The roots of Zionism: A toxic mixture of international Jewish socialism and Jewish nationalist colonialism

'A complex diplomatic entanglement'
(Al Jazeera English) -- By Mark LeVine --

The Israeli-Russian relationship is one of the most complex and intriguing diplomatic entanglements in international politics. Its roots lie at the heart of Zionism as a practical settlement enterprise rather than a merely utopian idea.

Indeed, without events in Russia, it is hard to imagine Israel having come to be.
The movement's founders, men such as Theodor Herzl and Chaim Weizmann, came out of a German and French speaking milieu; their focus in the movements first years were on cementing the idea of reestablishing a Jewish homeland in Palestine/Eretz Yisrael, securing its political support from the major European powers, and if possible, the Ottoman Sultan, and establishing plantation-style colonies financed by wealthy Jews that employed largely Palestinian labour.

These policies, which can loosely be termed "political Zionism," did not succeed in creating conditions suitable for large scale immigration.

At the same time, however, events in Russia helped prompt the first major wave of Jewish immigration to Palestine, known as the "Second Aliya", which lasted from 1904 to 1914 and saw 40,000 Jews emigrate from Russian-speaking lands to Palestine.

Socialist ideology

Building on the work of "pioneering" organisations such as the "Biluim" and "Hovevei Tzion" of the late 19th century, this wave of immigration was caused by an upsurge in pogroms against Jews across Russia at the turn of the century.
This violence coincided, crucially, with the spread of socialist and even Bolshevik ideas across Russia, which attracted a large number of Jews because of its promise of equality and an improvement in their often miserable living conditions.

Within a decade of their arrival in Palestine, the "practical Zionism" of the Russian-born leaders of the Second Aliyah, including the founding prime minister of Israel, David Ben-Gurion - born in Warsaw, which was then part of Russia - had effectively taken over the Zionist movement from within.

They were helped by a doubling of the number of Russian-speaking Jewish immigrants who arrived during the next, or third wave of immigration that lasted from 1919 to 1923.

Their socialist ideology, focus on agricultural labour and close settlement of the land through the "conquest" of land and labour, created the guiding framework for Jewish colonisation of Palestine under British rule, establishing the territorial, social, economic and political foundations for Jewish sovereignty.

Shedding diaspora identity

But if many of the movement's leaders came from Russia and Russian-speaking territories, their migration to Palestine marked an abrupt end of their identification with their previous homelands.

The basic ideology of Zionism considered aliyah to be a negation of diaspora identities in favour of the creation of a "new Jew".

Life in Russia was seen as part of a past that needed to be left behind. Immigrants were supposed to learn and speak exclusively Hebrew as quickly as possible and otherwise shed their previous cultural characteristics, at least outwardly, in favour of the official Zionist ideology.

Russia itself ceased to exist, having been replaced by the Soviet Union after the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917.

Preoccupied with jump-starting its own industrialisation and with controlling the complex political geography of the still young Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the Soviet Union did not have much direct involvement in Palestine during the three decades of British rule there.

Officially, however, it adopted an anti-Zionist ideology, seeing Zionism's nationalist grounding as opposed to the global and anti-nationalist ethos of Communism.

However, the Soviet Union played a pivotal role in the creation of the state of Israel, voting in favour of the 1947 Partition Resolution and being the first country to officially recognise the new Jewish state.

The strongly socialist ideology of Israel's government made it a natural ally for the Soviet Union despite the official anti-Zionist policies of Stalin. He believed that its rise would help spell the end of British power in the Middle East.

But any potential strategic alignment was scuttled by the time of the Suez crisis in 1956, which saw Israel ally with Great Britain and France against Egypt and the
beginning of large scale military sales and support for Israel's main enemies, such as Egypt, Syria and later Iraq, by Warsaw Pact countries...MORE...LINK
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Chris Moore comments:

If the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact between Nazi Germany and Communist Russia hadn't been betrayed by Hitler, and had matured into a full-fledged conspiracy to rule the world, its outcome might have looked something like a Gentile version of Zionism writ large, which, as the article above suggests, is itself a combination of national socialism and international socialism, in Jewish form.

Fortunately, Hitler's insatiable megalomania and power greed (and yes, hatred for Jewish Bolshevism) compelled him to a premature stab in the back of Stalin and the Communists, which provided the last vestiges of the Christian West the opening that was key to bringing him down.

Unfortunately, international Jewish socialism had its hooks well into America at that point (the Democrats in particular), so the U.S. was already teetering away from Christianity and towards quasi-socialism and runaway crass materialism itself -- which gave wealthy and powerful Jewish collectivists like FDR's manipulative Treasury Secretary Henry Morganthau and his backers the opening that they needed to steer the corrupt FDR/Truman administrations away from what should have been the showdown with Stalin that General Patton wanted and lobbied for. Instead, Morganthau and his ilk saw to it that Eastern Europe was turned over to the Communists (for political purposes, Wall Street and Jewish international capital purposes, and purposes of sheer vindictiveness) and Eastern European/Russian Christian civilization would thus be subjected to decades more of murderous statist social-engineering (or what the Jewish neocons like to call "preventive war" and nation building).

The lessons from this are legion, but the main lesson is: never trust coalitions of anti-Christians, be they Jewish international socialists and leftists, Jewish national socialists and American money-worshippers, or just plain old decrepit statist Democrats and Republicans.

The other main lesson is that ethnocentric diaspora Jewish collectivists employing statism (be they Right or Left) work as a loose unit, and should not be evaluated as relatively impotent atomized individuals or even special interests, but rather as, operationally, a sovereign nation unto themselves pursuing their own agenda and interests -- essentially a virtual Israel that operates loosely and unofficially, but is no less cohesive and consciously self-orchestrating than the Zionist motherland.

It is only through such and understanding that the International Nation of Zion, its history, its agenda, and its threat, can be fully comprehended -- even by the blinkered and duped lower levels of its own membership.