Trump to ask Israel to withdraw from four east Jerusalem neighborhoods

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1. Nationalism is an important factor in life but it is an inadequate concept at the same time because the capitalist system has dragged humanity out of feudalism and has created a world market. That has to be remembered at all times to see a way forward.

2. From Joseph Nedava’s “Trotsky and the Jews,” this quotation from a letter written by Trotsky to a friend:

   Trotsky
   nevertired of stressing his
   internationalism.
   He assuresus
   that
   he had no qualms in choosing between Jewishness and
   con-
   cern
   for mankind. He had wholeheartedly sided
   with
   the
   underdog
   from
   whatever
   people,
   and he
   would
   not
   permit
   Jewish
   parochial-
   ism
   to warp his
   “universal judgment.”
   Whenever it
   appeared
   to him
   that
   his Jewishcommitment,by
   virtue
   of thesheer circumstance
   of
   birth,
   was
   antithetical
   to his profound social
   consciousness,
   he
   did
   not for a moment hesitate to discard the
   former.
   “In my
   mental
   equipment,”
   he
   wrote
   in his
   autobiography,
   “na-
   tionalitynever
   occupied
   anindependent
   place,
   as it was
   felt
   little
   in
   everyday
   life
   …
   it was
   lost
   among
   all
   other
   phases of
   social
   injustice.
   Itnever
   played
   a
   leading
   part,
   not
   even
   arecognizedone
   in mylistof
   grievances.”
   30

   Not, in my opinion, the view of a proud and patrio0tic Jew. There is never a contradiction, in real life, between defense of the rights of the Jewish people and defense of the “underdog.” We Jews have always been underdogs.

3. @ Felix Quigley:Not everything in Joseph Nedava’s book “Trotsky and the Jews’ is complimentary to Trotsky. He points out that Trotsky repeatedly denied, in his published works, that he knew the Yiddish language, but on one or two occasions he admitted that he “knew it well.” Nevada quotes an unnamed Viennese journalist who knew Trotsky in Vienna as having told him (Nedava) that

   A Jewish journalist who
   knew
   Trotsky
   from
   the
   period
   of his
   stay
   in
   Vienna
   (“when
   he
   used
   to play
   chess
   with
   Baron
   Roth-
   schild
   in
   Cafe
   Central
   and
   frequent Cafe
   Arkaden daily
   to
   read
   the
   press
   there”)
   is
   even
   firmer
   on the
   Yiddish
   issue: “He
   [Trotsky]
   knew
   Yiddish,
   and if at a
   later
   date, in his
   autobiography,
   he
   pre-
   tends
   to
   know
   nothing
   about
   Jews
   and Judaism,
   then
   this is
   noth-
   ing
   but a plain
   lie.
   He who had visited at
   Cafe
   Arkaden
   for
   years
   on end
   must
   have
   mastered
   both these
   matters to
   perfection.
   The
   language
   ingreatestuse at
   that
   Cafe
   was—besides
   ‘Viennese-German’—Yiddish.”
   26
   Trotsky of course had no objection to the
   Yiddish
   language as
   such
   (as
   Hebraists,
   for instance,
   had,
   contending that Hebrew
   was
   the only
   national
   language of the
   Jews); this appears
   from
   hisreply
   to
   Lazar
   Kling,
   the
   editor
   of the
   Jewish
   Trotskyite
   organ
   in
   New
   York
   (Unzer Kamf—
   Our Struggle)
   :
   You
   ask, what
   is my attitude to the
   Yiddish
   language?—As to any
   other
   language.
   If
   indeed
   I
   used
   in my
   autobiography
   the
   word
   “jargon,”
   it
   is because in my youth the
   Jewish
   language was not
   called
   “Yiddish,”
   as
   it is
   today,
   but
   “jargon.” This
   is how theJewsthemselves
   called
   it,

4. @ adamdalgliesh:

   Their talk about “revolutionary defensism” is a cover for extreme reaction, a cover for them doing nothing to defend the Jewish people in the Holocaust. As clear as clear can be!

   You need a doctorate and unlimited time to examine these groups.

   They seem to be an opposition to an opposition. But in general terms they can be placed…

   New Left Review I/224, July-August 1997

   NORMAN GERAS
   MARXISTS BEFORE THE HOLOCAUST
   (Note from me…here Geras is in a way breaking new ground and this position brought down on his head the anger of some real friends of his)
   “I shall begin here from an astonishing fact. In December 1938, in an appeal to American Jews, Leon Trotsky in a certain manner predicted the impending Jewish catastrophe. Here is what he wrote: ‘It is possible to imagine without difficulty what awaits the Jews at the mere outbreak of the future world war. But even without war the next development of world reaction signifies with certainty the physical extermination of the Jews.’ [1] This was just a few weeks after Kristallnacht and it was one month before Hitler’s famous Reichstag speech of 30 January 1939 in which he ‘prophesied’ the annihilation of European Jewry in the event of a world war.”

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   Norman Geras’s Political Thought from Marxism to Human Rights: Controversy …
   By Mark Cowling

   Was the Holocaust unique? Tied up in knots, Cowley gets tied up in knots very quickly / Better to ask “What was the Holocaust of the Jews”? Leads into the question as to what is Antisemitism?

   How can socialists or communists stand aside from this whole general question?

   There is a subsidiary question which is did Trotsky stand aside? The answeer is a definite no and so a moment of reflection will show why these present antisemites involved in BLM and so on simply have hidden the actual statements by Trotsky of that time, especially from 1935 to 1940.

   It is my opinion that the issue of Judaism must be confronted. For a very long time, inside of persecution, Jews relied on their religion Judaism. Their rights to be Jews, and with it religious feeling, has to be defended unconditionally.

   The group in the resolution in not mentioning the Holocaust then underway have to be condemned in the strongest possible manner. They are covering their antisemitism by left sounding crap about the ruling class and so on. In the reality of life they are proving traitors to socialism and are on the side of the oppressing Fascists. Stalinism was always a very reactionary current. Stalinism rose in the fight against Lenin (it is thought Stalin poisoned Lenin because Lenin in sickness was turning on him) and then of course all out conflict with Trotsky and his followers, which were substantial, meaning Stalin had to conduct his war “bit by bit”

   A feature of Stalinism was that they often used the WORDS of revolution, especially the WORDS of the 1917 Revolution, but in essence doing very different. This feature is very long lasting. I have seen it time and time again. Trotsky went into some detail in analysing the May 24 attack on his house in Mexico. Mercader and his Mother all working on an elaborate GPU plot had a “Testament” written by the GPU to the effect that it was internal division in the Trotskysit movement.

   It is the same with this group. They are shouting so loud against capitalism etcetera. but this is only a cover for them doing nothing to defend the Jews in the Holocaust.

   Even though there is only 6 or 7 years intervening there is a sharp contrast with what Trotsky was saying about Jews and the danger they were in, and what this group is putting forward.

   I keep to this as a possible explanation…The leadership had been battered and by 1940 with the murder of Trotsky totally eliminated. Not just Trotsky, a cadre was eliminated. (Cadre is a French word for close leadership with an aspect of independent thinking in its makeup)

5. @ adamdalgliesh:

   Sadly you suffer very much from dogmatism and you flounder about with lengthy quotations which are as far as I can judge irrelevant and quite boring.

   I keep repeating the essence of the issue is fairly simple.

   Karl Marx was NOT an antisemitic, that is a lie and a slander. He was studying the development of the capitalist system and one of the issues was the role that Jews played. It is not a condemnation in any way.

   If Marx had been an antisemitic in any way, even the slightest way, then he could not have fought for Jewish political rights in Prussia. This part of Marx is very easy to understand.

   So to get a handle on where Lenin, Trotsky and the Bolsheviks stood get a handle on the Civil War. They were fighting the Whites, the Whites were total Jew Haters, Trotsky made antisemitism a capital offense, the Bolsheviks fought against Antisemitism in the Civil War and the White Leaders went on to become part of the Nazis in Germany..

   Zionism it must be said is a different category. The Bolsheviks following from Marx and Engels opposed in some ways all nationalisms, not just Jewish (Zionism)

   Above all qualities which Trotsky had was that he was never a dogmatist. Established positions were important but he would think over things and change.

   This is the essence of his writings in the 1930s if you care to investigate. Werner Cohn acknowledges this very point but he does so in a very weak manner.

   Dangers set in in the very early forties especially in the revisionism of Trotsky by Mandel who went in the opposite direction to the direction Trotsky was going before the murder

   But it was also Klement, Wolff, and innumerable leading members including the key one Leon Sedov, son in Paris of Leon Trotsky and Natalia in the horrific revenge of Stalin.

   In short a leadership was indeed wiped out by Stalinism in those years. Trotsky of course was the key one and the greatest possible loss.

   There ARE Jewish historians who have dealt with these matters more fairly

   One of these is Joseph Nedava and another is Norman Geras, sometimes called Trotskyist but definitely not. There are others too but small in number. It is hard because it requires reading.

   Under Trotsky in the 1930s there was a flowering of theory on this very subject but that was wiped out by the murderer Mercader.

   I have however nothing but contempt for your positions on this, you do not set out to discover, you set out to prove, and you inflict on the reader huge chunks of text which are not relevant. Werner Cohn admits that after Trotsky was murdered his positions were changed, then proceeds to blame Trotsky anyway. How about putting the blame where it belonged on Stalin and Stalinism.

6. @ Felix Quigley:
   Here is a document concerning the opposition of the Trotskyist movement to the Allies in World War II, and the advocacy of many of them of neutrality as between the fascist powers and the Allies. The Trotskyists did not take a strong and uncompromising stand against fascism during World War II. Instead, they regarded it as an imperialist war on both sides.

   “Attitude of the Proletariat Towards Imperialist War”
   MIA: History: ETOL: Documents: International Communist League/Spartacists—PRS 2

   submitted by the Left Faction of the Revolutionary Socialist League

   Written: 1944
   Source: Prometheus Research Library, New York. Published in Prometheus Research Series 2, 1989.
   Transcription/Markup/Proofing: David Walters, John Heckman, Prometheus Research Library.
   Public Domain: Encyclopedia of Trotskyism On-Line 2006/Prometheus Research Library. You can freely copy, display and otherwise distribute this work. Please credit the Marxists Internet Archive & Prometheus Research Library as your source, include the url to this work, and note the transcribers & editors above.

   The text of this resolution, which was submitted to the March 1944 founding conference of the British Revolutionary Communist Party by the Left Faction of the former RSL, is taken from six unsigned, undated pages headlined only with the title of the resolution.

   I. The Validity of Leninist Policy

   This Conference declares that the policy of revolutionary defeatism as laid down by Lenin during the First World War is entirely applicable to the present conflict. No new factors have arisen which can justify a departure from this fundamental proletarian policy towards Imperialist War.

   The view that the rise of fascism constitutes a new factor warranting the abandonment of the policy of revolutionary defeatism and the adoption of a defencist policy is a manifestation of petty-bourgeois ideology and is irreconcilable with the profession of socialist internationalism. The policy of revolutionary defeatism is applicable in all belligerent imperialist powers irrespective of the state form—whether fascist or democratic.

   The existence of the Soviet Union warrants only tactical changes. It cannot justify an abandonment of the basic expression of the class struggle in war time—the policy of revolutionary defeatism.

   II. The Fundamental Premise of Revolutionary Action in War Time

   The policy of revolutionary defeatism constitutes an assurance that there will be no capitulation to bourgeois ideology. It guarantees that the struggle for socialism will be carried on unaffected by fears of it facilitating “national disaster.”

   The fear of “National disaster” is the main weapon in the hands of the bourgeoisie for the maintenance of its hegemony in war time for it is the source of all opportunist (chauvinist) deviations, hence the Leninist axiom—“A revolutionary class in a reactionary war cannot but desire the defeat of its own government” constitutes the premise of every truly revolutionary action in war time.

   Such a desire and only such a desire is compatible with genuine class struggle. Revolution in war time is civil war, and the transformation of war between governments into civil war is on the one hand facilitated by military reverses (defeats) of governments, on the other hand it is impossible really to strive for such a transformation without thereby facilitating defeat.

   The desire of defeat must not be relinquished even where it is clear that such defeat carries with it the military victory of the enemy bourgeoisie. Defeat, even though it be by a “fascist” country, demoralises not the proletariat but the bourgeoisie hence such a defeat constitutes not an aid but an obstacle to the victory of fascism.

   Fascism can in no wise be imposed by an army of occupation. Fascism is based on the demoralisation of the working class and the destruction of its organisations and must not be confused with a military dictatorship. The demoralisation of the proletariat which is the fundamental condition for the victory of fascism can derive only from its failure to achieve socialism after a favourable opportunity has presented itself. Then and only then does the “initiative” pass to the frenzied petty bourgeoisie—which acting as agents of the big bourgeoisie, vents its despair—in the form of hate, upon the proletariat. Under a military occupation the petty bourgeoisie is more inclined to direct its hate against the foreign army, not against the proletariat. Fascism can only be “home grown.” Nor is the victory of democratic imperialism in any way other than that of disintegrating and demoralising the bourgeoisie whose power is exercised through a fascist state, conducive to the restoration of “democracy.”

   In the conditions of imperialist war the distinction between decaying democracy and murderous fascism disappears in the face of the collapse of the entire capitalist system. From the point of view of the British Workers the victory of German Imperialism is preferable to the victory of “democratic” Britain and conversely from the point of view of the German workers the victory of Britain is preferable to the victory of “fascist” arms. The class conscious proletarian sees in such victories only the defeat and humiliation of his own exploiters which he ardently desires.

   The proletarian does not regard imperialist war as simply a war between governments hence he does not consider that to desire the defeat of one’s own government is the same as desiring the victory of the “enemy” government. In a war between governments he is neutral, but imperialist war is a manifestation of the class conflict within society consequently he is not neutral towards his own bourgeoisie, he is not impartial towards the military fate of his own oppressor but desires the defeat of his own ruling class—the class which directly exploits him.

   To his own bourgeoisie he is related by the fact of direct exploitation, to the enemy bourgeoisie he is related on the one hand by the fact of it being the enemy of his own bourgeoisie in a war between governments, and by the fact of it being the oppressor of his class brother—the proletarian of the “enemy” country. Thus his only real enemy (sole enemy if allied countries are excluded) is his own bourgeoisie, in relation to the imperialist war he is neutral to the enemy bourgeoisie (desiring neither victory nor defeat), but of course desires its defeat by his brother proletarian. Thus also is it impossible for the proletariat to strike a blow in war time at the enemy bourgeoisie without striking at the proletariat of the “enemy” country and aiding its own bourgeoisie.

   International action in war time is directed solely against one’s own bourgeoisie.

   Lenin’s axiom is the prerequisite for serious revolutionary action, not because revolution is impossible without military defeat, history proves only that defeats are more advantageous to the revolutionary proletariat than victories, but because the proletariat and in particular the vanguard of the proletariat is rendered impotent unless it desires the defeat of its own government.

   III. Application of the Policy of Revolutionary Defeatism

   Revolutionary defeatism counterposes to the bourgeois necessity of achieving victory the necessity of the proletariat desiring the defeat of its own government. To the bourgeois lie that the enemy country is the cause of the war it counterposes the concept of our own bourgeoisie bearing to us sole responsibility for the war and its effects. To hatred of the enemy—fraternisation, to imperialist war—civil war for socialism. The task of the revolutionary party is to destroy the influence of bourgeois ideology upon the masses and to impose a socialist ideology upon the struggles of the proletariat. In war time the most pernicious and dangerous illusion is defencism. Defencism is a manifestation of nationalism—revolutionary defencism of national socialism. It is an insuperable obstacle to fraternisation and the achievement of international socialism. Hence the substitution of defeatism for defencism is of vital importance. The destruction of the elements of chauvinism can be accomplished only by counterposing the class needs of the masses to the national needs—the needs of the bourgeoisie.

   The defencism of the masses is mixed with many progressive sentiments and class instincts. The development of these features into a socialist consciousness cannot be accomplished simply by supporting the progressive features for to the masses they are inextricably mixed with the defencist illusions, but only by counterposing the one to the other.

   Failure to bring the class features into opposition to the nationalistic features means to give a “left” covering to patriotism. This is the role of charlatans. Attempts to capture the leadership of the workers on any other basis than that of revolutionary defeatism will lead to social-patriotism, to the destruction of the Revolutionary Party. This is not to say that the masses can be won to the banner of the Fourth International on the slogans of “turn imperialist war into civil war,” etc., but slogans which are evasive and ambiguous with regard to the proletarian attitude to the war are a betrayal of socialist internationalism.

   The value of all slogans, demands, etc., must be measured by the extent to which they enlighten the masses, destroy bourgeois ideological influence, raise socialist consciousness. During an imperialist war—especially prior to the revolutionary upsurge this means above all the raising of the internationalism of the workers. Therefore it is necessary to patiently explain the nature of the war, its incompatibility with working-class interests, and the necessity of fraternisation with the workers in the “enemy” country on the basis of class struggle each against his own ruling class. At first the Revolutionary Party can expect only to swim against the stream, but on its ability to do this depends its whole future. If it makes the smallest concession to defencism and fails to correct it, it is irretrievably lost.

   IV. Revolutionary Defencism

   Revolutionary Defencism constitutes an attempt to reconcile the socialist tasks of the proletariat with the bourgeois task of resisting defeat. It is an expression of petty-bourgeois ideology. Revolutionary Defencism seeks to present the revolution as a means of defeating the imperialist enemy, or of opposing defeat of one’s own country by the enemy. The socialist revolution is not a means of solving bourgeois national problems, but of resolving the conflict between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. The bourgeois nationalist problems of the imperialist belligerents were solved nearly a century ago. The policy of revolutionary defencism might possess some justification in a colonial war, at least if undertaken in a spirit of internationalism, but its application to an imperialist war is nothing but the policy of the social-chauvinist Kautsky, the “internationalism” of which serves only to justify the working class in every country with the defence each of its own fatherland. It is a betrayal of international socialism.

   Such a policy, notwithstanding its “revolutionary” flavour, cannot advance the working class one real step forward. Defencist illusions do not constitute a means of achieving the socialist revolution, they only bar the way to an internationalist attitude which is the prerequisite for fraternisation and the transformation of imperialist war into civil war.

   Revolutionary defencism has found numerous specious formulations—telescoping the tasks of winning the war and the revolution, defeating one’s own bourgeoisie first. The use of such general formulas as “The workers everywhere are the enemies of the bourgeoisie everywhere and working-class action in our own country encourages working-class action in the enemy country,” serve as a cover for defencism. The former as a justification of “neither victory nor defeat,” and the latter to justify a desire for the military defeat of the enemy. Even fraternisation has been presented as a weapon, not against our own bourgeoisie but against the enemy bourgeoisie also. The practical results of this “internationalism” in the spirit of Kautsky have been the American Military Policy, demands for efficient military equipment, deep shelters, better rationing, increased production, etc. Slogans which can only drive the workers further into the blind alley of defencism, into disillusionment and demoralisation.

   The American Military Policy (Chicago Conference Policy) is not a working-class policy but a petty-bourgeois hotch potch. It represents a fundamental departure from the traditions of the Fourth International. It adopts the view that this imperialist war would be progressive if it were under workers control, “we never…give them (the capitalists) any confidence in their conduct of the war.” As a general formula it is true a workers state wages progressive wars but we are confronted with specific conditions—not abstractions. This war is an imperialist war in which millions of workers are engaged in the slaughter of their class brothers at the behest of their own exploiters. It is reactionary to demand that this bloody slaughter, this crime should be conducted “under workers control.” Moreover the fact of the workers in each country demanding of its own bourgeoisie that it be made responsible for the slaughter of its fellow-workers cannot lead to international socialism, hence the “workers control” can never be realised, it remains an empty phrase. All that remains is support of the imperialist war.

   The American Military Policy advocated that the workers should “fight against sending of worker-soldiers into battle without proper training and equipment.” This is alleged to be a translation of Trotsky’s Military Policy. However the class-conscious proletarian can distinguish between not wishing to permit one’s own bourgeoisie recklessly to squander the lives of workers even though it be in the slaughter of brother workers and demanding the efficient prosecution of that slaughter.

   The demand for deep shelters—a specific demand which flows from acceptance of the American Military Policy can only be distinguished from the demand for superior weapons of war by drawing an absolute distinction between offence and defence and between military personnel and civilians. The demand springs from the masses because they accept the necessity of winning the war and desire to protect their lives. The necessity of winning the war is a product of bourgeois deception and is reactionary. The desire to protect one’s life is not specifically working-class—nor for that matter specifically human. It becomes specifically working-class only if it means protection of working-class lives (soldiers no less than civilians) from the attacks of one’s own bourgeoisie, i.e., if one’s own bourgeoisie is held responsible for the war and its effects (bombing); but in this case the demand for shelters is nonsensical. The demand for shelters is in fact directed only in form against one’s own bourgeoisie, in essence it is an act of aggression against the proletariat of the “enemy” country. It is a betrayal of international class solidarity.

   Similarly the demand for “increased production” springs from the desire to “defeat fascism,” i.e., German imperialism and as such it possesses no progressive content. The addition of the words “under workers control” does not alter the general character of the slogan. It only adds a “socialist” covering to the bourgeois lie of “defeating fascism.” The outcome of bourgeois lies can never be socialism, not any step towards it. The demand for “increased production” to aid the Soviet Union did possess a certain progressive feature—the desire to aid a workers state. But this feature could possess no value to the workers despite its class nature until it was counterposed to the defencist—i.e., bourgeois features. Failure to counterpose the desire of the workers to aid a workers state to their desire to prevent the defeat of “their own” country, e.g., by demanding that all existing arms be sent from Britain without regard to the interests of national defence, left the workers at the mercy of the Stalinists. In a slogan such as “Total Aid to the Soviet Union,” the addition of “under workers control” would not be a deception of the working class.

   The demand for the ending of the Party truce may be progressive or reactionary. Progressive if counterposed to the bourgeois task of winning the war, reactionary if advanced as a means to the better prosecution of the war.

   In circumstances in which the masses are dominated by defencist illusions it is valueless to adopt slogans which fail to oppose such illusions. It is necessary to place the working-class necessity of ending the truce in as sharp opposition as circumstances will allow to the “national interest,” to “winning the war.”

   The idea that to call upon the workers to seize power can never be reactionary whatever the purpose is in its very essence unmarxist. No slogan can possess an intrinsic progressiveness. The call to the workers to seize power must be evaluated not in accordance with some Kantian virtue of the “slogan in itself” but by the purpose—the aim for which the slogan is advanced. “To seize power in order to defeat fascism” is in existing circumstances no more progressive than support of the imperialist war. The aim of “defeating fascism” is the aim of our own bourgeoisie even though the original deception practised by the bourgeoisie is cloaked by a “socialistic” demand to “seize power.” A slogan cannot alter the character of the imperialist war.

   V. Defencism of the Leaders and of the Masses

   Defencism is a manifestation of bourgeois ideology. It infects the Revolutionary Vanguard through the capitulation of the masses to the intense ideological pressure exerted by the bourgeoisie through the instrumentality of the reformist leadership. But a “Revolutionary Vanguard” which succumbs to such influences and is unable to extricate itself is worthless. A failure of a “leadership” to resist an alien ideological pressure implies a failure to analyse the class origin of this pressure, that is, that it adopts a non-marxist, non-proletarian standpoint. It is petty-bourgeois. The masses on the other hand slowly but surely overcome their defencist illusions. The ideological pressure of the bourgeoisie is counteracted by the demands made by the bourgeoisie upon the proletariat. The sacrifices made by the workers in the interests of winning the war so sharply conflict with their class interests that the desire for the defeat and humiliation of their exploiters becomes the dominating factor in their attitude to the war. It is entirely untrue that the masses are unable to comprehend and accept the Leninist policy of Revolutionary Defeatism. The masses can assimilate every marxist theoretical question, but they do it in their own way, by testing it “under fire,” in the same way they test the Revolutionary Leadership. Those “leaders” who have been unable to swim against the stream, who have capitulated to defencism and been unable to extricate themselves, are lost to the movement. The masses will never accept them as the Revolutionary Vanguard.

   VI. Defencism and the Fourth International Leadership

   Defencist tendencies in the Fourth International have manifested themselves most markedly in precisely those countries in which the proletariat has more than its chains to lose—those countries which possess or possessed at the outbreak of the war colonial empires on the basis of which the bourgeoisie could grant its proletariat a privileged position. Hence it is not surprising to find that one feature of this defencism is expressed as a desire to “defeat fascism”—i.e., as opposition to the loss of a privileged position—as a pampered slave.

   Such opportunism must inevitably infect and is in fact infecting every aspect of Fourth International policy. In America and Britain the Fourth International is following in the footsteps of the 2nd., and 3rd., Internationals and it is useless to attempt to appeal to the absence of a distinct social strata in the Fourth International as the basis for degeneration. “History knows degenerations of all sorts” and the ideological influence of a “parasitic” proletariat may yet provide the basis for the death of Trotsky’s International.

   If the Fourth International is to live it must purge its ranks of all defencists. Not the slightest concession must be made to revolutionary defencism. At the core lies the need for a firm internationalist leadership which can resist the pressure of alien interests. This, not “objective conditions,” is the only guarantee that the Fourth International can fulfill its historic role.

7. The Trotskyist Movement on the Jewish Question
   From Victim to Shylock and Oppressor:
   The New Image of the Jew in the Trotskyist Movement

   By Werner Cohn
   © Werner Cohn, 1991
   Journal of Communist Studies (London), vol. 7, no. 1, March 1991, pp. 46-68.

   Abstract
   Leon Trotsky and the Jews
   Jews and the pre-War Trotskyist movement
   Trotskyism and the War: The Main Enemy is at Home !
   Trotskyism after the 1967 War: Against Zionism and
   Imperialism !
   The ‘Usurers’ of Abram Leon
   The Jews of Israel: An Oppressor Nation
   The Trotskyist Groups Today: Variety in Consensus
   Concluding Comments
   Notes
   Abstract: After the Arab-Israeli war of 1967, a change took place in Trotskyist positions concerning Jews. The earlier positions saw Jews as one of the oppressed peoples of the world. While the movement has always opposed Zionism, earlier pronouncements routinely coupled this opposition with denunciations of what where seen as anti-Semitic aspects of the Arab nationalist movement. After 1967, most sections of the Trotskyist movement began to characterize the Jews of Israel as an ‘oppressor nation’ and called for the destruction of Israel. The movement also began to distribute an earlier publication that characterized the Jewish tradition as one of usury.

   When Karl Marx was a young man of twenty-six and some time before he wrote any of the works that were to make him world-famous, he published an essay of about eleven thousand words ‘on the Jewish question,’ Zur Judenfrage. (1) In the course of this essay Marx made some extremely hostile comments on Jews, most notably accusing them of “money-mindedness.” This little essay stands isolated — in both subject matter and spirit — from the opus of the more mature Marx, and has generally been ignored by all the factions of the Marxist movement. (2)

   Ignored, that is, until it was resurrected by the post-Trotsky Trotskyists after the Arab-Israel war of 1967. As I shall show, this turn came as part of general post-War re-orientation of the Trotskyist movement and involved a repudiation of positions taken by Trotsky.

   Trotskyism today, fifty years after the death of its founder, is divided into numerous groups and grouplets, each claiming to be more faithful than the others to Trotsky’s vision of a Fourth International. The major formations are in France, Britain, and the United States, but there are also groups in South America, Sri Lanka, and other countries. Except for two groups in Britain, the movement can hardly be said to be very influenctial anywhere.(3) But through its great earnestness, its faithfulness to Marxist and Leninist texts and often to the spirit of Marx, and perhaps through its very fractiousness and combativeness, the Trotskyist movement may well serve as one of the important case studies of Marxism and its vicissitudes.

   Leon Trotsky and the Jews

   The Jewish origins and the original Jewish name of Trotsky — Lev Davidovich Bronstein — were well known in his lifetime. Unlike Marx, Trotsky was never baptized in the Christian faith, and, though a staunch atheist, he never denied his Jewishness to himself or to others. (4)

   In the whole period after the Russian revolution of 1917, Trotsky was a faithful disciple of Lenin’s, and, until he was displaced by rivals after Lenin’s death, Trotsky was generally regarded as the second man, after Lenin, in the Bolshevist leadership. On the question of Jews, Lenin the non-Jew andTrotsky the Jew expressed themselves in almost identical terms. The emphasis was always on the evils of anti-Semitism, with opposition to any form of Jewish ‘particularism,’ either in the form of Bundism or Zionism, playing a distinctly secondary role. Though both Lenin and Trotsky prided themselves on their unquestioning discipleship to Marx, neither ever voiced Marx’s negative sentiments concerning Jews; in fact, as far as can be determined, neither ever mentioned Marx’s writings on the Jews. By the same token, of course, it is also true that they never criticized Marx on this account.(5)

   As is well known, Trotsky and his supporters in the ‘Left Opposition’ became the object of a most vicious campaign of vilification at the hand of their erstwhile Bolshevist comrades. The campaign began in the middle 1920s and utilized as one of its weapons — through innuendo and indirection — the exploitation of popular Russian anti-Semitism. Trotsky and Lenin had taught that anti-Semitism would naturally die once capitalism is defeated and a ‘workers state’ established. By February of 1937 Trotsky saw how wrong he had been in this and wrote his now-famous article ‘Thermidor and Anti-Semitism.’ Here he exposed not only Stalin’s use of anti-Semitism but he also acknowledged that the problem of Jews in European society is more complex than Communists had thought it to be. This article was not published until after Trotsky’s death, and then not by his own closest supporters but by the ‘Shachtmanites,’ the by then schismatic group whom he had fought so bitterly in the last few months of his life.(6)

   Nedava has suggested that Trotsky himself used a very subtle form of anti-Semitism in this last faction fight. (7)Trotsky and his immediate followers (James P. Cannon and the ‘Cannonites’) accused the opposition (Max Shachtman and the ‘Shachtmanites’) of being more ‘petty-bourgeois’ and less ‘proletarian’ than they. The ‘Shachtmanites’ had a greater following in the New York local, which was also more Jewish in membership than the rest of the country. Some of the members of the Shachtman group, indeed, accused the ‘Cannonites’ of ‘catering to prejudices.’ (8)

   I was personally acquainted with the Trotskyist movement in those days and I find Nedava’s suggestion, while not totally without merit, to be somewhat tenuous. I have checked with Albert Glotzer, one of the leaders of the Shachtmanite faction at the time and a Jew who has become critical of Trotsky on many points. He denies any anti-Semitic implications in the faction fight of those years. (9) It is probably true, on the other hand, that the occupational distribution among the Jews, even in the Trotskyist movement of those years, was relatively less “proletarian” than that of non-Jews, and this was bound to have unfavourable implications in this strictly Marxist sect.

   Finally, the Jewish press in several countries has published interviews which Trotsky had granted in 1937. Some of his statements can be interpreted as tentative encouragement for Jewish territorial aspirations, and some people have even interpreted his words as implying support for Jewish claims to Palestine. What is certain is that, although remaining a firm internationalist and anti-Zionist, he never ceased to be concerned for the suffering of his fellow Jews.(10)

   Jews and the pre-War Trotskyist movement

   From its beginnings in 1929 (11) until the coming of the Second World War, the following were among the most conspicuous features of the Trotskyist movement:

   1. Trotskyism represented a radical leftism, which in the political culture of the day involved the greatest possible enmity toward the radical right, i.e. the Nazis.

   2. Trotsky and his followers exposed and denounced the Stalinist dictatorship, and they pointedly called it ‘totalitarian’ to show its similarities to Hitlerism. (12) On this important issue they were very isolated in left-wing circles in the 1930s and 1940s. At a time when the crimes of Stalin were so generally denied in the West, the Trotskyist movement showed much more realism and much more courage than conventional liberal and left-wing politicians.

   3. Trotskyist groups were very small everywhere, but the average intellectual awareness of its members was probably much higher than that of the competing Communist and Social Democratic mass parties. This statement is of course impressionistic and difficult to prove; I base it on personal recollection and on the published descriptions and memoirs for the period.(13) (The impression one gets from the Trotskyist movement today is quite different).

   4. Using the same kind of imperfect evidence, it is my impression that the membership and perhaps even more the leadership in these groups was largely Jewish from their beginnings around 1930 until approximately the middle 1960s. Furthermore, quite a few of the best known older Jewish intellectuals in the United States, and to some extent also in Britain and France, had some connection with the Trotskyist movement in the 1930s and early 1940s.

   No more than a very small minority of Jews ever were Trotskyists or Trotskyist sympathizers, but those who were, in this early period, were substantially in accord with the general consensus of Jewish public opinion: anti-Fascism, a taste for intellectualizing, distrust of Stalin. These Jewish Trotskyists were far from being ‘the average Jew,’ whatever that might mean, but neither were they radically at odds with their families or the social milieu from which they had sprung. The moderate — as it appears in retrospect — anti-Zionism of these Trotskyists would not have been an insufferable irritant; at any rate, Jews had not yet accepted Zionism as fervently or as quasi-universally as they did later.

   One way of following the striking changes in Trotskyist positions on Jews and Zionism is to read the writings over the years by Tony Cliff (Ygael Gluckstein).(14) In the 1930s he wrote for American Trotskyist journals as a member of then-illegal Trotskyist group in Palestine, using the name L. Rock. (15) In 1946 he emigrated to Britain where he eventually developed his distinctive view of the Soviet Union as ‘state-capitalist’. Today he is the leader of the (British) Socialist Workers Party, one of the more important Trotskyist groups worldwide.

   Writing in 1938, Cliff, like other Trotskyists of the time, opposed Zionism and the idea of a Jewish state, but he opposed with equal vigour the ‘anti-Jewish’ nature of the ‘Arab nationalist movement,’ in particular pointing to the Arab ‘pogroms’ of 1929.(16) Condemnations of the 1929 murder of rabbinical students at Hebron and of the Nazi connections of Al-Hajj Amin al-Husayni, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem in the 1930s, regularly accompanied Trotskyist denunciations of Zionism in this period. As we shall see, Tony Cliff changed this line after 1967.

   Trotskyism and the War: The Main Enemy is at Home !

   Until the Second World War, then, it can fairly be said that the internal culture of the Trotskyists groups, even more than any of their formal documents, assumed that Hitler and Stalin were the arch enemies. Today the enemy is ‘American imperialism’ of which Zionism is taken to be an appendage. This change in the movement’s demonology had as its concomitant not only a radically different relationship to Jews, which I will describe presently, but also a precipitous drop in the proportion of Jewish members. (17)

   The change did not come all at once. Speaking in retrospect, it was foreshadowed in the very harsh stance of the movement in opposition to the Allies’ war against Hitler.

   The Communist movement of Lenin, Trotsky, Luxemburg, and Liebknecht had been founded in opposition to the ‘social patriotism’ of the social democrats in the First World War, and Trotskyists had, using the same terminology, always insisted that no side in a war among the ‘capitalist’ powers should ever be supported by the proletariat. But on the other hand Trotsky had been particularly sensitive to the dangers of Hitler, and had indeed shown signs of regarding the German ‘fascists’ as much more dangerous than ordinary capitalist governments. (18) Trotsky had also called for a vote against annexation to Hitler’s Reich in the Saar plebiscite of 1935 while the Moscow-oriented Communists, at the beginning of the campaign, still considered such a vote to be a sell-out to ‘French imperialism.’ (19)

   Just before the war, some Trotskyists in Palestine, apparently Jewish, wrote to Trotsky to express concern over the traditional Bolshevist strategy of ‘revolutionary defeatism’ according to which the main enemy of the proletariat is always at home and revolutionary activity is to be carried on in wartime even though that may cause the defeat of one’s own country. These Trotskyists assked whether the movement could indeed regard the two sides in a coming war, in which Hitler’s Germany would no doubt be a participant, as equally reprehensible; whether, in effect, the Fourth International should counsel the working class of the Western countries to carry on activities against their own governments even at the risk of helping Hitler win the war.

   Trotsky’s reply was extremely harsh and unequivocal: the old Bolshevist slogans from World War I still holds. The ‘capitalist’ governments of the West are as likely as not to turn fascist anyway. ‘A victory over the armies of Hitler and Mussolini implies in itself only the military defeat of Germany and Italy, and not at all the collapse of fascism.’ Furthermore, ‘the more resolute, firm and irreconcilable our position is on this question all the better will the masses understand us …’ (20)

   Once the war broke out, Trotsky wrote the solemn ‘Manifesto of the Fourth International on the Imperialist War and the Proletarian World Revolution’ (May 1940) which failed to see much difference between Western democracies and Hitler Germany:

   “But isn’t the working class obliged in the present conditions to aid the democracies in their struggle against German fascism ?” That is how the question in put by broad petty-bourgeois circles …. We reject this policy with indignation. Naturally there exists a difference between the political regimes in bourgeois society just as there is a difference in comfort between various cars in a railway train. But when the whole train is plunging into an abyss, the distinction between decaying democracy and murderous fascism disappears in the face of the collapse of the entire capitalist system. (21)

   Trotsky was killed that year and was never to learn that the Western democracies did, contrary to his prediction, defeat fascism. In his 1939 reply to the Palestinian Trotskyists he had said that if the ‘slightly senile’ Allies were indeed capable of liquidating fascism, ‘even if only for a limited period,’ he would be wrong and those supporting the war effort would be right. (22) We don’t know what he would now say, were he alive. All we know is that those who act in his name — the Trotskyists of today — stand fast in proclaiming that his pronouncements of 1939 and 1940 were absolutely correct.

   But for the Jewish members and supporters of the old Trotskyism, it may well be that the movement’s position of ‘defeatism’ was the first of several profound shocks that alienated them from the movement. Certainly, as more and more of the details of the Holocaust became known after the war, Trotsky’s analogy to the ‘difference in comfort between various cars in a railway train’ appeared less and less felicitous.

   Trotskyism after the 1967 War: Against Zionism and
   Imperialism !

   In 1946, immediately after the Second World War, Tony Cliff wrote another pamphlet. He was now writing under his new name and for the Revolutionary Communist Party of Britain. He castigated all the worldly powers of the Middle East: ‘terroristic’ Zionist organizations, ‘British imperialism’ and other ‘foreign capitalists,’ ‘big Arab landowners,’ ‘the Arab bourgeoisie in Palestine,’ the (Moscow-oriented) Communist Party of Palestine, etc. (23) If he expressed particular venom for Zionism, he did not at all spare ‘the reactionary feudal leadership in the Arab national movement, and the anti-Jewish terror.’ Here he mentions, in particular, the Mufti of Jerusalem and his Nazi connections. (24) In another publication of the same year, Cliff is even more specific: ‘Who is the Mufti ? … He was the organizer of attacks on Jews in 1920, 1921, 1929 and 1936-39…’ (25)All this was vintage Trotskyism. The governments of the world, all the political parties and movements, whether left, right, or center, are thoroughly evil. Only the international revolutionary proletariat, yet to be awakened from its slumber by a yet-to-created mass Trotskyist party, can save the world from otherwise certain barbarism.

   Trotsky himself, when asked in 1932 about the 1929 Arab riots in Hebron, had thought that they combined elements of an ‘Arab national liberation (anti-imperialistic) movement … combined with elements of Islamic reaction and anti-Jewish pogromism.” (26)

   Aside from Cliff’s pamphlet and a very occasional article along the same line in publications such as The New International and Fourth International, international Trotskyism was in a sort of latency period after the war as far as the Jewish question is concerned. In this it did not differ markedly from the earlier periods of Trotskyism; Jewish matters had not been very important to it. And neither did the Trotskyist press pay very much attention to the new state of Israel. Not very much, that is, until after 1967, subsequent to which the topic became one of the major preoccupations of the movement.

   The Trotskyists were not alone in this new turn. Following the Israel Arab war of 1967, the Soviet Union broke diplomatic relations with Israel. Together with the pro-Moscow Communist parties and associated movements around the world, the Soviets began a tremendous, newly intensified propaganda campaign against Israel and Zionism. (27) One of the major themes in this campaign was an alleged similarity, identity even, between Zionism and Nazism. At the same time — and this became important for practical considerations — Zionism was said to be a tool or puppet of ‘American imperialism.’ The Soviet Union found that a very hard line against Israel helped it enlist Arab and other third-world leaders, and much of the New Left in the industrialized countries as well, in its Cold War with the United States. Certainly by the early 1970s opposition to Zionism had become one of the axioms of correct left-wing, ‘anti-imperialist’ thinking.

   There is a tradition in the Trotskyist movement, dating back to Trotsky’s “Left Opposition” to Stalin in the 1920s, of seeking to outbid the official Communist Parties on the matter of leftism: we are more leftist than thou ! After 1967 anti-Zionism became almost part of the definition of being on the left, and, seen from this point of view, it is not altogether surprising that the Trotskyists generally developed a harsher and more uncompromising line on this question than did the official Communists.

   Both pro-Moscow and Trotskyist Communists have always insisted, then as well as now, over and over in all pronouncements that deal even remotely with our topic, that they are, have been, and always will be staunch opponents of anti-Semitism. Their anti-Zionism, they never tire to say, is not at all directed against the Jewish group, let alone Jews as individuals. In fact, they say, it is Zionism that is really anti-Semitic: Zionism, like Nazism, preached that Jews are a foreign element in the countries of the diaspora; Zionists, like Nazis, tried to have Jews leave Germany in the Nazi period; Zionism as a political movement collaborated with the Nazis.

   Critics of Soviet policies on Jews (besides disputing the factual claims in such statements) have long maintained that Zionist’ is frequently used as a code word meaning ‘Jew’ in Soviet propaganda and that Soviet ‘anti-Zionism’ in fact amounts to opposition to the Jewish people. The question now is whether the anti-Zionism of post-1967 Trotskyism similarly contains elements of anti-Semitism. Different readers will wish to answer this question in different ways. Moreover, the Trotskyist movement is badly divided into many competing tendencies and so we shall have to pay attention to at least some of the more important ones among these.

   One of the first indicators of a new Trotskyist position came in yet another work by Tony Cliff, ‘The Struggle in the Middle East,’ written in 1967 immediately after the Israel-Arab war of that year. (28) Some of the material in it follows, word for word, the text of 1946 that we have considered at the beginning of this section. There is a condemnation of Zionism, hardly more scathing than before. There is the obligatory condemnation of ‘imperialism,’ and so forth. But some of the material is quite new. When attacking Israel, it is no longer a question of Israeli rulers or Jewish capitalists but rather of Israel tout court. Asking the question ‘can colons be revolutionary ?’, Cliff now castigates Jewish workers for a failure to ‘join forces with the Arab anti-imperialist struggle.’ (29) This is a new note for a Trotskyist writer; until that point accusations were always levelled against capitalists, Jewish or not, and not against workers, Jewish or not.

   The biggest change from his 1946 pamphlet is that in 1967 Cliff no longer makes any reference to Arab violence against Jews, to the role of the Grand Mufti during the Hitler period, or to any of the material that Trotsky, Cliff himself, and other Trotskyist writers had always used to balance their sharp criticism of Zionism. Cliff’s suppression of the name of Al-Hajj Amin al-Husayni, Grand Mufti and friend of Hitler, is something that he and other post-1967 Trotskyist writers have in common with the bulk of the newer left-wing critics of Israel. There is some irony in this rewriting of history. Trotsky himself had been victimized by a similar bowdlerization of history when the official chroniclers of the Soviet state sought to misrepresent his role in the Russian revolution. Trotsky’s exposé of the ‘Stalin School of Falsification’ constitutes one of the most revealing texts on such propagandistic revision of history. (30)

   The ‘Usurers’ of Abram Leon

   The document that most clearly marks the turning point in our story was actually written a quarter of a century before the 1967 war — between 1940 and 1942 — in Nazi-occupied Belgium. The author of ‘La Conception Matérialiste de la Question Juive’ was twenty-two when the work was started, younger than the Marx of ‘Zur Judenfrage.’ He had been a member of Hashomer Hatsair, the left-wing Zionist youth group, but by the time he started this work he had abandoned Zionism to become active in the illegal Belgian Trotskyist organization. By the time he was twenty-six, in 1944, he was killed in Auschwitz by the Nazis. (31)

   The book was first published by a Trotskyist group in Paris in 1946 and then in an English edition in Mexico in 1950. It seems to have been forgotten as fast as it was published and was unavailable for many years until it was resurrected by the Trotskyists after the 1967 war. In 1968 there was a French edition with a lengthy introductory essay by Maxime Rodinson which, among other things, attacked Zionism and Israel. In 1970 the English translation was republished by the Trotskyist ‘Pathfinder Press’ with a new introduction by Nathan Weinstock that included an even sharper attack on Zionism and Israel. This English edition has gone through a number of reprintings and appears in the current Pathfinder catalogue as of this writing (April 1990). It seems to be esteemed by most if not all of the current factions in international Trotskyism.

   Leon starts with a ‘materialist’ assumption that he shares with Marx and other Marxists: it is not the Jewish religion, not a specific Jewish culture, not Jewish sentiments of any sort that determine the Jewish group but rather their social — that is to say their economic — role. If anything Leon is more radical than others in this determinism: ‘We must not start with religion in order to explain Jewish history; on the contrary, the preservation of the Jewish religion or nationality can be explained only by the “real Jew,” that is to say, by the Jew in his economic and social role.’ (32)

   From the very beginning of their history, according to Leon, Jews were traders. Even in antiquity they were hated for this. Later they became ‘usurers,’ and here he quotes Marx: ‘both usury and commerce exploit the various modes of production. They do not create it, but attack it from the outside.’ (33)

   Throughout, Leon develops the notion of a socio-economic selection for membership in the Jewish group: Jewish individuals who choose not be merchants or usurers convert to Christianity; Christians who take on these occupations convert to Judaism. (34)

   ‘Usury’ is treated as the defining characteristic of the Jews beginning with the middle ages. Leon is most insistent that Jews entered this practice on their own volition and not at all as the result of outside forces: ‘It is self-evident that to claim, as do most historians, that the Jews began to engage in lending only after their elimination from trade, is a vulgar error.'(35) And again:

   The example of Poland again proves how infantile are the customary schema of Jewish historians who attempt to explain the commercial or usurious function of the Jews on the basis of persecutions. Who then had forbidden the Jews of Poland from becoming agriculturalists or artisans ? Long before the first attempts of the Polish cities to struggle against the Jews, all commerce and all banking in that country already lay in their hands.(36)

   Leon’s views here are very different from Trotsky’s. When the latter found occasion to deal with Jewish occupational peculiarities — the Jewish ‘middle men,’ money lenders, etc., in Rumania — he saw the Jews as victims of circumstances rather than as the villains portrayed by Leon. (37) Neither Trotsky, nor indeed Lenin, ever accused the Jewish people of ‘usury.’

   Leon is also very insistent on what he considers to be the ‘unproductive’ nature of the Jew in the feudal period: ‘The treasury of the usurer, in the feudal era, fulfills the role of a necessary but absolutely unproductive reserve …. The function of the banker is altogether different. He contributes directly to the production of surplus value. He is productive.’ (38) And again he quotes from Marx: ‘Usury centralizes money wealth, where the means of production are disjointed. It does not alter the mode of production but attaches itself to it as a parasite, and makes it miserable. It sucks its blood, kills its nerve … ‘ (39)

   Leon treats anti-Semitism, at least in the pre-capitalist era, as the natural result of Jewish behaviour through the ages:

   Hatred for the Jews does not date solely from the birth of Christianity. Seneca treated the Jews as a criminal race. Juvenal believed that the Jews existed only to cause evil for other peoples. Quintilian said that the Jews were a curse for other people. The cause of ancient anti-Semitism is the same as for medieval anti-Semitism: the antagonism toward the merchant in every society based principally on the production of use values. (40)

   And again: ‘The transformation of all classes of society into producers of exchange values, into owners of money, raises them unanimously against Jewish usury whose archaic character emphasizes its rapacity.’ (41)

   Only when he comes to contemporary society is Leon ambivalent about anti-Semitism. On the one hand he castigates it as a device of the capitalist class in its struggle against the proletariat. But he also thinks that ‘the historical past of Judaism exercises a determining influence on its social composition.’ (42) Since Jews today are no longer dominantly usurers, anti-Semitism now is actually a myth, a piece of ‘false consciousness’ that is deliberately fostered by racists. Jewish usury is now no more than a ‘vestige,’ but this vestige does give ‘a certain appearance of reality to the myth.’ (43)

   Jews no longer play a distinctive social role now, Leon finds, and he argues against ‘petty-bourgeois ideologists [who] are always inclined to raise a historical phenomenon into an eternal category.’ The disappearance of the Jewish people, he suggests, is a ‘historical necessity.'(44) The problem cannot be solved in a humane way under capitalism. Zionism is no answer at all. The hope lies in the example of the Soviet Union which has shown that ‘the proletariat can solve the Jewish problem’ and where ‘the “productivization” of the Jews has been accompanied by two parallel processes: assimilation and territorial concentration. Wherever the Jews penetrate into industry, they are rapidly assimilated. As early as 1926 there werehardly 40 percent of the Jewish miners in the Donetz Basin who spoke Yiddish. Nevertheless the Jews live under a regime of national autonomy; they have special schools, a Yiddish press, autonomous courts.’ Leon also gives unqualified praise for the Biro-Bidzhan scheme, the Kremlin’s Siberian answer to Zionism. (45)

   Here again, Leon’s differences with Trotsky are striking. For the last decade of his life, Trotsky missed no occasion for exposing and denouncing the Stalinist rule in the Soviet Union. Trotsky approved of the nationalized economy, for whose sake he continued to regard the country as a ‘workers’ state’ albeit a degenerated one, but he always coupled such approval with a most scathing denunciation of the political dictatorship. He took the same approach to the Biro-Bidzhan scheme. (46)

   Leon’s book was written with verve, intelligence, and high seriousness, qualities which we shall find lacking in the Trotskyist writings on Jews a quarter of a century later. But there can be no question of scholarly or historical accuracy, any more than there was for Marx’s ‘Zur Judenfrage.’ (47) Unlike Marx at the time of his pamphlet, Leon had had no benefit of a university education when he wrote this book. He had no control over the sources he cites, let alone the primary materials. Instead he used the traditional method of the autodidact pamphleteer: he scoured the secondary literature in search of statements in accord with his thesis; whenever he found something to his liking, he made careful citation of it in his book. Any thesis at all can be proven by this method, at least to the satisfaction of someone needing to grind a particular axe. Even Maxime Rodinson, the anti-Zionist French writer who is responsible for the new French edition of Leon’s book in 1968 and who approves of its political implications, finds Leon’s scholarship unacceptable. (48)

   Leon was of course not the first to propose that the Jews should be exclusively defined by their putative economic role and, this role now being outdated, that they are bound to dissolve into the surrounding population. This line of reasoning was taken up by Karl Kautsky, (49) and more closely related to Leon in time, by the Austrian-born Jewish Communist Otto Heller.(50) Heller was a member or supporter of the Stalinist Communist Party of Germany, and was of course even more enthusiastic than Leon about the Soviet solution to the Jewish question. (Like Leon, Heller fell victim to the Nazis. (51) ) But there is a great difference in the tone of these two writers. Where Leon’s is very moralistic in his condemnation of the Jews as ‘usurers,’ accusing them time and again of deliberately anti-social acts, Heller finds that Jews were ‘forced’ into such roles. (52) Except for Marx himself, I have found no Marxist writer, before the late 1960s, to be as disparaging of the Jewish people as Leon.

   Despite these flaws in the book — the unacceptable scholarship, the unprecedented anti-Jewish tone, the sharp deviations from Trotskyist positions on the Soviet Union — the Trotskyist movement decided to resurrect it in 1968 and has ever after praised it as one of its most authoritative publications. It is important to note, however, that this praise is kept to overall evaluations of ‘the authority on the Jewish question.’ (53) Today’s Trotskyists do not make the explicit allegation that ‘usury’ constitutes the historical heritage of the Jewish people; nor do they explicity repeat Marx’s accusation of’dishonest trade practice’, i.e. Schacher. (54)

   The Jews of Israel: An Oppressor Nation

   When the national convention of the Socialist Workers Party in the United States adopted its resolution on ‘Israel and the Arab Revolution’ in August of 1971, it was by far the largest Trotskyist grouping in North America and was also perhaps the most influential formation in the international Trotskyist movement. (55) No fewer than 1,100 delegates and visitors attended the convention. The resolution is probably the most carefully written exposition of the new Trotskyist thinking concerning Israel and Zionism. It solemnly and, for the movement authoritatively, establishes the new doctrine that the whole Jewish people of Israel — not just the rulers or capitalists of the country — are oppressors and must be considered enemies:

   The right of oppressed nationalities to self-determination is a unilateral right. That is, it is the right of the presently oppressed Palestinians to determine unilaterally whether or not they and the Hebrew-speaking Jews will live in unitary state or in separate states. The Israeli Jews, as the present oppressor nationality, do not have that right. (56)

   On the other hand,

   … within this framework, the Hebrew-speaking Jews, a small minority within the Arab East, are guaranteed all democratic rights of a national minority, such as language, culture, religion, education, etc. If appropriate, this can include the right to local self-administration in Jewish areas, but not the unilateral right to form a militia or other armed force; any form of local self-administration must be subject to the approval of the central government of the unitary workers state. (57)

   Above all,

   A key task of the Arab revolution, and the central task of the Palestinian struggle, is the destruction of the Israeli settler-colonial, expansionist, capitalist state. To accomplish this task requires, first of all, the revolutionary mobilization of the Arab masses; and secondly, within Israel, winning the largest possible support for the Arab revolution and neutralizing the opponents of the Arab revolution. (58)

   Although ‘the Jewish workers in Israel are economically and socially privileged compared to the Arab workers, both within Israel and the Arab East … [and] have also been entrapped by their support to Zionism,’ (59) the party nevertheless urges revolutionary socialists in Israel to win Jewish workers away from Zionism and from the existing trade unions (Histadruth) and to enlist them for help in the destruction of the Jewish state. ‘This is the only perspective in the interest of the Jewish masses as well.’ (60)

   Furthermore, ‘our revolutionary socialist opposition to Zionism and the Israeli state has nothing in common with anti-Semitism, as the pro-Zionist propagandists maliciously and falsely assert.’ (61)

   This position is then developed as follows:

   The situation of the Israeli Jews is essentially different from that of Jews in other parts of the world. The struggle against anti-Semitism and the oppression of Jews in other countries is a progressive struggle directed against their oppressors…’ (62) [But] The Israeli Jews form an oppressor nationality of a settler-colonial character vis-a-vis the Arab peoples. … From the point of view of the Leninist concept of the right of nations to self-determination, the key fact is whether the given nationality is an oppressed nationality or an oppressor nationality. …(63)

   There was a minority opinion in the party which went approximately as follows: we agree that Israeli Jews constitute an oppressor nation and have no right to self determination before the socialist revolution; nevertheless we think that after the revolution these Jews might well have a claim to a workers state of their own. (64) The majority decided that there should be no support for a Jewish state, either before or after the revolution. I have been informed that members of the minority were close to the thinking of the (Mandelite) European-based leadership of the international movement at the time, and their point of view may well be that of the Mandel group now (see below). (65)

   The party issued a booklet of approximately 60,000 words to explain the resolution and its reasoning. It ranged over the entire history of Palestine and Israel. Nowhere is there mention of Arab violence against Jews, nor of Al-Hajj Amin al-Husayni.

   The Trotskyist Groups Today: Variety in Consensus

   It would not be possible to make reference to all the groups and grouplets in the world today that lay claim to the mantle of Trotskyism. What follows is an account of the larger Trotskyist formations in Britain and the United States; they can be taken as a fair sampling of what
   worldwide Trotskyism currently thinks about Jews and Israel.The positions taken by the (American) SWP in 1971 are universally accepted, with only minor variations, by all the groups except one. As we shall see, the largest of all groups, that lead by Ted Grant, is in partial but significant dissent.

   It is convenient now to use the names of the respective leaders for labelling the various tendencies. Despite the fact that the philosophy of Marxism should dictate otherwise, Trotskyists, like other Communists, attach extraordinary importance to the personality of their leading comrades. Once a person is recognized as the leader of a given tendency, only death or excessively conspicuous dotage can displace him. This is of course in sharp contrast to the practice in most democratic socialist organizations.

   All these Fourth Internationalist groups think of themselves as ‘Marxist,’ ‘Leninist,’ and ‘Trotskyist,’ these terms serving as totemic emblems of the claimed descent from the great leaders. All three labels were used even during Trotsky’s lifetime. For lesser leaders now alive, however, totemic naming is sometimes taken as slightly disparaging. (66)Followers of James P. Cannon were called ‘Cannonites’ by followers of Max Shachtman, who in turn were known as ‘Shachtmanites’ to the former, and both of these terms bore slightly pejorative connotations. Nevertheless, or perhaps because of this, it is common in Trotskyist circles to refer to rival tendencies as followers of a particular leader. One convenience in this practice lies in the fact that the names of the groups themselves are often confusingly similar (the Socialist Workers Party in the United States is Barnesite while that of Britain is Cliffite, for example). The international allegiances of the various tendencies are certainly more conveniently traced through reference to the leading personalities. In any case, a nomenclature based on discipleship is the norm among writers on Trotskyism no less than among scholars of Hassidism.

   Healyism

   The first and by far the most flamboyant of recent Trotskyist leaders is the now deceased Gerry Healy, dead in London on December 14, 1989 at the age of 76. His organization — the small remnant now is called the Marxist Party, but in its heyday it was the Workers Revolutionary Party — became known for its very strident anti-Israel activities mainly through the unceasing efforts of its most illustrious member, actress Vanessa Redgrave.

   Under Healy’s autocratic leadership, the Workers Revolutionary Party had for some years more influence in Britain than is usual for Trotskyist organizations. There was a group of actors around Vanessa Redgrave and her brother Corin, a daily newspaper News Line, a publishing company with contracts from the Libyan government, ties to Labour Party figures such as Ken Livingstone. (67) Such connections brought Healy to the attention of the larger public, but so did, with disasterous consequences, his personal and political extravagance. He was finally alienated from the bulk of his own membership and became subjected to extremely hostile criticism from all the other Trotskyist groups. (68)

   These problems came to a head when it was revealed that during the 1970s and early 1980s Healy had received secret funds from Colonel Gaddafi’s Libya, other Arab governments, and from the Palestine Liberation Organization. Some of the money from Libya, it was alleged, was payment for spying on prominent British Jews. There were also charges from party members that Healy had sexually exploited no fewer than twenty-eight young women in his organization. (69) The Trotskyist movement has never before, or after, known flamboyance of this sort. The upshot is that the Workers Revolutionary Party splintered into approximately eight competing successor groups after 1985, and ‘Healyism’ may now be considered as dead as its founder.

   Cliffism

   We have already seen how Tony Cliff changed his position since his earliest writings in 1938 in line with the changing attitudes of international Trotskyism. Cliff is now one of the most senior figures in the movement. He is not only the leader of the (British) Socialist Workers Party but also of an international network of groups that accept his theory of ‘state capitalism’ in the Soviet Union. Next to Ted Grant’s Militant, Cliff’s is the second largest Trotskyist group in Britain.

   The SWP’s extremely harsh opposition to Israel is expressed in its recent pamphlet by John Rose, ‘Israel: The Hijack State. America’s Watchdog in the Middle East.’ (70) The cover
   of this work is dominated by a melodramatic cartoon depicting an Uncle Sam who only barely restrains a ferocious, enormous attack dog. The dog has huge sharp teeth, wide-open mouth, eyes bulging; he is straining at the leash and ready to attack; his mouth alone is twice the size of Uncle Sam’s head. The dog of course is Israel, and the cartoon is a faithful indicator of the tone of the whole pamphlet.

   The pamphlet acknowledges the help of Tony Cliff in the preparation of the pamphlet, and pays tribute to other ‘Jewish anti-Zionist’ writers for having paved the way for the present work, among them Abram Leon, Lenni Brenner, and Noam Chomsky. These authors form the basic sources for most current Trotskyist writings on Jewish matters and are frequently cited in them. (71)

   Rose accepts allegations from Brenner, Chomsky, and others, that there is a close similarity between Zionism and Nazism. (72)He also adopts a version of Israeli history, in sharp contrast to Trotsky’s views and Cliff’s earlier writings, according to which the Arabs were always victims and the Jews always aggressors. (73) The Mufti Al-Hajj Amin al-Husayni, who had been denounced by Cliff in his earlier writer for having organized ‘attacks on Jews in 1920, 1921, 1929 and 1936 39,’ is now seen by Rose as having been insufficiently vigilant on behalf of Arab demands. (74) A similar criticism is made of today’s Palestine Liberation Organization. (75)

   Finally, Rose indicates his condemnation of the whole of the Israeli Jewish population, not just the government and capitalists, by speaking of a ‘colon mentality amongst the mass of Israelis.’ (76) He also claims that an opinion survey found only one percent of Israelis agreeable to a political settlement by withdrawal to pre-1967 borders. This claim is based on a tendentious misreading of a single poll and can actually be shown to be inaccurate by a large margin. Insofar as Marxists identify with the popular will, they often tend to overstate the extent of popular approval of their positions; by making the opposite claim here, Rose emphasizes his condemnation of the whole Israeli populace.

   Barnesism

   Jack Barnes has been the leader of the (American) Socialist Workers Party since 1972. Since the early 1980s, under his leadership, the party has undergone certain changes that have caused many of the old-time Trotskyists to resign from membership or be expelled. The party has been very severely criticized by other Trotskyist groups. (77) It still looks to Trotsky for inspiration, publishes his writings, and retains the general political orientation of Trotskyism; but on the other hand it has also expressed great admiration for third-world leaders and in particular for Fidel Castro. (As far as is publicly known, this admiration has remained completely unrequited). These views constitute a significant shift when compared to traditional Trotskyist attitudes.

   Attacks on Israel and Zionism receive more emphasis from Barnesite than by the other groups. There are frequent articles in the party’s American paper The Militant, the party sells the anti-Israel literature of others, and, above all, it has spent considerable resources of its own to bring out two elaborate anti-Israel pamphlets in recent years. (78) Leon’s ‘The Jewish Question,’ among others, is suggested for further reading in both of them.

   The general line is familiar: the 1971 SWP resolution is re-affirmed; the Arab struggle is to be supported ‘unconditionally’; the Jews of Israel have no right to self-determination; Jewish workers should support the Arab struggle for the destruction of Israel; anti-Semitism in the rest of the world is to be fought. There are certain emphases distinctive to the Barnesites. While the other Trotskyists tend to criticize Arafat for being too conciliatory, the Barnesites, in line with their great admiration for third-world leaders, express confidence in the PLO and see Arafat’s recent willingness to recognize Israel as a necessary temporary concession on the road to the desired eventual destruction of Israel.

   Mandelism

   The Belgian scholar Ernest Mandel (sometimes writing as Ernest Germain) is the leader of the United Secretariat of the Fourth International. One of the three larger French Trotskyist groups acknowledges his leadership as do smaller groups in Britain, the United States, Israel (79), and other countries. Born in 1923, Mandel was active in the Trotskyist underground in Belgium during the Second World War where he met Abram Leon; he contributed the biographical sketch of Leon to the latter’s The Jewish Question. (80) Mandel is now a well-known Marxist economist and is probably the only professional scholar of international repute to have become a top leader in any Trotskyist movement. (81)

   Perhaps because of the scholarly achievements of its leader, the group’s materials on Israel are often more thoughtful and perhaps more carefully written than those of its Trotskyist rivals. But they are also a great deal harsher and more irreconcilable, if that is possible, in their opposition to the Jewish state. Unlike the Barnesite praise and approval of Arafat, for example, Mandelites do not hesitate to criticize the PLO leader for being too conciliatory to Israel: ‘George Habash [head of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine] was right when, addressing the leaders of the Palestinian right who are hegemonic in the PLO, he asked them: “Is this the time to make new concessions ?”‘ (82)

   Not all Mandelite writings are designed to appeal to the thoughtful. For instance, the American Mandelite affiliate Socialist Action has issued a booklet by Ralph Schoenman, The Hidden History of Zionism. (83) Schoenman had been assistant to Bertrand Russell and Secretary-General of Russell’s International War Crimes Tribunal. When Russell finally broke with Schoenman, he complained about Schoenman’s general unreliability: ‘[he is] very often excessively and misleadingly incorrect and his quotations must always be verified.'(84)

   Schoenman’s booklet is fairly shrill: The Zionists were in cahoots with the Nazis; the Jews were always violent and sadistic in the history of Palestine; the Arabs were always victims of these Jews and of the imperialists generally. Schoenman reserves his harshest words for those who support the right of Israel to exist alongside an eventual Palestinian state: ‘Even if the apartheid Israeli state were anchored on a ship off Haifa, it would be an outrage.’ (85) And again: ‘this specious employment of the principle of self-determination translates into a covert call for amnesty for Israel.’ (86) The tone is very vindictive against the Jewish state.

   Like Rose, Schoenman depends heavily on Brenner and Chomsky as sources in his footnotes. He also quotes various works by Israel Shahak, a chemist in Israel who has attacked not only Zionism but also the Talmud as the source of current Jewish malevolence. (87)

   Grantism

   There is one tendency in contemporary Trotskyism that forms a substantial exception to our general story: Grantism, also known as the ‘Militant tendency’ in the British Labour party. Led by Ted Grant, it is a disciplined Trotskyist organization within Labour. Since such factions are technically forbidden by Labour rules, Militant sometimes maintains the fiction that it is no more than a newspaper and does not exist as an organized group. Actually it does much more than merely exist: it is extremely well organized and probably has more influence in Britain than any other Trotskyist organization has ever had in a Western country. It may have as many as ten thousand members; it has important influence in municipal councils such as Liverpool; two Labour MP’s are said to be Militant members. Finally, Grantism also has small satellite grouplets in other countries. (88)

   Ted Grant emigrated to Britain from South Africa some fifty years ago and has been active in the British Trotskyist movement ever since. Together with Tony Cliff and Ernest Mandel, he is among the few survivors of the pre-War Trotskyist movement who are still active in the movement today.

   Militant’s attitudes on Israel are significantly different from those of all other major Trotskyist groups. (89) The ‘intifada’ is to be supported, it is, in fact, ‘a marvellous vindication of the Marxist view.’ (90) However, the Arab governments are not be trusted at all because they are dominated by capitalists. The PLO is opposed because it conducts a national rather than the necessary class struggle. Its actions, including the terrorism directed against Israel, naturally repel Jewish workers. Jews as well as Arabs have legitimate security concerns. Finally,

   A bridge can be built between Jewish and Arab workers by a movement which fought under the banner of a Socialist Federation of the Middle East. Such a movement would fight for democratic rights and a national homeland for Palestinians, while directing class appeals to Jewish workers and troops. It would defend the class interest of Israeli workers, and support the right of the Israeli nation to its own self-determination, within a socialist federation…. Marxists take as their starting point the fact that the fortunes of Arab and Jewish workers are inextricably bound together and the key task, therefore, is to provide an alternative programme to all those dragging the region into the swamp. (91)

   Nowhere in Militant’s writings is there talk of Israeli Jews as an ‘oppressor nation.’ By placing its own anti-Zionism into a strictly class-struggle context, Militant has managed to retain attitudes that were dominant in the older, pre-1967 Trotskyism.

   Concluding Comments

   The question of whether the Trotskyist movement is anti-Semitic arises primarily if one thinks of anti-Semitism as an all-or-none phenomenon. But a moment’s reflection shows that, like Marx himself, a movement may well show anti-Semitic aspects without thereby becoming totally anti-Semitic in its nature.

   All Trotskyist groups declare their staunch opposition to anti-Semitism while being hostile to the Zionist enterprise. Most of the groups wish the destruction of Israel and, toward that end, support Israel’s most irreconcilable enemies. In theory, most of the Trotskyist groups regard the Jews of Israel as an ‘oppressor nation,’ but this phrase does not occur very often in the Trotskyist propaganda. Beyond these positions there is a certain ambiguity about the image of the Jewish people. The groups promote and pay homage to the work of Abram Leon. But Leon’s specific accusation — that ‘usury’ constitutes the central phenomenon of Jewish history, in effect that Jew means Shylock — is neither explicitly endorsed nor ever repudiated by today’s Trotskyist writers.

   It is not surprising now that the membership in the Trotskyist movement is no longer overwhelmingly Jewish, as once it was in countries like France, Britain, and the United States. The movement does have some very bitter Jewish individuals, for instance the authors of the pamphlets I have cited. But these men and women have broken all meaningful association with the Jewish public. Trotskyism did at one time have a modicum of such contact, but today it is profoundly separated and deeply alienated from the great majority of Jews in general and also from Jewish intellectuals in particular. In this it differs significantly from the Communism of both Lenin and Trotsky.

   From the Jewish side, this alienation probably became inevitable once the strident anti-Israelism of the movement was clear. Beyond that, the Trotskyist refusal to endorse the Allies in the Second World War is no doubt a continuing irritant, as was the complete lack of interest of the movement in the fate of Soviet Jews in recent years.

   As we have seen, there are various emphases within the overall Trotskyist movement in its approach to Jews and to Israel; furthermore not all sections of the movement treat the issue as very important. Many of the rank-and-file Trotskyists I have met are very open not only to Jewish individuals but also to discussions of the issues that are involved; the atmosphere is rarely one of hatred. On the other hand I have also encountered individual Trotskyists, often of Jewish origins themselves, for whom rancour — anti-Jewish rancour — seems to be the dominant theme. Such rancour, of course, is also found in some of the publications I have cited.

   Our consideration of the Jewish question in the contemporary Trotskyist movement points, I believe, to certain inherent problems of the larger Marxist tradition from which this
   movement has sprung. As an ideology of class struggle, Marxism has, since the days of its founders, had difficulties when faced with human problems that simply will not dissolve themselves into a class analysis. The relationship of the Marxist movements to the problem of nations and nationalism has been marked by opportunism — Marx and the Marxists have taken sides in national disputes in accordance to what seemed the most expedient at the moment to a particular Marxist movement. This stance has been justified by Stalin:

   The question of the rights of nations is not an isolated, self-sufficient question; it is part of the general problem of the proletarian revolution, subordinate to the whole, and must be considered from the point of view of the whole…. the national movement … should be appraised not from the point of view of formal democracy, but from the point of view of the actual results obtained, as shown by the general balance sheet…. (93)

   I close with a more personal commentary. Much like the larger Marxist movement, Trotskyism since the days of the Old Man himself has been a peculiar mixture of opposing impulses. On the one hand, there are the truth-loving, democratic, humane, generous efforts of many individuals who have enlisted, often at considerable personal risk, for the cause of a better and more just society. Such impulses should have led the Trotskyists to take a more even-handed look at the Arab-Israel problem than they have in fact managed. They should also have been able to see through and dismiss the pathetic little anti-Semitic pamphlet by Abram Leon.

   But like other Marxist movements, the Trotkyists have also been capable of rancour, resentment, narrow sectarianism, always-knowing-better. A variety of circumstances seem to have conspired to make these latter qualities predominant in their approach to the Jewish people during this last quarter century.

   Notes

   (1) The critical edition of Karl Marx’s ‘Zur Judenfrage’ has
   been published jointly by the Soviet and East German
   (Socialist Unity) communist parties in Karl Marx Friedrich
   Engels Gesamtausgabe (MEGA), Erste Abteilung, Band 2, pp.
   141-169 (text) and 648-667 (notes), Berlin, 1982. The
   original ed

   Click here to go to home page of Werner Cohn

   Send an e-mail to Werner Cohn This e-mail link may not work for you if you use a web-based e-mail service. If so, please use my direct e-mail address as follows: wernercohn@mac.com

   Have you heard about my Early Companions ?@ Felix Quigley:
   Felix, here is Werner Cohn’s article about his youthful friendship with Trotsky and the anti-semitism of the post-Trotsky Trotskyists. Cohn wrote this shortly before his death, when he was over 90 years of age, just as you predicted he would have to have been in order to have known Trotsky and lived to write about him fairly recently.

8. FAKE NEWS!!!!!!!!!!!

   Reports emerged this week in the Israeli media that President Trump would be releasing a peace plan that would include requiring Israel hand over four Jerusalem neighborhoods to the Palestinian Authority, 40% of Judea and Samaria to the PA and internationalize the Old City of Jerusalem.

   But Caroline Glick says the reports are all lies.

   Caroline Glick spoke with a senior US government official who is familiar with the American plan, and he denied all the details in the report. He says the reports on the peace plan are fake news.

   http://www.jewishpress.com/news/israel/reports-on-trumps-peace-plan-fake-news/2018/05/04/

9. @ Buzz of the Orient:

   Somebody needs to take this seriously and explain why it is that Ivanka and Kushner are orthodox Jews and yet they are slashing Jerusalem. What is going on here?

   But you are right. The paucity of the Trump agenda in the face of Fascism on two fronts at least, the Fascism of the “me too” outlook, and the Fascism that comes from Hajj Amin el Husseini is most dangerous.

   Trump follows the old American philosophical method of making deals as he goes along. It is called in philosophical books “pragmatism” and is a real category.

   Trump can struggle on, and using this philosophy can score some victories, soem defeats from which he will zigzag, but the whole capitalist system is too complicated today and too rotting. Everything is in motion. Hegel was an idealist but he understood dialectics. Marx came and took his dialectics but placed dialectics in the real world, out of the mind of Hegel into the real world. Marx explained the capitalist system

   In one real way, and this applies also to Lenin and Trotsky, and to me, Marx reached for the whole, whereas Trump goes from deal to deal, seeing only the partial, and the partial is turning into temporary fixes, and these fixes as in Jerusalem rules out category, such as that the struggle of Islam is to destroy all Jews and Christians.

   200 years today since the birth of Karl Marx.

10. @ adamdalgliesh:

    You are talking complete rubbish! If friendly with Trotsky in 1930 that would make them then 20, nearly 90 years have passed to today, that would leave them 110 years old.

    Read Jordan Peterson. Naturally I oppose him on some things but he is right about “categories” and I am tracing this to the growth of Fascism in society especially in the America Trump haters and me too movement.

    Your stupidity leads you on the same path.

    “Stupid is what stupid does!”

11. Give up ANY part of Jerusalem and turn the rest into an International City. After a whole bloody YEAR of trying to put together a solution this is what they come up with? Obviously those people are being paid by the hour or else they are so incompetent that they belong in an asylum.. My view on this – look to the psalm:

    “Should I forget thee, O Jerusalem, may my right hand wither and my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth.”

    If I were capable of reimposing that curse to be effectiver I would sure as hell do so.

    I wonder how Ivanka will feel about her husband when his right hand has withered and his tongue cleaved to the roof of his mouth.

12. The only legacy that Trotsky left behind that has any connection with Israel is the Trotskyist movement, which is 100 percent anti-Israel and antisemitic. Even someone ( I forget his name) who was a personal friend of Trotsky in the 1930s , and a member of his movement at that time, confirms that the present-day Trotskyist movement is both anti-Israel and antisemitic. His article on the subject is available on the web. Don’t believe anything you read on Trotskyist.org

13. Great African Rift divides the Jews land from the Muslim Land.@ Edgar G.:

14. @ Bear Klein:
    Personally, I believe that we should stop mentioning the so-called “Palestinians” at all, in ANY context, except maybe, 50 years down the road, in a history lesson in schools, as an example, where the Israeli govt. under Rabin had a sort of mental collapse and did strange things.damaging to the State.

    I read this report last night on Arutz, and it added that Old Jerusalem was to be an INTERNATIONAL entity….. Trump should be told quietly and politely, friend to friend, that this cannot be done, that Jerusalem is just not a piece of rral Estate to be bought and sold, that there would be Civil War, and the govt. would fall; thav there would be internal chaos for the next 20 years. with govts elected and falling like ninepins. Refer him to the San Remo and Anglo-American Treaties and show him how \much Israel has already given up to these obscene murderers.

15. My response to this is one of complete contempt. I am speaking here as a marxist on the eve of 200 years since the birth of Karl Marx. I have just finished writing an article on how the liars, professional liars, of Stalinism were in the killing business in 1940. If interested it is on trotskyist.org

    These people do not think in terms of thpught categories and Peterson says something about this. I am interested in this thought process. It is a form of thought well recognised as very prominent in America called by the philosophical term “pragmatism”.

    I am more interested in what to do and how to proceed in the face of this.

    Does it not also show what a pipedream the Ted thing about Jordan really is. The Americans are intent on carving this Palestine State crapology out of tiny Israel.

    Netanyahu better speak and pretty damm fast.

    As I wrote this morning…Trump is threatened by Fascism, the me toos and all that madness, and he operates like a tinker horse dealer at a fair. Learn the category of Fascism or you fail.

    You cannot escape in our period the hard fought for gains made by Leon Trotsky. If you take a “turn up your nose” attitude you are truly lost.

    We are all being squeezed. Keep your head. Come up with a strategy.

16. Since the Palestinians have rejected the plan outright Israel should be saved from telling the USA no.

    Bibi should be saying in the abscence of a negotiating partner we plan to apply Israeli law to all Jewish Towns in Judea/Samaria plus will be building without restriction.

17. What kind of friend would pressure a country to give land away to the enemy?
    Has Trump lost his marbles?
    Why is he still kissing Arab asses?
    Why can’t he be a real friend?

18. Israel should ask US to withdraw from California and give it to Mexico.