By Chief Ali
While today European Jews are in unity with colonialism, the bloody history of Jewish people’s unity with Zionism goes back over 100 years.
At times, colonizers have used exploited and oppressed Jews when it benefits them, but now with the colonizer nation of israel, the same white colonizers who used to be self-proclaimed anti-semites now find it profitable to lend lip service to loving Jews and “fighting antisemitism.”
Mike Pompeo recently said “As we have made clear, anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism” and at the same time as promised to support the Zionist settler colony, israel, and fight the BDS boycott movement.
Colonizers across the political spectrum unite with Zionism for colonial profits extracted from the oppression of indigenous peoples. While Jews worldwide have been historically oppressed by these same colonizer nations, dialectical materialism means that if they unite with the colonizers, they become colonizers.
When European Jews choose to follow Zionism in colonizing African, Arab, and other Semitic peoples they took on the same “anti-Semitic” label that they now trying to weaponize against colonized people fighting for their liberation.
But they had their chance to choose liberation… and what did they choose?
The Road to Zionism
The choice of Zionism and colonialism wasn’t always clear. There were heated debates, and two pieces of writing in the early 1900s showed the main camps: Marxism and the National Question in 1913 and the Balfour Declaration in 1917.
The National Question, by the communist anti-colonial revolutionary Joseph Stalin, outlines how to build a state with people of multiple religions and nationalities. Should we segregate national minorities? No, Stalin answered, we should integrate them and guarantee their cultural autonomy with equal rights.
“[The] road to the victory of the revolution in the West lies through the revolutionary alliance with the liberation movement of the colonies,” Stalin wrote.
On the other hand, the Balfour Declaration was written by Walter Rothschild and Authur Balfour. Rothschild, an ex-member of the British Parliament, was the heir to the international Rothschild financial empire and leader in the Zionist movement.
Balfour, also from a wealthy family, was a British Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary. The Balfour Declaration declared “sympathy with Jewish Zionist aspirations” and “establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.” Although it gave lip service to preserving rights for non-Jews, history has proven this a moot point — Zionism has always been a form of racism and separatism, and it outright supports the genocide of Palestinians and the self-segregation of Zionist Jews.
Not the “Jewish Question”, but a question to Jews
Throughout the history of Europe, Jews have always suffered exclusion and hostility from Christians. Throughout the 1800s and 1900s, Europeans talked of the “Jewish Question” meaning, what should we do with the Jews in Europe?
Expel them, as Zionists suggest? Kill them, as Nazis suggest? Live with them, as the communists suggest?
At the same time, Jews have continually faced the question of whether to unite with these countries in which they live — in all its colonialism and anti-Jewish sentiments — or whether to disunite with colonialism and religious intolerance and fight for liberation and self-determination.
German Jews in 1908 faced this question: “would we side with colonialism?” At the time, the German Empire was colonizing Africa and genociding nearly 100,000 Herero and Namaqua people in what’s now Namibia. Did the German Jews rise up and say ‘no’ to their own oppression and the oppression of colonized Africans?
German Jews did not resist, and in fact, they enacted these horrors of colonialism. The German military, which included Jews, set up Shark Island concentration camp to kill, rape, and behead Africans for medical experimentations. This very camp would be a prototype for the ones in the Holocaust.
By the time World War I started in 1914, there were 100,000 Jews in the German military across the world. Did it matter to the Herero and Namaqua who were brutally slaughtered whether Germans considered its Jewish population white when all Germans were united in colonialism?
When European Jews chose to side with colonialism, they become an enemy to all colonized people and anti-colonial revolutionary movements worldwide.
World War II was a debate on colonialism, and Zionism won
After World War II with Hitler’s colonizer-faction neutralized, capitalist-colonial European powers were left with one way to resolve the “Jewish Question”: Zionism. The same British and German anti-semites were now proudly on the same side as European Jews (as long as they were Zionist).
In 1948 after an influx of European Jewish settlers, and their genocidal expulsion of Palestinians, the Zionist state of israel was formed on stolen Palestinian land. Colonized Palestinians of all religions are dispersed throughout the world, still blocked from returning to their ancestral lands through a regime of apartheid and genocide.
Not only did israel colonize Palestinian land, but an outpost of colonialism throughout the region, including land belonging to Palestinian and Arab jews. These acts encourage other colonized nations to become sellouts like Sudan, Bahrain, and the UAE, and attacks Iran, and steals Syrian land because they dare to fight back.
The remnants of Nazi Germany even started paying Israel “reparations” in the 1950s. This was little more than an investment in a new European scheme of colonization. To this day, Germany still has not paid reparations to Namibians for the colonial theft and genocide committed against them in the early 1900s.
Colonialism continues, and where are the Jewish movements?
The Ghanaian revolutionary, Kwame Nkrumah, wrote that “[the starting task to defeat colonialism] is to develop ideological clarity among the anti-imperialist, anti-colonialist, pro-liberation masses of our continents. They, and they alone, make, maintain, or break revolutions.”
For this reason, there must be absolutely no wavering when calling out false claims of antisemitism from racist colonizers who aim to confuse the masses of colonized people to prevent a united front against all colonialism and all colonizers!
Anti-colonialism is not or ever anti-semitism; the true anti-semitism is the zionist colonization of Semitic peoples/lands; anything someone would characterize as “anti-semetic” coming from anti-colonial revolutionaries is just anti-colonizer! From the start until the end, communists and anti-colonial movements have always sought to end all forms of oppression.
To this day, there are anti-colonial revolutionaries worldwide including in Syria, Iran, Palestine. Black Hammer Organization aims to unite all colonized people and bring down all forms of colonialism so the poor and working-class can have dictatorship over their land, lives, labor and resources, and where we can end capitalism to build a world where nobody lives at the expense of another. join our class for colonizers to materially support colonized people
Those who attack anti-colonial revolutionary movements only reveal their investment and unity in colonialism.
Land back!
