Some Early Anarchists on Zionism (1899-1939)

All Governments Disguise the Truth – Bernard Lazare (1899)

Excerpt from a letter from Bernard Lazare to Theodor Herzl, 1899

You are bourgeois in your thought, bourgeois in your feelings, bourgeois in your ideas and bourgeois in your conception of society. As such, you want to guide the people, our people, who are poor, unhappy, working class … You act outside of them and above them: you’d like to have them follow you like a herd of sheep. Like all governments, you want to disguise the truth, you want to be a proper government whose principal obligation is not exposing the national shame. But I want to expose it, so that everyone can see poor Job on his dungheap, scraping his sores with a piece of broken bottle.

Our Action and Spirit – Bernard Lazare (post 1902)

Excerpt from Bernard Lazare’s unpublished notes, ‘Contre le nationalisme du sol’

You want to send us to Zion? We do not want to go… We do not want to go there to vegetate like a dormant little tribe. Our action and our spirit lies in the wider world; it is where we want to stay, without abdicating or losing anything.

The Zionist Movement – Free Society (1904)

From ‘Free Society: A Periodical of Anarchist Thought, Work and Literature’, edited by A. Isaak, Chicago, February 14, 1904

The Zionist movement, whose two popular advocates, I[srael] Zangwill and Max Nordau, have done a great deal to interest Jews in it, is a movement which will rather exaggerate than diminish the difficulties of the Jewish race. Modern industrial and economic conditions will follow the Jews wherever they go, and if universal exploitation replaces mere race hatred, where will be the gain? The Jew has had plentiful instruction in the evils of government in general; while he is on the road to Anarchism, to turn back even to a purely Jewish government, will but be to exchange old evils for new ones.

Real Enlightenment – Alexander Berkman (1906)

Excerpts from a letter by Alexander Berkman, from Western Penitentiary, Allegheny City, Pennsylvania, to Emma Goldman, 11 February 1906

[…] And [Hillel] Sol[otaroff] & [Moshe] Katz turned Nationalists?! […]

[…] It is not segregation & nationalisation that is the need of the hour; rather the very opposite, for the brotherhood of man can never become reality until geograph[ical], national and racial lines & prejudices are forgotten, overcome: Nationalism is a barrier, a barricade against International fellowship, a ditch which progress must fill & cover up, not to speak of the impracticality of Nationalism, it is a false solution of the Jews’ troubles.

The only real salvation of the R[ussian] Jew lies in the Liberty of R[ussia] — It is alright to talk of government-incited riots etc. But you & I, who have lived in R[ussia] know that the hatred of Jews is a deep-set R[ussian] instinct; the instinct being given, it is easy to incite to pogroms.

Could the governm[ent] incite revolutionists to make pogroms? And it will take more than a mere constitution, it will take two or more generations of real enlightenment & education to eradicate the long-inbred racial prejudices of the R[ussian] moujik [peasant]; only Liberty can accomplish that. Till then there will be pogroms — under Tsars as well as under a Russ[ian] Constitution. Liberty, enlightenment is, after all, the only true cure for social & racial etc. evil. […]

Freedom in Every Country – Emma Goldman (1939)

Letter from Emma Goldman to Mark Mratchny, January 30, 1939

Dear Mark, not believing in the efficacy of nationalism does not mean that we remain “objective and cool” about the plight of the Jewish people.

For myself I can say that I feel it very deeply; but I insist that it was the bounden duty of the Jews to fight for their rights and freedom and in every country where they were born and raised to help to create its culture and its civilization. I fail to see the benefit that it will get by establishing a new State in Palestine with the same old feelings of nationalism and a State. I see no great gain in the possibility of the Jewish masses being put in concentration camps or exploited by Jewish capitalists. That is the only difference between you and me, I suppose.

As to the Spanish libertarians, they were driven to the statement “our revolution is a Spanish revolution” only because they were forsaken by the international proletariat and betrayed by the democracies. Prior to that disgraceful and criminal treatment the Spanish libertarians have received from the rest of the world. there was never a talk of “our revolution is a Spanish revolution. ” On the contrary, they always maintained that the Spanish revolution and struggle against Fascism are not only to support Spain and Spanish rights but are for the people of the whole world.

Our Spanish comrades always insisted that if they succeeded in crushing Fascism in Spain it would undermine Fascism in the rest of the world. So you see, my dear, that it is not that our Spanish comrades have become nationalists instinctively so; but they are being driven at bay by friend and foe, not the least among them some of our own comrades. That has forced them to depend on their own selves and that has also created a nationalistic feeling, which I think is justified in their case.

Not so the Jews who have never lifted a finger to prevent the event of Hitler in Germany or have shown the least resistance in any country. Please do not think that I feel they are getting what they deserve — no. But I cannot close my eyes to the fact that the Jews have failed miserably to defend their own grounds. I insist further that if Hitler had only persecuted the Polish Jews he would have 90% of the German Jews on his side just as Mussolini had nearly all the Jews in Italy on his side.

Alas, it is no good to be a coward. In the end, no one respects cowards and the price for it is just as great.