Michael G. | Red Phoenix correspondent | New Jersey–

We are living through a moment of accelerating repression. Mass deportations violate both domestic and international law. Basic rights—speech, assembly, protest—are being gutted. Fascists no longer hide behind legality. Dissent, especially resistance to the genocide in Palestine, is met with Gestapo-like surveillance, arrests and police violence, all under the grotesque pretense of “fighting antisemitism.” However, the forces of Zionism are themselves in alliance with actual antisemites as they share a common interest in imperialist wars.

We are expected to believe that this administration—which has included figures like Elon Musk, who made Nazi salutes onstage, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who claimed COVID-19 was engineered to spare Jews—is concerned with Jewish safety.

The ruling class, divided on many fronts, understands its common enemy: the working class. Today, the Zionists, white supremacists, Ukrainian nationalists, neo-Nazis, fascists, Christian nationalists, Democratic and Republican Parties, and exploiters of the working class of all shades, have entered into a holy alliance against the working class and the progressive movement for Palestine. 

The idea that this alliance exists to protect Jewish people is a vile fabrication. The same forces that chanted “Jews will not replace us” are now paraded as defenders of the “Jewish people” (read: Zionists). Besides this, the Zionists openly collaborate with rabid antisemites for their own political purposes. This contradiction exposes the true function of Zionism: to protect the class interests of the bourgeoisie, whether Jewish or gentile.

Indeed, the Zionist movement’s alliances with reaction did not begin with the British Mandate. In the 1930s, the Betar paramilitary organization—many of whose members would go on to form the IDF—received training from Mussolini’s blackshirts in Italy.

Nationalism has long been a tool of the capitalist class to divide the masses and obscure the real conflict: the class struggle.

Theodor Herzl, the founder of Zionism, wrote that “Jews will always have sufficient enemies,” treating antisemitism as an eternal fact rather than a historical product. Zionism, from its inception, accepted antisemitism as inevitable and proposed nationalism—not revolution—as the answer. They eternalized racism through the use of race science and eugenics. They also put the Jewish bourgeoisie and the Jewish proletariat into the same group, ignoring that one inherently exploits the other and that their interests do not align. But antisemitism is not an ancient or permanent force; it is a political weapon wielded by capitalism to divide the working class. Its only real antidote is socialism which alone can confront and defeat national chauvinism. Bourgeois nationalism can never resolve the antagonisms it claims to address because the roots of national chauvinism lie in capitalism itself.

The struggle however is not a national, but a class struggle—and we must never forget that. In World War I, a war between imperialist powers to redivide the world (much like the Russo-Ukrainian war today), the degenerated parties of the Second International sided with “national defense.” Lenin exposed this betrayal, showing the war’s true nature: not nation vs. nation, but capitalist vs. capitalist, each dragging their own workers into war for capital. He stood firmly for proletarian internationalism, reminding us that workers share more with each other than with their own ruling classes. This is our position.

Likewise, Zionism does not “protect the Jewish people.” We know this well when we see Zionist leaders openly collaborating with the most vile antisemites imaginable. Zionism is a project that serves the interests of the international bourgeoisie, especially the NATO faction of global imperialism which needs a representative of its expansionist interests in the Middle East, but it has nothing to do with the Jewish working class whom this section of the bourgeoisie also exploits. Zionism is not a shield against antisemitism, but a weapon in the hands of imperialism.

Consider the example of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, located in New York City. Originally founded as a center for Yiddish cultural preservation and scholarship, YIVO has since become an institution that lends its legitimacy to deeply reactionary and Islamophobic narratives as well as historical revisionism while still claiming legacy from its labor-oriented founders. It has hosted propagandistic lecture series such as “Hamas and the Origins of Islamic Antisemitism,” which slander anti-Zionism and smear the Palestinian resistance. 

YIVO also works closely with the Lithuanian government—an entity that emerged out of the counter-revolutionary collapse of the Soviet Union which is now engaged in covering up the role its founding figures played as Nazi collaborators during World War II. In an effort to whitewash this history, Lithuania aggressively promotes the “double genocide” theory, which falsely equates Nazi atrocities with Soviet resistance, falsely portraying communism as just as bad as fascism. With this they can justify their “national heroes” — such as Jonas Noreika, Kazys Škirpa, Juozas Ambrazevičius, Antanas Baltūsis-Žvejas, responsible for the deaths of thousands of Jews, after whom many schools, streets and institutions are named — fighting for the Nazis because allegedly they “just did not know they were bad” and were “blinded by fear” of the “Communist Menace.” In Lithuania, more than 95% of the Jewish population was exterminated by the Nazis. Estonia, another Baltic state with similar policies towards “national heroes” and the “double genocide,” was the first country under Nazi control to be declared Judenfrei, free of Jews. These countries have a very dark past of Nazi atrocities which they continue to deny, underestimate and ignore with the help of Zionist organizations, choosing to focus on the nonexistent crimes of communism instead. 

YIVO’s CEO, Jonathan Brent, also sits on the board of the neoconservative Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, a far-right propaganda outfit that falsely claims communism killed 100 million people—a number taken from the discredited Black Book of Communism which includes in the “100 million” Nazi soldiers killed by the Red Army.

These far-right governments and organizations spend all their time attacking socialism precisely because the Soviet Union as a socialist state functioned so well, and despite the propaganda, the vast majority of Baltic peoples remember socialism with great nostalgia. This double genocide myth is ridiculous also because the Soviet Union was the most progressive country in the world for national minorities, including Jews. It made antisemitism a crime and always explained to the people how antisemitism served to blind them to their real enemies, the bourgeoisie. This is also precisely why Zionist institutions cling so hard to the double genocide myth, because it prevents the people from seeing the true solution to national chauvinism, socialism.

The Lithuanian foreign minister who visited YIVO headquarters in 2010 spoke just a couple years earlier about a “Jewish plot” to allow dual citizenship in Lithuania. He boasted about making 2011 a year of commemoration of Holocaust victims. Right after his trip he of course changed his mind and rededicated 2011 to all the country’s losses other than the Holocaust. Since then, YIVO has continued to do public relations for the Lithuanian government, including its president’s visit to YIVO’s headquarters in 2023.

YIVO has also demonstrated its hostility to the working class. When its librarians attempted to unionize during the COVID pandemic, it fired all of them. 

In general, the Jewish institutions in America have created what Norman Finkelstein calls Holocaust Industry—the systematic exploitation of Holocaust memory to serve Zionist, imperialist, and capitalist interests. Elie Wiesel, one of the most prominent figures in this industry, notoriously lobbied the U.S. Congress not to recognize the Armenian Genocide, arguing that recognizing other genocides would somehow undermine the uniqueness—and thus the political utility—of the Holocaust. The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., also has a long and shameful history of erasing the up to 1.5 million Romani victims of the Nazi genocide. 

Another glaring example of this unholy alliance is the presence of Christian fundamentalists at Zionist rallies whose support is rooted in the belief that the mass return of Jews to Israel will trigger the second coming of Christ, at which point two-thirds of the Jewish people will be killed and the remaining third will convert to Christianity.

Brandeis University, the “Jewish Harvard,” which was the first university to ban Students for Justice for Palestine and arrest and beat its students in the wave of protests last year, is even invested in ISIS.

Where are the shrieks from the zionists about antisemitism here? 

There is, in fact, a real threat of antisemitism—but it does not come from the working class or from anti-Zionism. It comes from the bourgeoisie, the class which holds real power. When capitalists can make Nazi salutes on public stages, the actual threat of antisemitism is very clear. Yet all of this the Zionists ignore. Zionism will readily make common cause with forces that openly fantasize about Jewish annihilation, as long as those forces are loyal to imperialist interests and the colonial project in Palestine.

All of this points to a critical truth: there is no singular “Jewish interest.” There are only class interests. The interests of the Jewish bourgeoisie are aligned with capital, repression, and imperialism. The interests of the Jewish working class are aligned with the Palestinian people and the global working class. The Zionists know this too which is exactly why they collaborate with the forces of antisemitism and reaction.

Therefore, the Jewish working class must and has already begun to reject Zionism and nationalism in all its forms. The only viable path forward is proletarian internationalism. Only through this unity can we defeat both antisemitism and Islamophobia and build a world free from genocide, fascism, and imperialist war.

From Warsaw to Gaza, L’chaim Intifada!

Long Live Proletarian Internationalism!

No War but Class War!

Free Palestine!

Categories: Anti-War, Discrimination, U.S. News

Tags: Palestine, Zionism