Blog : Philosémitisme

En ce qui concerne l'échec inévitable de la lutte contre l'antisémitisme contemporain voir l'interview de l'historien Simon Epstein @ JForum.

Extraits de la recension de l'ouvrage collectif Rebels Against Zion: Studies on the Jewish Left Anti-Zionism, édité par August Grabski de l'Institut Historique Juif de Varsovie, par David Hirsh [photo], professeur de sociologie à l'Institut Goldsmiths, Université de Londres. @ Fathom et Engage:

In the first half of the 20th century, most Jews failed to find their way to a successful strategy for dealing with the threat antisemitism. [...]  The truth [...] is that all the strategies adopted against antisemitism failed. Bundism was eradicated in the Nazi gas chambers. Bolshevism failed to stop the Shoah and, while it did succeed in gaining state power over a third of the world, it did not do so by defeating antisemitism but by adopting it in its anti-Zionist variant. Zionism too, as was broadly predicted by both Bundists and socialists, failed to save European Jews in the necessary numbers, and remained, until the 1940s, a utopian movement. [...]

In 1954 Isaac Deutscher, Trotsky?s biographer, wrote that he had ?of course' abandoned his life-long anti-Zionism. It seemed obvious to him that the world had changed, in Auschwitz and on the battlefield. European Jews had been murdered; the remnants had forged a new nation in Palestine, which Deutscher regarded as a ?historic necessity', a ?raft state.? Now the key questions changed. It was no longer relevant to ask whether Zionism was a winning strategy against antisemitism; the question was how would the Jewish state reach a peace with its neighbours and how it would negotiate the contradiction between its Jewishness and its democracy'


The political meaning of the term ?anti-Zionism' couldn't be more different after 1948 from its meaning before 1939, yet so often people who consider themselves to be Marxists are more concerned with the continuity of form than with the break in content. Before 1939 anti-Zionism was a position in debates amongst Jewish opponents of antisemitism. After 1948 it became a programme for the destruction of an actually existing nation state. [...]