The hysteria in Israel about socialist 99 is being fed by bourgeois Israeli leaders to cover up the critical situation there
By Dr. Moshe Sneh
( Translated from the Yiddish by Max Rosenfeld.)
Jewish Life
March 1953
When the news came to Israel of the Zionist and Israel involvement in the Prague trial, the “left” Zionist party, Mapam , split on the issue. Led by D r. Moshe Sneh, a minority of party leaders refused to go along with the majority view that Mordechai Oren, a Mapam leader who confessed to complicity in the conspiracy, was guilty, and that anything anti-Jewish was involved in the trial. Dr. Sneh submitted the following article stating his position to the Mapam organ, Al Hamishmar, which refused to print the article. It was finally published in the Mapai daily, Hador, and appeared in a Yiddish version in the New York Poale Zion weekly, Yiddisher Kemfer, on January 9, and is translated in part into English below.
Because of his firm position against the charge of “anti-Semitism ” in the Soviet Union and the peoples democracies, Dr. Sneh has been expelled from Mapam . He is organizing a new group in Israel.—Eds.
THE United Workers Party (Mapam ) reacted to the Prague trial from two public platforms; in a leading article in Al Hamishmar, the organ of the party, and in a statement of its parliamentary group on the floor of the Knesset.
The following lines are not meant to re-state or say anything new about the position of Mapam, which received authoritative and binding expression in the two above-mentioned declarations. But this “position” was taken on a wave of slanders against the Czechoslovak People’s Democracy, against all the countries of socialism, against Communism throughout the world, against Mapam here in our country. These slanders have provoked the thoughts and observations expressed here.
The muddy wave which for a week has been flooding organizational life in Israel—whom is it really intended to harm ? It is clear: it is aimed at the working class in Israel, against the masses in Israel.
It arose, this wave of baiting, in order to cover up and hide the wave of rising living costs, which tears the food out of the mouth of the working person, and the wave of unemployment which is drawing tens of thousands of workers into the whirlpool of hunger and desperation. It arose, this wave of incitement, in order to wipe out the wave of resistance of the inhabitants of the Maabarot (temporary quarters of the new immigrants), where they have been ordered to spend the winter in tents, despite all the deceitful speeches about secure dwellings for the winter.
It arose, this wave of filth, in order to divert the attention of public opinion from the failures of the country’s leaders, both in internal affairs as well as external affairs; from the growth of the deficits in the economy and in the public treasury and from the decline of Israel valuta on the stock markets of the world; from the pressure of the American rulers to make “peace” with the Arab countries at the expense of Israel—a “peace” which would be merely an aggressive regional pact for war. It arose, this wave of hate, in order to awaken in the masses an enthusiasm to take part in a war as a holy thing against the Soviet Union and all the nations striving for peace.
It arose, this wave of insults, in order to hush up and obliterate the wave of dissatisfaction and embitterment which is mounting in the camp of the supporters of the existing order and especially among the youth and the workers of Mapai.
For these purposes there appeared on the floor of the Knesset the united chorus of the crows, which interrupted the music of the radio program “Voice of Israel.” These intentions united in one front all the poison-spewers from Ben-Gurion and Sharett to Labun and Livneh, Begin and Lipshitz, all partners of the American front in the state of Israel; from Mapai to Herut to the deserters from Mapam.
Communism Against Anti-Semitism
Communism and anti-Semitism are mutually contradictory, are two things which contradict each other—actually a thing and its antithesis. But in order to strengthen the “Falling House of David (Ben-Gurion),” in order to attach the state of Israel to an imperialistic, fascistic, anti-Semitic league, together with McCarthy and MacArthur, with Guderian and Kesselring, with Adenauer, with Tito and Franco—the speakers of Voice of America in the Israel Knesset dragged out this false refrain: “Communism is anti-Semitism.”
Lenin taught the working class throughout the world, in the time of rising anti-Semitism in tsarist Russia, “It is not the Jews who are the enemies of the workers; the enemies of the workers are the capitalists of all countries. Among the Jews there are workers, there arc toilers—they are the majority. And they are our brother s-in-oppression by capital; they are our comrades in the struggle for socialism.”
Stalin regarded anti-Semitism as the most acute form of cannibalism. “Anti-Semitism, in the extreme form of racial chauvinism, is the most terrible relic of cannibalism. Anti-Semitism is for the exploiters a convenient lightning rod which protects capitalism from the attack of the toilers. Anti-Semitism is a danger for the workers, like a misleading path which takes them off the straight road and leads them into the jungle. Communists, as consistent internationalists, can therefore not be anything else but uncompromising and sworn enemies of anti-Semitism. In the Soviet Union anti-Semitism is strictly forbidden as a phenomenon that is absolutely inimical to the Soviet regime.” (Reply to a representative of JTA, Jan. 31, 1921.)
This is the teaching of Lenin and Stalin on the question of anti-Semitism and this is the foundation of the practical politics of the Communist Parties not only in the Soviet Union, but also in the people’s democracies which grew up after the Second World War.
All the prattle about a so-called change which took place in this respect is lies and falsehood. In all the countries of socialism, anti-Semitism is regarded by law as a criminal offense and he who breaks the law against anti-Semitism receives a heavy penalty.
The Slander Will Fail
In the days of the trial in Prague, the Czechoslovak radio broadcast a special program which denied the libel about “tfie anti-Semitic character” of the trial—but this information was given prominence only in one newspaper —Al Hamishmar.
Reaction in Israel is interested in presenting the Prague trial as anti-Semitic. The bourgeoisie in every nation is always interested in presenting its class interests as general, national interests, in dragging the working class into solidarity with “national” reaction, with “its own reaction,” and in drawing the workers away from international proletarian solidarity.
Scientific socialism has equipped the working class with the knowledge and the consciousness that its class struggle against the bourgeoisie within its own nation is not in contradiction with the existence of one society and one people, in the framework of one bourgeoisie state, but that it forms the essence of this society. It is a mistake “to conceive of the conflict of interests between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, the acute class struggle which takes place between them, as the dissolution of society, as a severance of all relations between the opposing classes” ; “as long as capitalism exists, so long will the bourgeoisie and proletariat be tied to each other by all the threads of the economy, as parts of one capitalist society” ; “the class struggle, even the sharpest, can therefore not lead to a dissolution of society.” (Stalin, M arxism and Linguistics.)
Scientific socialism has also equipped the working-class with the knowledge and the consciousness that socialist international solidarity is not only not in contradiction with the national interests of the given nation, but that it is the guarantee for the true national interests of all nations—the highest expression of loyal patriotism.
Also, the recent history of our ancient people has forcefully proved this teaching. The Soviet Union which in its war of defense against Hitler aggression conquered and smashed the nazi beast, therewith rescued the entire world from the stupor of fascist enslavement, freed many nations from fascist plunder and rescued the Jewish people from extermination and destruction.
And the Soviet Union, and together with it the people’s democracies, and the Czechoslovak People’s Democracy among them—they were the ones who extended to the Jewish people full assistance to set up its own state in Israel. In the two most violent and most fateful occurrences in Jewish history—in the attempt to destroy the Jewish people and in the struggle for its establishment—it was the Communist world, and the Soviet Union at its head, which showed and proved that it and only it was a true friend of the Jewish people, as of all the nations of the world. And every “explanation” that the Prague trial shows, so to speak, that “Communism is the enemy of the Jewish people” or of the state of Israel or of the liberation movement of our people, is no more than a malevolent libel and a lying slander.
The fact that the government of Israel has harnessed itself to the chariot of American imperialism, the speeches of Sharett and Eban and Ben Gurion, which are laden with hate, and spread enmity to the Soviet Union and to Communism—could produce no other effect. Therefore, we cannot react to the Prague trial in partnership with the enemies of socialism in Israel. And their attempts by word and deed, to turn those in Israel who are loyal to socialism against the strongholds of socialism in the world and to cut us off from the world revolutionary camp, of which we are an inseparable part, will not succeed.
If you want to know what is the true psychical cause of the anti-Communist outburst in the Knesset, on the “Voice of Israel,” and in the bourgeois Mapai press, you have only to listen to the outpouring of love and to the glorification which Ben Gurion, and Namir and Labun and Livneh and Begin pour out to the betrayers of communism: to Trotsky and Bukharin, to Kamenyev and Zinovyev, to Tito, Rykov and Kostov, to Slansky and Clementis. What hymns of praise did the ministers and spokesmen of Mapai sing about each one of these whose liquidation saved a socialist state from destruction!
And just look: love and kindness for him who betrayed Communism in the Soviet Union and went over to the service of imperialism; and the other side, the cry of hate and the hissing of snakes against one who through his life experience and through the lessons of his struggles, rose in his development from the national bourgeois democratic movement to proletarian class consciousness, to revolutionary socialism, to true friendship for the Soviet Union.
( Translated from the Yiddish by Max Rosenfeld.)