ANARCHO-ZIONISM

One of the terms that is gaining wide-spread currency among those who support Israel is 'Anarcho-Zionism'. It names one of the more interesting movements, and shows that left-wing ideology need not be slavishly pro-Palestinian, nor witless, gutless, and insane.


Pursuant this concept, I would bring the intellectual heritage of Sam Dolgoff to your attention.


Sam Dolgoff was born in Russia during the Czarist period, and raised and educated in the United States, to which his family moved when he was three. He became politically active in his early twenties. Throughout most of his life he was involved in both organizing and formulating the political thought of the Anarchist movements, and represented a more intellectually rigorous approach to political theory than has been evident in recent decades.
As was common for many on the left until fairly recently, he saw national movements of liberation as great advances in human history, and particularly derived inspiration from those struggles which brought about genuine social change, such as the Cuban revolution in its early years until Stalinism took over, and most particularly the Zionist movement, which culminated in the re-birth of the Jewish homeland and the re-assumption by Jews of the rights of nation-hood, which had been in abeyance since Roman times and repressed by all subsequent imperialisms.


It must have been a matter of keen disappointment to so driven a revolutionary that Arab nationalism never acquired a strain of social liberation, becoming instead merely another authoritarian and imperialist ideology - albeit one that allows its adherents great latitude in political expression, due to the rivalries of the various societies in the Middle-East - from Nasserite and Baathist at one extreme to classic Fascism in the style of Hitler or Mussolini at the other - often combining both, and almost always shaped by the personality cults of great opportunists.


Sam Dolgoff, along with other thinkers in progressive circles, felt that Zionism was not only possibly the only counter to the dangerous tendencies in Arab Nationalism, but the best. Zionism represented an ideal which Anarchists could well support - an enlightened social movement, a national liberation movement, and a revolutionary change from the tired ideologies of social and economic control which for millennia kept the population in chains.


To quote from a key tract:
In anarcho- Zionism, Zionism is approached not as a political ideology necessarily but as a system of collective self defense and with the belief that resisting the forces of globalization and capitalism by definition includes resisting the forces of Islamic- empire building. As in all anarchist movements, anarcho-Zionism is opposed to racism, sexism and the intolerance that is often seen in Islamic areas. Islamic empire building cynically uses the religion of Islam as a means of control , both keeping the Moslem population subservient to their capitalist overlords while at the same time providing a philosophical justification for the under classes to submit to institutionalized oppression. "Zionism" provides a necessary protective stage until the Islamic world progresses through the necessary revolutionary stage.
[Nation Building as the means of Social Liberation, Passover 2008]


And to quote Sam Dolgoff himself on this issue:
".... the Israeli comrades are forced, like the other tendencies, to accept the fact that Israel must be defended. The day after the proclamation of the state of Israel (15 May 1948) Assam Pasha, Secretary-General of the Arab League, threatened that: "This will be a war of extermination and momentous massacres like the Mongolian massacres and the Crusades." In discussion with Israeli anarchists it was emphasized that the unilateral dismantling of the Israeli state would not at all be anarchistic. It would, on the contrary, only reinforce the immense power of the Arab states and actually expedite their plans for the conquest of Israel."



It is interesting to note that anti-Zionism, like all classic bigotries, knows no class or caste, and occurs across the entire spectrum of political action. The Nazis were anti-Semitic, the Stalinists were and are still anti-Semitic, and the Arab Nationalists have always been anti-Semitic. That anti-Semitism reaches its fullest modern expression in anti-Zionism.
That anti-Zionism is a destructive poison which the sympathizers and collaborators of Arab Nationalist Movement on both the left and right, in America, in Europe, and in the third world, have infected the political discourse.


It is time to put paid the corrupting of social movements. To take back the discourse. To weed out the ideology of hate, and to remove anti-Zionists from the causes that they have crippled.

It is time to recognize Zionism as the great movement of social change that it is; one that should serve as an example to all progressives.