[The following article appeared in the May 4 issue of La Gauche, weekly newspaper of the Ligue Révolutionnaire des Travailleurs (Revolutionary Workers League), Belgian section of the Fourth International. The translation is by Intercontinental Press.]
The Ghetto Revolt and the Founding of the Zionist State
This year, within the space of a few weeks, two great events in the contemporary history of the Jewish people will be commemorated - the thirtieth anniversary of the Warsaw ghetto uprising and the twenty-fifth anniversary of the proclamation of the state of Israel. The coincidence is not accidental, for the two historic dates are intimately May 21, 1973
triumph over bestial imperialism.
related. One symbolizes the way in which the fate of the Jews came to represent the human condition under Nazi barbarism. The other is explainable by these sufferings; it took Auschwitz to push the Jewish masses-and with them Western public opinion - into the Zionist camp.
But at the same time, what a contrast! In the Warsaw ghetto the survivors of the genocide against Polish Jewry embodied the dignity of humanity, resisting oppression, even without immediate hope of success; a revolt that ennobled all humanity, a tragic epic that prefigured the victories of the Indochinese revolution which, under different and more favorable circumstances, was able to
But the creation of the state of Israel, on the other hand, symbolizes the spiritual degeneration of this same Jewish community, which has become the colonial oppressor
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in Arab lands, reducing a whole people, the Palestinians, to exile, poverty, and powerlessness.
The militants of the young "socialist" movements, who, at the sides of their comrades of the Jewish workers movement, led the Jewish Combat Organization in the Warsaw ghetto from beginning to end, realized, in action, the great historic role of the Jewish spirit in the modern world The Spinozas, the Freuds, the Einsteins, sons of a community embedded like a hinge between various cultures, undertook the critique of established values. The Marxes, the Rosa Luxemburgs, the Trotskys brought this process to its culmination by forging the ideology and the instrument of the proletariat's struggle, pointing out in the particularities of the Jewish condition the road to the emancipation of humanity - the revolutionary action of the conscious workers. The insurrection of the survivors of the Warsaw ghetto (as well as those of other ghettos, unjustly unrecognized) is part of this proud tradition. It belongs to the most glorious pages of history; it constitutes the Promethian dimension of the Jewish tradition. It taught its generation that man struggles and never gives up.
A Glorious Revolt-But No Heirs
There is no longer any Jewish community in Poland to pay homage to the monument of the ghetto. The bureaucratic Warsaw regime has "purged" the country of Jews, relying on the old reactionary anti-Semitism to try to quell the social rage of the shipyard workers, which was unleashed in the wake of the revolt in the Baltic ports.
The Warsaw ghetto insurrection will not be commemorated by a single Jewish daily in the Soviet Union; since the deportation of Jewish writers in 1952, the Jewish community in the Soviet Union has been deprived of its own cultural life, subjected to subtle and varied forms of discrimination that push it toward emigration. And in the West, the commemorative ceremonies will strike a false note; the official leaders of the Jewish community are closely associated with the existing regimes- too busy organizing the pro-Israeli lobby to bother about the traditions of the revolt; too well integrated into the cogs of the system of exploitation to recognize the lines that bind the Warsaw ghetto revolt to the• revolution. Their camp is not that of humanity in struggle for its dignity.
In Israel the monument erected to the glory of the commander of the ghetto insurrection, Mordechai Anilewicz, is located in the kibbutz whose name evokes his memory: Yad Mordechai. This "socialist" village was founded along the (1948) borders as a military outpost. Today, its economic existence is based on the exploitation of the wage-labor of Palestinian refugees in the Gaza Strip, and especially on the wage-labor of school-age children. What a symbol! What a mockery!
Constant Features of Zionist Plan
This, in a nutshell, was the Zionist program: to construct a Jewish state in Palestine, which implied refusal to fight anti-Semitism wherever it arose, and instead in- 586
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