Contents
- Proletarian Internationalism Against National Unity
- On the Path to the Comintern
- Gradualist Internationalism
«In the great world war, all small nations served as an excellent tool for imperialist purposes», wrote Moisei Rafes (1883–1942), a staff member of the Agitation and Propaganda Department of the Executive Committee of the Communist International (ECCI), in the pamphlet “The Palestinian Pogrom and the Palestinian Idea”, published in Moscow in the spring of 1920. Rafes asserted that the establishment of a «Jewish national home» in Palestine was a «provocation whose victims were to be the deceived Jewish and Arab toiling masses».
This assessment was enshrined in the Resolution on the National and Colonial Questions of the Second Congress of the Comintern (1920). At the centre of the discussion preceding the adoption of the resolution was the question of the driving forces of the revolutionary process in Palestine. The main participants in the debates were Maria Frumkina (1880–1943), representing the Communist Bund formed in March 1919; Abram Merezhin (1880–1937), a member of the Central Bureau of the Jewish Sections of the RCP(b); and M. Kon-Eber, head of the delegation of the Socialist Workers’ Party of Palestine – “Poale Zion” (SWPP–PZ).
Proletarian Internationalism Against National Unity
At the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, a socialist current emerged within Russian Zionism, whose participants initiated the colonization of Palestine. From the late 19th century until the early 1920s, the number of Zionist circles in Russia grew constantly, with the exception of a period of decline in the inter-revolutionary years. On the eve of the October Revolution, the Russian Zionist Organization, created in 1902, united over 1,200 groups. In the book “The Zionist Movement in Russia” (Jerusalem, 1977), Israeli historian I. Maor noted that «although political Zionism emerged as a worldwide organization, as a mass movement it existed only in Russia».
This issue requires a separate, detailed examination; for now, we will limit ourselves to a few facts. The first “Poale Zion” (“Workers of Zion”) group was created in 1900–1901 in Yekaterinoslav (now the Ukrainian city of Dnipro) on the initiative of Jewish publicists Ber Borochov (1881–1917) and Shimon Dobin (1869–1944). In 1907 in The Hague, representatives of “Poale Zion” from various European and American countries founded the World Socialist Union of Jewish Workers “Poale Zion” (PZ). In the first stage of its existence, it was connected with the Zionist movement of Theodor Herzl (1860–1904), but in 1909, the Russian “Workers of Zion”, seeking to «preserve the proletarian independence of socialist Zionism», withdrew from the World Zionist Organization (WZO).
At the beginning of the 20th century, the Jewish population of Palestine mainly consisted of orthodox religious communities, which received the generalized name “Old Yishuv”, which translates from Hebrew as “settled place, population”. They lived in the four “holy cities” of Palestine: Jerusalem (36,000), Safed (8,000), Tiberias (4,000), and Hebron (1,000), as well as in Jaffa (10,000) and Haifa (3,000). This oldest part of the Jewish population of Palestine consisted of the Sephardic community formed on the Iberian Peninsula. It was also joined by immigrants from North Africa, Bukhara, Iran, and other Eastern countries. Another part of the “Old Yishuv” was the Ashkenazi community, primarily consisting of Eastern European Jews. The “New Yishuv” was formed by Zionist colonists, mostly immigrants from Eastern Europe, primarily from the “Pale of Settlement” of the former Russian Empire; it was they who formed the backbone of the Jewish labour movement in Palestine.
By the end of the First World War, the Palestinian “Poale Zion” had become the leading political organization of the “New Yishuv”, uniting practically all the Jewish labour organizations of the “Promised Land”. In March 1919, a new organization, “Ahdut HaAvoda” (“Unity of Labour”), was created on its basis, headed by the future first Prime Minister of Israel, David Ben-Gurion (1886–1973). Calling for the consolidation of all national forces in the construction of a “Jewish national home”, the “Union of Labour” announced its entry into the WZO. The internationalist minority of the Palestinian “Poale Zion”, led by Y. Meirson and Y. Khaledi, rejected this decision and in October 1919 formed the Socialist Workers’ Party of Palestine – “Poale Zion” (SWPP–PZ) in Jaffa. Meirson, elected as its chairman, wrote about the “old Marxists” who had joined the WZO: «They exchanged the red banner of the international solidarity of the proletariat for the blue-and-white banner of national unity. The collapse of “Poale Zion” is the collapse of reformism». Thus, the leaders of this party placed their choice in the context of the «worldwide struggle between the camp of revolutionary forces and the camp of reformism within the ranks of the international labour movement».
The SWPP–PZ perceived the “Jewish national home” in Palestine under the British protectorate as a «law-enforcement refuge» for the Zionist bourgeoisie, «seized with terror at the impending triumph of the proletarian dictatorship», calling it a «Zionist nationalist ghetto» for Jewish immigrant toilers.
On the Path to the Comintern
At the 5th Congress of the World Socialist Union of Jewish Workers in Vienna (August 1920), the overwhelming majority of delegates from Soviet Russia, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Austria rejected any forms of cooperation with the WZO and announced the creation of the World Jewish Communist Union – “Poale Zion”. Thereby, the position of the SWPP–PZ received broad support in European countries. In a number of cases, “Poale Zion” organizations outside Palestine, including in Soviet Russia, began to be perceived as branches of the SWPP–PZ, which, in turn, came to be viewed as the organizational centre of the World Jewish Communist Union – “Poale Zion”. However, the majority of the US “Poale Zion” and, most importantly, of Palestine itself, joined the WZO. In 1923, they joined the Labour and Socialist International of A. Henderson, F. Adler, and E. Vandervelde, whereas the World Jewish Communist Union – “Poale Zion” oriented itself toward the Comintern from the moment of its formation. «The indicator of the genuinely socialist character of every “workers’ party” is its attitude toward the world war and the revolution in Russia», stated Meirson. «Imperialist London or proletarian Moscow? August 1914 or October 1917? Balfour or Lenin? The Zionist Congress or the Communist International?»
Initially, the credentials committee of the Second Congress of the Comintern refused to include Kohn-Eber among the delegates as a representative of an organization that had not yet eradicated its “nationalist prejudices”. He was granted guest status, but later received an advisory vote as a representative of a party «striving for a transition to communist positions».
The position of the SWPP–PZ at the Congress was outlined in the memorandum “Palestinianism as a Factor of Revolution in the East”, prepared by the party’s chairman and delegate to the First Congress of the Peoples of the East (Baku, September 1–8, 1920), Y. Meirson. The party advocated for the joint struggle of the «Jewish and Arab proletariat […], for the creation of new communist forms of social life in Palestine».
The ECCI put forward two conditions for admitting the Palestinian communists into the Comintern: to fulfil the requirements of the “21 Conditions for Admission to the Comintern” and to change the name of the party. By that time, the SWPP–PZ was already calling itself the Jewish Communist Party. The ECCI insisted on replacing the adjective “Jewish” with “Palestinian”. On October 5–6, 1920, at the organization’s 2nd Congress in Jaffa, the party accepted the Comintern’s conditions, and in April of the following year, the ECCI resolved «temporarily, until the 3rd Congress, to admit the Communist Party of Palestine into the Comintern in a sympathizing capacity».
Gradualist Internationalism
The theoretical foundation of “Poale Zion” was Palestinianism – a specific version of Austro-Marxism, in which national-historical differentiation occupied a special place. According to the theory of “real nationalism” by the founder of the Poale Zion movement, B. Borochov, the proletariat of an oppressed nation was capable of genuine class struggle only after it achieved emancipation within its own national society. Thus, the participation of the Jewish proletariat in the global class struggle was conditioned upon its acquisition of national autonomy. Borochov thereby contrasted bourgeois and proletarian Zionism: while for the former, political territorial autonomy was the ultimate goal, for the latter it was merely a transitional stage on the path to socialism.
The Central Bureau of the Jewish Section of the RCP(b) saw in Palestinianism an attempt to «combine the communist idea with adherence to Zionist ideology». This posed the danger of artificially separating the struggle of the Jewish minority proletariat from the struggle of the Arab majority proletariat. Defending his position, Kohn-Eber gave an assessment of the Arab national movement: «[In Palestine] we are dealing with the aspiration of the nomadic tribes of the Arabian desert […] to establish the most ancient forms of slavery over the settled population of these countries, i.e., the feudal organization of domination by the chieftains of these tribes over the peasant population».
In the SWPP–PZ’s appeal to the First Congress of the Peoples of the East, party chairman Meirson asserted that the Jewish proletariat must «go at the vanguard» and, by virtue of its organic connection on the one hand «with the revolutionary movement of the Middle East, and on the other […] with the European proletariat», become «that actual link which connects the nationally oppressed East with the socially enslaved West» in their «decisive struggle against imperialism and its colonial policy». The SWPP–PZ correctly assessed the backwardness of the Arab national movement, but apparently was not capable of fully assimilating the Comintern’s strategy.
At the Congress in Baku, the appeal “To the Peoples of the East” was adopted, which, in essence, was the strategic programme of the Comintern’s anti-imperialist policy. Its cornerstone was the call for an anti-colonial struggle against the British and French oppressors. In the section dedicated to the Palestinian question, the Arab and Jewish toilers of Palestine were called upon to wage a joint struggle against a common enemy – Great Britain, which «drove the Arabs from the land to give these lands to Jewish settlers […], and then [to suppress] the indignation of the Arabs, incited them against the very Jewish settlers it had planted, sowing discord, enmity, and hatred […], weakening both sides so that it could itself rule and command» (First Congress of the Peoples of the East. Stenographic Report. Petrograd, 1920).
Thus, the main task of organizing the revolutionary movement in Palestine was, according to the ECCI’s definition, the achievement of the internationalist unity of Arab and Jewish toilers in the struggle against imperialism.
November 2023