[Peace-discuss] No Anti Semitism: No occupation

[David Johnson]

 <http://weknowwhatsup.blogspot.com/> Facts For Working People

No Anti Semitism: No occupation 

 

>From Felicity Dowling


Roger Silverman, whose father Sydney Silverman MP, received the first formal
letter telling of the Holocaust writes below on the issue of Zionism, and
the Jewish communities in Europe.  Roger's father was a left MP and was
involved as the article says in quite appalling events in the war. One was
getting a letter addressed to him from Jews left in Europe on the true
extent of the extermination ...not that he could do much about it. Then he
went as one of the first British representative to the camps. The context is
that some young people coming up are so involved in the Palestine issue they
become almost Holocaust deniers. Then the right wing in Labour are pushing
criticisms of the Left as being anti Semitic. 

 

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<http://www.irishtimes.com/culture/the-europeans-no-25-sydney-silverman-1.14
33837> Sydney Silverman

by Roger Silverman

Zionism today is one of the most virulent manifestations of racism. It is
the ideology used to justify the existence of a state which openly denies
equal rights to a quarter of its population on racial grounds, and rules
over four million colonial subjects in neighbouring territories that it has
occupied for half a century by military conquest. How is it conceivable that
such an ideology could ever have been acceptable to anyone considering
themselves socialists?


The Jews of Tsarist Russia and Eastern Europe were a monstrously persecuted
minority, living in designated ghettoes, speaking their own separate
language, practising their own religious and cultural customs, denied civil
rights, and subjected to periodic organised massacres in which thousands
were killed: orgies of violence that acquired a special name of their own:
pogroms. Those that had managed to flee to Britain before an Aliens Act was
passed restricting further immigration were reviled by the establishment as
a "dirty rabble".


Throughout the Russian empire, the Jewish working class was organised in a
socialist movement called the Bund, a separate but integral part of the
Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party. Its aspiration was for cultural
autonomy within a democratic socialist Russia. It was in opposition to this
mass cultural and political movement that Zionism emerged as a reactionary
sect, feeding on despair that Jews could ever attain their rights except
within a separate state of their own. It can be compared with the rise of
national-racial separatist movements among the black population of the USA;
Marcus Garvey's "back to Africa" movement, for instance, closely mirrors the
Zionist mirage of the re-establishment of a Jewish nation in a historic
Biblical "homeland". In both cases, aspirations towards class unity with the
majority ethnic population were cut across by a semi-mystical mythology.


Then came the rise of the Nazis in Germany, their conquest of Europe and
their invasion of Russia. The Jewish population of occupied Europe was
virtually annihilated. Six million were bludgeoned to death, forced to dig
their own graves before being shot, or gassed on an industrial scale in
specially constructed chambers.


In 1942, as head of the British section of the World Jewish Congress, Sydney
Silverman received the first reports of the holocaust and alerted the world:


"It is certain that by a deliberate plan, the war on all Jews by Hitler and
practised as a chronic psychopathic malady since he came to power nine years
ago has become a raging tearing frenzy, acute in every part of Europe, where
no one before was conscious of any so-called Jewish problem. They have been
arrested, scattered, deported across Europe to strange and devastated areas
and there murdered: men, women and children, without mercy, without
discrimination of age or sex or strength, except some solitary few judged
able for some months yet to work on as hopeless slaves. Certain it is that
unless help comes there will soon be no Jews alive in Nazi-occupied Europe."



Even in these circumstances it is to his credit that he added a warning
against any scapegoating of the German people, and a reaffirmation of
socialist internationalist principles: 

"It is so fatally easy to use their unimaginable horrors to play into the
hands of those who would themselves use another kind of racial myth to
destroy the greatest chance the world has ever had to reconstruct its life
on saner, sounder principles, the recognition that we are all one human
family and that our natural hates, fears, suspicions and oppressions arise,
all of them, out of the failure to apply in comradeship and co-operation our
human powers to the natural resources of the good earth so that all may live
in peace together." 


I have a small personal connection with this. He wrote:


"On April 15th 1945, my youngest son was born. That was the day
Bergen-Belsen was liberated by the advancing British armies. But ten days
earlier Eisenhower had freed Buchenwald. He was so horrified by what he saw,
so terrified that nobody would believe it, that he invited the Speaker of
the House of Commons to send an all-party delegation of MPs to come, to see
and to testify. I was one of them, the only Jew - and even so I had to fight
for my place. So I went, leaving my wife and three-day-old son in hospital.
Two of the party had had, in pre-war days, pro-Hitler sympathies. One of
them never recovered from the effects of his visit and died shortly after
his return. The other committed suicide."


It was the rise of Nazism which strengthened Sydney Silverman's defiant
reassertion of his Jewish identity, and the reality of the holocaust which
confirmed his own illusions in Zionism. After the war, what had previously
throughout Eastern Europe been a peripheral reactionary sect became a
credible, if ultimately illusory, lifeline. Jewish survivors of the
concentration camps were desperately seeking refuge somewhere they could
begin to build a new life free from persecution and the threat of
annihilation. To that generation, the reactionary nature of Zionism with its
susceptibility to future exploitation by world imperialism to create an
outpost from which to suppress the Arab national uprising had not become
apparent. The rickety boats of these holocaust survivors were turned back or
sunk by British colonial warships, deliberately drowning refugees. Their
settlements were besieged by feudal kingdoms and sheikhdoms and the Grand
Mufti of Jerusalem. In their desperation they were all too easily seduced by
Zionist demagogy. 


It might have been possible then to confront communal rivalry. In Palestine
in the 1920s there had been 500,000 Arabs and 150,000 Jews, many of whom
worked and struggled side by side. The heroic revolutionary Leopold Trepper,
who was later to organise within Nazi Germany the underground communist spy
network the Red Orchestra, had organised in Palestine the Ichud/Itachak
(Unity) movement, which brought Jewish and Arab workers under a single
banner, organised joint strikes and challenged the power of the Zionist
Histadrut, which only admitted Jewish workers. 


Sydney Silverman retained to the end of his life misplaced illusions in the
goal of a national homeland for Jews. In dispute with Stalinist critics, he
argued that the reactionary policies of the Israeli government did not
justify "pretending that Jewish people's national consciousness, pride in
their language, care of their culture or faith in their future are more
bourgeois, reactionary or capitalist than these things are when practised by
Georgians, Uzbeks, Armenians or the Russians themselves." 


However, he condemned the reactionary alliance of the new Israeli state with
Western imperialism. At the time of the Suez crisis, he was personally
instrumental in forcing the Labour leadership to condemn the joint military
action against Egypt by the British government in collusion with France and
Israel; and when the Middle East came to war in 1967, he strongly opposed
the Israeli occupation of neighbouring territories. It is beyond doubt that
if he had lived beyond February 1968 he would certainly have denounced the
continuing occupation and successive wars of colonial repression against the
Palestinian people.

 

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