Kaddish2
Yitgadal V’yitkadash Shmei Raba
And no one came
Many thousands called Him on Shabbat morning
Crying His name out loud
Begging Him with tears just to come
But He ceased from all His work
No God came
And no God calmed
Only Satan celebrated uninterrupted
ISRAEL AS PART OF THE DIASPORA
7 October 2023 was the day when Israel became part of the Diaspora. It was the day when Zionism’s historic task to protect Zion— the Land of Israel as a refuge for persecuted Jews — failed. ‘Never Again’ became instead a hollow slogan. For many Jews, it was a question of history repeating itself — from the Khmelnytsky massacre in Ukraine in 1648 to the Farhud in Iraq in 1941. A fatalistic return to the past. They understood 7 October as a pogrom3 of ethnic cleansing. The events of 7 October have given rise to the poetry of anguish —as such events have done in the past.
Bialik wrote after the Kishinev pogrom in 1903: “And the pain is so very, very great! There was a man who died before his time, leaving his song unfinished. He had another song to sing, and now it’s gone, gone forever”.4
Uri Zvi Greenberg, the poet of twentieth century Jewish suffering, similarly wrote about the Jews in a time of persecution in a Lament for the Solitary Sheep.
Not in the fields did the murderers find my Jewish sister, as the wolf finds the solitary sheep, but at home.
Over streets and houses of her birthplace her cry carried.5
Even dogs, Greenberg wrote, were treated better than Jews.
They pity a dog, stroke, even kiss it
like a much-loved baby, pampered at home6
1881 AND 2023
Many Ashkenazi Jews in the UK can trace their own history back to the pogroms of 1881 which followed the assassination of tsar Aleksandr II in St. Petersburg in March of that year. The sole Jew who was implicated in the deed, Gesia Gelfman, was elevated to the role of devious mastermind. This was followed by the first pogrom in mid-April 1881 in elisavetgrad and by the discriminatory May Laws which were passed during the following year. All this — and in particular the subsequent repression under tsar Aleksandr III — led to a large-scale Jewish migration to the United Kingdom. Simon Dubnov argued that the migrations after 1881 were comparable only to those which followed the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492.7
In 1881, major revolutionary groups such as the Narodnaya Volya and the Chernyi Peredel remained on the sidelines and refused to condemn the pogromshchiki (the perpetrators of the pogroms) because they did not wish to alienate them from the central cause of overthrowing the Romanovs. The narodniks of 1881 were entrapped by the tradition of worshipping ‘the people’. Many on the far Left in 1881 were privately highly condemnatory of the actions of the pogromshchiki who saw the Jews as Christ-killers, money-lenders and exploiters of the poor and vulnerable. Their inaction resided in the logic of political expediency and that higher principles were at stake — and this demanded silence. Popular fury against the Jews was seen as ‘a respectable form of class war’.8 The killing of Jews was seen as a sad necessity in the service of the greater good of the revolution and the liberation of the masses.
The open antisemitism of figures such as the Ukrainian Gerasim Romanenko, who resurrected the imagery of the Jew-kulak9 seemed to have been much more the exception than the rule. Adapting Bakunin’s theory of social anarchism, the far left in tsarist Russia believed that the violence of ‘revolutionary antisemitism’ could be redirected towards the authorities. Pavel Akselrod, the son of a Jewish innkeeper in the Bryansk region, was an early advocate of change in Russia in the 1870s. He was initially influenced by Lasalle and Bakunin and was a member of Zemla i Volya (Land and Liberty) which subsequently split into the Narodnaya Volya and the Chernyi Peredel. Akselrod looked towards Western europe as a beacon of democracy and the rule of law. He opposed terrorism as a political weapon and argued that Russian populism ‘smacked of Slavophil medievalism’.10
Although Akselrod had gone into exile in 1880 before the outbreak of violence, he was aghast at the pogroms that occurred in the following year. He therefore decided to write a pamphlet in which he intended to argue that the Jewish working class should be defended against their lethal assailants. When he broached the idea to the executive committee of the Narodnaya Volya, its members were indifferent. When he approached Georgi Plekhanov to endorse the proposed pamphlet, Plekhanov announced that he was too busy with other projects while Pyotr Lavrov felt unqualified to make any comment. Akselrod ultimately abandoned the pamphlet in frustration.11
The Chernyi Peredel diverted the blame for the killings to the new tsar Aleksandr III and his government: “The beating of the Jews”, they proclaimed, “is the result of the desperate situation of the people and the medieval policy of squeezing the Jews into the confines of a relatively small territory”.12
This inhibition to act was also common amongst some Jews. The belief that Jews were often regarded as a subversive and alien element in Russia was glossed over. Several generations of the acculturated tsederbaum family were involved in these political struggles from the 1860s to the 1920s. Lydia Dan recalled that her father, Josef Aleksandrovich tsederbaum never blamed the pogromishchiki, stating that they were “not conscious of their acts”. He always spoke positively of the peasantry, she recalled.13 This pattern was repeated years later in the wake of the Kishinev pogrom by members of the Bund, who proclaimed that
After all, the main mass of the pogrom-makers will consist of those same destitute toilers whose interests socialists are pledged to defend. . . . Is it really to be expected that we, the socialists, should go forth and beat up our admittedly blinded brothers, but brothers all the same, hand in hand with the police? Or, at best, hand in hand with the Jewish bourgeoisie armed in the defence of its property?14
As Leo Motzkin documented many years later, the complicity of silence of the Russian far left was a moment of truth for many Jews.15 Yet in the end, most felt that they should stay embedded in the revolutionary movement— after all, it was their ideological sanctuary. One writer later compared such a mindset to the akedah (the binding of Isaac) whereby Abraham was com- manded to kill Isaac in a display of devotion to ‘a higher cause’ than to his own flesh and blood.16
Jews who believed in a better Russia were not unaffected by this turn of events. Pavel Axelrod observed this and commented that “The Jewish socialist intelligentsia suddenly realised that the majority of Russian society regarded the Jews as a separate nation and considered all Jews — a pious Jewish worker, a petit bourgeois, a moneylender, an assimilated lawyer, a socialist prepared for prison or deportation — as Yids harmful to Russia whom Russia should get rid of by any and all means”.17
When Jews left their Jewish environment to work for the revolutionary movement, their families often sat shiva for them — as if they had recently died. The reaction of the Russian Left in the 1880s created an abrupt about-turn for many. The poems of Akselrod’s father-in-law, Isaac Kaminer, were now suffused with feelings of regret and an enhanced sense of Jewishness. Some felt that they could not wait for the day of liberation by the forces of progress — what mattered therefore was self-emancipation and not emancipation by others. Acculturated figures such as Moshe Leib Lilienblum and Leon Pinsker began to preach the message of a return to Zion. Pinsker argued that the world hith- erto had never had to deal with a Jewish nation but always with “mere Jews”.18
A minority of Russian Jews became Zionists and thereafter comprised the First Aliyah, in which the student group BILU19 played an important part. Chaim Hisin, one of the first BILU immigrants wrote in his diary in February 1882:
The recent pogroms have violently awakened the complacent Jews from their sweet slumbers. Until now, I was uninterested in my origin. I saw myself as a faithful son of Russia which was to me my raison d’être and the very air that I breathed.20
Even so, Akselrod and other Menshevik Jews remained wedded to replacing first tsarism and then Bolshevism in Russia.
For others, the pogroms spawned a plethora of ideologies aimed at solving the “Jewish problem”. During 1897/8, both the Bund and Lenin’s Russian Social Democratic Labour Party — as well as Zionism arose — and proposed differing solutions to the Jewish question. Dubnov wrote a “sixth letter” in the aftermath of the first Zionist Congress in Basel which he titled “Reality and Fantasy in Zionism”.
THE OLD LEFT AND ZIONISM
Unlike France, where there was always a strong far left comprising a powerful Communist party (CPGB) and a myriad of trotskyist groups, the working class in Britain during the twentieth century was repre- sented essentially by the social democratic Labour party. the early leaders of the CPGB were Indian socialists such as Rajani Palme Dutt who brought with them an anti-colonial perspective—and as loyal adherents of the Kremlin saw Zionism too as a form of colonialism. Ramsay MacDonald, the leader of the Labour party, actually visited Palestine in 1922. He saw the Jew as “a warrior, not a moneylender or petty trader; a wild untameable mountaineer living in fortified towns, a patriot”.21
even so, there were some in the Labour party who viewed the Zionist enterprise as one framed in colonialist parameters. Beatrice Webb argued that it justified white settlement in Kenya.22 In the aftermath of the Great Depression and the rise of Nazism, many Jews joined the CPGB in the 1930s because it constituted a bulwark against the rise of the local British Union of Fascists of Oswald Mosley. Yet only two Communists were ever elected as members of parliament — and this was only after World War II, when the Soviet Union was seen as an ally and the Red Army as the courageous fighter against the Nazis. Indeed, at that time the membership of the CPGB had almost tripled.23
The Labour Party was unexpectedly elected in 1945 and the war-hero, Winston Churchill was ousted from office. The left of the Labour Party enthusiastically endorsed the cause of Zionism. Figures such as Aneurin Bevan, Michael Foot and Richard Crossman were at odds with Prime Minister Clement Attlee and Foreign Secretary ernest Bevin.
Aneurin Bevan, the founder of the National Health Service in the UK, was increasingly irritated at the situation in Palestine and especially by the insensitive approach of Ernest Bevin, so much so that he actu-ally considered resigning from the Attlee government.24 Harold Wilson, a follower of Bevan during the 1940s and later British prime minister, described him as a “significant Cabinet malcontent” when it came to the Palestine question.25
After the 1945 election, the Nazi-Soviet collaboration, epitomised by the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact, had begun to fade in the wake of the defeat of Nazism—only to be recalled once more when the Doctors’ Plot took place in January 1953 with its antisemitic veneer. It is from that time onwards that many British Jews who were members of the CPGB transferred their political allegiance initially to the Labour party. Israel’s victory during the Six Day war in 1967 and the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968 persuaded virtually all the remaining Jewish Communists to leave the party. Some, such as Sir Alfred Sherman, went further and crossed over the ideological barrier. Sherman himself would become one of the founders of Thatcherism.
THE NEW LEFT AND ISRAEL
The withdrawal from India in 1947, and Israeli independence in 1948, were the first steps in a process of decolonisation in which the British empire was transformed into the British Commonwealth. The defeat of the French at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, and the struggle of the FLN for Algerian indepen- dence during the 1950s, reflected the exit of european powers from their colonies. In 1957, Britain embarked on wholesale decolonisation when the Gold Coast became Ghana.
At the Bandung Conference in April 1955, however, Israel was excluded from the establishment of the non-aligned bloc. Nehru was faced with a boycott by the Arab states and Muslim countries such as Pakistan and Indonesia if Israel was not barred from attending. The foundation of this exclusion had begun after 1945, when the future of Mandatory Palestine was being decided. At the first Asian Socialist Conference in Rangoon in January 1953, the egyptian delegate refused to sit at the same table as the Israeli delegate. China’s Chou en-Lai compared Palestine to Taiwan (Formosa) at Bandung. Although China was still allied to the USSR, it prefigured the rivalry between them over the bid to gain influence in the developing world.26
The Soviet Union’s historic anti-Zionism initially underwent a dramatic volte-face in the spring of 1947 and moved towards a tepid welcoming of the idea of a state of the Jews. This approach was partially grounded in the idea of preventing the United States from replacing the British as a power of influence in the Middle east. Stalin’s last years were peppered by antisemitism. His successors, Krushchev and Bulganin, continued his policy of anti-Zionism and antagonism towards Israel, albeit in a somewhat mollified form. The Kremlin perceived that the national interests of the USSR lay in cultivating the newly emergent nations of the developing world.
During the 1960s, Soviet publications increasingly began to equate Zionism with Nazism—a trend that was reinforced following the eichmann trial in Jerusalem in 1961. In Fascism under the Blue Star (Moscow 1971), Yevgeny Yevseyev depicted Zionism as an octopus with tentacles, controlling everything from afar. Yuri Ivanov, in Beware Zionism (Moscow 1970), spoke about Zionist influence over the banks, the media, and Western governments. Jack Ruby, who had shot Lee Harvey Oswald, the assassin of President Kennedy, was labelled “a Zionist”, while trotsky was ostensibly revealed to be a subterranean Zionist.27 Jewish advocates of “socialism with a human face” in Czechoslovakia in 1968, such as Eduard Goldstuecker and Frantisek Kriegel, were transformed by the Kremlin from being life- long Communists into born-again Zionists.28 A separation was created between Jews who had perished in the Shoah and “Zionists” in Israel, who were depicted as the embodiment of evil.
All this promoted the idea of “Zionist settler-colonialism” on the British New Left, which had come about during this period of decolonisation in the 1960s. It was underpinned by rising nationalism in the Arab world, the emergence of many new nations in the developing world and the USSR’s pandering to a post-imperial world and its flirting with anti- semitism. The problem for the Kremlin — and later for the New Left in Britain — was that although it claimed to be anti-antisemitic, most Israelis just happened to be Jews. The theme of “Zionist settler-colonialism” was inherited and thus embedded in the broad ideology of the New Left in the UK many years before the settlement drive on the West Bank and Gaza following the Six Day War. It reflected dismay at the events of 1948 rather than those of 1967.
The membership of the New Left29 in Britain was comprised essentially of a post-1945 generation which was distant from World War II and from the Shoah. Its agenda in the age of the war in Vietnam and the fight against apartheid was that of decolonisation. In the 1960s, the nationalism of the nascent Palestinian struggle fitted into their worldview much more readily that the social democracy of Israel.
THE BRITISH FAR LEFT AND ISLAMISM
The Six Day War in 1967 and the implicit acceptance by Arafat of a two- state solution in 1974 catalysed the emergence of Islamic Jihad in 1981 and Hamas in 1988. They capitalised on the belief that rival ideologies such as Communism and Arab nationalism had failed — and that Islam was the answer. Following on the heels of the Iranian Revolution and the retreat of the Soviet Union from Afghanistan, they inherited the views of nineteenth century figures such as Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, Mohammad Abduh and Rashid Rida amongst others. The end of the Iran-Iraq war allowed tehran the freedom to follow other political projects. This included the embrace of Palestinian Islamists and other opponents of Arafat’s Fatah — and subsequently fierce opposition to the Oslo Accords of 1993.
Islamism in the 1980s had determinedly persecuted the international Left—the ayatollahs of Iran had mercilessly persecuted and executed members of the tudeh—the Iranian communist party. In Tripoli, Communists were massacred in 1987.30 Although the Bolsheviks had been decidedly anti-Islamist during the 1920s, except when it served their purpose, times had changed. While Lenin and Trotsky opposed the wearing of the hijab, by the 1990s, the far Left in the UK and the Islamists realised that the end of the Cold War could bring benefits to both if they collaborated. They shared a utopianism that included opposition to the West and its beliefs and, by extension, the definition of Israel as “a colonial settler” state. In the aftermath of the Six Day War, Maxime Rodinson published his Israel: A Colonial-Settler State, in which he projected a Marxist interpreta- tion of Islam and Arab history. The Stalinist Rodinson had been a member of the Communist party in France, resigning during the mid-1950s but at the same time helping to develop the Soviet Union’s understanding of anti-colonialism in the 1960s. Many on the far Left also looked to Frantz Fanon’s work, The Wretched of the Earth.
Decades after the generational revolt of the 1960s and the emergence of the New Left in Britain, the UK had changed rapidly from an imperial power into a multi-cultural society. The legacy of slavery and colonialism became increasingly important signifiers in British society. Despite this development, the far Left had made little headway in gaining support from ethnic minorities who were often subjects of discrimination and were mainly Labour supporters. By the 1990s, the far Left in Britain began to explore new avenues and resolved to break with past. They decided to cultivate Islamists as a means of attracting the Muslim community to its banner because they viewed them as “the new proletariat”. In 1994, Chris Harman, a stalwart of the Socialist Workers Party, published a pamphlet entitled The Prophet and the Proletariat.31 He concluded that
It has been a mistake on the part of socialists to see Islamist movements either as automatically reactionary and “fascist” or as automatically “anti-imperialist” and “progressive”. Radical Islamism, with its project of reconstituting society on the model established by Mohammed in 7th century Arabia, is, in fact, a “utopia” emanating from an impoverished section of the new middle class.
Several figures on the far left in fact converted to Islam. Among them were Roger Garaudy in France and Yvonne Ridley in Britain. So did Carlos the Jackel who wrote L’islam révolutionnaire: Textes et propos recueilles, rassemblés in 2003. The Red-Green alliance, as it was termed by some,32 became a topic of discourse within the far left. Opinion was divided as to whether this was a good thing.33 This cooperation came to fruition during the mass protests in the UK over the invasion of Iraq in 2003, when devout trotsky- ists happily worked with the Muslim Association of Britain, an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood. even so, some on the far Left still asked the question that had arisen at least as far back as 1881: “How can progressives work with reactionaries?”
This invasion of Iraq drew the far Left in Britain closer to Hamas, itself an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood. This dovetailed with an antagonism towards Zionism and an inability to comprehend Jewish nationalism within the parameters of Marxist theory. Hamas, on the other hand, was depicted as a textbook liberation movement — one that should be supported in the belief that it would eventually turn to the Left. The domestic language in the Middle east was different. The Hamas front, the Change and Reform party which stood in the Palestinian elections of 2006, had urged Palestinians in its election manifesto to “immunise the citizens, especially the young people, against corruption, westernisation and intellectual invasion”.34
REACTION TO 7 OCTOBER 2023
During the 1980s, Tony Benn was seen as the leader and hope of the Labour Left. He had been an uber-Zionist in British politics, writing regularly in the Jewish Vanguard during the 1950s. Benn moved gradually towards the Left in the 1970s and subsequently distanced himself from support for Israel. However, while he embraced the Palestinian cause, he also argued in favour of a Jewish state despite his opposition to the policies of Menahem Begin’s Likud. Benn opened up the gates to a dialogue and cooperation with the far left outside Labour. When Jeremy Corbyn accidentally became leader of Labour in 2015, he developed Benn’s legacy and effectively formed a bridge that allowed the far left to flow into the party. Corbyn himself had always embraced the Palestinian cause and would not distance himself from Hamas, and the anti-Zionism of many of his followers often tipped over into antisemitic caricatures of Jews. Several far-left websites supported Corbyn during his time as Labour leader.35 Corbyn’s crushing defeat during the 2019 election and his succession by Sir Keir Starmer allowed the Labour party to gradually return to the status quo ante, which in turn precipitated the exodus of the far left from its ranks. These events prepared the ideolog- ical ground for the reaction to the events of 7 October 2023.
The initial sympathy for Israel in the immediate wake of the Hamas massacre was swiftly replaced by a huge wave of sympathy for the Palestinian cause when Gaza was attacked by the IDF. In London, there were weekly demonstrations of hundreds of thousands who called for a ceasefire. They constituted a mixture of liberal humanitarians, the far left and Muslim communities. A much repeated chant at the demonstrations proclaimed “From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be free”—essentially a plea for a Greater Palestine and not for a two-state solution. Many British Jews understood this as a call for a judenrein territory. Condemned by the Sunak government as “a staple of antisemitic discourse”, many on the far left viewed this as a question of free speech. Jewish organisations reported a substantial increase in antisemitic incidents — and this in turn catalysed marches and demonstrations against antisemitism.36
Identification with the Palestinian cause has been perhaps more of an expression of Muslim identity in the UK than anything else. In the House of Commons, many Muslim Labour MPs, and those with a substantial number of Muslim constituents, refused to accept the party line of not demanding a ceasefire, but called instead for a “humanitarian pause” in the hostilities.37 Palestine had unmistakably become a cause célèbre amongst many Muslims in the UK. There were no demonstrations against China when it came to the persecution of the Muslim Uyghurs. In opinion polls during this period, millennials, often anchored in tik-tok and Instagram, tended to identify with the Palestinians, while the over-65s, closer in age to the Shoah, have tended to support Israel. For younger people, who live in a multi-cultural society, decolonisation and the end of empire was a much more dominant theme. Many have since attempted to educate themselves about the complexities of the Israel-Palestine conflict. Rashid Khalidi’s The Hundred Years War on Palestine recently made a remarkable appearance in the UK Sunday Times best sellers list. Women’s organizations and gay rights groups projected a sotto voce approach to Hamas — downgrading the raison d’être for their existence.
CELEBRATION AND INTERPRETATION
The allusion to Satan roaming free and celebrating in Asaf Gur’s poem with which this piece commenced, is one that certainly relates directly to Hamas, but celebration of the events of October 7th were not confined to Hamas, but rather characterized parts of the far left in Britain as well.38 Some on the far Left viewed the events of October 7th as an act of Palestinian resistance, a justified blow against the occupation and the humiliation of decades.39 Hamas and the Palestinian people were thereby often telescoped into one. Past history was reclaimed. Some compared the Hamas attack to past liberation movements such as the FLN in Algeria, which had killed many civilians in the course of their struggle.40 Khaled Mashal similarly evoked the struggle of the Viet Cong.41 In the footsteps of Malcolm X in the 1960s, many on the far Left viewed Israel as the last bastion of “white” colonialism which, like South Africa, would eventually be liberated.
Several politicians adopted language that preserved their neutral stand by expressing their humanity. They often discovered that an imprecise use of words elicited criticism. In Dublin, former taoiseach (Prime Minister) Leo Varadkar commented on the release of the Irish-Israeli nine year old emily Hand, saying “An innocent child who was lost has now been found . . . our prayers have been answered.” Varadkar’s Christological spin on kidnapping and imprisonment was an adaption of “I once was lost but now I am found” from the New testament42 and of course, a variation on the classic song, “Amazing Grace”. Other themes that were expounded included the belief that there were no civilians in Israel, only soldiers and would-be soldiers. Others latched on to the imprecise number of dead to suggest Israeli distor- tion and impropriety. Some suggested that the killings never happened at all, while a few resorted to undisguised classical antisemitism.
The mainly secular Jewish Voice for Labour — a highly peripheral group — quoted from Hosea that they have sown the wind and “they shall reap the whirlwind”. Some argued that the destruction of the state of Israel did not mean the destruction of the Jews. The most common approach was one of omission in that the killing of Palestinian civilians in Gaza substituted for any public remorse about the killings of 7 October — and this in essence provided a pathway out of the moral conundrum as whether or not to condemn the killing of Israelis. Once again, a mirror of the silence of the Russian Narodniks in 1881.
THE FUTURE FOR BRITISH JEWS
The killings of 7 October will undoubtedly become another addition to the roll-call of tragedies to beset the Jews which are recalled on Tisha b’Av, the traditional day of mourning for the destruction of the two temples (and other disasters in Jewish history). Kinot (lamentations) will be recited. Poems will be written. Prose will be read. It is also clear that the Israel-Palestine imbroglio has become a continuing issue dividing Left and Right—and perhaps within Britain’s budding multi-cultural society, one between Muslim and non-Muslim. emphasised by the Black Lives Matter Movement, the far left perceives the Jews as “white”, privileged, and sup- porters of the status quo. The Muslim community, ten times larger than the Jewish community, is seen as “black”, part of the impoverished working class and carrying the legacy of anti-colonialism and anti-imperialism.
As a minority, Jews in Britain have often spoken out against Islamophobia. Differences over Israel and Palestine have tended to remain abroad, outside the realm of discourse. This may now not be the case in the future. The conflict that began on October 7th has clearly damaged Jewish-Muslim relations, although to what extent and how permanent this is remains to be seen. Recent reports have suggested that tehran wishes to exploit such inter-communal tension.43
Any understanding of the raison d’être for the emergence of Zionism and consequently the rise of the state of Israel has been lost in a welter of anti-colonial slogans. Many British Jews have adopted the slogan “Jews Don’t Count” in protest against the myopia of the far left in recent years. Its meaning has been rendered more relevant since 7 October. Incidents of antisemitism in the UK, both overt and unspoken, have risen exponentially during the crisis. It is unlikely that this will fall to pre-7 October levels. The sense among some is that the Jews are now in a much more vulnerable position. International instability, the rise of populist demagogues and an apparent breakdown of societal norms in general, contribute to a sense of ongoing concern.
According to numerous scientific surveys, the Jewish community is a liberal one, which has overwhelmingly opposed the settlement drive on the West Bank, advocated a two-state solution and thought that Netanyahu was unsuitable as prime minister in the wake of the “judicial reform” controversy.44 All of this will become irrelevant, however, if anger against Israel per se remains a permanent feature in Britain and is redirected locally towards Jews.
Notes
1. The title is taken from a phrase coined by Ahad Ha’am in 1891 and used by Simon Dubnow when he spoke at a memorial meeting in Vilna on November 17, 1905. This followed the pogroms of the previous month. See Simon Dubnow, Nationalism and History, ed. Koppel S. Pinson (New York, 1970), 205.
2. Asaf Gur, Kaddish (translated by Heather Silverman, Michael Bohnen, Rachel Korazim) November 2023.
3. Pogromit is the Russian verb “to break or to smash”.
4. ChaimNachmanBialik,Bialik’sEpitaph(AchareiMoti),translatedbyDavid Aberbach in Aberbach, David, C. N. Bialik: Selected Poems (London, 2004).
5. Uri Zvi Greenberg, Rehovot HaNahar: Sefer Ha-Eyaliyut veha-Koah (Jerusalem, 1951), 66 (translated by David Aberbach).
6. Ibid. Greenberg Ein Od Meshalim (Jerusalem, 1951); 242 (translated by David Aberbach).
7. Simon Dubnow, ‘A Historic Moment’ (May 1903) in Dubnow, Nationalism and History, ed. Koppel S. Pinson (New York, 1970), 194.
8. Leonard Schapiro, “The Role of the Jews in the Russian Revolutionary Movement”, Slavonic and East European Review 40:94 (December 1961), 148–167.
9. Lucy Dawidowicz, ed. The Golden Tradition (New York, 1967) p. 406.
10. erich e. Haberer, Jews and Revolution in Nineteenth Century Russia (Cambridge, 1995), 178.
11. Abraham Ascher, “Pavel Axelrod: A Conflict between Jewish Loyalty and Revolutionary Dedication”, Russian Review 24:3 (July 1965), 249–265.
12. Declarationofthe(SecondShift)ofChernyiPeredel,St.Petersburg15June 1881 in John D. Klier, and Shlomo Lambroza, Pogroms: Anti-Jewish Violence in Modern Russian History (Cambridge, 1992), 93.
13. Leopold H. Haimson, The Making of Three Russian Revolutionaries: Voices from the Menshevik Past, Interview with Lydia Dan (Cambridge, 1987), 51.
14. ‘RevolyutsionnayaRosszya’,VestnikBunda3,(June1904)quotedinSchapiro. 15. See Leon Motzkin, Die Judenpogrome in Russland (Cologne, 1909).
16. M. Kiei, “The Jewish Narodnik”, Judaism 19 (1970), 309. cited in Haberer, 218.
17. Dawidowicz, 410.
18. Leo Pinsker, “Autoemancipation”, in Benzion Netanyahu (ed.), Road to Freedom: Writings and Addresses by Leon Pinsker (New York, 1944), 76.
19. Beit Ya’akov Lekhu ve-Nelkah (O House of Jacob, let us rise up and go) in Isaiah 2:5.
20. Arthur Hertzberg, The Zionist Idea: A Historical Analysis and Reader (Philadelphia, 1997), 169. See also Chaim Chissin, A Palestine Diary: Memoirs of a BILU Pioneer 1882–1887 (New York, 1976), 31. Diary entry 10 February 1882, Moscow.
21. Ramsay MacDonald, A Socialist in Palestine (London, 1922), 24.
22. Beatrice Webb, diary entry September 2, 1929 in Norman Mackenzie, ed. The Letters of Sidney and Beatrice Webb, vol. 3 (Cambridge, 1978), 315.
23. Times, February 25, 1949.
24. HughDalton,HighTideandAfter:Memoirs,1945–1960(London,1962),199. 25. Harold Wilson, The Chariot of Israel (London, 1981), 187.
26. David Kimche, The Afro-Asian Movement: Ideology and Foreign Policy of the Third World (Jerusalem, 1973), 67.
27. JTA, 25 March 1970.
28. New York Times, 29 August 1968.
29. C. Wright-Mills, “Letter to the New Left”, New Left Review 1:5 (September-October 1960), available at: https://newleftreview-org.bengurionu.idm.oclc.org /issues/i5/articles/c-wright-mills-letter-to-the-new-left.
30. Washington Post, 8 February 1987.
31. Chris Harman, “The Prophet and the Proletariat” International Socialism Journal 2:64 (Autumn 1994). Available at: https://www.marxists.org/archive/harman /1994/xx/islam.htm#n1.
32. emmanuel Karagiannis and Clark McCauley, “The emerging Red-Green Alliance: Where Political Islam meets the Radical Left”, Terrorism and Political Violence 25:2 (2013), 167–182.
33. Dave Crouch, “The Bolsheviks and Islam”, International Socialism 110 (Spring 2006). Available at: https://isj.org.uk/the-bolsheviks-and-islam/
34. Azzam tamimi, Hamas: A History from Within (Northampton, Mass., 2007), 305.
35. See The Canary; Another Angry Voice; The Skwawkbox.
36. A march against antisemitism of British Jews and its allies took place in central London on November 26, 2023.
37. See the New Statesman, 3-9 November 2023.
38. Rivka Brown tweeted on X on @rivkabrown on 7 October and retracted this statement and apologised in a tweet on X on 11 October.
39. Tariq Ali,“Uprising in Palestine”,Sidecar: New Left Review 9 October 2023. https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/uprising-in-palestine
40. Moshe Machover, “Oppression Breeds Resistance”, Weekly Worker 1462 (12 October 2023). https://weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1462/oppression-breeds -resistance/
41. Khaled Mashal interview with al-Arabiya 19 October 2023. https://english .alarabiya.net/News/middle-east/2023/10/19/-Israel-is-killing-us-whether-we-resist -or-not-says-former-Hamas-chief
42. Luke 15:24 and Luke 15:32
43. Sunday Times, 26 November 2023.
44. See the reports of the JPR (Institute for Jewish Policy Research).
Israel Studies vol.29 no.1 Spring 2024