The Menace of Jewish Fascism

By WILLIAM ZUKERMAN

The Nation, April 25, 1934

London, April 2

FOUR years ago, when a speaker at a Zionist Congress at Basel casually uttered from the platform the words “Jewish Hitlerites,” the storm of protest and indignation which arose was so great that the session broke up in tumult and riot; the speaker was obliged to withdraw his words and to apologize publicly for casting the shadow of an ugly suspicion upon a Jewish party. To Jews then, as to non-Jews today, it seemed preposterous that a growth so closely allied to anti-Semitism should ever strike roots in Jewish life. But now the words no longer evoke any pro­test and no one dreams of contesting the reality which they stand for. Fascism is too glaring a fact of Jewish life for denials. Strange as it may seem to an outsider, a Jewish Fascist Party not only exists but has already passed the point of struggling for recognition and is aspiring for power within the best-organized Jewish social movement. The party has an organized membership of 50,000; it controls a large press; it exerts a strong influence on Zionist policy within and outside Palestine; it dominates Jewish public opinion in Poland, and sways Jewish sentiments all over the world. It may sound like a paradox, but it is nevertheless a fact that the Jews, especially in Eastern Europe and Pales­tine, probably more “than any other people except the Ger­mans are stricken with the virus of fascism.”

The grimness of the paradox is increased by the fact that Jewish fascism is in its origin, aims, and tactics more akin to the Teutonic brand of that movement than to the Italian. Not only is the uniform of the Jewish Fascist Party brown, but its driving force, like that of the Germans, is also a strong feeling of national wrong, and its source of inspiration is one of the treaties resulting from the World War. Its following, like that of the Nazis, is recruited from among the nationalist youth. The movement, naturally, also has its Leader, a journalist of great proficiency well versed in the art of stage dramatics, and its forces, like those of the Nazis, are also divided into storm troops (Brith­ Trumpeldor”) and bodyguards (Brith-Chail”), To complete the comparison, Jewish fascism also advocates “revolution­ary” action against both Marxists and a foreign government, and its forces are drilling under Polish military officers in preparation for some war known only to their leaders.

The seat of Jewish fascism is Palestine: the field of its activity is the Zionist movement the world over but especially in Poland its backbone is the dying Jewish middle class, which is being mercilessly ground between the millstones of anti-Semitism and the post-war economic development; its driving force is its grievance against the Mandatory-Power in Palestine. It is these real economic, political, and social forces which give the movement a solid basis.

Before the war Zionism was more a movement for Jewish social reconstruction than for economic betterment. It aspired to make over all that abnormal life which had been imposed upon Jews by the old ghetto and the newer anti-Semitism. The war and the post-war settlement entirely revolutionized this ideal. The Treaty of Versailles, by breaking up the former economic units of Eastern Europe, swept away whatever economic position the Jews had In that region. In addition, all the newly created states began their political careers with a wave of violent anti-Semitism whose purpose was to drive out the Jews from even those occupations still left to them. Worst of all, the countries overseas which before the war had absorbed the surplus Jewish population from Eastern Europe, and thus eased the situation, closed their doors to new immigration. Jews in Eastern Europe – which means primarily Poland, for in Soviet Russia Jews have found an altogether different solution to their problems – found themselves in a situation almost without parallel even in their long tragic history. The state of subjection to which the Nazis in Germany are striving to reduce the German Jews has already been achieved in Poland.

Under such transformed circumstances the early aspects and aims of Zionism have also been transformed entirely. From a spiritual center the National Home has become chiefly an economic refuge. From a subjective liberal experiment Zionism has become an exclusively political utilitarian movement. Palestine has become the primary country of Jewish immigration. Jews have begun to turn to it with hopes and aspirations which neither the pre-war Zionists nor the framers of the Balfour Declaration ever envisaged. The settlement of Palestine has passed chiefly into the hands of Jews from Poland, who have brought to the country an immense store of enthusiasm and enterprise which is still of the old, individualistic kind, the kind which the Russian Jews have sought to abandon – an enthusiasm for building up big businesses and private fortunes. Together with the old Halutz (Jewish pioneer and land laborer), there have begun to come to Palestine in greater and greater numbers the ruined shopkeepers, petty traders, bankrupt business men, brokers, agents, and middle-class men of all kinds who can no longer exist in Eastern Europe. These people come to Palestine not with the old idea of transforming their own lives, but with the idea of transforming the country to fit their old economy; not to escape from the ghetto, but to transplant it; not to build a new home on entirely new social foundations, but to resurrect the old one–the ideal of the middle-class fascist the world over.

It is this new immigration into Palestine that forms the social and economic basis of Jewish fascism and makes it the serious danger that it is. The newcomers are not only the victims of fascism but spiritually also its supporters. They come to Palestine not because of any idealism, but because all other places are closed to them, and because that is the only country where they can have a fascism of their own and where they can hope to revive the glory of their passing world. The recent prosperity in the National Home has served to enhance these hopes. In this respect this windfall, like so many others, has proved a mixed blessing. The leg­ends of the great boom are attracting people of a most un­desirable character and raising most undesirable hopes.

Already the character of Jewish Palestine is changing appreciably. The agricultural, labor, and productive aspects of the settlement are being obscured by the financial and speculative aspects. Social enterprise is giving way to private adventure of a pernicious type. Land speculation is rampant. Private enterprise is in open competition with the National (land) Fund, and in certain districts the National Fund has to withdraw altogether. Tel-Aviv is rapidly becoming a miniature European metropolis with all the evils and artificiality of uncontrolled Western civilization. The boom is on. The speculators, brokers, small shopkeepers, petty traders have found the Promised Land again. These people take their revival in the National Home more seriously than does Hitler’s Kampfsbund des Mittel-Klasses. Their fight against “Marxists” and labor is more bitter than that of the Nazis. There is hardly another Jewish community in the world where the class struggle is being fought with so much hatred and venom as in Palestine now, and nowhere else is party strife so savage. In short, the social and economic reorganization of Palestine along fascist lines is in full swing.

The menace of Jewish fascism appears at first sight to be negligible. The party itself, its Brown Shirts, its military drills in the backyards of Poland, its fight against the Mandatory Power and Marxism, its attempts to restore the de­composing body of the Jewish middle class – all this appears to be a comic-opera imitation which has no basis in Jewish reality. But this is only a first and partial view of the manifestation. A closer analysis reveals a situation much more complicated and menacing. Behind Palestine there is always Zionism, and that movement is so intricately interwoven with Jewish social life the world over that if it succumbs to fascism, a porthole is opened for fascist sentiments to flow in freely and flood every Jewish community. The real danger of Jewish fascism is not in its own organized strength but in the influence which it exerts upon other parties standing near to it, which are ostensibly far from fascism. This was the case with the Germans and it is true also with the Jews. The Zionist movement, like all nationalist movements, is the most fertile field for fascism. Under the guise of nationalistic grievances and demands, fascist sentiments can easily pass unnoticed, and they now do in Zionism. Jewish orthodoxy openly embraces the fascist program, political as well as economic. Other parties, not so frank in their avowal, are tacit supporters of the most extreme demands of fascism. In Poland there is no longer any distinction between the fascist and the Zionist press. In America the “revolutionary” anti­ British stand is awakening sympathy. In Palestine, it is true, labor is putting up a brave and strong fight, but it is a lone fight which has the support only of a few individual Zionist liberals. The bulk of the Zionist movement gravitates toward fascism, although Zionists are mostly not aware of it, and the majority would indignantly deny that their pure, selfless nationalism, which wants nothing of others, or even that their “Great Zionism,” as Jewish fascism often calls itself, has anything in common with the brutal fascism of Germany.

The situation resembles very much that in Germany before March, 1933, when the Nazi dictatorship, with its Brown Houses and concentration camps, had not yet been officially proclaimed, but had been made possible by the tacit acceptance and support of the whole nationalist part of German society. There was scarcely a nationalist German, no matter what his party, who did not think inwardly what the Nazis said aloud to the world, and who was not convinced of the justice of the German grievance and of the right of the Nazi demands. It was this moral disintegration of non-Nazi society, not the hordes of Hitlerism, that brought about the fascist victory in Germany. Exactly the same dis­integration and the same danger exist now within Jewry.

For it must not be forgotten that Jews are predominantly a middle-class people, and that class has been more thor­oughly ruined among Jews than among any other people. While other nations have strong agricultural and industrial classes to offset the ruin of their middle classes, the Jews have none of these. The ruin of the class means therefore the ruin of the nation. In addition, the anti-Jewish outburst in Germany has aggravated a tragedy which was hardly capable of further aggravation. It has revealed that the Jews not only have natural economic forces working against them but that they are surrounded on all sides by a bitter, personal hatred which has no parallel in modern times. Jews have encountered the enmity of men before, but never social forces allied with personal enemies. The very foundation of their economic existence is being knocked from beneath their feet. Communism on one hand and fascism on the other are both working toward the elimination of the Jews from their middle-class positions. The former does it constructively and with consideration, the other destructively and with hatred and curses, but the direction of both is the same. There is certainly no mistake about the trend of events for Jews. The age of individualism, which was on the whole favorable to them, is passing. They will have to reconstruct their economic lives as they did in Soviet Russia.

That a portion of the Jews fighting under such stress should turn to a fascism of their own creation in the hope of retaining their old position is no wonder. But if Zionism shows itself as blind as German nationalism, and impelled by legitimate national grievances and economic despair, opens the door to fascism among Jews, the moral disintegration which will set in will not be less than that which led to the establishment of the Brown Houses and concentration camps. The crime of Zionism will be even greater, for it has already the lesson of German nationalism before it, and there is no excuse for ignorance and blindness now. Zionism today is fighting a terrible battle. It fights not only for its own soul, but for the soul and even the physical existence of the Jewish people.