Ever since political Zionism first emerged on the stage of history at the end of the nineteenth century, it has had its opponents as well as its advocates on the left. In the golden era of the Second International - that is, before 1914- it was generally the Marxist as opposed to the 'revisionist' wing of social democracy, especially in Central and Eastern Europe, that stood in the forefront of opposition to Zionism as a political ideology and movement. Frequently, too, it was Jewish intellectuals, especially in Eastern Europe, who were most vehement in their rejection of Zionism, branding it as a clerical, obscurantist attempt to return the Jews to the ghetto or as a design to subjugate the Jewish masses to the retrograde nationalism of the Jewish bourgeoisie. Both Jews and non-Jews in the revolutionary Marxist movement tended to see Jewish nationalism in Lenin's terms (derived from a polemic against the anti-Zionist Bund rather than against the Zionists!) as an absolutely 'un-scientific' and 'reactionary' idea whose purpose was to divert the Jewish masses from the class struggle. As Karl Kautsky and the Austro-Marxist Otto Bauer emphasised at the turn of the century, Zionism and Jewish nationalism stood in contradiction to the only truly progressive solution of the 'Jewish question'- namely, assimilation of the Jews in the classless society of the future to be created by socialist revolution. By seeking to revive a fossilised ghetto Judaism, the Zionists, so the argument ran, were perpetuating a reactionary caste, a relic of the Middle Ages and creating an obstacle in the common struggle against antisemitism. The Russian Marxists, Lenin, Trotsky and Julius Martov, also shared this view, as did an entire generation of internationalist revolutionaries - many of whom were, in Isaac Deutscher's phrase, 'non-Jewish Jews' seeking to cast off their ethnic identity and escape into the utopia of universalist socialism. Already this first phase of Marxist anti-Zionism showed a curious characteristic that has persisted to the present day - namely, that individuals and ideological tendencies with little else in common (and sometimes even bitter enemies within the left,) such as the centrist Kautsky, the reformist Social Democrat Otto Bauer, the ultraleftist Rosa Luxemburg, the Bolsheviks Lenin and Stalin, the Menshevik Martov, and the internationalist wanderer between the worlds, Trotskycould unite on at least one issue: their opposition to Jewish nationalism.

The arguments of this classical Marxist left against Zionism are still frequently quoted in the ideological anti-Zionist literature of the contem porary left, but it is crucial to note some very important differences. In the first place, before 1914 and indeed until the post-Holocaust period and the creation of the state of Israel, the subject of Zionism never assumed major importance on the left. Although there are a number of basic doctrinal texts, even these possess an ad hoc character and have only in retrospect been invested with a quasi-sacral quality.

Thus modern Soviet propaganda will endlessly refer to Lenin's so-called polemics against the 'Zionists' without revealing that he barely discussed the subject and reserved most of his polemical efforts on the 'Jewish Question' for denouncing the Bund or condemning antisemitism. Similarly, the Western New Left as well as the Communists will resuscitate texts on the Judenfrage as ancient as Karl Marx's young Hegelian polemic of 1844 against Bruno Bauer to justify an entirely different political purpose- namely the Soviet political war against 'international Zionism'. Neither Marx, Engels, Kautsky, Lenin, Trotsky nor Rosa Luxemburg would ever have dreamed that Zionism could become a major world problem, an ideological issue of the first importance for the Socialist bloc on a par with the struggle against capitalism or imperialism, or that it could become a code word for the forces of reaction in general. For the traditional Marxist left such a proposition would have been incomprehensible, and to admit it would have implied that something had gone radically wrong with the entire Marxist view of the historical process, in which ethnic and national antagonisms are inevitably to be superseded by class polarisation on a universal scale. For if one thing united traditional left-wing thinking on the Jews (in both East and West) it was the assumption that Judaism was bound to disappear according to the laws of historical development, that the final emancipation of the Jews implied the dissolution of any Jewish group identity. The total failure of this historical prognosis or prediction is, in my opinion, itself one of the reasons for the extraordinary antipathy of many Marxists toward Zionism today - for the state of Israel, the offspring of the Zionist movement, by its very existence calls into question the whole Marxist tradition of theorising on the Jewish question. As we have pointed out, Marxism did from the outset relate to the ideological content of Zionism but rejected it on principle as incompatible with the doctrines of proletarian internationalism. In particular, it denied that the Jews were a nation, that they had a common history, language, culture, and so on - arguments that frequently recur in the extreme-left polemics against Zionism today. But here, too, the context is very differ ent, as are the modes of debate, the tone of the argument, and its underlying meaning or deep structure.

https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-1-349-11262-3_4