Zionism was built as a bulwark against socialism

No one is immune. Pro-Israel forces have been mobilising to destroy progressive forces across western countries.

Their efforts have not been limited to attacking individual activists and groups, universities and media outlets, community organisations and artists, but have also targeted politicians and governments.

Their campaigns successfully destroyed the possibility of a Jeremy Corbyn electoral victory in Britain, targeted US Senator Bernie Sanders by vilifying him and funding his rivals, and are now going after the socialist French presidential candidate Jean-Luc Melenchon, whom they accuse of antisemitism, among other defamatory accusations.

They have also targeted the Spanish socialist government of Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez by supporting right-wing opposition parties, including the Spanish far-right Vox party, while lobbying against the Irish government and progressive Irish politicians in the US.

These anti-progressive Zionist tactics are hardly new. Since the late 19th century, the Zionist movement has sold itself to imperial sponsors as a bulwark against socialism, and western imperialist powers adopted it precisely as a tool against socialism and communism.

Recent Zionist anti-progressive machinations are mere continuations of this reactionary history.

Imperial foundations

Zionism’s anti-socialist activism was born with the movement itself. In talks with the German Kaiser and his ministers in the mid-1890s, the founder of the Zionist Organization, Theodor Herzl, assured the Germans that Zionism would distance Jews from socialism: “It was folly on the part of Jews to join the Socialism movement, which would soon rid itself of them.”

Herzl added that the Kaiser “was impressed when I mentioned the fact that at the University of Vienna we have taken students away from Socialism”. Zionism, he added, would also spur Jews not to join revolutionary and anti-Kaiser organisations: “We were taking the Jews away from the revolutionary parties.”

This form of western anti-communism, itself a transmogrified antisemitism, labelled Russian communists and the Soviet revolutionary government as ‘Judeo-Bolsheviks’

Indeed, it was Zionist anti-communism that clinched the alliance with anti-Bolshevik Britain. The timing of the 1917 Balfour pledge of British support for Zionism’s quest for a “national home” for Jews in Palestine – issued only five days before the triumph of the October Revolution in Russia – was not a coincidence.

Acting on false reports from Zionist informants claiming that most Russian Jews were Zionists who might otherwise support socialism, British officials grew anxious after the February Revolution regarding Jewish backing for the socialist movement.

In April 1917, Lord Robert Cecil, then parliamentary secretary to the Foreign Office, telegraphed the British ambassador in Petrograd, arguing: “We are advised that one of the best methods of counteracting Jewish pacifist and socialist propaganda in Russia would be to offer a definite encouragement to Jewish nationalist aspirations in Palestine.”

The victory of Russian communists removed a key incentive for Eastern European Jews to emigrate, jeopardising British and Zionist plans for Palestine. By pledging to secure a Jewish “national home” there, Britain sought to promote an alternative ideology that would discourage Russian Jews from supporting communism.

US President Woodrow Wilson echoed similar views in backing the Balfour Declaration. His support stemmed from American “concern about the spread of communism among East European Jews, particularly Poland, after the October Revolution in Russia”.

The American position was reinforced at the end of 1918, when Balfour discussed the Jews and Palestine with Wilson’s chief adviser, Colonel Edward M House.

In his diary, House recorded that Balfour “is inclined to believe that nearly all Bolshevism and disorder of that sort is directly traceable to Jews”.

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House added: “I suggested putting them, or the best of them, in Palestine, and holding them responsible for the orderly behavior of Jews throughout the world. Balfour thought the plan had possibilities.”

This form of western anti-communism, itself a transmogrified antisemitism, labelled Russian communists and the Soviet revolutionary government as “Judeo-Bolsheviks”.

The Communist International, created by the Soviets, understood this dynamic. The Second and Third Comintern Congresses of 1920 and 1921 characterised Zionism as a movement intended “to divert the [European] Jewish working masses from the class struggle and is nothing but a petty-bourgeois counter-revolutionary utopia”.

Inverting antisemitism

Although the antisemitic claim that communism and Bolshevism were “Jewish conspiracies” is often associated with Nazi ideology – itself derived from Tsarist White Russian propaganda – such views were also promoted by Britain and the United States, and were widely shared in western Europe, including among Zionists, long before the Nazis appeared on the scene.

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The Zionist British Prime Minister David Lloyd George reported such views to the British War Cabinet’s Eastern Committee, where General George Macdonogh relayed a Zionist official’s warning that “if the Jewish people did not get what they were asking for in Palestine, we should have the whole of Jewry turning Bolsheviks and supporting Bolshevism in all the other countries as they have done in Russia”.

Winston Churchill was among the first to publicly articulate these antisemitic ideas, describing communism as a “Jewish conspiracy” for world domination – in contrast to Zionism, which colluded with imperialism, antisemitism and the western European Jewish bourgeoisie while promoting a settler-colonial solution to “the Jewish problem”.

In a February 1920 article titled “Zionism versus Bolshevism”, published in the Sunday Herald, Churchill professed support for assimilated Jews loyal to their countries of citizenship.

He dismissed them, however, as politically irrelevant to what he saw as the central struggle between Zionism and communism, represented by what he called “international Jews” bent on a conspiracy to destroy western Christian civilisation:

Zionism offers the third sphere to the political conceptions of the Jewish race. In violent contrast to international communism, it presents to the Jew a national idea of a commanding character. It has fallen to the British Government, as the result of the conquest of Palestine, to have the opportunity and the responsibility of securing for the Jewish race all over the world a home and a centre of national life… Zionism has already become a factor in the political convulsions of Russia, as a powerful competing influence in Bolshevik circles with the international communistic system. Nothing could be more significant than the fury with which Trotsky has attacked the Zionists generally, and Dr. Weissmann [Chaim Weizmann] in particular.

As early as December 1922, Chaim Weizmann met in British-occupied Jerusalem with Britain’s high commissioner, the Jewish Zionist Herbert Samuel, the British police chief and other colonial officials, urging them to repress communist Jewish settlers in Palestine and bar the future immigration of Jewish communists.

Weizmann emphasised what the officials already believed: “Zionists and Bolsheviks were deadly enemies. Bolsheviks persecuted Zionists. Bolshevism is in every manner completely opposed to Zionism.”

A global battle

Israel’s anti-socialist policies continued after its founding in 1948. Even though the Zionist leadership of Israel after 1948 professed a commitment to “socialism” for Jewish settlers – or, more precisely, to Jewish master-race socialism – its anti-communism inspired all its alliances with anti-Soviet Britain, France and the United States.

Today, it is the French leftist Melenchon and his party who are defamed by right-wing and centrist French forces, including the pro-Israel camp, as ‘Islamo-Bolsheviks’

Its attacks on socialist Arab countries, including Syria and Egypt, went hand in hand with its major propaganda effort after 1967 to depict the Soviet Union – the country with the staunchest stance against antisemitism, and for that reason defamed by western antisemitic countries as “Judeo-Bolshevik” – as itself antisemitic.

In the late 1970s and 1980s, Israeli military support for the genocidal right-wing dictatorship in Guatemala, along with the right-wing terrorist dictatorships of El Salvador, Somoza’s Nicaragua, Pinochet’s Chile and the Argentinian military junta, was fully consistent with its anti-socialist efforts across the globe, let alone its alliance with apartheid South Africa.

Today, it is the French leftist Melenchon and his party La France Insoumise, who are defamed by right-wing and centrist French forces, including the pro-Israel camp, as “Islamo-Bolsheviks”.

Israel and the pro-Israel French right and centre are mobilising all their power to defeat Melenchon’s strong electoral campaign. Their efforts in France are only one front in a broader global battle being waged by Israel and its supporters against socialist forces that, since 7 October 2023 and the ongoing Israeli genocide of the Palestinians, have insisted on defending Palestinian rights.

As a consequence, Israel and its supporters’ wrath against these socialists will not abate until they are fully defeated.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.