A-Infos (en) Spaine, Regeneracion: Historical Notes on Anti-Zionism within the Jewish Community By Liza (ca, de, fr, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

The Jewish people and all of humanity held hostage by genocidal Zionism 
---- The only way to eradicate Zionism globally is by organizing a 
class-based, anti-colonial, and anti-imperialist opposition at the 
international level. To this end, it is essential that the cross-border 
Jewish community work alongside political organizations throughout the 
Middle East, where the social force of workers, and especially women and 
dissidents, plays a fundamental role. From its origins, the nature of 
the State of Israel is colonialist, genocidal, and apartheid, and its 
existence and actions of dispossession and expulsion of the Palestinian 
people are currently supported by imperialist powers, with the US and 
Europe at the forefront. Zionism is nothing more than the implementation 
of that ideology of terror and capitalist extermination against 
humanity, this time with ultra-religious and racist overtones, seeking 
to reduce the Palestinian people to nothing.

The Palestinian cause is therefore linked to the global anti-capitalist 
and anti-colonial struggle today. Zionism, as the absolutely hegemonic 
force in Israel, defended by imperialism and its strategic interests in 
the Middle East, has become a political doctrine that has hijacked the 
Jewish people themselves, and indeed all of humanity. Tracing the truly 
class-based and internationalist opposition that has fought against 
Zionism since its inception in the history of the Jewish community marks 
an indispensable path for building this struggle today. Zionism has made 
antisemitism its banner against any criticism of its genocidal project, 
and yet, after the Palestinian people, Zionism's main enemy is any other 
Jew who is not a Zionist. It uses the historical suffering of the Jewish 
people to legitimize an oppressive colonial project against another people.

The origin of Zionism is rooted in a nationalist and colonial project.

Zionism emerged in Europe in the late 19th century as a branch of modern 
nationalism within secular Judaism. European nation-states rejected 
social communities that could not be included in their nationalist 
ideals, thus initiating severe oppression of numerous peoples who 
threatened to disrupt the national order. Not all of these communities 
resisted by forming hegemonic political projects that sought to build 
nation-states oppressing other peoples. However, in 1897, the World 
Zionist Organization was founded, advocating for the creation of a 
Jewish national state. Drawing on Jewish and rabbinic tradition, they 
began to develop a political project of migration to the territory of 
Ottoman Palestine, and later, the British Mandate of Palestine. Based on 
the premise that the Jewish people constituted an ancestral nation, it 
began as a colonialist project integrated into the nationalism of its 
time, and therefore, as a project of domination by the competing 
national bourgeoisies within capitalism. The waves of Zionist 
colonization, or "Aliyah" in its Hebrew name, began, promoting 
agricultural settlements with financial support from European Zionists. 
They would achieve their main objective in 1948 with the creation of the 
State of Israel as a supremacist project, and on the agenda of 
capitalist imperialism as the main ally and destabilizer of the Middle 
East since the second half of the 20th century.

These Zionist groups were initially a minority, and they exploited the 
violent situations of anti-Semitic pogroms in Europe to justify their 
national project as an emancipation. However, a majority of European 
Jews favored the defense of the working class and revolution in the 
countries where they lived, rejecting the idea of creating an Israeli 
nation-state, which was a political project in the bourgeois and 
colonial vein. Nationalisms always engender expansionist and reactive 
responses that resulted in the creation of fascism, and Zionism has its 
origins in this doctrine, framed within a higher level of capitalist and 
imperialist exploitation.

The creation of the "Bund", the Jewish anti-Zionist and revolutionary 
socialist opposition

In Eastern Europe, Jewish workers had been organizing themselves into 
revolutionary groups since the mid-19th century, being especially active 
in Tsarist Russia, where they were part of socialist organizations. The 
General League of Jewish Workers was also founded in 1897, specifically 
in Vilnius (Lithuania), bringing together Polish, Russian, Belarusian, 
and Lithuanian Jews from across the Russian Empire, under the Yiddish 
name "Bund."

This anti-Zionist Jewish movement was one of the most important leftist 
organizations in paving the way for the outbreak of the Russian 
Revolution of 1905, and many of its members were persecuted by the 
Tsarist authorities for being both Jewish and socialist. The Bund 
created a comprehensive network of self-protection against antisemitism, 
closely linked to the development of a revolutionary socialist 
emancipatory project. They organized schools, libraries, sports clubs, 
and even healthcare centers that served the marginalized working classes.

This anti-Zionist Jewish organization joined the Russian Social 
Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP), founded in Minsk, which was Marxist in 
ideology. They held an internationalist position, viewing Zionism as a 
profoundly nationalist project, while the Bund advocated prioritizing 
the class struggle in territories with Jewish communities in Europe. 
During the 1917 Soviet Revolution, they clashed with the Bolshevik 
faction and were subsequently persecuted as an organization. In the 
interwar period, some of their members joined the Kombund, communist 
Jews who supported the new Bolshevik political order, although most 
would later suffer torture or murder at the hands of the Stalinist regime.

The Bund became a significant force within the Jewish community in New 
York and maintained its presence clandestinely in Lithuania and Poland. 
In Poland, the Bund accused Zionist leaders of aligning themselves with 
antisemitic positions during campaigns to promote the colonization of 
Palestinian territory. The Folkspartei, a secular, social-liberal Jewish 
party, also operated in Poland. Unlike the Bund, it did not advocate 
class struggle but was equally opposed to Zionism. Organizations like 
the Bund participated in the resistance against the Nazi Holocaust in 
Europe during World War II, and many of their members were murdered.

Some of its survivors eventually succumbed to Zionist labor ideology and 
formed colonizing entities in the territory of Palestine after the 
creation of the State of Israel. Other former Bundists, who had managed 
to go into exile, re-established organizations in Europe or America, but 
they would never again possess the anti-Zionist strength they had 
achieved in the first third of the 20th century. Zionism would exploit 
the Holocaust to the fullest extent to advance its colonialist project. 
Jewish communities that, in the second half of the 20th century, 
positioned themselves against Israel and its apartheid in Palestine, 
began to be accused by Israel of being self-hating Jews. This 
persecution within the Jewish community itself by Zionism makes Zionist 
ideology the main hegemonic antisemitic force aggressing against Jews in 
the world.

The joint Jewish and Palestinian struggle in territory colonized by Israel

Initially, the first communist organization in Palestine was founded in 
1919 by Jewish workers who had broken away from the "Poale Zion" 
organization, a branch of labor Zionism. They believed that the Zionist 
national objective was a deception of the Jewish community and that many 
Jewish workers were being manipulated by Zionism into migrating to the 
predominantly Arab territory. The Socialist Workers Party (SWP, in 
Hebrew) was established and began denouncing Zionism as a reactionary 
ideology in all its forms. They called for the unity of Jewish and Arab 
workers against British imperialism, the backer of Zionism. However, 
this Palestinian communist party, refounded in 1923, was later 
Stalinized and officially transformed into the Communist Party of Israel 
("Maki") in the 1930s. Furthermore, Stalin himself carried out 
antisemitic persecutions in the USSR. Some Soviet satellite states would 
supply weapons to Israel through members of that Stalinized communist 
party, which played a prominent role in carrying out the Palestinian 
Nakba in 1948.

In the late 1930s, the Revolutionary Communist League was founded in 
Palestine, an anti-Stalinist organization composed of young Trotskyist 
Jews, mostly exiled from Germany and other parts of Europe, who found 
themselves completely displaced by European fascism. They were joined by 
Arab communists like Jabra Nicola, who, after the end of the world war 
and the Palestinian Nakba, became anti-Zionist and Marxist activists in 
various European countries.

In 1962, Matzpen ("Compass" in Hebrew), an Israeli revolutionary 
socialist and anti-Zionist organization, was founded and remained active 
until the 1980s. It brought together Jewish and Arab activists with 
diverse backgrounds in leftist movements and organizations in Israel. In 
June 1967, they positioned themselves against the Six-Day War and the 
new territories colonized by Israel in the Palestinian territories. 
Their activists made contact through conferences with members of the 
international New Left, even communicating with the Black Panthers in 
the United States. They also established contacts with Palestinian 
groups such as the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine 
(DFLP) and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), which led the 
Palestinian struggle in the 1970s. Matzpen would later dissolve into 
multiple organizations representing different currents of Marxism, with 
some of its original members subsequently participating in the First 
Intifada.

Anarchism in Israel and contemporary anti-Zionist Jewish movements

Anarchism in Israel can be traced back to the beginnings of the kibbutz 
movement, the communities and settlements of labor Zionism in Arab 
territories since the first waves of Jewish immigration. Like Marxism, 
anarchism has maintained a rather mixed, complex, and shifting 
relationship with Zionism, influenced by international events. 
Proudhonian ideas, and even those of Gustav Landauer, influenced some of 
the early kibbutzim, the settlers of the Israeli kibbutzim. The 
organization Hapoel Hatzair (translated from Hebrew as "The Young 
Worker") published articles on Kropotkin and Tolstoy, claiming to follow 
an anti-statist, anti-militarist, and pacifist line of cooperation with 
Arab peasants. In reality, they were a branch of labor Zionism, not 
representing a confrontation with Zionism as a colonizing project. Even 
Joseph Trumpeldor, a Russian-born Zionist who declared himself an 
anarcho-communist, proposed in the 1920s to build a "General Commune in 
Palestine." The anarchist influence on these Jewish settlers was more 
moralistic in nature, as they did not form an explicitly libertarian, 
socialist, and anti-Zionist organization.

Following the Palestinian Nakba, anarchist activists positioned 
themselves against Israel from the perspective of state formation, due 
to its racist and colonialist implications. A few anarchist groups 
emerged, publishing their own works, but they remained isolated and 
largely disconnected from broader social and international struggles. It 
was after 1967 and the aforementioned Six-Day War that anarchist 
activists cooperated with Matzpen and collaborated in the creation of 
the Israeli Black Panthers. Similarly, anarchist activists protested 
within Israel against the 1982 Lebanon War, including Toma Sik, a 
Holocaust survivor and prominent Israeli antimilitarist, who founded a 
section within War Resisters' International (WRI).

Anarchism remained active in the 1980s as part of the Israeli punk 
movement, as well as among conscientious objectors and draft resisters 
who refused to participate in the repression of the First Intifada. A 
short-lived Israeli Anarchist Federation was formed to protest police 
brutality and the opening of the first McDonald's in Israel. In the 
1990s, Israeli anarchism focused on anti-globalization protests and 
animal rights struggles, helping to establish Anonymous for Animal 
Rights (similar to the American organization PETA). Some Israeli 
anarchist groups also joined post-leftist movement projects such as Food 
Not Bombs and Reclaim the Streets. It was during the Second Intifada in 
the 2000s that a new wave of organization emerged around the 
International Solidarity Movement ("ISM") and Israeli anarchists 
supported Palestinian actions against road checkpoints and street curfews.

In 2003, Anarchists Against the Wall (AatW) was founded as a direct 
action group against the construction of the Israeli wall in the West 
Bank, denouncing the ethnic cleansing and violence it entailed. The 
group disbanded in 2010 after suffering severe repression at the hands 
of the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF). Isolated anarchist groups 
participated in the 2011 social justice protests in Israel (the 
equivalent of the 15M movement or Occupy Wall Street). During this 
decade, and particularly during the Covid-19 pandemic, anarchist 
collectives in Haifa organized mutual aid projects and food distribution 
during the lockdown. In recent years, young anti-Zionist Jews have 
joined the Palestinian anarchist group Fauda, fostering cooperation 
between Arab and Jewish activists against apartheid in Palestine. 
Currently, there are few anarchist groups operating in Israel with an 
anti-Zionist program capable of forming a hegemonic movement. And other 
radical movements also largely fail to question Israel's nationalist and 
racist character. However, in the protests that have been taking place 
in Israel for the past two years, an "Anti-Apartheid Bloc" has formed, 
with hundreds of activists demanding an end to the crimes committed in 
Palestine, and a movement against military service in Israel.

Of particular note is Ilan Shalif, an Israeli anarcho-communist who 
originally participated in Matzpen, also supported Anarchists Against 
the Wall, and in the last decade attempted to promote Ahdut (translated 
as "Unity"), an anarchist-communist collective. He currently maintains 
that to stop Zionism, an internationalist and anti-imperialist force 
must be formed against the Israeli elites; and that the Palestinian 
cause is part of the struggle of the Global South against colonialist 
projects.

Ángel Malatesta, militant of Liza, Anarchist Platform.

https://regeneracionlibertaria.org/2025/10/29/apuntes-historicos-del-antisionismo-entre-la-comunidad-judia/
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