Lenin on anti-Semitism.

Vladimir Illyich had his moments. It was in March of 1919 that the White Armies were waging a general offensive on the Siberian front. There Kolchak's forces engaged in mass-floggings, summary executions, anti-Jewish pogroms, the destruction of thousands of villages and farms. The reactionary forces led by Kolchak and Denikin had been incubated by the Tsarist regime and had been stirred to act by the fall of Bloody Nicholas. On the side of counter-revolution the powers of Europe, alongside the US, Japan, and China, intervened to strangle Bolshevism in its cradle. The possibility of defeat was a very real one at this time. Lenin took the time to stake out a political position on the anti-Jewish pogroms being carried out by the White movement and its allies:

Anti-Semitism means spreading enmity towards the Jews. When the accursed Tsarist monarchy was living its last days it tried to incite ignorant workers and peasants against the Jews. The Tsarist police, in alliance with the landowners and the capitalists, organised pogroms against the Jews. The landowners and capitalists tried to divert the hatred of the workers and peasants who were tortured by want against the Jews. In other countries, too, we often see the capitalists fomenting hatred against the Jews in order to blind the workers, to divert their attention from the real enemy of the working people, capital. Hatred towards the Jews persists only in those countries where slavery to the landowners and capitalists has created abysmal ignorance among the workers and peasants. Only the most ignorant and downtrodden people can believe the lies and slander that are spread about the Jews. This is a survival of ancient feudal times, when the priests burned heretics at the stake, when the peasants lived in slavery, and when the people were crushed and inarticulate. This ancient, feudal ignorance is passing away; the eyes of the people are being opened.

It is not the Jews who are the enemies of the working people. The enemies of the workers are the capitalists of all countries. Among the Jews there are working people, and they form the majority. They are our brothers, who, like us, are oppressed by capital; they are our comrades in the struggle for socialism. Among the Jews there are kulaks, exploiters and capitalists, just as there are among the Russians, and among people of all nations. The capitalists strive to sow and foment hatred between workers of different faiths, different nations and different races. Those who do not work are kept in power by the power and strength of capital. Rich Jews, like rich Russians, and the rich in all countries, are in alliance to oppress, crush, rob and disunite the workers.

Shame on accursed Tsarism which tortured and persecuted the Jews. Shame on those who foment hatred towards the Jews, who foment hatred towards other nations.

Long live the fraternal trust and fighting alliance of the workers of all nations in the struggle to overthrow capital.

This was one of eight speeches by Lenin recorded on gramophone. Significantly, it would later be the speech left out by the Communist Party when they came to re-record these speeches to re-circulate them in 1961. And this was Khrushchev's thaw. It's clear there had been a regression. It would get worse: Brezhnev would later reinstate the Jewish quota in Russian schools. The measure had originally been used by the Tsarist regime as part of a whole swathe of laws instituted to restrict and persecute Russian Jews. This was the same regime we can thank for the word 'pogrom' and the first drafts of The Elders of the Protocols of Zion, which was produced by the secret police and later distributed by the Black Hundreds. The anti-Jewish legislation of the Russian Empire would be obliterated in the revolutionary fervour of 1917. From then on the anti-Semites had a new canard, the Jews had stolen the motherland.

Right from the beginning there was a tension between the secular policies of the Bolsheviks and the official commitment to self-determination. The Jews were not problematic as an oppressed people with a unique culture, what the Bolsheviks found problematic was the Jewish faith and political Zionism offered the potential of an independent current. At first it was secular Yiddish culture which received the patronage of the state, while education remained secular, and Hebrew remained suppressed as it was under the Tsar. Even still the leap to equal rights was a dramatic one for a society that had been in the frenzy of pogroms not long before. Stalin would later set out to establish an autonomous Jewish region in the easternmost corner of Russia. It was meant to be a compromise with Jewish nationalism. Yet Stalin would later back the establishment of Israel in 1948 and arm the Israelis in the war of that same year.

It wasn't over yet. Stalin had hoped that Israel would be a Soviet ally in the Middle East. When Golda Meir and the Israeli delegation came to Moscow in 1948 there was a spontaneous gathering of thousands of Jews. At that point Stalin was frightened of where this could lead and initiated an anti-Semitic campaign of his own against "rootless cosmopolitans". It went as far as purges of doctors and assassinations of actors, not even famous Yiddish poets were safe. Through it all Stalin enjoyed popular support from Kibbutzniks within Israel. Even still the Soviet Union would move to a much more critical position on Israel in the coming decades and align itself with Arab dictatorships instead. The new restrictions on Jews extending to preventing them from emigrating to Israel. It was the birth of the refuseniks, a favourite cause of neoconservatives. And yet today's neo-fascists still see Jewish-Bolshevism under their beds at night.

Rumours of Peace.

Few satirists could have conceived of such a scene. It was too perfect in its surreal edge. With Ariel Sharon lying entombed, Tony Blair took his position at the nearby podium and gave one of his usual performances. Sporting a yarmulke, most unnaturally, Tony oozed counterfeit solemnity “The same iron determination he took to the field of war he took to the chamber of diplomacy. Bold. Unorthodox. Unyielding.”

I wander what kind of ‘iron determination’ it takes to slaughter 69 unarmed and defenceless villagers of Qibya. Sharon later claimed that his men had no idea there were still people living in the homes that they were bombarding with gunfire and grenades. It was this sort of conduct that led David Ben-Gurion to dub the young man “a pathological liar”. No doubt the twenty to fifty unarmed and defenceless refugees killed at al-Bureig were witnesses to similar displays of iron. Both took place in 1953 at the hands of Unit 101 led by the departed commander on ‘reprisal’ attacks. We’re talking retaliation for the deaths of two or three people probably. Today the Israeli military still lacks a sense of proportionality, let alone any comprehension of the immorality of revenge. It was just the beginning for young Arik. He would soon be storming across the Sinai alongside Anglo-French forces determined to snatch back the Suez Canal.

Wherever the man went there seemed to be Arabs falling to the ground dead. At the battle of Mitla 260 Egyptians were left dead. The battle became a subject of controversy (a euphemism in common usage) as some claimed Sharon deliberately engaged in unauthorised aggression. General Sharon would later return to the Sinai with Israel’s most powerful forces in 1967 at the battle of Abu-Ageila. Then in the Yom Kippur War, Sharon disobeyed the orders of his superiors and instead set out to engage the Egyptian army across the Suez Canal. In doing so the General initiated a turning point in the war and was set in time as a hero of military might from then on. The fact that the General had graduated by then to terrorizing the inhabitants of Gaza and north-eastern Sinai isn’t so heroic. It went as far as expelling 10,000 farmers, bulldozing their homes, and destroying their farmland to make way for settlement. This is how Sharon earned the title of Bulldozer.

Around this time the Bulldozer had become enamoured with an array of right-wing forces taking shape into what would become the Likud Party. Ever mercurial, Sharon jumped at the chance to advise a Labour Zionist government before attempting to stand as the Likud candidate for 1977 only to find he wasn’t the favourite. He had been refused any support by mainstream parties, so he founded a small party to win himself a seat, and managed to barter his way into Begin’s Likud government. Sharon was the Minister of Agriculture for 4 years before being promoted to Minister of Defence. That was his proper place after all. Notably, as right-wing as Menachem Begin was he did believe in the rule of law to some extent and torture almost stopped for 4 years. The hiatus came to a close when the Bulldozer became Defence Minister.

The new Defence Minister had his priorities in order. Time interviewed Sharon and he showed no time for throat-clearing and spoke bluntly “I believe that the starting point for a solution is to establish a Palestinian state in that part of Palestine that was separated from what was to become Israel in 1922 and which is now Jordan.” He had known from early on that the Palestinians had to be restricted to cantons in order for settlements to be expanded further and further. The end was an Israel with its territory stretching from the Mediterranean to the Jordan. But he knew he could not do this alone.

When it came to regional power Lebanon became the battleground for Israel and Syria and the various forces aligned to either side and those caught in between. The General took the side of the Maronite Christian militias and especially the Phalange Party founded by Pierre Gemayel out of admiration for Hitler. The aim of a client state in Lebanon was what spurred Sharon to action. Then came the massacre at Sabra and Shatila. It just so happened that the camp of Palestinian refugees was under Sharon’s watchful gaze when the Phalange came to flush out the “terrorists”. The Israeli troops stood by and watched for nearly 3 days as the rampage snuffed the life out of 1,700 human beings. Bold. Unorthodox. Unyielding.

This is a rather light overview of the atrocities Sharon committed. Why then would he be heralded as a ‘peacemaker’ exactly? Anyone with this record would expect to never hold such a prominent position ever again. He lost his job after much protest, but he bided his time. After the failures of the Labour governments of the 1990s and amidst the Second Intifada the old man took advantage of the rightward lurch overtaking the country. He pledged no negotiations with the Palestinians until the Intifada ended. The so-called “peace plan” that Sharon proposed, and partially initiated, amounted to relinquishing 42% of the West Bank and establishing a ‘security barrier’ (longer than the Berlin Wall) to annex around 50% of the occupied territories. To this end Sharon reinvented himself as a man of peace and transferred around 9,000 Gaza settlers to the Negev and the West Bank. It’s clear what the real prize was in his mind.

Lessons for a White Ally.

The radical American anti-racist campaigner Tim Wise has an interesting designation for what he does and what other white anti-racists do. He calls himself a 'white ally'. Wise argues not for white anti-racists to speak for people of colour, but to develop a critique of white privilege from within. The point should be to strengthen the position of racially-conscious Black Americans by providing a critique of the same white male power-structure from a white perspective. I agree with this priority: to undermine white racial consciousness in its manifestations. The other aims that we have to consider were summed up well by Theodore W Allen. As part of the conclusion to his review of David Roediger's book Wages of Whiteness (1991) the Marxist historian and economist Ted Allen listed the four basic challenges that the anti-racist has to meet:

First, to show that white supremacism is not an inherited attribute of the European-American personality. Secondly, to demonstrate that white supremacism has not served the interests of the laboring-class European-Americans. Third: to account for the prevalence of white supremacism within the ranks of laboring-class European-Americans. Fourth, by light of history, to consider ways whereby European-American laboring people may cast off the stifling incubus of 'white' identity.

This is from the starting-point that the historical relativist critique of race as a social construct does not go far enough in unsettling the roots of race as a formation of social control. Likewise, Allen rejects racism as a natural occurrence among white people towards the Other. Actually the point of his work is to provide a historical account for race in specific historical conditions: namely, slavery. As a Marxist historian Allen is concerned with the degree to which white working-class people have undermined their own interests by pursuing racial interests over class interests. The first victims of racial oppression are those immediately subject to it, the second victims are those who blindly align themselves with the oppressors. For example, trade unions in the US were incredibly weaker because they had, for a long time, a white-only membership policy. White privilege (a concept Allen coined) is not to be understood as the literal privileges of white people, but the relative advantages gained through divide and conquer.

The colonial and racial oppression of the Irish provided the impetus to presuppose a 'common interest' among English people which may circumvent the class antagonism and even render it harmonious. This is why Karl Marx was right to situate the struggle for Irish national liberation was, effectively, the struggle against the English ruling-class which could open up the space for the English working-class to shake off the chains of class oppression. Ultimately, the British ruling-class managed the crises of its colonial outpost through various methods, eventually leading to a partitioned compromise, and to this day leading to a peace process. The reunification of Ireland has been postponed and by now the thrust of British capitalism lacks the need for racial oppression in Ireland. We can say that the material circumstances have changed, but that doesn't legitimate the cause of a united Ireland as that was always a just cause. It's just no longer linked to working-class emancipation in the same way.