Re: Zionism

It looks to me like the position of the US SWP. They have a pro-Israel
anti-BDS position that states that anti-Zionism is essentially pro-Hamas
Islamopfascism. It seems that is what Kristin is arguing, particularly on
the most recent anti-Muslim, great replacement-like post.

Loving in the Pacific, where our army did joint exercises with the
Indonesian military, I was well aware of the East Timor issue. I never saw
it framed by the East Timorese as a religious dispute.

Comradely,
John

"All I ask of our brethren is that they take their feet off our necks."
Sarah Moore Grimke, abolitionist (1792-1873)

On Wed, 12 Aug 2026, 16:23 Anthony Teso via groups.io, <anthony.p.teso=
[email protected]> wrote:

> Re: Zionism, the "Judeo-Christian tradition," and what a class analysis
> actually looks like
>
> Kristin says she would love to hear the problem approached through class
> analysis. I'll take that at face value and try to supply one, because I
> think the exercise shows why her framing forecloses the thing she says she
> wants.
>
> Start with the premise: "Zionism is an internecine debate between Jews.
> Any non-Jew with a strong position on Zionism is immediately suspect."
>
> Consider what this rules out. It rules out Palestinians. On this premise,
> the people whose villages were depopulated in 1948, whose land was
> transferred to state and quasi-state ownership under the Absentees'
> Property Law, and who live under military administration in the West Bank
> or under blockade in Gaza hold no legitimate standing on the question of
> the state that does these things to them. Their position is at best
> suspect. That is not a class analysis. It is the substitution of ancestry
> for social position—the precise inversion of what historical materialism
> asks us to do.
>
> It also, incidentally, disqualifies Kristin. If only Jews may hold a
> strong position on Zionism, then the strong positions she has advanced
> across this thread are self-indicting by her own rule. Rules of this kind
> always turn out to have an exemption clause for their author.
>
> A materialist asks different questions. Who owns the land, and by what
> legal and coercive process did ownership change hands? Who is permitted to
> sell it, lease it, and work it? Which state apparatus enforces that
> arrangement, and which imperial power underwrites the apparatus? What is
> the class structure of the population inside the Green Line and of the
> population outside it? None of these questions is answered by consulting
> anyone's grandmother.
>
> And when you do ask them, you find that the labor question sits at the
> center of the story. The "conquest of labor" and "conquest of land"
> campaigns of the Second Aliyah, the Histadrut's function as a labor
> federation that organized Jewish workers partly by excluding Arab ones from
> the Jewish sector, and the Jewish National Fund's inalienability
> covenants—this is a class history. It is the history of a labor movement
> constituted as an instrument of colonization, which is exactly why it
> produced a workers' movement that could not become the basis of a common
> struggle with the Arab working class. Ber Borochov tried to square that
> circle theoretically. Hal Draper spent decades explaining why it could not
> be squared. Whatever else you say about *Zionism, Israel, and the Arabs*,
> it is not a book about who is or isn't Jewish. It is a book about land,
> labor, and state power.
>
> On the "Western, Judeo-Christian tradition": this is presented as two
> thousand years of continuous development. It is nothing of the kind, and
> the history is not obscure. The compound term "Judeo-Christian," in its
> current sense, is an American coinage of the late 1930s and 1940s—assembled
> as an anti-fascist ecumenical formula and then repurposed in the Cold War
> as a civilizational marker against communism. The two millennia it
> retroactively claims contain the expulsions from England in 1290 and Spain
> in 1492, the ghetto, the pale, the blood libel, Dreyfus, and the pogrom.
> Presenting that record as a shared tradition of free inquiry is not a
> historical claim at all. It is an ideological artifact of the
> mid-twentieth-century United States, being offered here as though it were a
> fact about the longue durée. A Marxist ought to be interested in when and
> why such formulas are manufactured and in whose service.
>
> On Islam. Kristin cites Erdoğan's line that there is no moderate or
> immoderate Islam and treats it as authoritative: when someone tells you who
> they are, listen. But Erdoğan is not "someone." He is a bourgeois head of
> state with a material interest in monopolizing the definition of the faith
> he governs in the name of—an interest in denying that any Islam exists
> other than the one he authorizes. Accepting his account at face value is
> not listening; it is granting a politician the essentialist claim he needs.
> We would not accept Netanyahu as the authoritative interpreter of Judaism
> or the Christian right as the authoritative interpreter of Christianity.
> The method has to be consistent, or it isn't a method.
>
> There is no "Mohammedan side." There is Egyptian capital and the Egyptian
> working class; there are the Gulf monarchies and the South Asian migrant
> workers they hold in debt bondage; there is the Iranian state and the
> Iranian bus drivers and teachers it imprisons; there are the Islamist
> formations that have made their careers crushing the left, in Iran in 1979
> most spectacularly. To speak of a single side is to accept the
> self-description of reactionaries who very much want their subjects to
> believe there is one.
>
> Which brings me to what Kristin's opening actually does. It offers a
> binary: on Zionism you are either a Nazi or a Jew-hater. This is a false
> alternative, and the third-camp tradition exists precisely as its
> refutation.
>
> That position is opposition to the Zionist state project as a project of
> dispossession and simultaneous opposition to the Arab bourgeois regimes and
> to the Islamist formations that claim to oppose it—because those regimes
> have never been the vehicle of Palestinian liberation and have repeatedly
> been its jailers. Neither Tel Aviv nor Tehran, Cairo, Riyadh, or Doha. The
> agency lies with Palestinian workers and with Israeli-Jewish workers, whose
> emancipation is not available separately, and with no state or clerical
> apparatus above them.
>
> That position is neither of Kristin's two options. Its existence is
> sufficient to dispose of the premise the thread began with.
>
> Last point, on the exchange with William. He objects to class
> essentialism; Kristin answers that class essentialism is what Marxism is
> and that he wants the liberal list. Jonna already supplied the refutation,
> and it comes from Marx. The Kugelmann letter argues that the English
> working class cannot emancipate itself while it stands with its own ruling
> class against Ireland — not out of sympathy, but as a condition of its own
> struggle. The demand to fight national and racial oppression is not an
> import into Marxism from liberalism. It is the position Marx arrived at in
> working out why the English proletariat was politically paralyzed.
>
> Racism is not a departure from class analysis. It is a class question, and
> treating it as an ornament is the economism Marx himself spent the 1860s
> arguing against.
> --
> Tony
> 
>


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