Zionism and Black Seperatism

[Apoi_Viitor]

Would it be accurate to compare early (pre-Israeli statehood) Zionist movements to early black separatist movements? In which case, wasn't Zionism a progressive ideology turned reactionary?

[Jimmie Higgins]

Would it be accurate to compare early (pre-Israeli statehood) Zionist movements to early black separatist movements? In which case, wasn't Zionism a progressive ideology turned reactionary?In a way, yes. Both ideologies came out of a general nationalist sentiment (and various movements) in the nineteenth century. They are also both nationalism developed out of a desire to end oppression from communities who were more or less forced into segregated lives within larger society.

With nationalism of oppressed people there are always more reactionary sides and more progressive sides and both black nationalism and, to my limited knowledge, the pre-Israel Zionist movement reflect that. It's one thing to live in a segregated ghetto and think, gee we are running things ok and it would be much better if the local aristocrat didn't put extra taxes and restrictions on us and it would also be good if bigots didn't attack our community in pogroms, so maybe we should just have our own city and country. But then it's another to say to the same rulers who are oppressing you: hey, you don't like us, but let us do some dirty work for you and in return give us a little colony somewhere (as in Israeli Zionism). Zionism and Black Nationalism had these sides: in the 1800s, for an example of more reactionary nationalism of the oppressed, there were prominent proto-black nationalists who argued to be given indian land to settle or to return to Africa to "civilize" the natives.

Even within the context of fighting oppression, I think these examples of right-wing nationalism of the oppressed can be said to be a total failure. Israel's ruling class doesn't give a fuck if jews are oppressed in Eastern Europe today, so that kind of nationalism is really accommodating oppression and trying to find the best deal it can within a larger oppressive situation.

From the thread on Zionism:


...if you read what people like Hess and Herzl what is interesting is that these writers were often willing to call on some of the most fundamental assumptions of anti-semitism to justify their support for a Jewish state - Herzl in particular argued that Jews would never be able to fully integrate or win emancipation in other societies and had to therefore constitute themselves as a separate political entity. Zionism and anti-semitism are united in their common emphasis on Jewish difference and the impossibility of ever transcending that difference in favour of meaningful unity.

[Sun at Eight]

No, not at all. I think movements of Jewish self-determination and self-organization, such as the Bundists in Eastern Europe, could be more progressive than many Bolsheviks believed (I think there were elements of anti-Semitism and fear of anti-Semitism in response to those movements). As Machover argues (http://www.marxists.org/history/etol/writers/machover/2006/11/isr-pal.html), early Zionist leaders both operated within anti-Semitic concepts current in their day (the Jew is a foreign element, rootless) and saw their best chance in a colonization project (not necessarily in Palestine, but somewhere in the colonized world) where they could be Whites in a culturally Jewish outpost under the protection of and for a European power.

However, although this doesn't come out of the modern Black separatist nationalist movement, which really gets going with Garvey, IIRC, it might be interesting to compare with the colonization of Liberia by freed slaves.