Letters . . . November 15, 2023

H.S. teach-in vs genocide
Last week, a few days after Israel began bombing the workers in Gaza, my coworker and I decided we needed to organize a space for our high school students to learn more about what was happening. My co-teacher and I had already spent a class lesson teaching students some of the history of Palestine and taking questions and comments, so I knew some students wanted to learn more. I spoke to other coworkers, including one who has family in Palestine about the plan to respond to this war with a discussion. Because there is a Zionist teacher at the school, who has a history of opening up investigations on coworkers, I was given lots of warnings to think twice about having this event and to be careful.

We went ahead and organized it by making announcements in all of the history classes, so all students were invited. This was a good way to build with the teachers in the department, too. Given the email by the New York City Schools Chancellor expressing support only for those killed in Israel and implicitly threatening anyone with an alternate point of view, it was a big deal that teachers agreed to announce it.

At the meeting about ten students showed up. My co-worker, who is a relatively new teacher, and very antiracist, wanted to lead by explaining why he, as a Jewish worker, felt strongly about criticizing Israel’s fascist attacks. Students responded by expressing what they had been hearing on the news and Tiktok. They compared what was happening in Palestine over the last six or so decades to gentrification in NYC. They expressed outrage at the racism of it all and the attacks on innocent people. One student asked what we thought the solution was. I immediately took the opportunity to explain that I was a communist and why I thought communism was the only solution. I invited them to a study group happening a few days later. Although none made it, a few have told me they are interested in attending future events. The next step is to share CHALLENGE with them and get to know their parents!
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Boston UAW picket: mood of the workers is changing
Several groups of Boston/Worcester PL’ers and our friends walked the UAW picket line at the Stellantis distribution warehouse in Mansfield, MA to bring our solidarity and communist politics. The picketers welcomed our Challenges and leaflets. It was clear that the mood of the working class is changing!

I have never seen striking workers so open to an anti-capitalist perspective. It was pushing an open door for them to condemn the Democratic Party and Biden for bailing out the Big 3 in 2008 and coercing the workers to accept give-back contracts. They also know that the future of auto production works against them. Electric vehicles production is simpler, and uses fewer production workers. This is the logic of capitalism that they can do nothing about short of destroying the profit system.

There were workers who were also walking the picket line from several different unions—SAG-AFTA, Steel Workers, Electrical Workers. This organizing of strike support represents some improvement in the leadership of the AFL-CIO, and It made a big impression on the UAW workers. They commented on how their demands were clearly resonating with all workers. It fostered their class consciousness in that they could see that their bold strike action was leading the way for the working class. Strike support should always be a cornerstone of our practice.
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How nationalism poisoned the communist movement
The CHALLENGE editorial in the Nov. 1 issue stated, “The...U.S. ruling class....supported the creation of a ‘Jewish state’ and the displacement of millions of workers from Palestine in exchange for a Cold War ally against Soviet influence in the Middle East and support in the fight to control...the region’s oil.”  However, the issue of nationalism is much more complex.

Zionism, a form of Jewish nationalism, was always an anathema to early Jewish communists. The book Perfidy, by Ben Hecht exposes the role of Israeli rulers in sacrificing Jewish workers in the Holocaust in order to gain control and pad their own nests. But in addition, the Soviets were instrumental in establishing the State of Israel in 1947. The U.S. was, in fact, at first opposed to it.

The Soviets had hoped to find a home for the remnant of Jews after the Holocaust, during which six million were murdered, and established Birobidzhan in Siberia, which didn’t succeed for long. During the war, once they realized the magnitude of Hitler’s designs, they moved surviving Jews to Uzbekistan in the East to save them. In 1948 the Soviet ambassador to the U.N., Andrei Gromyko spoke about the Jewish historical claim to Palestine and the need to respond to “...the aspirations of the Jews to establish their own state.”  The U.S. would be the first to recognize this new state, but the U.S.S.R. soon followed, the first to offer ‘de jure’ recognition, a stronger form of international recognition and one that the U.S. delayed in giving.

In 1948 the U.S. had joined with Britain, its wartime ally, in following a U.N. embargo on arms shipments to the Middle East, leaving the Zionists with only one major lifeline of weapons, the then-socialist Czechoslovakia. Included were weapons, ammunition, fighter airplanes, and secret training areas for Israeli troops.  A brigade of Czech volunteers was also trained to fight with the Israeli army.  The Arabs knew something was going on, and in the U.N. an Arab diplomat charged that Zionists were using weapons, “the source of which was known to the U.S.S.R. representative.”

Although Soviet Jews were prevented from emigrating to Israel, other countries permitted it.  During the “thaw years” between 1948 and 1952, Bulgaria, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Rumania, and Poland allowed almost 300,000 surviving Jews to go to Israel.The Soviet Union’s help ended almost as soon as it began, and Israel started turning to Western imperialists who welcomed them in the competition for dominance of local resources, especially oil.  What had motivated the Soviet Union to take the position it did? Stalin’s concern for the Jews was already evident.But nationalism as a political ideology was not thoroughly rooted out in the Soviet Union. There were so-called progressive nationalists, who were to be supported,whilst bad nationalists were to be opposed.  Progressive Labor Party says all nationalism is bad. In this way we attempt to correct errors which led to the revival of capitalism in the Soviet Union and China.

Some of the reasons historians have offered for the Soviet Union’s stance on Israel are: that Stalin was angered with the Arabs for being pro-German during the war and sided with the Jews who had suffered at the hands of the Nazis; that the Soviets wanted to penetrate the Middle East and the Mediterranean and saw a Jewish state as an opening wedge; that the Jews were more open to communism than the reactionary Arabs; that the Jewish state would grow increasingly favorable to the Soviet Union and thereby spurn the U.S. imperialists. That isn’t how it turned out.