November 14, 2008

Karl Marx, Declaration of war – on the history of the Eastern Question, published in the New York Daily Tribune on 15 April 1854. See Marx/Engels, Collected Works, Volume 13 (1980), pp. 100-108. The quoted passage appears on pages 107-108.

 

The visit which the famed socialist revolutionary Karl Marx made to Jerusalem in 1854 has been very carefully hidden by people like Chomsky. It is of great importance. Many lies have been told against Karl Marx by the ruling classes. However, he used a scientific method in his writing. he studied the facts. He produced the facts. Sometimes he generalised on the basis of these facts. I first saw this on the pages of Emperors new Clothes. Jared Israel had been written to by Nathan Weinstock who had been a bitter opponent of Israel and this was his way of making amends for some of the lies he had previously lent his name to.

Nathan Weinstock goes on (as well as the quote from Marx) to deal with the issue of dhimmitude which is useful. More useful still are Jared Israel’s corrections to Weinstock and his general comments on this issue. I am now actually in agreement on Weinstock at least partially with Francisco Gil White. There is something which is very strange about Weinstock because he is actually here promoting the “Palestinian people” myth.

However the quote from Marx is really what I wish to focus upon here:

[begin quote here]

 

 [Quote from Marx starts here]

“The Mussulmans, forming about a fourth part of the whole, and consisting of Turks, Arabs and Moors, are, of course, the masters in every respect, as they are in no way affected with the weakness of their Government at Constantinople. Nothing equals the misery and suffering of the Jews at Jerusalem, inhabiting the most filthy quarter of the town, called hareth-el-yahoud, this quarter of dirt between  Mount Zion and Mount Moriah, where their synagogues are situated – the constant objects of Mussulman oppression and intolerance, insulted by the Greeks, persecuted by the Latins and living only upon the scanty alms transmitted by their European brethren. The Jews, however, are not natives, but from distant and different countries, and are only attracted to Jerusalem by the desire of inhabiting the Valley of Jehosophat and to die in the very places where their Redemptor is to be expected.

‘Attending their death,‘ says a French author, ‘they suffer and pray. Their regards turned to that mountain of Moriah, where once rose the temple of Solomon, and which they dare not approach, they shed tears on the misfortunes of Zion, and their dispersion over the world.‘”[2]

[Quote from Marx ends here]

Weinstock continues:

In passing, Marx informs us that Jerusalem had 15,500 inhabitants, including 8,000 Jews and 4,000 Moslems (Arabs, Turks and Moors).

His remarks are confirmed by all contemporary observers. We will leave out the surveys of the Alliance Israelite Universelle, whose objectivity might be questioned by suspicious readers, and rely instead on the accounts of Catholic writers of travel guides for pilgrims to the Holy Land. These edifying tours invariably culminated in the contemplation of the spectacle – both instructive and heartrending – of the downtrodden Jews, living in the most extreme poverty. Frozen in prayer before the Wailing Wall, they formed a living illustration of the degeneration of the “killers of God.” And in order to heighten the impact of this grand finale, a point would be made, before undertaking this final step,  including a visit to the Jewish quarter in the programme.

“This is by far the darkest and most unhealthy part of the whole city. (…) The wretched appearance of the inhabitants and the disgusting state of this district mean that nobody passing through it can forget God’s curse which weighs so visibly on the Jewish people.”[3]

Let’s return to the picture Marx painted of the Jews of Jerusalem.

What does he show us?

* That the Jews inhabit “the most filthy quarter of the town“, “the quarter of dirt.”

* That they were “the constant objects of Mussulman oppression and intolerance,“ without this sparing them the insults of the Greeks and persecution of the Latins.

* That in this period the Jews of Jerusalem were not indigenous (in fact, the Jewish population of the city and the larger area had been growing constantly since the end of the 18th century through the addition of newcomers from the Ottoman Empire and elsewhere) and that they awaited death while praying for redemption.

[Comment by EC editor Jared Israel starts here]

The above paragraph is confused or else there is a typographical error in the original. (The translation is accurate.)

Weinstock states, apparently based on a part of Marx’s text which he does not quote, that as of 1853 the Jewish population of Jerusalem had been growing constantly since the end of the 18th century, that is, for five or more decades. That would mean there was an established indigenous Jewish population in Jerusalem at least before 1800, a century before the first Zionist convention in 1897.

Weinstock states that Jewish newcomers came from within the Ottoman Empire and elsewhere. Those who came from within the Empire were migrating within the borders of a state.  Obviously Muslims were also migrating within this state. None of these migrants, Jews or Muslims, were colonists or even immigrants, but it is only about the Jews that people say, “They were not ‘indigenous.’” Nathan Weinstock makes a similar point below.

Notice that in 1853, 44 years before the first Zionist convention in Basel, Marx wrote that there were twice as many Jews as Moslems in Jerusalem.

According to Marx, the Jews were there because their passion for Jerusalem was so great it overcame their  horror at how they were treated: “…the constant objects of Mussulman oppression and intolerance, insulted by the Greeks, persecuted by the Latins…”

[Comment by EC editor Jared Israel ends here]

 

Nathan Weinstock’s text resumes:

What Marx has described here – and all contemporary observers agreed with him – is quite simply that the Jews of Jerusalem (like other Jews in what is commonly called the Holy Land and as was the rule in the whole Moslem world) were reduced to a status of structural and intrinsically discriminatory degradation, that of being “dhimmis.“

The condition of being a “protected” subject – or dhimmi – at the mercy of the Moslem authorities, is the humiliating status laid down by the Sharia (Islamic religious law) for the minorities of the Book. It therefore also applied to the Christians of the Moslem world, which did not stop them from displaying a virulent anti-Semitism. They seemed to have derived, from the anti-Jewish traditions of the Christian churches, psychological compensation for their daily humiliation by turning on pariahs on an even lower rung of the scale of social respect than theirs. Thus, in 1847, inspired in all likelihood by the Damascus affair,[4] Jerusalem’s Orthodox Christians accused their Jewish fellow citizens of “ritual crime.“[5]

Nothing shows the degraded situation of the dhimmi more clearly than the case of Yemen. In this area, every man carried a curved dagger in his belt. Jews, however, were forbidden to carry a dagger, symbolising the Moslems‘ view of the Jews as sub-human. The degraded status laid down for dhimmis was expressed in discriminatory rules of dress, a ban on riding noble beasts (horses and camels) and the requirement to give way to any Moslem, over whom Jews could obviously not exert any kind of authority, and to pay special taxes (kharaj and jizya) and other additional levies, without this guaranteeing them any protection against repeated attacks by the populace.

Indeed, the “protection” offered to the dhimmis did not safeguard them from persecution. In the Middle East alone (and similar events occurred in North Africa and the whole Arabo-Moslem world), confessional riots and massacres of non-Moslems took place in 1850, 1856 and 1860 in Aleppo, Nablus and Damascus successively. The Jews of Jerusalem, Hebron, Tiberias and Safed were subjected to raids, pillage and extortion throughout the first half of the 19th century.[6] The situation of the dhimmis improved after 1838-40 with the establishment of European consulates in Jerusalem; diplomats demanded that they benefit from the firman of the Sultan of 18 February 1856 granting legal equality to minorities. However, these external interventions produced a backlash, sparking off bloody outbreaks of inter-confessional hatred against the Christians of Lebanon in 1853-60.

When one gives a bit of serious thought to the nature of this structural humiliation inflicted on the dhimmis, the category which springs to mind to cover their condition is that of colonialism. Indeed, the dehumanisation imposed on Jews and Christians as a whole, in contrast to all Moslems, meant that each member of the latter community, irrespective of their social rank, enjoyed a privileged position in relation to the minorities. This corresponds strictly to the condition of the colonised as described by Albert Memmi [7]Thus, historically, the much decried colonialism, whose misdeeds in the Middle East people like to denounce, is perhaps not always to be found where you might expect it. Viewed phenomenologically, the fact is that in the Arabo-Moslem world the subhuman, the “dog,” is first and foremost the Jew.

I am aware that my use of these terms will arouse incomprehension and even indignation in many Moslems whose sincerity I don’t question. They will be keen to remind me that the Jew was a familiar figure in the North African or Levantine [8] scene, that a multitude of ties linked the Jews and their neighbours and that there was a certain mutual dependence between the respective cultures. These are not false observations, but they are hopelessly vitiated by an error of perspective. To use a stark analogy, in the final analysis this proximity of Jews and Moslems was similar to the one between the rider and his horse – with the Jews underneath. The blindness afflicting the Moslem observer in this respect corresponds precisely to that of the colonialist who remembers with great feeling the years of hard work performed at his side by his “boy,” without grasping that their relationship was based on submission. It’s the perception of a [slave owning] southerner.

wards the clash between the Zionist newcomers and the Palestinian peasantry in the “Holy Land.” Away from superficial explanations and fashionable off-the-peg simplifications,

The point of recalling this situation is that it played a role in the birth of and attitudes to

[9] a critical look at the origins of the friction between the Arab population [10] and the Yishuv [11] reveals that the first significant conflict between the two communities had nothing to do with agricultural settlements, the purchase of land or the Zionist project as such. The clash broke out following the decision by the pioneer Jews of Sejera in 1908 to dismiss their Circassian guards and replace them with Jews, with the establishment of the Hachomer (Watchmen) organisation modelled on the self-defence units set up in Eastern Europe to combat pogroms. The reason was the same too – to be able to defend their security and organise their own defence without relying on anyone else. It should be emphasised here that the defence in question was directed against pillaging Bedouin and cattle rustlers who preyed on all the villagers, and not against dispossessed farmers. It was precisely the dismissal of the (non-Arab) Circassian guards which brought resentment against the Zionist settlers to a head. Why? Why did the neighbouring rural Arabs feel affected by this change? The explanation is of stark simplicity: dhimmis are destined to live under Moslem protection. So what right could they, who were less than dogs, have to bear arms and ensure their own defence? In so doing they were disregarding their allotted status of submission.

{The above paragraph by Weinstock needs to be critically examined. He refers to something called the “Zionist Project”. This method of Weinstock is simply unacceptable and is related to Stalinism, the Stalinism of the so-called “Left”, and we as a Trotskyist movement oppose this. What then is the “Zionist Project” as Weinstock refers to it, except it is the wish of the Jewish people internationally to ground their national movement in a national home. It is true that Leon Trotsky in his early life opposed Zionism because he thought that this form of nationalism would be divisive. He also thought that the socialist revolution would wipe out antisemitism. But by the time of the 1930s Trotsky had changed his view fundamentally on this. He stated then on several occasions that the Jews were a distinct nation, that the Jews must have a national home, and that this national home must be in Palestine. At the same time he warned that under capitalism, and with Britain holding the Mandate, that this would not be possible, and that only under a socialist comonwealth could the Jews have the freedom in their national home to practice their religion and ancient culture. So you can see that Weinstock is not coming from that viewpoint but from something very different. The conclusion I reach…Weinstock has not broken from the antisemitism of the so-called “Left”, even though he is criticizing them, and even though he makes useful points which real socialist revolutionaries will be able to incorporate and to use. Lesson…read Weinstock very critically…FQ} 

 

 

The origin of the confessional brawling between Arabs and Jews which broke out in Jaffa in March 1908 is obscure. On the other hand, the underlying reason for the agitation against the Jews of Hebron (who were not newcomers, but people of the old Yishuv, who were, incidentally, opposed to Zionism) in December 1908-January 1909 – is clear, as Henry Laurens has shown from a study of French diplomatic archives. “The Moslem population was called on to boycott Jewish businesses to put the Jews back in their place.“[12] The conservative inhabitants of the town did not at all appreciate the Young Turk revolution and its promises of Ottoman citizenship. The Jews should not get it into their heads that they were equal to others. This Jewish “insolence” required a ruthless reminder of the rules of the confessional hierarchy; the colonised had to be put back in their place. On top of this, minds were being poisoned by the (basically interchangeable) myths of the Jewish conspiracy and the Masonic plot brought in by European anti-Semitism, which were gradually spreading in the Middle East. The nationalist leader Rashid Rida, for example, considered the Young Turk “Union and Progress” Committee as nothing more than an expression of Jewish and Masonic power. These fantasies continue to flourish to this day thanks to constant reading of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and other anti-Jewish ravings of Western origin.

However the most striking fact, judging by the slogans raised, is that the anti-Jewish riots – and it is significant that the attacks were aimed not only at recent immigrants but also (and sometimes mainly) at the old Yishuv which had existed long before the Zionist enterprise, as at Hebron, and even on occasion at the Samaritans, who were not even Jewish – were not driven by opposition to Zionism (property purchase, settlement on land, policy of exclusive employment of Jewish labour). Indeed, anti-colonialist rhetoric was strangely absent from the crowds’ chants. They did not express the aspiration of the masses for independence or a protest against the expulsion of peasants from their land. No. The bloody riots of 1 May 1921 in Jaffa took place to shouts of “Moslems defend yourselves, the Jews are killing your women!“,[13] i.e. by an appeal to a classical archetype of the racist or Southern slave-owner imagination, the exact Middle Eastern equivalent of the obsessive dread encapsulated in the phrase “don’t touch a white woman.”

And on 2 November 1921, anniversary of the Balfour Declaration, what were the slogans yelled out in Jerusalem,[14] by demonstrators armed with clubs and knives in yet another bloody attack on the Jewish population? You might expect slogans expressing the desire of the masses for self-determination or independence. Not at all. Their rallying cry was: “Palestine is ours, and the Jews are our dogs,[15] the law of Mohammed is the sword and the government is but vanity.”[16] Rather than showing a new anti-imperialist awareness, the demonstrators were asserting every Moslem’s inviolable right (“the government is but vanity”) to impose, by the sword, “the law of Mohammed” according to which “the Jews are their dogs.”

This is what people don’t want to hear about.

To complete my demonstration, it should be noted that the explosions of hatred which would bring bloodshed to the Jewish community in the 1920s were mainly directed not against the rural settlements or urban districts created by Zionist immigrants, but the Jews of the old Yishuv, a partly Arabic speaking community which had been present in the area for decades and tended to be against Zionism for reasons of religious conservatism. Nonetheless, in 1929 in Hebron and Safed, the Arab population poured into the Jewish quarters to slit throats, mutilate, castrate and rape their inhabitants in an outpouring of atrocious barbarity. Unlike the Zionist newcomers, these religious Jews had never thought to take any measure of self-defence in case of attack, so they formed an ideal prey for the killers. But what we should note is that this bloodthirsty fury targeted peaceful neighbours, who had nothing to do with conflicts over the Zionist settlement policy and whose only crime was to be Jews.

So, please, spare us the catch-all explanations proffered by lazy minds claiming that everything can be explained by the injustice suffered by the Palestinian people. What we have here is quite simply the results of the dehumanisation of the dhimmis and the dreadful punishment reserved for those wanting to escape their status. At the start of the twentieth century, the members of the old Yishuv became the companions in misfortune of other non-Moslem minorities such as the Assyrians and Armenians, also suspected of seeking to throw off the yoke of dhimmitude.

Finally, the key role played by dhimmitude in the Palestinian conflict is nicely illustrated in the development of the concept of the “Palestinian people.” Henry Laurens has studied the emergence of the term “Palestinian” in about 1908-09. What is striking is that, while the concept of “Palestinian” embraces all the successive waves of Moslem immigration into the Holy Land in the 19th century, whether Arab or not (Houranis from Syria, North Africans, Circassians, Bosniacs, etc.), on the other hand the Jewish elements of that same forming population are excluded. This is the case for the old Yishuv and of Jews from the Arab-Moslem world (from North Africa, Bokhara and Yemen), even when Arabic speaking. Any Moslem can by right join the Palestinian community, any Jew is a priori excluded – thrown to the dogs.

I don’t wish to be misunderstood. It would be absurd to reduce the Israel-Palestinian conflict, which is of unusual complexity, to a single factor, that of dhimmitude. But it would be just as vain to seek to grasp its deep roots without taking into account a structural factor which coloured the Arab perception of the Jew, Israeli or not, from the outset, and continues to do so today. The “Arab rejection” of the Israeli reality and the very legitimacy of a Jewish state in Palestine runs like a red thread through the history of the conflict. This visceral hatred of Israel, the unbearable sense of humiliation which this state arouses cannot, as if often claimed, be explained by the tragedy of the Palestinian refugees. It goes further back: on 15 May 1948, at the very moment when the regular armies of the Arab states crossed the Jordan – and before there was a single Palestinian refugee – the Secretary-General of the Arab League, Azzam Pasha, declared, “This will  be a war of extermination and a momentous massacre, which will be spoken of like the Mongolian massacre and the Crusades.”[17] And nor does it stem from the Israeli presence in the West Bank and Gaza after 1967, since the entire Arab world had boycotted and refused to recognise the Jewish state, which it demonised and swore to destroy, since its proclamation in 1948.

Irrespective of the political conditions shaping a lasting solution to the Israeli-Arab conflict, it first of all requires a revolution in attitudes. The hour of real peace will strike when Israelis are, quite simply, accepted as cross-border neighbours, even though their governments’ policies may arouse disagreement. How one would like to see all those who interminably proclaim their sympathy for the Palestinian cause contribute to this essential change!

Translated by Colin Meade
Letter from Nathan Weinstock follows footnotes for “Stories of Dogs”

See all of the original article in Emperors New Clothes on

http://www.emperors-clothes.com/docs/weinstock.htm