Copy of Scapegoat - Andrea Dworkin - pdf

and 1914 [that] made the creation of Israel possible. ”24 He points to David
Ben-Gurion, Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, Levi Eshkol, and Bert Katznalson, all of
whom “were determined revolutionaries who imported ideas about communal
living from nineteenth century Russia, together with a commitment
to the secular asceticism of Russian revolutionaries. ”25 They wanted
an ethnically distinct communism, a Jewish socialism, radical and secular.
With the civil unrest that preceded the Russian Revolution, more Jews
came to Palestine; and this wave, too, was radical, secular, and shaped the
premises of the Israeli state; “[t]hey started building a military force, patiently
and consistently. ”26 Israels first three heads-of-state came to Palestine
before 1914; the fourth, Golda Meir, came in 1921. In Russia, the
czar was deposed, his family murdered; and the red Russians established
the Soviet Union. Nearly three million Jews were facing death from
famine and armed conflict in the new Soviet state; and “ [t]ens of thousands
of Jews were being murdered by marauding bandits. Entire villages
were wiped out in fierce fighting between [the] Soviets and the Poles. ”27
This was the practice, not the theory.
Given czarist support for the pogroms— in fact, making them state policy—Jewish
tears were not shed when the Romanovs met their maker; and
Soviet communism promised Jews inclusion, dignity, and a repudiation of
classic (class-based) anti-Semitism. Lenin’s first cabinet was in fact “dominated
by men of Jewish origins: Trotsky, the leader of the Petrograd coup
and founder of the Red Army; Kamenev, and Zinoviev, Lenin's righthand
man... Sverdlov was now president of the Party’s Central Committee, and
Karl Radek, Maxim Litvinov, A. A. Yoffe, and others all held prominent
positions. With the exception of Litvinov, they all registered their nationalities
as Great Russian, not Jewish. ”28 Marxists of Jewish descent “transposed
their loyalties to the global proletariat. ”29 They wanted to be in the vanguard
and just plain folks, too. They wanted power and equality. They had
a luminous idea that would cannibalize them.
In those early, formative years, it was the unimportant Stalin, later a
mass killer and virulent anti-Semite, who wrote the position paper on
what Soviets called “nationalities, ” which included, but was not limited
to, Jews. Socialism, he said, must resist nationalism; he meant ethnic
bonding, subcultural loyalties; for the Jews the dynamic was clear and
widely welcomed— if Jews were Soviets, there would be no basis for anti-
Semitism. The defining of nationalities was not seen as an ominous contradiction
in the communist idea; nor was anti-Semitism seen as
intractable.