THE PITTSBURGH PLATFORM (1885): More than a decade before Herzl's Zionist congress, American Reform Jewish leaders gathered to define their movement. Led by figures like Isaac Mayer Wise, they issued the Pittsburgh Platform.
It explicitly stated:
“We consider ourselves no longer a nation, but a religious community, and therefore expect neither a return to Palestine... nor the restoration of any of the laws concerning the Jewish state.”
The prominent Austrian-Jewish writer and satirist published a stinging polemic titled Eine Krone für Zion ("A Crown for Zion") in 1898. He accused Herzl of aiding anti-Semites by validating the premise that Jews did not belong in their native European countries.
But it was the General Jewish Labor Bund, which were among the first to not only reject but actively campaign against Zionism in the Jewish communities.
Founded in 1897, the Bund was a secular, socialist, and fiercely anti-Zionist organization that operated primarily in the Russian Empire.
The Bund actively opposed Zionism, arguing that emigration to Palestine was a form of bourgeois utopian escapism. Instead of viewing anti-Semitism as an immutable part of the gentile world, their core ideology—known as doykeit (or "hereness")—posited that the Jewish diaspora was their home, and that Jews should stay and fight for equal rights and cultural autonomy alongside their oppressed neighbors.
The Bund did collaborate, and sometimes differed, from the Bolsheviks at different times, since Lenin and the Bolsheviks led a fight to the death against antisemitism and the pogroms.
The Bund fought shoulder to shoulder with the Bolsheviks in the Red Army against the White counterrevolutionary armies that slaughtered thousands of Jews. Needless to say it was the British, French and US that armed the White armies to slaughter the Jews. The majority of the Bund, the "Kombund” joined the Bolshevik party in 1920-1921.
The historic Congress of the Peoples of the East took place in Baku, Azerbaijan, from September 1 to September 8, 1920. Forty-one Jewish delegates attended the congress out of nearly 2,000 majority Muslim participants. Many of these individuals were local Mountain Jews from the Caucasus or Bukharan Jews, alongside European Jewish communists. There, members of the Bund held debates with Mountain Jews and others against Zionism.
It's a very interesting history. I highly recommend reading about it, and in particular the speeches and documents on the fight against colonialism, for women's rights, and against national oppression including the debates on Zionism.
Zionism in fact was opposed by the vast majority of Jews from many different perspectives. Most Orthodox Jews opposed it as heresy, and the overwhelming majority of assimilated Jews in the UK and elsewhere in Europe were anti-Zionist.
In reality it was only after the Holocaust and the abuse of Jewish survivors by the European and US victors that the majority of Jews saw no alternative to forced migration. It was the “allies” who really fulfilled Hitler's “Final Solution” to cruelly drive all the Jews from Europe, to form an imperialist outpost against the Arab masses.
Nah. Until you see 319 Jewish billionaires as just THAT, Jewish, you will be snookered by that empty signifier, Zionist. I love your work, but .... Highlighting aberrations, nope.
FIRST ANTI-ZIONISTS WERE JEWS.
THE PITTSBURGH PLATFORM (1885): More than a decade before Herzl's Zionist congress, American Reform Jewish leaders gathered to define their movement. Led by figures like Isaac Mayer Wise, they issued the Pittsburgh Platform.
It explicitly stated:
“We consider ourselves no longer a nation, but a religious community, and therefore expect neither a return to Palestine... nor the restoration of any of the laws concerning the Jewish state.”
The prominent Austrian-Jewish writer and satirist published a stinging polemic titled Eine Krone für Zion ("A Crown for Zion") in 1898. He accused Herzl of aiding anti-Semites by validating the premise that Jews did not belong in their native European countries.
But it was the General Jewish Labor Bund, which were among the first to not only reject but actively campaign against Zionism in the Jewish communities.
Founded in 1897, the Bund was a secular, socialist, and fiercely anti-Zionist organization that operated primarily in the Russian Empire.
The Bund actively opposed Zionism, arguing that emigration to Palestine was a form of bourgeois utopian escapism. Instead of viewing anti-Semitism as an immutable part of the gentile world, their core ideology—known as doykeit (or "hereness")—posited that the Jewish diaspora was their home, and that Jews should stay and fight for equal rights and cultural autonomy alongside their oppressed neighbors.
The Bund did collaborate, and sometimes differed, from the Bolsheviks at different times, since Lenin and the Bolsheviks led a fight to the death against antisemitism and the pogroms.
The Bund fought shoulder to shoulder with the Bolsheviks in the Red Army against the White counterrevolutionary armies that slaughtered thousands of Jews. Needless to say it was the British, French and US that armed the White armies to slaughter the Jews. The majority of the Bund, the "Kombund” joined the Bolshevik party in 1920-1921.
The historic Congress of the Peoples of the East took place in Baku, Azerbaijan, from September 1 to September 8, 1920. Forty-one Jewish delegates attended the congress out of nearly 2,000 majority Muslim participants. Many of these individuals were local Mountain Jews from the Caucasus or Bukharan Jews, alongside European Jewish communists. There, members of the Bund held debates with Mountain Jews and others against Zionism.
It's a very interesting history. I highly recommend reading about it, and in particular the speeches and documents on the fight against colonialism, for women's rights, and against national oppression including the debates on Zionism.
Zionism in fact was opposed by the vast majority of Jews from many different perspectives. Most Orthodox Jews opposed it as heresy, and the overwhelming majority of assimilated Jews in the UK and elsewhere in Europe were anti-Zionist.
In reality it was only after the Holocaust and the abuse of Jewish survivors by the European and US victors that the majority of Jews saw no alternative to forced migration. It was the “allies” who really fulfilled Hitler's “Final Solution” to cruelly drive all the Jews from Europe, to form an imperialist outpost against the Arab masses.
____
Jewwashing
Nah. Until you see 319 Jewish billionaires as just THAT, Jewish, you will be snookered by that empty signifier, Zionist. I love your work, but .... Highlighting aberrations, nope.
https://paulokirk.substack.com/p/oh-no-the-end-of-the-world-judaismzionism?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=5i319
Please keep at it. The world needs it. They have to be held to account. 🙏
Hard Pass. They are likely Zionists.