Ενας κόσμος γεμάτος τοίχους

Μέσα στο φασιστικό γαϊτανάκι που στήθηκε στο ιντερνετ τις τελευταίες μέρες γύρω από το νομοσχέδιο που θέλει τους μετανάστες να εξακολουθήσουν να φυτοζωούν στη πατρίδα μας, η ολομέλεια ΣΥΡΙΖΑ Παννονίας αισθάνεται την ανάγκη να παρέμβει γι'ακόμη μια φορά στο δημόσιο αυτό "διάλογο".

Μέσα σε αυτή την καταισχύνη, αντιτάσσουμε την αγωνία ενός λαού που εξαϋλώθηκε μέσα στη δίνη της απολυταρχίας και της οργανικής θεωρίας του κράτους.

Οι παρακάτω γραμμές έρχονται κατευθείαν από την New International (Τομ. 12 Ν. 9, Νοέμβρης 1946, σσ. 259-261).

We may argue that the national consciousness awakened among Europe’s Jews by the Nazi persecutions is a long step back from the advanced internationalist consciousness and assimilationist aims that predominated among Jews in pre-Hitler Europe and therefore constitutes a political retrogression for the Jews. True enough; but the same must be said about all the other peoples of Europe who underwent a resurgence of national consciousness as the result of German oppression. Yet we did not deny the validity of the struggles for national liberation on the part of the European nations. We based our socialist perspectives in large measure upon them.

But the other peoples of Europe had a territory to fight for; the Jew has none. The Jew cannot solve his problem fundamentally by fleeing to Palestine. He should seek to stay and become part of the proletarian class struggle in whatever nation he resides. Only the fight for socialist freedom for all of mankind can achieve freedom for the Jew. With all of this no Marxist can differ. More, it is incumbent upon the Marxist to offer this perspective to the Jewish people and seek to convince them of it. But what shall be our attitude toward those Jews who do not heed our advice and pursue their national aims, which, rightly or wrongly, they relate to joining the Jewish community in Palestine? Can we refuse to recognize this as a democratic right and a legitimate national aspiration? Are only Jews to be denied the right to have national consciousness and national aims?

True enough, no people has the right to realize its national aims at the expense of another nation. Jewish national aims cannot be realized at the expense of the Arabs. But is this the implicit and inevitable result of Jewish immigration to Palestine? The mere immigration of Jews to Palestine no more deprives Arabs of their rights than the continued residence of the Jews in Germany or Poland deprives Germans or Poles of their rights. The Arabs’ rights would be jeopardized only if a “Jewish state” in Palestine were the only possible result of Jewish immigration. An infringement of the Arabs’ rights is no more implicit in the fact of immigration itself than is abuse of a Jewish minority – let the Zionists note! – implicit in the fact of an independent Palestine under an Arab majority. (This thought is developed further in the resolution of the National Committee of the Workers Party published in this issue.)




To deny the right of the Jews today to immigrate to Palestine on the grounds of the possible consequences it will have upon the Arabs is to deny them the right to go anywhere. A larger percentage of the population of Palestine is prepared to welcome and assist them than is the case in any other nation. The doors are everywhere shut tight on the grounds that the entry of large numbers of Jews will have evil consequences for the present populations. Barriers either reduce all immigration to a trickle or specifically make Jewish immigration all but impossible in each of the large under-populated countries.

In such a “democracy” as Canada, Jewish immigrants are placed at the very bottom of the “least desirable” category. In the United States, the notorious quota system effectively blocks immigration from the European countries containing the largest number of Jews. In Argentina and Brazil, preference is given to immigrants from the Latin countries of Europe and Jews are considered particularly undesirable. In Mexico, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand it is the same story with only minor variations. Russia shows neither a desire to accept the Jews of Europe nor do the latter show any eagerness to go there. Tens of thousands of them who escaped or were forced into Russia from Poland are now drifting back across Europe to enter the American and British zones of Germany, most of them regarding the latter as a way station to Palestine.



The Jews of Europe face a world of walls. It is this condition that also turns their face toward Palestine. Not that the wall around Palestine is less formidable. But behind the Palestinian wall the most powerful Jewish minority of any country in the world reaches out a hand of welcome and succor. (In contrast, a public opinion poll reveals that only five per cent of the population of the United States favors a liberalization of immigration laws.) The Jews of Europe feel that it they must batter down the walls of a nation to enter, they prefer to do it with help from the inside.

The fight for the right of the Jews to go to Palestine cannot be considered as a substitute for the need to fight against all reactionary restrictions upon immigration wherever they occur. The struggle to open the doors of their own country to the refugees is an obligation which the workers of each nation must place in the forefront of their demands on behalf of European Jewry. However, the need to open the large, under-populated nations of the world cannot, in turn, become a substitute for the need to take a forthright position in support of the immediate and pressing struggle raging around the right to enter Palestine.

In this respect, a special duty devolves upon the revolutionary socialists of the United States. No other country is in so favorable a situation to admit large numbers of immigrants and provide them with a high standard of living as the United States. Both the wealth of American economy and the vastness of its territories make it possible to admit a million immigrants without the slightest impression upon its economic or political institutions. Yet it is precisely in the United States that the greatest hypocrisy has been demonstrated on the Jewish question. Here, as with all American political questions, the Jewish question has in the past been debased to its lowest and most vulgar level – an angling for the Jewish vote in election campaigns. Beginning with the 1922 resolution of Congress on behalf of a Jewish “national home” in Palestine, and continuing with repeated declarations of this character by Congress and state legislatures (above all those with large Jewish constituencies), the politicians have engaged in a cheap gesture to the Jewish people – a gesture about which they were not serious and about which nothing was ever done. Since the recent war even the gestures have become more sparing as a result of American interest in Saudi Arabian oil and, as a result, a growing concern on the part of the military authorities and State Department not to antagonize Arab opinion. The hypocrisy of the American authorities was dramatically exposed in a recent speech by Bartley C. Crum, member of the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry, when he said:

... when we got on the Queen Elizabeth, the secret files of the State Department were disclosed to us. We found that for every promise made by our Presidents from 1920 onwards, for every practically unanimous resolution passed by Congress, and for the planks in the 1944 platforms of both the Republican and Democratic parties, our State Department advised the Arabs that nothing would be done.

The main content of the struggle of American socialists on behalf of the Jews of Europe must be to “Open the doors of the United States!” But together with the international working class movement they must throw their support behind the equally important and pressing demand of “Open the doors of Palestine!”