Zionism

Zionism has become reactionary because instead of being a scheme for immigration, as many at first thought it would be, it became a scheme for colonization, and therefore of imperialism. If there are now differences between imperialism and the more impatient nationalists, we may see it parallelled in South Africa in the struggle between Smuts and imperialism on the one hand and Malan and the Afrikaander Nazis on the other, who certainly cannot be termed “progressive” by their “friends at court”.

We hear many voices in this country urging that the scheme for a totalitarian Zionist State in Palestine should be helped to succeed because it would assist the Jewish people to a homeland of their own. It is pointed out that in so vast a portion of the world they are persecuted and need a haven of refuge. With this we are not disposed to agree, for these plans are suggested for after the war, when presumably it is taken for granted that persecution and anti-semitism will continue. This may well be the case, but it is the duty of all to prevent this state of affairs by making the social revolution that will end persecution for all peoples, which is not only a more humane, but an easier, task, than rooting thousands and millions from their native homelands and settling them in a few miles of desert knowing full well of the dissension of those already there.

The greatness of the Jewish people never made itself manifest when it was an imperialism, a compact tribe of warriors inspired with the idea of a God personally responsible for fighting its battles against all the nations of the world, framing severe penal codes for itself and despising the rest of the world. Nor was it manifest in the years it was constricted to the ghetto and forced into trade and usury. Its greatness came with the Diaspora, in its spreading civilisation amongst the nations; most of all when the French Revolution broke down all barriers, and its apostles of freedom arose like Heine who were cosmopolitans and not narrow nationalists. Fortunately no Revisionist racial bar prevented Freud, Spinoza, Zamenhof, Mendelssohn, Einstein, Marx and others from merging their gifts among the nations.