The response of the International Jewish Labor Bund to the establishment of the State of Israel on 14 May 1948, which appeared in the Vol. 1 No. 6 issue (June 1948) of the Bund Bulletin. Bundism was a Jewish anti-Zionist socialist movement that originally developed in the Russian Empire, and whose adherents argued for Jews to confront anti-Semitism wherever they found themselves rather than to migrate to Palestine.
May 15, 1948, will certainly mark a date of great importance in the history of the Jews. On this day the Socialist Government of England ended its rule in Palestine and turned over, according to its promise and on its own volition, the further responsibility for this troublesome scrap of land to the United Nations.
Almost the same hour an independent Jewish state called Israel was proclaimed in Tel-Aviv. President Truman immediately recognized the Jewish State. After a few days the second great world power, Soviet Russia, also bestowed the new State with its recognition. Other countries swiftly followed suit.
A wild wave of joy and excitement swept the Jewish communities in the United States and the world over. Even though the united Arab nations replied to the proclamation of the Jewish State by declaring war and by immediately invading Palestine, these hostilities were not able to abate the joyous sentiments of the majority of the Jews.
We frankly admit that the rank and file of the Jewish Socialists under the BUND banner cannot rejoice with the majority of the Jewish population. Heavy misgivings assail us as to the immediate future of the 600,000 Jews in Palestine as well as to the repercussions of the Jewish State on the whole of Jewish life outside it. What the Jews in Palestine need is not the right to bleed and die under the banner of their own independent state, but to live in peaceful cooperation with the Arabs so as to assure and enhance their cultural and national advancement. We doubt the ability of the United Nations to bridle the nationalistic fanaticism of the aroused Arabs, worsened by the propaganda of their reactionary Muftis. The present state of affairs, in which the life and the future of the 600,000 Jews in Palestine became an object with which the great world powers play their imperialistic game, is foreboding indeed. No matter how courageous the Jews of Palestine fight, the odds against them are overwhelming : A Jewish island of 600,000 people surrounded by an Arab ocean of 30,000,000 can hardly survive.
The composition of the provisional government of the new State of Israel is anything but reassuring. Against the opposition of the Jewish workers organized in Histadrut, and heedless of their warnings, representatives of the notorious Jewish terrorist groups with familiar fascist tendencies are included in the government. Such appeasement of fascist trends had always led to fatal results, wherever it was tried. It is liable to lead to the same bleak developments inside the Jewish State.
The midget Jewish State in Palestine has already become the main attraction of Jewish life everywhere. Hundreds of millions of dollars, not to mention the tremendous amount of spiritual effort, are already elicited from the Jewish communities and poured into the Jewish State in Palestine. The necessity of waging war is prone to increase the scale of all kinds of donations and activities for the sake of an independent Jewish State. The impact of such generosity on the Jewish communities outside Palestine cannot be but devastating. The diversion from their actual needs, the frustrated hopes which will inevitably replace the present state of bliss, the apathy which will sooner or later come in the wake of the present excitement, are the dreary consequences which the Jews everywhere will have to pay for the present nationalistic paradise they cherish.
Jewish Socialists never shared the opinion of Zionists that an independent state in Palestine would solve the Jewish problem. Nor do we share it today, after such a state has been established. We have always believed that the only solution for the Jews, as well as for mankind in general, is the reconstruction of the world on a socialist and democratic basis. Our belief remains unshaken even now, when the Zionists achieved, at least temporarily, their goal. During half a century the BUND movement tried to win the Jewish working population for the international struggle for Socialism. Non-Jewish Socialists rather than the Jewish nationalists were for half a century our nearest allies. The establishment of a Jewish State in Palestine does not reconcile us with Jewish nationalism and cannot change our traditional attitude. We belong to the international Socialist camp and we will remain there.
But first of all and above all it is our duty as Jewish Socialists, faithful to our Socialist tradition and our Socialist inheritance, to do our utmost in order to stop the war which is now ravaging Palestine. An end must be put immediately to the gory war. Only the nationalist-minded elements in both camps—the Arab as well as the Jewish—are intoxicated with hatred toward the so-called enemy.
The Jewish population, as well as the Arabs, must not sacrifice their lives on the shrine of nationalism. The Jews as well as the Arabs need peaceful relations based on equality, on mutual respect for the rightful aspirations of both nationalities of Palestine. An independent Palestine—a common state of the Arabs and the Jews which may guarantee both nations the widest autonomy for their further national and cultural development and unite them for the well-being of all the inhabitants of the land,— that is the real goal to strive for.
Taken from the Bund Bulletin, Vol. 1 No. 6, June 1948.
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