Heckman beautifully reconciles the story of Jewish attraction to internationalism and universalism with the more marginalised North African case studies. Heckman discussion of progressive Jews and via Hannah Arendt more politically as the conscious pariah. There continues to be a robust critique of the state of Israel for over a century, and which Lorber notes is, buried under the mistaken assumption that all Jews have consistently supported Zionism.[57] Thus when we expand this legacy to understanding Palestine politics, it loses what is considered a key argument. That is why I suggested that the erasure is multi-layered, political amnesia doesn’t work as singular modus. Put differently, not only the Arab Jews are unworthy of being mentioned, but also progressive, anti-colonial, internationalist Jews. Moreover, debates often revolve around what constitutes antisemitism. The denial of anti-Zionism as an important strand within Jewish communities across the world is not a surprise. For example, the General Jewish Labour Bund in Lithuania considered Zionism the bourgeois answer to the Jewish Question and as Lorber discusses, they regarded the call for a Jewish state anescapist response to antisemitism. Not many Jewish immigrants in the US were looking to the other side of the world, they opted to improve their material conditions and advocate for workers’ rights and social status in and through movements. As Lorber argues: ‘For many decades, the heart of a vibrant secular Jewish Left beat not for the upbuilding of Jewish settlements in mandate Palestine but for the Scottsboro Boys, the struggles of workers in factories and fields, the fight against fascism in the Spanish Civil War, the movement to defeat Nazi Germany, the unfolding progressive vision for a more just and equal world’. From figures in ANC, leaders in the Marxist tradition (Rosa Luxemburg and Leon Trotsky), Jews joining the anti-fascist struggles of the 1930s and 1940s, as Alan Wald describes “this consideration of the past [Jewish Revolutionary Internationalism] in the present cannot occur as the tracing of a straight line but only as a shadowing of the contours of a slow spiral […]. It is a past that must not pass because it once carved deep and distinctive tracks …”.[58] Recalling the story of anti-apartheid activists arrested (1963 Johannesburg) with Mandela and trialled (Rivonia Trial) with severe sentences, among them was a noticeably disproportionate Jewish participationinside Black liberation.[59] Nonetheless, it is important to beware of cultural essentialism in all cases. By the same token that the Antisemite Arab does not exist as a given, theTransgressive Jew is not a primordial fact either. Even if this is conveniently hidden to the benefit of an anti-Palestinian, Israeli, white Jew. Alan Wald points to the phenomenon of a Revolutionary Internationalist as thepotential actuality of multiple identities. It grows from basic reminder that one’s emancipation is always bound up with the emancipation of others:

There was and remains no consensus as to whether being Jewish is mainly a religious, cultural, ethnic or national identity. What is pertinent [is that] individuals then made a choice in political outlook and behaviour that is known as Revolutionary Internationalism.[60]

The Jew and the Arab share an oppression which is constituted by racist hatred that directly touches on the realm of definitions in which there is no space given to the progressive and anticolonial Jew. This shows us the (unintentional) overlap with which Lapidot gestures to a certain indifference that ends up organizing both anti-Semitism and anti-anti-Semitism.[61] The interpretation of whole sections of Jews is side-lined. The notion of new antisemitism is effectively an alternative to the bigoted terms “Muslim antisemitism” and “Islamic antisemitism.” Unsurprisingly, European states deploy these notions in order to discipline Muslim communities.[62] That is also why it is argued that, if anything, the European framework for hate speech regulation should be contextualized within Europe’s own past and present Judeophobia and Islamophobia. By recovering grassroots socialist movements rooted in Yiddish as the language and the Jewish working class, is important here. Sai Englert describes the importance of fighting where one is, alongside the people one lives with, as beautifully conjured through the notion of Doykayt (here-ness) for the Jewish Bund, which was “conceived as a rejection of both Zionism and separatism to argue with Jews about the importance of changing the world, their current world.”[63] We should thread lightly when asking whether its lessons tell us something exclusively about Jews or about the human condition as a whole. Sai Englert urges for an interpretation of Jewish history in light of ‘Judeo-Jewish’ thought in which Jews only act for Jews, and others act against them and thus across a particularistic and universalist focus:

It is a question resolved newly every generation, depending on context, in one direction or another. If the first half of the twentieth century in Eastern Europe represented the universalism of Jewish thought and action, the second half has undoubtedly been dominated by a narrow particularism.[64]

But because of what Achcar, Englert, Heckman, Lapidot, Lorber, Nadi, Salaymeh and Wald also show in this article, I take another lesson from this perspective too. This is about the simultaneous existence of ordinariness and uniqueness of what can be considered a “moral universe”. This seeks ways to disseminate a radical pedagogy from the inspiring intellectual legacy of Arab intellectuals discussed above and the Jewish Revolutionary Internationalism. I refer to understanding political struggles who share an understanding of capitalism and decolonisation, that produces an analysis situated in a “world system that requires that discrete challenges against exploitation locally must of necessity work in harmony internationally. […] an elective affinity with a heritage animated by a global, supra-national identity”.[65] We therefore cannot regard antisemitism only as the inert history of Hitler. We must for example remember the anti-Semitic targeting of Jewish leftists under US McCarthyism.[66] Serfaty was part of anticolonial consciousness, not unlike many on the left. And yet, as a Jew he was also conditioned because of how the antisemitic law of the Vichy Regime during World War II targeted Moroccan Jews. Serfaty symbolises the Doykayt subjectivity. As Sai Englert note, the socialist Bund did not consider Jewish history or movement separate or distinct from the histories and movements of the societies in which they lived. This is why the signifier “Jew” in debates about antisemitism becomes the arc, and why as Lapidot (following Gil Hochberg) argues we must take on the critique against Zionism as “Europe’s way to cleanse itself from its two modern historical crimes—anti-Semitism, on the one hand, and colonialism on the other—by transferring their weight onto its primary historical victims.”[67]

A Radical Pedagogy

They reduce you to workhorses for the most backbreaking of labours and to cannon fodder for their army, with their senseless, criminal dreams of domination and conquest. They refuse you even the chance to practice the religion that our forefathers continued for centuries. This religion of peace, of justice, of mutual respect, they have transformed into a religion of hate, of war, and of injustice. (Abraham Serfaty, Letter to the Damned of Israel. 28 September 1982).

The posters I began this essay with, were works of art, but it was immediately recognisable that they were first and foremost made as part of struggles. Because the deliberately one-dimensional manifestation of such expressions remains astounding, these ground-breaking products of transgressive politics that must be historicized adequately. The anti-colonial politics were side-tracked by unsubstantiated accusations and a racist bias. But despite how these admonitions were mapped onto these political artefacts, the impending revolutionary reverberations of the posters are something to treasure. They bring to live political causes that carry as their ethical compass the importance of radical solidarity and activist alliances. An important conclusion for the progressive left is that the struggle against anti-Semitism cannot be separated from the struggle against contemporary Islamophobia. This idea of progressive reciprocity has been replaced by another, a very curious, kind of trade-off. I refer to what the excavation of Palestinian politics shows through the prism of rituals and political performances related to antisemitism. And that this teaches us a cruel yet crucial irony about political strategies.

In 1998, the White House (Dennis Ross) pushed for a token of peace in the form of some sort of formal acknowledgement of the Holocaust. The US state department and Palestinian negotiators for the Oslo Agreement thus organised a visit to the Holocaust Museum (Washington DC) by Palestinian President Yasser Arafat.[68] This approach is critiqued for the obvious reasons (why bring Palestinian into the fold of what is a European complicity and crime in what was eerily similar to an apology?). Yet, the cruel irony is that even this tokenism cannot resist the deeply ingrained racism and islamophobia reserved for Palestinians. The museum director refused to invite president Yasser Arafat. Only after much diplomatic pulling and embarrassing conditions (Arafat was not to enter officially as a political leader, neither as president the Palestinian people nor head of PLO, merely on a personal title did he concede).[69]The main point here is that – aside from how little sense it makes for Palestinians or Arabs to immerse themselves in deflecting European antisemitism or apologising through ritualistic acknowledgement for the Holocaust – such a performativity is either ignored, suspected, or plainly rejected. I mean that it doesn’t actually do what it aims to do. But this is merely another side of dehumanisation. Entertaining antisemitic opinions did not always endure. Achcar gives examples A shift towards a clearer stance also notable in the political evolution of Hezbollah (Nassrallah undermined anti-Semitism in many speeches). And if we recall the aforementioned sheikh Jamal Mansur supporting the Jewish narrative of the Holocaust, did his measured proposition to include the general school curriculum history make any difference? Not really, as he was assassinated a year later. Mansur was one of the thousands of deadly targets amid a popular uprising (Aqsa Intifada 2000-2005) that changed the course of the Palestinian history.[70] The Oslo peace agreement in reality only brought defeat and the Israeli military occupation continued. This had its toll. It would frankly be odd if after the failed peace process of the 1990s, the Second Intifada, the 2006 war on Lebanon, Cast Lead Gaza’08-’09, 2012, 2014 anti-Semitic conspiracies had not grown. A deterioration of progressive politics opens the space for reactionary interpretations.

This essay called for moving the focus away from conservative cliches, reject the rehashing the right-wing conspiracies in leftist spaces, and engaging more explicitly with the transgressive examples that our radical histories endowed us with. To adhere to progressive approaches with a universal vision and anti-racist ethic, is a risk. But as the scholars I cite illustrate: the milieu and intellectual sharpness was there all along and still offering inspiring lessons for today; even if the debates about Zionism and antisemitism raised by Arab radicals in the 1960s/70s are occluded in mainstream historicising it is our heritage. Most relevant in terms of historical contextualisation is that there is an essential connection between defeats and political failures and a deterioration of the principal rejection of antisemitism. I attempted to tie the lost history of progressive politics that challenged antisemitism to the question of what the revolutionary posters simultaneously reveal and conceal. By illuminating some of the voices via the politics of Jewish radicals such as Abraham Serfaty or Darwish in that important (regrettable small) window of Palestinian and third-world intellectual history through these posters, their impact continues to reverberate. Not only did progressive intellectuals provide important lessons for revolutionary resistance, they argued against divide and rule, the importance of including minorities and the universal rejection of the Holocaust. The rediscovery for contemporary activists is happening at once in a subjective and philosophical way, on the level of representation – getting acquainted with Jewish Arab radical legacy matters – and on the level of ideology – revising transgressive epistemologies that expand the mind.

Rather than closing off the discussion, this provides us with two crucial possibilities. The temporal moment of radical left- and progressive thinking, what ground-breaking leaps were they developing, which radical ideas and symbols marked these, and how has this transcended to reverberate/inspire others but has been deliberately erased and silenced. No secular (anti-imperial, anti-capitalist) struggle can be successful if it tried to erase cultural and religious specificities.[71] Looking back, however, is never about reproducing linear developments, it’s always contradictory. We need to move away from binary approaches and simplistic answers because our histories are uneven. Arab Jews in Israel are both complicit in a colonial projectand itself oppressed in that colonial project. Andboth local antisemitismand Zionist recruitment in collaboration with the dictatorship of Hassan II explain the large relocation of Moroccan Jews to Israel. That is why Serfaty thought explicit participation of Arab Jews in anti-Zionist politics and the unequivocal identification as a Jew in Arab political spaces are transgressive act. The intentional decimation of that radical window was necessary precisely because of its transgressive potential. Intellectual regression and political pessimism gradually detach the compass of movements from earlier progressive politics and transgressive ethics that harboured a particular political agency in wider society, and eventually attracts conservative cynicism. Revisiting that process also points to the counter-revolutionary assaults on Palestinian solidarity are precisely what the erasure of this radical history facilitates. The opposite, way increasing reactionary influence of KSA in the region, or whether GCC funding, normalisations with Israel, domestic crackdown, the relegation of progressive radicalism is therefore part of the story.The virtually constant accusations of antisemitism faced by critics and activists is part of this reactionary list, what the ‘scientific advisory group’ of Documenta fifteen in Germany did or the adoption of IHRA in the UK does, does not feel different from what repressive bodies in the region do.

If only it was for real concerns about antisemitism. To rephrase Lapidot, anti-Semitism is a political performance that disregards, forgets, or obliterates its own concept. Semitism is the (Western Christian) double invention of “Judaism and Islam—the Jew, the Arab.” are generated essentially as enemies, objects of hate.[72] Moreover, the hypocrisy of Western liberal ideals are the seed for right-wing conspiracies. A familiar pattern, is that Muslim migrants in Europe are told to accept Islamophobia in the name of free speech. With every accusation of racism when they exercise free speech in condemning Israeli Settler colonialism; and with every racist assumption about Arabs or Muslims that underlie debates about Palestine, distrust and cynicism will bloom. Here we should recall that Zionism was locally considered an extension of European colonialism in much the same way that French colonial divisive policies (Jews/Muslims, Arabs/Amazigh) were farcical. The practice of colonial favouritism deepened suspicions and inflamed antisemitism as discussed via Englert and Takriti. Neighbours began to frame Jews as foreigners despite centuries-old Algerian Jewish local roots. Reactionaries of any denomination fear the revolutionary sparks produced by unity. Those voices that had broken away from cultural essentialism and religious bigotry had to be taken out. To me, these posters are a treasure because they keep some of the resonance alive and resist the erasure of Arab progressive epistemology. That is why I tried to highlight the presence ofdouble erasure, while there is the absence of a transgressive anticolonial Arab movement, it cannot be fully understood without the absence of the progressive Jew. Taken together, we may find a reasonable explanation of perseverance of this absence.

[1] This collection was curated with Subversive Film for the Lumbung Press publication and was part of Dokumenta fifteen. The 15th edition of the well-known art exhibition in Germany held between June and September 2022 in Kassel. See https://documenta-fifteen.de/en/about/.

[2] Through a consideration of the main ideological currents (liberals, pan-Islamists, nationalists, communists), Achcar (2010) adds crucial context about local, regional and global power relations that informed their political landscape, including how Arab Nationalism emerged a decade later as a popular alternative out of this political vacuum. This would be the backstage to the period when Israel invaded Lebanon in one of the bloodies wars in recent memory.

[3] In Gilbert Achcar there are references to Mahmoud Darwish, Edward said, Elias Khoury, Azmi Bishara, Adonis, Samir Kasir, Joseph Samaha, Philip Matar, Joseph Massad. That I have not come across any female intellectuals is a sign of the times, namely that during the 1970s and even until the early 2000s, the public political discourse was completely dominated by men.

[4] The communist parties were already disgraced when Soviet forces violently occupied Afghanistan. The later collapse of the USSR meant a double degradation of a Left alternative that was beneficial for the crushing of the left in general and allowed a leftist legacy to be partly erased. This counter-revolution dynamic permitted a deliberate reframing of anti-colonial Palestinian solidarity as antisemitic.

[5] From his 1967 "The Other America" speech at Stanford University, explaining the cause of the Harlem (New York) and the Watts (California) riots. The full quote is “It is not enough for me to stand before you tonight and condemn riots. It would be morally irresponsible for me to do that without, at the same time, condemning the contingent, intolerable conditions that exist in our society. These conditions are the things that cause individuals to feel that they have no other alternative than to engage in violent rebellions to get attention. And I must say tonight that a riot is the language of the unheard. And what is it America has failed to hear? It has failed to hear that the plight of the negro poor has worsened over the last twelve or fifteen years. It has failed to hear that the promises of freedom and justice have not been met. And it has failed to hear that large segments of white society are more concerned about tranquility and the status quo than about justice and humanity.” See here the speech: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dOWDtDUKz-U.

[6] As Fanon argued in Concerning Violence: The violence which has ruled over the ordering of the colonial world, which has ceaselessly drummed the rhythm for the destruction of native social forms and broken up without reserve the systems of reference of the economy, the customs of dress and external life, that same violence will be claimed and taken over by the native at the moment when, deciding to embody history in his own person, he surges into the forbidden quarters. Available online:http://www.openanthropology.org/fanonviolence.htm.

[7] This context is crucial in any reading of Fanon, but his approach has been framed as revenge – short off a call for violence - see for an earlier contribution about this wider philosophical argument Immanuel Wallerstein’s 1970 Frantz Fanon: Reason and Violence, Berkeley Journal of Sociology, Vol. 15: 222-231

(PN, 25, 11, in. Wallerstein 1970:223).

[8] Through English, French and Arabic archives of Arab social movements and their main political journals, and examining religious sources he frames the region’s politics and religious positions.

[9] Achcar: 243

[10] The most important examples he engaged are Harkabi, Bernard Lewis and Huntington.

[11] I discuss The Arabs and the Holocaust: the Arab-Israeli War of Narratives by Gilbert Achcar [(2010), London: Saqi] in Mondoweiss:

[12] Achcar: 261

[13] Referenced in Achcar as 1976: 298

[14] Achcar: 242

[15]The British treated the Arabs in the most brutal colonial manner, most directly the Balfour Declaration and the Peel Commission. 

[16] Find reference.

[17] Lean 2017:11. Reference: Nathan Lean. 2017.The Islamophobia Industry: How the Right Manufactures Fear of Muslims.

[18] See Khalili, L. (2010). The location of Palestine in global counterinsurgencies. International Journal of Middle East Studies, 42(3), 413-433. doi:10.1017/S0020743810000425

[19] There are numerous examples: https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/02/24/why-benjamin-netanyahu-loves-the-european-far-right-orban-kaczynski-pis-fidesz-visegrad-likud-antisemitism-hungary-poland-illiberalism/;https://www.timesofisrael.com/senior-hungarian-official-netanyahu-and-orban-belong-to-same-political-family/;https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2018-07-18/ty-article/.premium/the-netanyahu-orban-bromance-that-is-shaking-up-europe-and-d-c/0000017f-db69-db5a-a57f-db6b405b0000; https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2018/07/20/netanyahu-and-orban-meet-in-summit-of-illiberal-nationalists/;https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/04/22/the-trump-netanyahu-alliance; Shanes, J. (2019). Netanyahu, Orbán, and the Resurgence of Antisemitism: Lessons of the Last Century. Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies37(1), 108-120.doi:10.1353/sho.2019.0005.

[20] The leader of Hamas (Sheikh Jamal Mansur was in support of the Palestinian Call on the occasion of the 50^th anniversary of the Nakba.

[21] Asim Qureshi. 2020. I Refuse to Condemn. Resisting racism in times of national security. Manchester University Press

[22] The collective response was titled “We are angry, we are sad, we are tired, we are united”

[23] 2020:3.

[24] The Prevent duty is a government requirement imposed on all education providers ‘to have due regard to the need to prevent people from being drawn into terrorism’ and became a contentious and heavily criticised for targeting especially Muslim students of colour, see the earlier Prevent Prevent:https://www.nusconnect.org.uk/campaigns/preventing-prevent-we-are-stude…. See respectively, on Prevent: Saffa Mir’sGuilty without a crime (chapter 8 in Qureshi 2020), Nadya Ali’sWriting for the kids (chapter 12 in Qureshi 2020); on IHRA (and JDA): Lena Salaymeh’s (Forthcoming)Colonial political theology: Orthodoxy and orthopraxy in colonial politics, Ruth Gould’s (2020), TheIHRA Definition of Antisemitism: Defining Antisemitism by Erasing Palestinians. The Political Quarterly, 91: 825-831.https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-923X.12883; and on Tuck see: Bricup:https://bricup.org.uk/article/bricup-statement-on-nus-tuck-report/ and Brismes’ response to the Tuck report: https://www.brismes.ac.uk/news/statement-in-response-to-the-rebecca-tuc….

[25] I would like to thank Lena Salaymeh for recommending this very helpful scholarship to me.

[26] 2020: 7

[27] 2020: 17

[28] 2020: 19

[29] 2020: 20

[30] 2020: 8

[31] Interesting, in seeking to deconstruct a rise of new anti-Semitism and the basic categories that underlie it, Lapidot disagrees with the (such as carried by Hannah Arendt) alternative ‘antisemitism’ over ‘anti-Semitism’ for the reason that antisemites do not oppose any ‘Semitism’, which constructs a Jewish enemy but has nothing to do with any opposition to ‘Semitic’ ethnic origins or language communities (:6).

[32] This logic converts traditions into religions, law into positive law, and states (as forms of governance) into modern nation-states (forthcoming:4).

[33] Salaymeh defines colonial political theology as an epistemology that relies on dualisms such as “hate speech” and “free speech,” as well as “new antisemitism” and “Abrahamic religions”.

[34] Important here is her disagreement with other critiques of JDA that pointed at Palestinians not being included in determining its definition. Palestinians, as such, are not experts on either antisemitism or anti-Zionism, but JDA itself contributes to a deeply colonial framing that portrays Jews as essentially Zionists through a false pairing of antisemitism and anti-Zionism. JDA ignores the antisemitism (including philosemitism) of Zionists or supporters of Israel because this form of antisemitism serves Zionist colonization.

[35] Especially the Macpherson principle, which was mostly about the duty of authorities to believe and report and victim's perception and investigate racist attacks, turned into the interpretation that the victim has the exclusive prerogative to determine whether is racially discriminatory. This is challenged also based on the progressive principle that not all members of a group share the same approach or principles and thus an assumed unanimity is impossible.

[36] Salaymeh Page: 11

[37] Salaymeh Page: 10

[38] Achcar: 247

[39] Achcar: 248

[40] See Modernity and the Holocaust, Baumann 1989, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press 1989.  Afropessimis claims (especially by Wilderson) of a Black ontology that does not compare (in one way is “superior” to) any other form of suffering) shows similarities with debates regarding the incomparability of the Holocaust.

[41] Page 17.

[42] Salaymeh, page: 15.

[43] Salaymeh page: 18.

[44] Sai Englert (2021), ‘Anti-Semitism and De-Racialisation - The case of Algerian Jews’, Spectre Journal, 3. Online: https://spectrejournal.com/antisemitism-and-deracialization/

[45] Sai Englert (2021), ‘The case of Algerian Jews’.

[46] Takriti, Abdel Razzaq. 2022, “The Kurd and the Wind: The Politics and Poetics of Palestinian–Kurdish Affiliation.” Chapter Two in The Political and Cultural History of the Kurds by Amir Harrak. Oxford: Peter Lang. Page 27.

[47] Takriti 2022. This is why it matters that the most progressive Arab-regional nationalist tendencies were grounded in a universalist anti- colonial and anti- imperialist ideology. Page 28.

[48] It was noticeable around the overwhelming expressions of support for Palestine during the 2022 World Cup in Qatar, that an increase of online interventions about the Western Sahara emerged on social media. Many of this input were bots. For earlier empirical research see: Aouragh, M. 2016. Hasbara 2.0: Israel’s Public Diplomacy in the Digital Age. Middle East Critique. 25 (3), pp. 271-297. https://doi.org/10.1080/19436149.2016.1179432

[49] Salim Nadi, Historical Materialism 2023, in this collection.

[50] Salim Nadi, Historical Materialism 2023, in this collection.

[51]  Brahim El Guabli (2020) Reading for theory in the Moroccan Marxist-Leninist testimonial literature, African Identities, 18:1-2, 145-161, DOI: 10.1080/14725843.2020.1773243

[52] Salim Nadi, Historical Materialism 2023, in this collection.

[53]  Brahim El Guabli (2020) Reading for theory in the Moroccan Marxist-Leninist testimonial literature, African Identities, 18:1-2, 145-161, DOI: 10.1080/14725843.2020.1773243

[54] Heckman 2018

[55] Salim Nadi, Historical Materialism 2023:4. [how to refer to the pages?]

[56] Alma Rachel Heckman. (2018). Jewish Radicals of Morocco: Case Study for a New Historiography. Jewish Social Studies, 23(3), 67–100. https://doi.org/10.2979/jewisocistud.23.3.03

[57] Ben Lorber 2019. Jewish Alternatives to Zionism: A partial History. Jewish voice for peace, 11 January.

[58] Alan Wald. 2020. On Jewish Revolutionary Internationalism.

[59] Wald describes that (2020 On Jewish Revolutionary Internationalism) Mandela’s ANC was also supported by his school friends and SACP leaders Ruth First and Joe Slovo of Latvian and Lithuanian Jewish families: “Slovo became commander of “The Spear of the Nation,” the armed wing (founded by Mandela) of the African National Congress; First was assassinated in 1982 by the South African police while she was teaching in exile in Mozambique, apparently because they couldn’t get to Slovo himself.(6)”. […] Baruch Hirson (1921-1999), founder of the critical Marxist journal Searchlight South Africa in 1988, who was jailed for nine years for carrying out sabotage in connection with the pro-Trotskyist African Resistance Movement (ARM).

[60] Alan Wald. 2020. On Jewish Revolutionary Internationalism. Against the Current. No. 209 (November/December). Online:https://againstthecurrent.org/atc209/jewish-revolutionaries/. According to Wald much of the confusion of the Jewish Revolutionary Internationalist tradition, and what this means for a Jewish identity in the modern world, was facilitated by ambiguities and uncertainties in the original discourse of Marxist positions, especially “The Jewish Question” and quotes Italian scholar Enzo Traverso “The history of the Marxist debate on the Jewish question is a history of misunderstanding.”

[61] Lapidot 2020, page:18

[62] Salaymeh, page: 17

[63] Sai Englert. 2016. Doykayt: Yiddishland for All. Salvage, January 25: https://salvage.zone/doykayt-yiddishland-for-all/.

[64] Sai Englert. 2016. Doykayt.

[65] Alan Wald 2020 On Jewish Revolutionary Internationalism.

[66]Jewish Alternatives to Zionism2019;Decidedly Marxist 2019.

[67]  Lapidot, 2020:1

[68] Cf. https://apnews.com/article/a3fd2088a8a65690302b891fd764ab0a

[69] Achcar, page: 250

[70] Achcar, page 251

[71] Nadi 2023, page:9

[72] Lapidot Page:17.

Mr. Hoffman: Your idea of justice is the only obscenity in the room. You schtunk. Schande vor de goyim, huh?

The Court: Mr. Marshal, will you ask the defendant Hoffman to –

Mr. Hoffman: This ain’t the Standard Club.

The marshal: Mr. Hoffman –

Mr. Hoffman: Oh, tell him to stick it up his bowling ball. How is your war stock doing Julie? You don’t have any power. They didn’t have any power in the Third Reich, either.

The Court: Will you ask him to sit down, Mr. Marshal?

The marshal: Mr. Hoffman, I am asking you to shut up.

Mr. Rubin: Gestapo.

Mr. Hoffman: Show him your .45. He ain’t never seen a gun.

The Court: Bring in the jury, Mr. Marshal.

Mr. Rubin: You are the laughing stock of the world, Julius Hoffman; the laughing stock of the world. Every kid in the world hates you, knows what you represent.

Marshal Dobkowski: Be quiet, Mr. Rubin.

Mr. Rubin: You are synonymous with the name Adolf Hitler. Julius Hoffman equals Adolf Hitler today.

~“At the Chicago Conspiracy Trial,” Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin et al.[1]

This piece is being made available as a preprint edition of the double-volume Marxism and the Critique of Antisemitism special issue of Historical Materialism. Further additions will still be made before then. The final published version of this text will be made available on the Brill website in the coming months. We ask that citations refer to the Brill edition.All Illustrations are by Natalia Podpora.

Early in the research for this project, I interviewed a long-time comrade in Chicago, Joel Finkel, who I knew as a socialist, 4th Internationalist, and active anti-Zionist with Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP).[2]  Eager to learn how his socialism, anti-Zionism and Jewish identity intersected, I sat him down for a long, nearly three-hour conversation at the famous Jewish deli in the strip mall zone west of the Loop, the last fragment of what used to be a thriving Jewish neighborhood before urban renewal and the expanding University of Illinois obliterated it -- a reminder that the suburbanization of Jews was done as much by bulldozer as it was funded by racially restricted FHA housing loans.  Like a number of other Jewish activists of his generation I have known through the years, Joel downplayed how much his Jewishness was central to his becoming a revolutionary: he wasn't religious, his parents were progressives but not in the Jewish left, and he underscored that the primary movers of his political life were objective and historical events such as the war in Vietnam and the civil rights movement.  He had a clear analysis of the contradictions of capitalism, the historical conjuncture of the 1960s, the role of Zionism in global imperialism, and thought of questions of personal identity as slightly foreign to his ears, as if I had asked him about his moon sign.  And then, perhaps two hours into the conversation about how he got involved in the movement and developed his political outlook, he choked up, flushed, and almost sobbed, "we couldn't let it happen to anyone else."  It, I asked?  "The Holocaust.  It couldn't happen again."[3] 

Finkel's formation is one I encountered often while reading memoirs and interviewing Jewish activists who were part of the New Left of the 1960s and early 1970s.  In another interview with Susan Eanet (now Klonsky), a former Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) activist and founder of the Revolutionary Youth Movement (RYM) and later the new communist October League, explained her own dedication to Palestinian liberation through Holocaust memory.  After talking for several hours in her northwest Chicago home about her Jewish upbringing, about her father who was a founder of a liberal temple in Washington D.C., and about how that related to her anti-Zionist writings for the SDS newspaper New Left Notes, she finally explained:  "we couldn't be good Germans."[4]  Jews, she said, more than anyone, should know the price of the world's silence as a genocide is taking place.  Tellingly, also Mark Rudd framed his resistance to the Vietnam War in the exact same way in his memoir of SDS, saying he "can't be a good German.”[5]  "In my home, as in millions of Jewish homes, "Hitler" was the name for Absolute Evil," Rudd explains, going to further to say "only this time, it was us, the Americans."  Like Klonsky, Rudd evoked the Holocaust not to suggest that Jews are special victims of a unique tragedy or to justify or rationalize their behavior, but to explain why they felt a personal responsibility to oppose fascism and colonialism done in their name, either as Jews and/or Americans.  Shortly after her release from prison, for Weather Underground member Kathy Boudine recollected that her decision to support the Black Liberation Army's campaign of bank robberies and jailbreaks rested on her analysis that America was in the process of committing multiple genocides and that she, like Rudd and Klonsky, thought "a lot about Germany" during the Holocaust: "how do you live a life when your government is doing what its doing?"[6]  In other words, she neither could be a "good German."

The idea that there is a particular Jewish responsibility to oppose fascism and the genocidal race theory behind it was expressed clearly by another member of SDS and early friend of Rudd, David Gilbert.  "For myself and many other Jews in the movement," Gilbert wrote in his memoir, "the bedrock lesson from the Holocaust was to passionately oppose all forms of racism" explaining also that he because of the Holocaust, he could "never join the oppression of other people.”[7]  And even though Gilbert's describes his parents as apolitical, he asserts "they taught me racism was wrong" a conclusion drawn from witnessing the violence of antisemitism.[8]  Rudd also locates the meaning of the Holocaust not only with destruction of European Jewry, but specifically with "racism; that's what anti-Semitism was.”[9] "Racism" as an explanation of antisemitism does not locate antisemitism as something unique to Jews, but as part of a larger structure of white supremacy, in so far as it connects the persecution of Jews to the oppression of people of color. In this way Rudd connects his support for SNCC not only with a political project, but his own personal story.  "With the solipsism of a child," he writes of reading Anne Frank's diary and looking at the death camp tattoos of his relatives, and "saw myself among the dead.”[10]  For Rudd and for many Jews in the movement, their attachment to fighting racism was a way of articulating their own feelings about being Jewish.  As historian Arlene Stein suggests, "I developed an intense, vicarious identification with the struggles of African Americans" as a means to better understand "the collective experience of trauma" after the Holocaust.[11] While Stein articulates this as a form of displacement, for Rudd and others it was a way to passionately connect with and honor their Jewish heritage.

It is often assumed that the 1967 Arab-Israeli War and the emergence of the Black Power movement engendered a split between Jews and the New Left.[12]  This story is told by both progressive and reactionary historians alike, and is memorialized in iconic images such as the Jewish Defense League standing in front of a Brooklyn synagogue in sunglasses to “defend” it from a planned speech by Black Panther James Forman or Abbie Hoffman’s 1967 editorial for the Village Voice decrying to expulsion of the mostly Jewish white activists from Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee (a position he soon, nonetheless, recanted after conversations with Stokely Carmichael and others).[13]  This split between Black Power and the anti-imperialist left is often said to coincide with the emergence of Holocaust memorialization.  Some, such as Norm Finkelstein understand the sudden rise of Holocaust memorialization in the late 1960s and early 1970s as a cynical move to “exploit Jewish suffering” for the project of Jewish nationalism, while others such as Michael Staub locates increased public expression of Holocaust memory within the context of a late 1960s Jewish revival.[14]  Either way, both narratives assume a tension between left-wing Jews and Black Power and anti-imperialism as given, and locate a new American Jewish commonsense of Jewish nationalism abroad and a quickening of Jewish identity politics at home as both totalizing and hegemonic.  The only problem with this narrative is that the most prominent, and visible, Jewish radicals of the 1960s and early 1970s – Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, Mark Rudd, Susan Eanet/Klonsky, Rennie Davis, Dick/Mickey Flacks, David Gilbert – did not agree.  Not only did much of the Jewish New Left in organizations such as SDS and SWP continue to back the anti-Zionist Black Panther Party, many deployed Jewish memory of the Holocaust, the Red Scare, and antisemitism to formulate their revolutionary global politics. It is not so much that Finkelstein and Staub are incorrect, as their readings of a Jewish 1960s tend to write out of history how Jews in revolutionary – and non-Jewish -- organizations formulated a Jewish sensibility through Jewish memory, particularly of the Holocaust and the experience of right-wing antisemitism.

In this sense, Rudd, Klonsky, Gilbert, Hoffman, and Finkel’s deployment of the Holocaust speaks to ongoing and present debates about its meaning and relevance in the politics of Jewish memory and identity. There is a growing consensus that supposed silence among American Jews around the Holocaust was at best partial.  Scholar Hasia Diner counters the narrative that the Holocaust was "unspeakable" until the late 1960s, or that Jews refused to remember or honor the dead out of fear of antisemitism, or shame of victimhood.[15]  Diner documents how memorials, religious ritual, journal articles and art were created and disseminated by Jewish organizations, synagogues, and in private homes and community events.  Far from distant from the minds of Jewish Americans, the presence of the Holocaust reconstructed Jewish American life in personal and public ways.  Indeed, the Holocaust was a common enough reference point in Jewish life that Philip Roth's first published story in the late 1950s not only evokes the genocide, uses it as the punchline of an ironic joke.  Grossbart, the Jewish private who wants to avoid combat in the Pacific and leave base for treyf eggrolls on Passover, manipulates the scrupulous Sergeant Marx by suggesting Jews "let themselves get pushed around" in Germany and needed to "stick together."[16]  Indeed, one can read the entire collection of stories in Goodbye Columbus as a kind of meditation on the Holocaust, from "The Conversion of the Jews" to "Eli, the Fanatic."  The Jewish community in "Eli" are so desperate to not attract antisemitism they wish to ban a Yeshiva, but also so concerned about Jewish cultural continuance after the Holocaust, they do whatever their children ask of them, even convert to Christianity.  In evoking the Holocaust with irony and complexity, Roth signals less a silence on the topic, as much as an intimate knowledge of it and of the many ways it complicated and animated Jewish American life - a near decade before the 1967 War.

 Even for scholars like Diner acknowledge the "myth of silence" is a construction, however, there is an assumption that the Holocaust made the Jewish community fundamentally conservative and assimilationist.  As Norman Finkelstein documents, the 1967 Arab Israeli War sparked not only a wave of support for the victorious Israeli armies, government officials from the State Department to the Pentagon began to understand how Israel could be a strategic ally. “The Holocaust proved to be the best defensive weapon deflecting criticism of Israel,” Finkelstein writes.[17]  In service of Israeli nationalism, the Holocaust he argued was transformed from a fascist genocide that was part of a larger far-right racial project, to something very particular and “unique” that happened only to Jews.[18]  European historian Enzo Traverso takes this analysis a step further to suggest "the Shoah closed a cycle of European intellectual history, in which Jews had been a central part," transforming Jews from a "pariah" class to an integrated part of Western culture.  It is Henry Kissinger for Traverso, not Trotsky who inherits the meaning of the Holocaust in global politics.[19]  Citing the ways the Nuremburg Laws and American triumphalism celebrated both the inclusion of Jews into the fabric of mainstream American life and Israel into the sphere of the capitalist West, "the Jew" for Traverso has gone from being counter-modality to European modernity to its most ideal subject.  Citing both Israel and human rights law, Traverso argues that the "former trouble makers and disrupters of order had become its pillars.[20]  Historian of antisemitism Paul Hanebrink frames it another way:  as the victory over Nazi Germany became absorbed into the narrative of global American power, so did the Jews go from being a "Judeo-Bolshevik menace" to part of the "Judeo-Christian West.”[21] 

In an essay by Mark Tseng-Putterman in Protocols, he argues that the mobilization of the Holocaust not only justifies the state of Israel for a Zionist Jewish establishment, its very memory actually makes Jews less likely to see Israeli "culpability in the so-called conflict."[22]  For Tseng-Putterman, Holocaust narratives create a kind of "Jewish-exceptionalism" that serves as the ideological infrastructure for Zionism, and more broadly, blinds white Jews to ways in which they mobilize their own whiteness.  "Far from progressive," Tseng-Putterman continues, "the absolution of Jewish participation in white supremacy" by focusing on the Holocaust as the singular event defining antisemitism, "halts opportunities to challenge Jewish complicity."  Indeed, the article argues it is precisely through the American narrative of the Holocaust that Jews have been conscripted into the institutional relations of American liberalism and American empire.  That the U.S. can place itself as the protector of the Jews reinforces and can be understood to be the modality through which liberal white supremacist state maintains is legitimacy.  Not only are the Nuremburg Laws part of the legal superstructure of the global American empire, the incorporation of a certain kind of Jewish suffering is the way the state disavows its own history with eugenics and genocide.  "There is an order" to state violence, the author declares, and by centering the Holocaust as a primary part of that order, Jews literally whitewash their own complicity with whiteness and empire as well as allow the state to benefit from Jewish investments in a normative history of antisemitism.  In the order of state violence, the Holocaust is low on the hierarchy, and more silence, rather than less, is necessary.  The article suggests that Holocaust narratives cannot be mobilized outside of a context of whiteness and cannot but help, in such as a context, redeploy it. 

“Just as organized Jewry remembered The Holocaust when Israeli power peaked, so it remembered The Holocaust when American Jewish power peaked,” Finkelstein argues, suggesting that the Holocaust not only deflected criticism of Israel, but also deflected white Jews from criticism of their whiteness.[23]  As Jewish studies scholar Ben Ratskoff wrote in Jewish Currents, Jewish analogies to the Holocaust are the "narcissistic" means by which Jews "disavow" concern for and their complicity in white racism and the normative violence of liberalism.[24]  "2017 may have offered a strange solace" Tseng-Putterman writes, posing that antisemitism actually reassures Jews of their safety in the world, rather than threatens it, as it mobilizes the state in their defense.  Jewish memory of antisemitism not only exaggerates the threat of antisemitism, antisemitism is the very means by which Jews align their interests with the state – antisemitism is a form of state power.  Antisemitism in this formation, makes white Jews whiter; it solidifies their relationship to narratives and institutions of American power.  One may look no further than attacks against Jeremy Corbyn and progressive American socialists to see the ways in which a discourse of antisemitism protects the powerful, and is deployed as a weapon against democracy. 

Rudd, Klonsky, Gilbert and other New Left radicals articulate however a challenge both to the mainstream Jewish establishment’s Zionist conscription of the Holocaust, as well as to Traverso and Tseng-Putterman's narrative about post-Holocaust memory and Jewish identity.  While Traverso, Finkelstein and Tseng-Putterman are certainly accurate to point fingers at an increasingly reactionary Jewish establishment, their analysis tends to evacuate other possibilities for progressive Jewish life outside of or even oppositional to such institutions, with a logic, history, and subjectivity of its own.  Such discourse tends to flatten Jewish experience into an expression only of large – if quite powerful – Jewish institutions. As Michael Rothberg documents, Holocaust memory is "multidirectional," and emerged in the context of anti-fascism and de-colonial discourse in the 1940s and 1950s long before it emerged as a pillar for a muscular Israeli and/or U.S. nationalism.[25] While widely divergent in their political commitments and perspectives, both Hannah Arendt's Origins of Totalitarianism and Aimé Césaire'sDiscourse on Colonialism, published in the early 1950s, locate both the origins of fascism and the roots of the Holocaust in European imperialism, in transnational, or perhaps supra-national projects of economic expansion and political repression.  Indeed, as Norm Fruchter wrote for the summer 1965 edition ofStudies on the Left, the wide-ranging anger at Hannah Arendt for her condemnation of both Jewish nationalists and Jewish leadership during and after the Holocaust was a markeddeparture for an American Jewish community that substituted the "secular values...of social justice, use of intellect, the pursuit of knowledge" for Zionism and its "myth of the victim which Jews tend to substitute for their history."[26]  This Rudd and Klonsky who do not wish to be "good Germans," the violence of fascism is not something that happens only to Jews, or can be accounted solely through Jewish history or Jewish victimization.  The violence of fascism is a structural part of imperialism, whether the genocidal levels of violence deployed against the Vietnamese during the U.S. invasion, or ethnic cleansing and militarism of the Israeli state.  The question for Jews is less how to memorialize the Holocaust as a uniquely Jewish tragedy, but rather what is the ethico-political stance the Holocaust requires of a Jew.

As Gilbert makes plain, Jewish survival is not the primary lesson the Holocaust imparts. While it is clear that Gilbert, Klonsky, Rudd, Deutscher and others understood Jews to be targets of fascist violence, they also understood that social solidarity, not Jewish particularism, or nationalism, was what Holocaust memory should mean. As Deutscher writes "I am a Jew by force of my unconditional solidarity with the persecuted and exterminated."[27]  Note the construction - it is not solidarity with other Jews that makes Deutscher Jewish, it is particular "force" that marks his passion and his solidarity.  It is the depth of commitment against persecution and extermination that makes the Jew.  While Gilbert does not explicitly say this, one could possibly derive that the lengths was willing to go, eventually to a life sentence in prison, marks the "force" of his solidarity, and hence his Jewishness. And yet Gilbert is also clear to normalize such feeling.  His parents, who he describes as apolitical, his father an Eisenhower Republican, mother a relatively liberal but not zealous Democrat, explicitly articulated that the lesson of the Holocaust was to stand against racism.  That this was the opinion of Jews who were otherwise politically in no way remarkable suggests less their idiosyncrasy by the articulation of a Jewish commonsense in the decades immediately following the Shoah, not an aberration.  When Rudd writes, "I saw myself among the dead" when he imagined the Holocaust as a child, it did not lead him to think Jews were exceptional - rather it led him into the struggle to oppose genocide and imperialism wherever he encountered it. 

Perhaps the most sustained engagement with the radical usable past of the Holocaust is Suzanne Weiss’ memoir, Holocaust to Resistance:  My Journey.  Weiss, a Polish survivor who spend the last years of the war in hiding and then in a Jewish orphanage in France, emigrated to the United States when two Jewish members of the Communist Party in New York adopted her in 1950.  The first time Weiss articulates herself as a Holocaust survivor in public however is many years later, during an official state visit by Ariel Sharon to Toronto in 2003.  Framing her own experience as both unique and yet at the same time part of larger structures of racialized state violence, she spoke the following at a rally outside of Sharon’s hotel:

Hitler's Holocaust is unique in history; nothing is 'similar' to it.  Still, many Israeli techniques -- the expulsions, the ghettoization, the pervasive checkpoints -- have a disquieting resemblance to Nazi methods. To oppose Sharon is not anti-Jewish....a united resistance can, like the anti-Nazi Resistance of my childhood, win out against the aggressors.[28]

Before this point, Weiss was no stranger to politics:  she had been a member of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) since her teenage years, and had organized antiwar demonstrations, visited Cuba on an official delegation, and worked in heavy industry trying to form unions among other workers.  And yet it wasn’t until she undertook a personal journey first to Poland, then as a social worker among Holocaust survivors that she articulated the meaning of her experience:  “I wondered whether Holocaust survivors differed from survivors of other traumas, tragedies, or genocides, such as Palestinian families subjected to daily terror, the destruction of their families, and the loss of their homes, possessions, and homeland,” she asked. “Holocaust survivors, I concluded, must be addressed not through comparison with other historic disasters…Yet working with Holocaust survivors sharpened my awareness of the suffering of all peoples emerging from genocide and societal traumas.”[29]  This double turn, in which Weiss recognizes the specificity of Jewish trauma does not make it perfectly analogous to other forms of oppression, yet her increasing awareness – unlike Traverso and Tseng-Putterman’s claims – increases her feelings of solidarity with other oppressed people, especially with Palestinians. 

It’s also clear in Weiss’ narrative that her conclusions regarding the Holocaust are not a rupture with her family’s past or her experience, but rather as she articulates it, a final culmination.  Throughout her text she sprinkles comments from her mother, such as “’Jewish people have a natural affinity to Negroes seeking human dignity,’ Mom said” on walking past a lunch-counter protest, or “The Ku Klux Klan hated Jews just as much as they hated Blacks," noting a synagogue was dynamited the same week as a Black church.[30]  During the Suez crisis in 1956, Weiss’ father confirmed his continued critique of Zionism by noting “Israel is on the wrong side again,” aligned with imperial west.[31]   Weiss’ most succinct articulation of a Jewish anti-Zionist subjectivity was in high school.  Troubled one day when a Jewish friend ask if she was a Zionist, she replied “no, I’m Jewish.”  For Weiss, her Jewish identity both preceded the question of Zionism, and also excluded it.  When she asked her red-diaper baby boyfriend about the incident, he explained that a “Zionist is anyone, Jewish or not, who defense the settlement of Israel as the Jewish homeland.”[32] 

Neatly separating Zionist politics from Jewish identity, Weiss’ sense of Jewish identity was reaffirmed, and reflected that Jews will experience antisemitism wherever they go, no matter the location or country – and couldn’t see how a nation-state would solve such a question.  She asked her rhetorically, “wouldn’t it be a convenient place to get rid of us all at once?” In this way Weiss both articulates an anti-Zionist common sense, in which Zionism is something both alien from her point of view, but also troubling:  she didn’t understand why it seemed important to her friend when it was something that seemed so far, so removed.  And her response – though equally laconic, was common diasporic reason – antisemitism is global, it makes sense then to be a global and dispersed people, on the move.  More than anything else, it was the brevity of the passage that was remarkable – in less than a page in a 300 page memoir, the question of Zionism was settled in her mind.  Are you a Zionist?  No I’m Jewish, seems paradoxical, yet it is the governing logic of the 1960s Jewish New Left.

While the central political “journey” in My Journey is from Holocaust survivor to revolutionary, the physical journey Weiss undertakes is from Poland, to France, to the United States, and then finally, in the 1980s, back to Poland.  While one cannot call it kind of reverse-Aliyah back to Europe, it is clear that Weiss finds a kind emotional and historical sense of closure by visiting the towns in which her family once lived.  For Weiss the return back to Poland is filled both with melancholy and also optimism. She travels to the Jewish cemetery in Piotrkow, where her mother and grandmother ran a bakery.  Finding the cemetery “overgrown with weeds” and the townspeople unconcerned with its upkeep, Weiss writes that “alone, I listened to the melancholic murmur of the breeze swaying leaves” before returning to Warsaw.[33]  Yet while in Warsaw, she is heartened to learn that the Solidarnosc movement, which the SWP supported, printed “anti-racist leaflets and posters…as proof that the union stood firm against xenophobic sentiment.”[34]  These twin feelings, that the murder, and erasure of her family from Poland, and the “Polish Spring” with the Solidarity movement, suggests that whatever her fight around Jewish identity and the Holocaust may be, there are European problems to be resolved in Europe.  The entire journey of the text, from survival to finally awakening of the political implications of the Holocaust, live within a political cycle around questions of capitalism, fascism, human rights, the state, and Jewish memory.  Israel’s only presence in the text is read only as an interloper, literally – as Ariel Sharon visits Toronto, much to the dismay of the Weiss and her comrades. 

The Anti-Zionism of the Jewish New Left

It is often assumed that with some exceptions, that the emergence of Holocaust memory among American Jews coincided with general American jubilance over the Israeli victory in the 1967 War.  As Norm Finkelstein writes, “American Jewish elites suddenly discovered Israel” after the Six-Day War, while Keith Feldman takes this step further to suggest, after Norm Podhoretz, “nothing less than the mass conversion of the American Jews to Zionism.”[35]  Amy Kaplan, Eric Dollinger and Melanie McAlister also document how the U.S. press and much of the Jewish and non-Jewish institutional world deeply identified with Israeli's lightening victory over Arab states, contrasting Israeli missiles blowing up Soviet jets before soaring over Africa to free hostages with "with images of Americans fleeing in helicopters from rooftops in Saigon."[36]  Many Americans, Jewish and non-Jewish alike, identified on a personal level the Israeli victories as if they were their own.  For many scholars of Jewish life, the sudden identification of the United States with Israel, combined with Jewish class ascendency after World War II, marks the end of Jewish otherness in the United States:  internationally, and domestically, Jews had entered the mainstream of American life.  Rudd’s narrative it would seem, asks us to question that assumption.

On the level of large Jewish institutions, this narrative of Jewish “conversion to Zionism” and the sense of belonging it implies would seem to bare itself out.  Historian Matt Berkman notes how such jubilation followed the money:  he tracks how after the 1967 War, a massive institutional shift in communication strategies, donor accounts, and political priorities towards supporting Israel -- even among mainstream Jewish institutions such as the American Committee for Judaism (ACJ) that had up to this point remain non-Zionist.[37]  Prior to the late 1960s, most Berman comments that large Jewish institutions mostly focused on the plight of Jews in the U.S., including refugees and Holocaust survivors.[38]  This shift in funding not only suggests a turn to Zionism as definitional for American Jewish life, it also suggests that large Jewish institutions felt Jews were no longer, in the main, a special case needing extensive extra-governmental support.  And more than this, for many Jewish liberals who were turning away from what they understood as the excesses of the radical left, Israel seemed to be like America, only better - "there were no draft dodgers in Israel," historian Michael Fischbach writes of the new pro-Israel consensus, and Vietnam War, no burning ghettos, no drug addicts, no crime.[39]  This merger between liberals and conservatives on Israel was perfected by Otto Preminger and Dalton Trumbo's 1960 film Exodus, based on Leon Uris' novel of the same name.  As Kaplan notes, it frames Uris' narrative of Israel's founding as violent retribution for the Holocaust, while also maintaining concern with international legitimacy, the United Nations, and world peace after World War II.[40]  The new support for Israel seemed to both be a progressive war of liberation by a persecuted people, while also magically defeating America’s enemies supported by the Soviet Union.  Jews were America’s best story.  

For center-right and even liberal commentators such as Nathan Glazer and Irving Howe, supporting Israel took on a "mystical" importance, cementing Israel for the first time as not only a center, but the center of Jewish American life.[41]  For liberals such as Howe and liberals-turned-neocon such as Glazer, Jews who were outspoken in their antagonism against Israel or support for Palestinians, ceased to be Jews. As troubling as Howe and Glazer's conclusions are for their gate-keeping of Jewish identity, there are a number of radical historians who ironically uphold Glazer and Howe's thesis:  as Keith Feldman argues in his study on the role of Palestine in the formation of American empire, "both the Jewish left and the Jewish right felt threatened by the Black Power movement," especially Black Power activists' critique of Israel after the 1967 Arab-Israeli War.[42]  For the right, the Black left was dangerous because of their attention to Jewish practices of economic exploitation and their rising class status.  Jews Glazer felt, were singled out as the enemy of Black Power.  While for Feldman, the Jewish left does not descend into such racist rhetoric, Black Power organizations' increasingly hostile stance towards Israel and ouster of Jewish activists from Student Non Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) meant for them the historic and often quite material alliance was over.  In titling his chapter "Jewish Conversions," Feldman documents the right-ward drift of former Jewish leftists, as their support for Zionism and multiethnic democracy isolated them from the radicalizing currents of the anti-imperialist left. 

While the convergence of Holocaust memory and support for the state of Israel became a mainstay of Jewish institutional life on both the center and right, it is often forgotten how marginalized Jewish centrists and conservatives felt themselves to be in the 1960s, especially on the question of Zionism.  Indeed, if anything, the Jewish mood by the late 1960s was quite the opposite: from the overheated rhetoric of the Jewish Defense League (JDL) to the more dulcet tones of Jewish professors and the Jewish press, the assumption was that Zionism was in crisis on the Left, even and perhaps especially because of the left's Jewish constitution.  The sense among Jewish right wing radicals, and liberal intellectuals seemed to be that Jewish youth sided far more with SDS than with the IDF, let along the JDL.  The mood was so dire that in 1970, a conference was convened by the Histradrut Cultural Exchange Institute in New York's Arden House, gathering over a dozen leading liberal to left Jewish intellectuals to discuss the crisis. The lineup included sociologist Nathan Glazer, socialist historian Irving Howe, distinguished Hebrew professor Robert Alter, Mordecai Chertoff, Harvard professor Seymour Lipset, journalist Leonard Fein among others, and with the exception of Noam Chomsky, there was broad consensus that the Jewish left had turned against Zionism and thus, in their reading, the Jewish people.  For Jewish activist and journalist Leonard Fein, he summed up the mood of the New Left by saying "considerable intellectual support the left once had for Israel is gone.”[43]

One fact that perhaps also would puzzle a contemporary readership was how Jewish these dignitaries of liberal Jewish life also assumed the left to be. Irving Howe laments that “Jewish boys and girls, children of the generation that saw Auschwitz, hate democratic Israel and celebrate as revolutionary the Egyptian dictatorship…a few go so far as to collect money for Al Fatah.”[44]  Buried in Howe’s lament is not only the grief over Jewish youth’s rejection of Zionism, but that in their revolutionary fervor, they are “indifferent to the antisemitism of the Black Panthers,” suggesting that Black Power and Jewish nationalism are diametrically opposed.[45]  Seymour Lipset also notes accurately that the "New Left is disproportionately Jewish," and concludes that then the New Left Jewish youth have joined a tendency " opposed to the Jewish people as a people.[46]  For Lipset and many others on the panel, the post-Bolshevik left has long opposed Jewish nationalism and Jewish culture, and the opposition to the state of Israel was not about American empire, but rather, the long war of the left to destroy Judaism in the name of universalism and advocacy for the most marginalized.   While some such as Walter Laqueur and Chertoff, this was explicable as a Jewish rebellion against one's liberal Zionist parents, and attributable the wider youth movement.[47] And for others such as Lipset, joining the left is blended with the desire to "assimilate" and to use the left as a vehicle to become fully American, for nearly all, there was an assumption that Yet for most, there was a broad recognition that the New Jewish Left, like the Old Jewish Left, was hostile to Jewish nationalism, or "particularism," especially as it manifested in the Israeli state.  For Glazer, this was all about race, as he cogently and perhaps aptly summed up the many alliances and solidarities of the left by saying bluntly:  "the New Left supports the Arabs because the blacks do" - which for Rudd and Klonsky would be a point of pride; for Glazer, an act of "sycophancy.”[48]  For nearly all the authors, again, Chomsky excepted, "there are Jewish interests and it is the thrust of the New Left to oppose them.”[49]  Or as SWP leader Gus Horowitz dryly summarized in 1971, "the Zionist forces are...on the defensive.  They are much less confident of public sympathy than they used to be.”[50]

What makes the New Left's anti-Zionism legible beyond just the opinions of individual activists and appear as an existential threat to Zionists and the Jewish right is that anti-imperialism had become perhaps the central slogan, the ideological anchor of New Left movements by the late 1960s.  The U.S. invasion of Vietnam was increasingly understood as part of the left commonsense as less a policy mistake, or even a crime, but an expression of U.S. imperialism, and one episode in a global fight between the Third World and the West.  As Martin Luther King reframed the War in his famous "Beyond Vietnam," no longer was the call for the U.S. to fulfill its own principles of democracy, but rather to grasp U.S. was on the "wrong side of a worldwide revolution," a phrase that would be understood commonly in the 1960s to mean the anticolonial uprisings from Vietnam to Cuba to Algeria to Ghana to South Africa.  King's shift in this moment was not only surprising to many because he "broke the silence," but he also signaled his support for New Left and their analysis of the War and the role of America in the world.  This connection between Black liberation and the struggle against imperialism was the core focus of the Black Panther Party, and came to be the dominant frame of radical analysis for the leadership and much of the membership of SDS.[51]  As David Gilbert summarized Eldridge Cleaver, “You’re either part of the solution or part of the problem; either on the side of the people of the world or of imperialism.”[52]  For the Jewish intellectuals gathered by the Center for Cultural Exchange, they understood very well what this broad global analysis would mean for Jewish nationalism - and indeed, the 1967 War seemed to cement Israel in the minds of much of the New Left as yet another imperial power.[53]

While high profile Jewish, left wing writers and activists such as I.F. Stone, Isaac Deutscher, Irwin Silber of the National Guardian and Noam Chomsky were publicly critical of Israel after the 1967 War, what obscures the Jewish left critique of Zionism obscured today (even if it was quite clear in the 1960s), is that the liberation of Palestine was understood by members of SDS and SWP as part of a larger anti-imperialist struggle against Western capitalism.  Rather than summarize the conflict as between competing religions or ethnic groups, SDS, SWP and their allies tended to frame Palestine, much as they did the struggle in Vietnam and Cuba, as part of a wider global conflict between the Third World and the capitalist West.  As Richard Saks, a member of SDS and later the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP), framed it: in so far as “imperialism was at the center of our analysis of American capitalism,” we also understood that “Israel was an outpost of American empire.”[54] As Rudd summarized, support for Palestinians “It distinguished the true anti-imperialists from the liberals” and he wanted to be on the side of anti-imperialism.[55]   It was an issue that marked the New Left’s rupture with the liberal 1960s consensus, clarifying that the U.S. failure in Vietnam or the unpopularity with the draft were not particular issues to be solved, but systemic crises in a world system they meant to overthrow.  In 1968 the SDS leadership decided to explain its position Palestine in a series of articles by Eanet a staff writer for New Left Notes and someone close to leadership.  Eanet also expressed in an interview that it would be strategic for the articles on Palestine to be authored by someone who was not only known to be Jewish, but the daughter of the founder of a major synagogue in Washington D.C.[56]

Despite or perhaps because of Eanet’s background, her articles to do not frame the conflict in the Middle East as a Jewish and Arab issue, but rather in an editorial note describing the series, the editor argues that "outside of Vietnam" the "movement against imperialism in the Arab countries....may be the leading struggle against U.S. imperialism in the world today."[57]  Turning the New Right thesis that Israel is like America, but better, Eanet describes a country like the United States, only perhaps worse - as the dispossession of Palestinians from their land and Israel's expansive agenda is far from complete, and the Israeli working class saturated with racism. Eanet marks in the beginning of the article that the "situation in Palestine was analogous to the flight of early colonists in America...to a land already occupied by Indian people." Noting that the it was the racism of early Jewish colonists that prevented them from joining with the Arabs against the British, Eanet also argues that it was Jewish racism that informed the Kibbutzim labor policy of hiring only Jews, not socialism.  Divesting Palestinians from their land and "means of production" in the cities was just a start:  "Zionism was an ever expanding policy," Eanet writes, and given the "metaphysical concept of a 'homeland' and 'chosen people'" the Israelis will "expand as they can militarily."  With the rise of Al-Fatah and its "support of the Arab masses" one should not only see the analogy to Vietnam, but the analogy to the United States:  one can stop an Indian War before it is over.  This analogy was furthered by a second SDS pamphlet by Larry Hochman, who argued the "fundamental...central issue in Southwest Asia is the fact that a Jewish state has been established in the Arab midst without the invitation or consent of the indigenous population...at the aegis of Western imperial rule."[58]  

The SWP was generally aligned with SDS and with Black power positions on Israel-Palestine.  And like SDS, it was largely the Jewish members who argued and debated the policy on Palestine, at least in print – Peter Buch, Pete Seidman, Gus Horowitz, and John Rothschild.  In part the Jewish authorship of SWP pamphlets was explained by the need to defend the organizations against claims of antisemitism.  But it also seemed to come from a sincere desire by the Jewish members to not only shield the organization, but also address the ways in which SWP’s position is derived from a long, and proud, history of American Trotskyists taking a principled stand against Zionism, antisemitism and fascism, even when other Marxists were quiet.  The adopted resolutions and supporting materials, later published as a small book of around 80 pages titled “Israel and the Arab Revolutions,” was chiefly authored by Gus Horowitz, one of the few Jews in SWP who had grown up in an orthodox, Zionist household.  The pamphlet offered two major lines of argument – the first, that the Palestinian movement for self-determination was, unlike Nasserism and Ba’athism, a democratic people’s movement of the broader Middle East, and as such, an “advance” over the anti-colonial bourgeois nationalism that had come before in the region.  And because the movement was democratic in nature, Horowitz argued, it had the real chance to “appeal to the Jewish masses” and win them “away from Zionism.”[59] 

While SDS approached Israelis through the lens of “white skin privilege,” Horowitz tended to view the Israelis as both exploited by nationalism at the same time as they formed an “oppressor nationality” in relationship to Palestinians.[60]  Arguing that SWP is not only the strongest voice “against Zionism” on the left, it also is the “strongest opponent of anti-Semitism,” Zionism for Horowitz “does not advance the interests of the Jewish people – in Israel or anywhere else in the world.[61]  While Horowitz grants that Zionists have constructed their own “Hebrew nationality” that is distinct from diasporic Jewish identity, a Jewish-only state aligns Jews with “imperialism” and with their own bourgeoisie.[62]  It is for this reason that Jews in Israel do not have an independent working-class movement, fear invasion from the Arab world, and fear their growing pariah status globally – Israelis have sacrificed the possibility for peaceful cohabitation with their neighbors for a violent bourgeois nationalism.  Yet unlike the Arab national governments that are neither serious about Palestinian liberation and will deploy antisemitic rhetoric, Horowitz argues, the democratic nature of the Palestinian liberation struggle offers a place for Jews within it, if they are willing to give up on an ethnic state.  The fear that Palestinians will drive Jews into the sea is not the fear of antisemitism, but fear of revolution:  “to consider that the Arab revolution will necessarily threaten the national oppression of the Israeli Jews is an unfounded fear of the revolution itself, a fear which is incited for counterrevolutionary reasons by the imperialists and Zionists.”[63]  The situation for Jews in Israel Horowitz concludes, is not that of a religious or ethnic minority as it is in other countries, but as an oppressor – and the liberation of Palestinians will be their own liberation. 

While neither Eanet nor Horowitz identify themselves as Jewish in their articles, nor do their articles claim a particular Jewish subjectivity, for them as well as the other two-dozen or so New Left revolutionaries I interviewed, they understood their socialist anti-imperialism, including their anti-Zionism, as a continuation rather than a rupture with their Jewish sense of self.  For some such as Horowitz, Saks and SDS activist Steve Goldman, they identified primarily as Marxists and anti-imperialists, and yet, toward the end of the interview, echoed similar sentiments, that the “Jewish tradition” is to “side with the underdog,” and “the oppressed,” and because of this, most Jews are “less inclined to anti-communism,” and probably “more likely to sympathize with people of color.”[64]  This position – that they were both inside a tradition they could define and yet also, not defined by the tradition – was a common, perhaps the most common, sentiment among the activists – so much so I might almost call it a kind of Jewish subjectivity itself.  For for former SWP organizer Linda Loew, who like Saks came from a red diaper background, she summed it up simply by saying that she both liked being part of a multi-ethnic movement in which she could organize with farmworkers, students, and civil rights activists, and not feel that she was burdened by a sense of identity – which she thought of as her father’s intense sensitivity around perceived and real antisemitism.[65]  Yet she also prided herself on being the kind of Jew who opposed Zionism, and felt very much that she was carrying on the legacy of her parents.  “I didn’t feel there was a break,” she said, between her life in the New Left and her parents’ life, either in the kind of revolutionary work she was committed to in the SWP, or with her sense of what it meant to be Jewish.  Like Yuri Slezkine’s commentary on Sholem Aleichem’s “Tevye the Dairyman” Hodel running off to be a revolutionary – even or especially an anti-Zionist one -- is in a larger Jewish sense, still all in the family.[66] 

New Left Anti-Fascism and (Jewish) Red Scare Memory

One reason for a Jewish left to oppose Zionism during the 1960s while also affirming a Jewish subjectivity may have been due to the way progressives tended to see the post-war prosperity in very different terms than large mainstream Jewish institutions such as AJC and ACJ and their adherents.  As Marc Dollinger writes, “American Jews celebrated the postwar consensus,” enjoying their “integrating into the suburbs” and finding “common ties” with their new often white, Christian neighbors.[67]  Along with this new consensus, of course, there was also a rapid rise in class ascension, fueled by the GI Bill, university entrance in greater numbers, and the beginning of the end of restrictive covenants backed by FHA loans – all things, it should be noted, denied to most African-Americans during the same period.  Yet while large numbers of Jews ascended into the middle class, for the many hundreds of thousands of Jews on the Communist and socialist left of the 1940s and the decade of the 1950s, the era of course, looked quite different.  For Jews on the left, whether in the Communist Party, as members of Communist affiliated unions and organizations, or simply people with strong left sympathies, the era appeared less as the birth of a new post-war consensus, and more like the emergence of a post-war fascism.                                                                                                                      

Several years before Philip Roth ironized Jewish assimilation in Goodbye Columbus, Jewish Communist writer Howard Fast published a different tale about Cold War Jewish life in the United States:Peekskill USA.  The short book is a first-person narrative of Fast’s role in the infamous Peekskill riot of 1949, in which gangs of right-wing vigilantes twice attacked the concert goers and supporters of Paul Robeson.  Fast was part of the initial organizing committee, using his name and reputation to help publicize the event, and on the first night, was also one of the concert attendees who organized resistance to the mobs: he and two dozen other men fought off the fascist attackers, protecting the concert space while others fled to safety. Fast’s analysis, supported by the Civil Rights Congress that urged him to write it, was that this event was the opening salvo of a new form of fascism that was emergent in American life.  As Fast writes, “thePeekskill affair was an important step in the preparation for the fascization of America and for the creation of receptive soil for the promulgation of World War III,” as a way he concluded to both prepare the U.S. for necessary “violence” to put down the left, and also begin preparations for new military conflict.[68]  As one of the many instances of “force and violence against the left” Fast saw the coming Cold War, what Dollinger refers to as “consensus,” as less a coming sign integration and liberal democracy, than as a right-wing purge of the left, and the intensification of a militarized state.[69]

The racial and political coordinates of the vigilante violence were quite stark to Fast.  The crowd that assaulted the concert goers shouted racist and antisemitic slurs, “screaming at us in a full frenzy…full of the taste of death,” promising that “every n- bastard dies here tonight!  Every Jew bastard dies here tonight.”[70]  Rather than just a random event or stray racial epithets, Fast cites both the ACLU and the Civil Rights Congress documentation of how both riots were premeditated, and done in full view of local and state police.  Fast not only witnessed police intermingling with the vigilantes, he watches as a cop “beat the windshield of the car in with his club while he drew his revolver with another hand, while “another policeman” was “smashing in the windshield of a car that asked for directions.”[71]  The racist and antisemitic rhetoric Fast also documents as systemic and premeditated.  Stickers were printed and plastered all over town reading “COMMUNISM IS TREASON.  BEHIND COMMUNISM THE JEW” and a statement from one of the groups organizing the riot read:

You Jews, and we mean you Communist Jews, have made yourself obnoxious and offensive to the American people, and you are only using the American Negro as a “Front” in your criminal un-American activities.[72]

Fast additionally documented an attempt to assassinate Robeson, with a sniper’s nest discovered in the trees behind the stage, and even before the full assault on the concert goers, black people were dragged out of cars in town and beaten in broad daylight.  Fast described the mob not as “lumpen” but as “prosperous-appearing men, well set up, well dressed, real estate men, grocery clerks, lunch counter attendants…” – not a rabble but “decent citizens” and civic leaders.[73]  It was an organized assault, from the top down.

Fast said he wrote the book to wake Americans up, for he felt Americans have an “amazing resistance…toward” the “acceptance” of an “unmistakable phenomenon – the cultivation and growth of American fascism.  We simply do not believe it.”[74]  As if to prove his own point, Fast himself documents multiple moments in the text when he either refuses to recognize what he is seeing, or refuses to listen to advice from people who had a better understanding of what transpired that week.  Frequently “Mrs M,” his children’s nurse, and a Black woman, admonished Fast for not understanding how “white folks behave” and left town before the second concert.[75]  Likwise, the night of the second concert, Fast frequently documents how he fails to comprehend what he sees:

"Then suddenly we had to slow down. The car ahead of us had fared worse than we; every window was smashed, even the rear window. I remember saying to R-

"The road is wet. They must have gotten the gas tank or the radiator."

There was a dark wetness that flowed out of the car ahead of us; and then we realized that it was blood, but an enormous flow of blood that ran from the car that way and into the road."

Even at the level of Fast's sentence, the "but" creates an opposition between what he sees and the enormity of it, revealing his own sense of unreality as he faced yet again another barrage of violence on the way out of the concert grounds. Through his Black nurse and his own feelings of unreality, Fast quietly documents not only the slowness of his own perceptual response, the much longer lineages of fascism his nurse seems far more aware of: “how white folks behave.”

Perhaps the most important Communist organization to make the connection between the U.S. and home-grown fascism was the Civil Rights Congress (CRC).   Founded in 1946 to replace the International Labor Defense, it took an explicitly antifascist approach to organizing against racism and anti-union suppression.  Placing the Holocaust at the center of its analysis of capitalism, William Patterson, its director, compared the fate of African-Americans in the United States to Jews under the Holocaust.  Furthering the analysis of Negritude theorist Aimé Césaire, Patterson held the origins of fascism lay in colonialism and slavery, systems that in an era of crisis, returned back to Europe to form fascism.  Following this logic, perhaps the CRC's most famous and controversial act was the We Charge Genocide petition delivered to the United Nations in 1951, claiming that under the U.N. charter, the United States was committing genocide against African-Americans, and U.N. intervention against lynching and Jim Crow was necessary.  What was remarkable about the CRC was that it was one of the few organizations with a sizeable grassroots Jewish and African-American membership and leadership to denounce the Rosenberg trial as a site of fascist violence.  One might even say that because of its Jewish and African-American members and leadership, it was uniquely suited to make such comparisons.  Unlike the American Jewish Committee (AJC) and the NAACP that both denounced the Rosenbergs, the CRC connected the execution of the Rosenbergs to lynchings of African-Americans in the deep south and Nazi genocide in Europe[76].  The CRC, like the Communist Party and later the BPP saw the violent backlash against Communism, including the execution of the Rosenbergs, the bloody riot at Peekskill against Paul Robeson, and the jailing of Communists under the Smith Act as signs of incipient fascism.  Had the CRC not been banned in 1956 as a "subversive organization" under the same Act, it is very possible that it would have been among the groups sponsoring the BPP's "United Against Fascism" conference.  

Stanley Aronowitz's 1960s pamphlet on the specificity of American fascism likewise connects the Holocaust to the "systematic and conscious genocide against generations of blacks, both North and South," linking the Nazi mass murder to "lynchings" and the "brutality" with which "American Indians" were treated by an "advanced industrial country.”[77]  Aronowitz, who comes out of the left-labor tradition and was not allied with SDS, nonetheless saw in the Panther's description of the United States as fascist something that aligned with a longer left tradition in the United States.  Fascism for Aronowitz, is not merely a kind of lower middle-class populism, but a modality of rule that arises when the traditional modes of parliamentary hegemony are no longer sufficient to resolve contradictions or quell rebellion.  But rather than see fascism as a departure from normative modes of rule, fascism exists within and is an expression of U.S. liberal institutions, founded as they were on forms of capitalist violence.  Thus Aronowitz concludes, much like the CRC, that the "anticommunist purges" of the late 1940s and 1950s constituted a "prefascist stage" of American capitalism, which culminated in the "public trials of countless communists...the murder of Rosenbergs....witchhunts against trade unions....and the McCarren Act" which banned any organization affiliated with the Communist Party.[78]  Unlike the Zionists who might refer to the Holocaust as a form of Jewish exceptionalism, or radicals such as Tseng-Putterman who would order the Holocaust on a hierarchy, the CRC, Aronowitz, the CP and others thing of racial genocide and fascism in its many intersecting forms as a totality of capitalist rule. 

In this context, it makes sense that the most serious left-wing pamphlets and articles on antisemitism in the 1960s would appear from Marxist organizations.  While most New Left organizations had significant Jewish presence, their considerations centered on defending groups like SNCC and the BPP against charges of antisemitism for calls against Zionism.  In part because there is a lengthy Marxist literature on antisemitism, and in part from their own analysis of the role antisemitism plays in the construction of fascism, both the CPUSA and SWP devoted extensive resources to discussing the present role of antisemitism in America and its relationship to Zionism and the right.  Both CP and SWP publications do not single out antisemitism as a transcendent evil, nor mark the Holocaust as a singular event in human history.  Like Marcuse and the BPP, they locate the Holocaust within the larger structures of capitalism and imperialism, and see antisemitism as a structural and reoccurring feature of capitalist life.  In collection of essays in late 1970s on antisemitism and Zionism from Jewish Affairs, Communist author Hyman Lumer documents still active presence of antisemitism in American life.  Quoting from a University of California study, Lumer writes that two-thirds of Americans are antisemitic, one of third hold such views "private," another third are "outspoken antisemites" and a last tenth "advocate doing something to take 'power' from the Jews.”[79]  Lumer roots antisemitism in capitalism and imperialism, and in doing, places the "Nazi Holocaust" alongside the "millions of Africans" who "suffered death at the hands of slave traders" and the "genocidal extermination of the Indian people in the Western hemisphere.[80]  Like Hannah Arendt, Lumer locates antisemitism in both the economy in so far as he documents Jews' exclusion from "top executive and administrative positions" in banks, corporations, and elite universities, but he primarily aligns antisemitism as part of a political formation, the far right.[81]  "With a sharp swing toward reaction on the part of the Nixon administration....fascist elements...rise in an open, virulent expression of antisemitism," Lumer argues, further documenting the "desecration of synagogues" in recent months.[82]  Lumer who was one of the members of the Communist leadership who went underground in the 1950s and later arrested and jailed for a year under the Taft-Hartley Act for "conspiring to lie about membership in Communist Party" as an organizer in a labor union, was very familiar with both the fascist and antisemitic nature of the American state.  Like generations of Marxist critics before him, Lumer locates the rise of antisemitism as a means to deflect from the power of global capitalism, and shield the ruling classes from scrutiny. 

The specificity of antisemitism for the left, was not then simply an afterthought.  Pete Seidman, a red diaper baby whose father lost his job during the red scare, wrote the position paper for SWP on antisemitism.  While Seidman had been personally aware of antisemitism from a young age, as he was bullied and school and his father was a blacklisted former communist, it was the experience of being attacked by the ADL for SWP's support for Palestinians that goaded him into serious study on the question.  What is perhaps most remarkable about Seidman's study is the emphasis it places on the failures of liberal democracy to protect Jews from structural antisemitism both before and after WWII.  Antisemitism, for Seidman, is less a means for market liberalism to disavow the racial modalities of capital accumulation as Tseng-Putterman and Ratskoff suggest, than a structural part of the liberal state itself.  Focusing on the Roosevelt administration, Seidman shows how even while Roosevelt made token gestures toward Jewish inclusion and courted Jewish leaders of well-heeled organizations, on its most fateful policy decision, whether to allow Jewish refugees from Europe fleeing fascism, Roosevelt collaborated with assimilationist Jewish organizations to keep Jewish refugees out.  Not only did the Roosevelt administration not raise quotas, it intervened to ensure that even existing quotas were not filled, even after Kristallnacht made the Nazis' plans quite clear.  This did not change even after the full knowledge of the Holocaust was widely shared:  Roosevelt and later Truman's policy of keeping Jewish refugees out of the United States remained -- fearing that Jews, as the Nazis felt, would bring with them communism and other "unassimilable" ideas.  For Seidman, the Roosevelt administration's refusal to allow Jewish refugees was entirely in line with the antisemitic culture of assimilation, enthusiastically embraced by many Jewish organizations, including B'nai B'rith and the AJC, which felt that becoming "good Americans" was important than rescuing Jews from the Holocaust.  Seidman goes so far as to accuse the Roosevelt administration of conscious antisemitism, noting that despite the "carefully cultivated reputation as a friend and benefactor of the Jews," placed a know antisemite and fascist sympathizer, Breckinridge Long, in charge the administration's Jewish refugee policy.[83]