This is the text of the presentation given by Barry Healy to the March 9 Red Ant Is Anti-Zionism Anti-Semitic? forum. The video of this presentation can be viewed here:

Marxist foundations

In 1843, when Marx wrote his book, On the Jewish Question, Germany was ruled by decrepit aristocrats who proclaimed that they ruled on behalf of Christianity. The so-called “spirit of the state” was Christian.

So, there were all sorts of laws oppressing Jews, effectively an apartheid state.

Marx wrote his book in opposition to Bruno Bauer, who was then a revolutionary. Bauer had published a book saying that if Jews wanted emancipation, they should give up their religion first. He said that a state can only be secular when everybody is induced to give up their religion.

Within a couple of years, Bauer moved from radical politics into straight-out anti-Semitism.

Zionist Israel declares that the “spirit” of its state is Jewish, which is just the mirror image of the oppressive German Apartheid states, the kind of state that Marx denounced.

The logic of Zionism leads directly to the kind of racist hatred that came to possess Bruno Bauer. Bauer grew to hate Jews while Zionists are possessed by a genocidal hatred of Palestinians.

What Marx argued for was a democratic, secular state in which people could express their humanity, including all its religious and spiritual aspects.

When we call for a “democratic, secular Palestine” that’s what we are talking about. That is the content of “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.”

Today, I want to examine how we got into this mess with anti-Semitism and Zionism. How did anti-Semitism arise in the first place? What has maintained it over the years and how did it get intertwined with capitalism?

I say that Zionism actually maintains anti-Semitism.

So, I am going to cover 2,000 years of history in approximately 30 minutes. I give warning that I will be skimming over some matters.

What I argue is that anti-Semitism is a problem of European civilization, not a problem of religion and it has been dumped onto the Palestinians. I say Zionism is a false Messiah for the Jewish people, creating disaster.

My presentation draws upon a variety of sources.

They include a couple of Marx’s writings, Karl Kautsky’s Foundations of Christianity, Abram Leon’s classic work, The Jewish Question, Perry Anderson’s Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism, The Darkening Age by Catherine Nixey, and Janey Stone and Donny Gluckstein’s recent and excellent book The Radical Jewish Tradition.

Historical class and religious struggles

So, let’s start with what the Mediterranean world was like 2,000 years ago.

The dominant force was the Roman Empire, which Kautsky explains was built on the military prowess of the Italian independent farmers, the yeomanry.

However, the Empire’s expansion created contradictions that eventually tore it apart. It was because the military victories brought an endless supply of slaves into Italy.

As the slave economy grew it undermined the economic position of the yeoman farmers and drove them into the cities as proletarians. And slave production itself had its own, undermining contradictions.

The urban proletarians had citizenship rights and demanded bread from the rulers, so the metropolis uselessly sucked wealth from the provinces.

In the Communist Manifesto Marx and Engels say the intractable class struggle between the rich and the poor in Rome mutually exhausted both sides and the whole edifice collapsed.

Having undermined the yeoman farmers, to raise armies Rome turned to mercenaries, like the German Vandals and Goths. They trained these tribes in military technique. Eventually those mercenaries simply invaded and conquered the Empire.

As Abram Leon explains, the Jewish people of the Middle East were perfectly placed to succeed as traders, bridging the Roman, Egyptian, Babylonian and Chinese Empires.

So, Jews were scattered in the diaspora as traders long before the Jewish Revolt and the destruction of Jerusalem.

Here’s a description of these traders:

The merchants speak Arabic, Persian, Greek, the language of the Franks, of the Andalusians and of the Slavs. They journey from west to east and from east to west, partly on land, partly by sea. They take ship in the land of the Franks, on the Western Sea and steer for Farama (in Egypt). There they load their goods on the backs of camels and travel by land to Kolzum. There they embark into the Eastern Sea and go to India and China.

So, the bottom line is that these people were extremely sophisticated.

The Jewish religion was centred in Jerusalem, where the priests dominated and lived corruptly.

In the diaspora, a Jewish sect called the Pharisees built community prayer centres called synagogues. Their theology opposed the priesthood.

These synagogues were sophisticated and intellectually rich and attracted a large supporter base of non-Jews who were allowed to participate on the edge of the congregations.

Among the Greeks the Jewish food restrictions and circumcision were abhorrent and so while there was a large community of non-Jewish sympathisers, there was a barrier to them converting.

But then into these synagogues came a new Jewish sect, the Christians.

To put it mildly, the Christians sparked debate.

They said Jesus was the Messiah and God had allowed them to eat whatever they wanted and that people didn’t have to get circumcised.

At the beginning of each synagogue meeting the Pharisees would call down blessings from God on the congregation and then they’d call down curses on the enemies of the congregation.

After a while the Christians got listed among the cursed and that drove them out of the synagogues. It also led the Christians, as they wrote their Gospels, transposing back into the mouth of Jesus the debates they were having with the other Jewish groups.

Abram Leon says there was a class divide in all this, too. He says:

Christianity, in its beginnings, must be considered as a reaction of the laboring masses of the Jewish people against the domination of the wealthy commercial classes.

Christian victory and civilisational devastation

All of this squabbling among Jewish sects would mean nothing except that in the year 312 Emperor Constantine converted to Christianity. Out went Christian radicalism and in came Christian dominion. Christianity blessed the Emperor and the Emperor used Christianity as a tool.

Perry Anderson says the rise of Christianity was both a symptom and a cause of the collapse of the Roman Empire.

The Christian hierarchy that started being paid by the Roman state added yet another layer of useless bureaucracy to an already bloated state apparatus.

But, by effectively becoming the police, the Christians brought a whole new ideology to Western civilisation: total ignorance.

As Catherine Nixey explains, the early Church fathers preached and recommended that the masses should remain illiterate. And they organised the destruction of libraries and much more.

For example, St Augustine said: “all superstition of pagans and heathens should be annihilated [that] is what God wants, God commands, God proclaims.”

So, all the statues and temples and books were attacked, especially books.

Nixey estimates that 90 per cent of antique literature went up in flames.

As all this burning and wrecking was going on the Goths and Visigoths invaded. Perry Anderson says that their arrival melded the dying slave economy with Germanic social structures and created feudalism.

Both parts of that synthesis were in crisis when they met, so the result was very slow in maturing.

Feudal social and ideological formation and construction of anti-Semitism

Under feudalism the productive working masses, the peasants, were tied to the land and forbidden to travel. There was a social contract between the peasants and the barons. The peasants fed the barons, and the barons militarily defended the peasants.

Nothing was meant to change. God was in his heaven and on earth everything was in its place. The prevailing ideology was stasis and that was blessed by the church.

Part of the theology was that usury, lending money for interest was bad and wrong. The only proper source of wealth was land, so the barons and kings incessantly warred against each other to expand their holdings.

However, what about the Jews? They not only had another religion, they had books and they read and argued and they moved around trading.

The economy of feudalism was natural and survivalist. Abram Leon says it produced use values, not exchange values. That is: each village or valley met its own needs.

But there was still a need for trade, especially in luxuries. So, just as the Dalits in India got consigned to doing all the socially necessary labour that was outside of the social construct, Jews were consigned to a tight niche.

Jews were allowed to trade. And through that they acquired hoards of money.

When barons and kings needed cash for their armies they borrowed from the Jews. When it came time to pay back, they often would denounce the Jews as usurers, kill them and seize their wealth.

For good measure they might encourage a pogrom from among the peasants.

You can see from this how anti-Semitism was constructed and how useful it was for the ruling orders.

Capitalist revolution and Jewish emancipation

Janey Stone and Donny Gluckstein show how, as capitalism began to slowly crystalise within feudalism kings would expel Jews from their realms to stop competition with Christian capitalists.

One of the nations that was accepting of Jews was Poland and so most Jews ended up living there. Then Poland got carved up between various empires and the majority of Jews ended up living under the Russian Tsars.

The Tsars strictly constrained Jews to a limited number of occupations and living locations. It essentially trapped them as a middle layer between the sainted Tsar and the peasants.

I’m going to read a description of life in the Polish town of Vilna that illustrates how the Tsars set up their realm so that everybody hated each other and had to relate to the Tsar as the holy arbitrator:

Despite several communities living cheek by jowl, it was no melting pot… each nationality lived a separate life and had no contact with the other. Eight different languages were spoken. Polish stood at 31 percent, Russian 20 percent while Belorussian and Lithuanian were among the others. But Yiddish was easily highest at 40 percent. These proportions were reversed outside the city precincts. Yiddish speakers were 4 percent whereas Russian constituted 44 percent, Ukrainian 18 and so on.

Within this ghettoised existence there were also class differentiations between rich Jews, who liaised with the outside authorities and poorer Jews. This is a recurrent feature all the way up to Zionist behaviour in World War II.

Stone and Gluckstein show that where the bourgeoisie took up its historical role of waging democratic revolution against feudalism, Jewish emancipation advanced.

Those capitalist revolutions occurred because capitalism is based on commodity production for profit, not use values. So, money hoards change into capital and it needs freedom to chase profit. Workers need freedom to sell their labour power.

So, the human beings who personify both capital and labour need freedom, hence bourgeois democracy.

Where the bourgeoisie chickened out of its revolutionary role, specifically in Germany and Tsarist Russia, Jews suffered. In short: revolutions were good for Jews, counter-revolutions were bad. Today, Zionism is clearly a counter-revolutionary force.

Jewish radical and anti-radical traditions

Within Tsarist Russia, Jews suffered as capitalism emerged because, as Isaac Deutscher pointed out, they were “the main, primitive agent of the money economy”. As the incoming capitalist money economy smashed feudal life those on the receiving end struck out blindly at what they experienced as the cause.

From all of this, Jews in the lower classes drew revolutionary conclusions and became leaders of revolutionary movements. This tradition extended into the rise of the revolutionary communist movement.

Rich Jews also drew conclusions. Their line was to adapt to the prevailing anti-Semitism and cut deals to protect themselves.

Stone and Gluckstein say that many Jews became Communists or members of the Bund, which was politically centrist. The Bund organised armed resistance to pogroms, which had some significant successes.

But other political trends did not organise resistance.

For example, the conservative rabbis wanted to control the population and would do anything possible to not upset anti-Semitic authorities.

These Orthodox conservatives opposed any idea of moving to Palestine and establishing a Jewish state. They said that could only happen when the Messiah comes.

This gives the lie to the Zionist claim that establishing Israel fulfilled centuries of prophesy. In fact, the creation of Israel broke with centuries of religious teaching.

Another competing tend was bourgeois assimilationism. Rich Jews found it convenient to simply adopt the prevailing language and culture. Assimilationism was strongest where emancipation was best established, which was in Western Europe.

Assimilationist Jews came to see their lower class co-religious as an embarrassment. Assimilationists adjusted themselves to the prevailing racism of their capitalist societies.

So, for example, the British Board of Deputies did not oppose the 1905 Aliens Act, which was designed explicitly to exclude Jews from entering Britain.

The last trend was Zionism established by Theodore Herzl. It had the least support of all the trends.

Isaac Deutscher noted that in the Jewish community elections that were held regularly in Poland up to World War II, the Zionists never won a majority. The overwhelming majority voted for the Bund or for Communists.

Zionist accommodation to anti-Semitism and imperialism

But what Zionism lacked in grassroots support, it made up for in networks with the great and powerful. Herzl made it his business to reach out to the most anti-Semitic political figures and offer them the service of extracting Jews from their societies.

Herzl despised all progressive thinking. He said: “Universal brotherhood is not even a beautiful dream.”

Herzl died in 1904 but his followers reached out to the anti-Semite, Lord Arthur Balfour, the man responsible for the 1905 Aliens Act. He declared British support for a Zionist homeland in Palestine.

There were a couple of reasons for Balfour’s Declaration. One reason was, as he put it, to “mitigate the age-long miseries created for Western civilization by the presence in its midst of a Body which it too long regarded as alien and even hostile, but which it was equally unable to expel or to absorb.”

Stone and Gluckstein say the Declaration was also a “cynical decision of an embattled imperialism desperate for allies.” Balfour hoped Zionists in the USA would push that country into World War I.

Britain double-crossed everyone. Besides the 1917 Balfour Declaration they offered Palestine to the Arabs in 1915 and as a joint administration to the French in 1916.

In a letter to the British Prime Minister Balfour said:

“The weak point of our position of course is that in the case of Palestine we deliberately and rightly decline to accept the principle of self-determination. We do not propose even to go through the form of consulting the wishes of the present inhabitants of the country… the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land.”

In 1917 there was another event: the Russian Revolution. The Revolution swept away all anti-Semitic laws. In a few weeks the Revolution achieved more that the Zionists and other conservatives had ever achieved.

It gave the lie to the Zionist claim that non-Jews will always hate and oppress Jews.

I won’t go into the history of Zionist expansion into Palestine. What is important is the relationship between the bourgeois Zionists and imperialism and how willing the Zionists were to betray their co-religious.

As is well-known, in the 1920s Germany was gripped by a series of revolutionary waves and the growth of a mass Communist Party. The German bourgeoisie found it convenient to unleash the Nazis on the leftists.

Nazi propaganda always identified Communists as Judeo-Bolsheviks. They also channelled mass discontent with capitalism into hatred of Jewish capitalists.

So, the German bourgeoisie happily threw their Jewish comrades to the wolves. But there was a lot of throwing people to the wolves.

An example is what occurred immediately after Hitler took power. There was a world-wide boycott of German goods, a BDS, if you like. A slogan of the boycott was: “The boycott is the moral substitute for war”.

The World Zionist Organisation deliberately undermined the boycott by cutting a deal with the Nazis. It was called the Transfer Agreement.

It allowed 60,000 Jews to move to Palestine as part of the Zionist project. They had to buy their way out of Germany, so poor and left-wing Jews were sacrificed.

Ironically, as Nathaniel Flakin relates in his biography of the immortal Jewish communist Resistance fighter, Martin Monath, the Agreement allowed Zionist organisations to function legally in Nazi Germany up to 1938 while left organisations were smashed.

So Yiddish language newspapers were imported from Poland and the Nazi authorities couldn’t read Yiddish. So, the police would visit Zionist meetings and not notice that Monath was reading the writings of Leon Trotsky in Yiddish to the youth.

Monath went on to a heroic career operating underground in Occupied France. He produced a German language newspaper directed at German soldiers and recruited many. He was martyred by the SS just before the liberation of Paris.

The Zionists can’t point to similar heroes. Their record was horribly different.

Zionist betrayal of Hungarian Jews

Perhaps the worst example of collaboration was that of the rounding up and extermination of the Hungarian Jews in 1944.

At that point the war was clearly coming to an end, but the Nazis were intent on their genocide. Hitler’s favourite henchman, Adolf Eichman was in charge of Hungary and his underling, Kurt Becher was organising the shipping out of Jews.

Becher had honed his skills on the Eastern Front where he slaughtered Jews with machine guns and special mobile gas trucks. His first job in Hungary was to shake down Jewish capitalists for money. He was known to have suitcases full of loot.

Given the balance of forces in the war, how could he get the Jewish community onto transport trains without sparking a revolt?

Becher worked with a leader of the Hungarian Zionists, Rezso Kasztner. Becher allowed Kasztner to organise around 1700 bourgeois Jews to leave Hungary by train and go to Palestine in return for copious bribes.

Kasztner knew very well about the gas chambers. He enjoyed nightclubbing with the Nazi occupiers, eating and drinking the best while other Jews starved. He was the total collaborator.

Kasztner’s role was to run around Hungary telling ordinary Jews that it was safe to get on the Nazi trains. He said they were going to work in factories.

On Kasztner’s train there were wealthy Jews, Zionist leaders, prominent rabbis and Kasztner’s friends and family. Kasztner organised for the Nazis to carefully vet who was on the train. Jews who weren’t part of the Zionist circle were thrown off.

Becher was able to peacefully vacuum up about 700,000 Hungarian Jews in a matter of weeks.

The vast mass of transported Hungarian Jews overwhelmed the capacity of the gas chambers.

Art Spiegelman in his graphic memoir, Maus, A Survivor’s Tale recounts his Polish father telling him what happened next:

“Those that what finished in the gas chambers before they got pushed in these graves, it was the lucky ones. The others had to jump in the graves while they were still alive. Prisoners what worked there poured gasoline over the live ones and the dead ones and the fat from the burning bodies they scooped and poured again so everyone could burn better.”

Becher was tried for war crimes at Nuremburg but got off scot-free. That was because Rezso Kasztner rushed to defend him.

Kasztner told the court:

…Becher belongs to the very few SS leaders having the courage to oppose the program of annihilation of the Jews, and trying to rescue human lives…

Becher became a successful businessman in West Germany and even advised Chancellor Kohl. It appears that he used his stash of looted wealth as his grub stake.

What happened to Kasztner afterwards demonstrates Zionism’s viciousness and hypocrisy.

In the 1950s he became the spokesperson for the Israeli Ministry of Trade. However, one of the Hungarian Jews who had managed to survive the death camps denounced him publicly as a collaborator. The Israeli government sued that person for defamation on behalf of Kasztner.

In his defence, Kasztner said that betraying the Hungarian Jews was acceptable because they had assimilated to Hungarian culture. He said the “Hungarian Jew was a branch [of Judaism] which long ago dried up on the tree”.

He meant that, because Hungarian Jews were assimilated, they could not be expected to resist and were not worthy to be saved.

Kasztner was found guilty. However, the Supreme Court, on appeal said he was guilty of collaboration but overturned the part of the verdict that found that sending Hungarian Jews to their deaths was unacceptable.

The point of all this is that Israel is not a safe haven for Jews, it is only a safe haven for Zionists. From Reszo Kasztner’s train to the Israeli helicopters slaughtering Israelis in the October 7 conflict, Zionism is utterly cynical.

Zionism: False Messiah

In conclusion, I want to reiterate that Zionism is a false messiah for the Jewish people, which is the title of Nathan Weinstock’s account of its history.

My last words I will take from Abram Leon, and I’ll interpose my thoughts. Remember that he wrote at the worst point of World War II when the Nazis were inflicting anti-Semitism on all of Europe.

And remember that Abram Leon was a Resistance hero who died in the Nazi camps.

Abram Leon said:

Never has the situation of the Jews been so tragic.

I say the situation of the Palestinians is tragic but so is the situation of Jews caught in the false consciousness of Zionism. It leads them to madness.

Abram Leon:

In the worst periods of the Middle Ages entire countries opened their doors to receive them. Today capitalism, which rules the whole world, makes the earth uninhabitable for them.

There are five million stateless Palestinians in the world.

Abram Leon:

Never has the mirage of a Promised Land so haunted the Jewish people. But never was a Promised Land less capable of resolving the Jewish question than in our time.