The Holocaust: Never Again!

The rise of Jew-hatred in the 21st century

The Holocaust: Never Again!

By James Miller 2025

The persecution of the Jewish people, accused of responsibility for the economic and political crises of the modern world, has turned out to be far more persistent than we could have imagined. After the war, the Holocaust, which had lasted from 1938 to 1945, came to be regarded as “a horrible event in the past.” But as the world economic system weakens and crumbles, it has become increasingly apparent that the Jews of the world have once again become the scapegoats for the failures of the system. A new Holocaust is gathering strength in the early 21^st century, especially after the pogrom committed by Hamas on Oct. 7, 2023.

The Jews—a population composed of a spectrum of nationalities and income levels—were certainly not responsible for the economic chaos in Germany in the wake of WWI. But the Nazi regime that came to power in 1933 nourished itself on the outrageous lie that the Jews were responsible for the suffering of the German people in the years 1919–1928. These lies were duly recorded in Hitler’s book Mein Kampf, published in 1925, and repeated in his speeches to large crowds assembled in German cities.

But Hitler’s antisemitic tirades were not just verbal excesses or the ravings of an unbalanced mind. Hitler’s hatred of Jews was a deep-rooted tradition in Europe, dating back centuries. Hitler wrote and spoke with the perspective of winning over the enormous masses of German workers and farmers who had shifted their hopes to the Socialist and Communist parties in the 1920s. The vast majority of factory workers had organized themselves to such a degree that they were able to exercise virtually complete control over working conditions in the biggest and most productive of the workplaces in Germany.

Hitler claimed that the Jews organized secret conspiracies to plan and carry out diabolical missions to undermine, corrupt, and impoverish decent society. For this, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion proved to be a handbook for understanding Jewish villainy. In Mein Kampf, Hitler wrote:

“How much the whole existence of this people is based on a permanent falsehood is proved in a unique way by ‘The Protocols of the Elders of Zion’, which are so violently repudiated by the Jews. With groans and moans, the Frankfurter Zeitung repeats again and again that these are forgeries. This alone is evidence in favour of their authenticity. What many Jews unconsciously wish to do is here clearly set forth. It is not necessary to ask out of what Jewish brain these revelations sprang; but what is of vital interest is that they disclose, with an almost terrifying precision, the mentality and methods of action characteristic of the Jewish people and these writings expound in all their various directions the final aims towards which the Jews are striving.”

— https://www.amazon.com/Mein-Kampf-Adolf-Hitler-ebook/dp/B0024FA18K

And why does Hitler call attention to the opinions expressed in the Frankfurter Zeitung? Of course, this is a newspaper—one of many—in his view, controlled by Jews. Hitler says:

“It is just for the intellectual demi-monde that the Jew writes those papers which he calls his ‘intellectual’ Press. For them, the Frankfurter Zeitung and Berliner Tageblatt are written, the tone being adapted to them, and it is over these people that such papers have an influence.”

—Hitler, ibid.

In this situation, Hitler needed a good reason for urging these masses of workers to vote for his party, his platform, his perspective. He had to be able to prove why only his movement could rescue them from the miseries they were suffering. He had to make them understand that only his party would rescue them from the Jews. And for Hitler’s success, it was critical for everyone to believe that the Jews were the source of their problems.

Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, a former social studies professor at Harvard, sets the stage for the

“As people’s orientation broadened with modernity’s advent to include a strong regional and national consciousness, antisemites’ concerns remained mainly domestic though expansively so, leading them to worry about how Jews were compromising and harming a country’s or a people’s social and cultural purity, its economy, its public discourse, and its national security. This overwhelmingly domestic orientation also characterized German antisemites during medieval times and into the modern era. Interestingly, among Germans, and principally among them, a shift began to be made, especially after World War I with the Nazis’ focus on the international arena.

“The twofold reason for this altered orientation is clear: the Germans had suffered a crushing defeat at the hands of an international coalition in World War I, and an even more crushing peace at Versailles, crippling the German economy, hemming in its power, and humiliating its people as the people of no other great power had ever been treated. So German antisemites’ gaze widened to include critically the international realm as part of their own. But it was not just that the effect of the international arena was so acutely felt in Germany, it was also that Germans under the Nazis knew that they stood against the world’s major powers while they aspired to establish their own European, if not world, domination. So Germans’ concern with the Jews’ alleged threat took on greater international dimensions.”
— https://www.amazon.com/Devil-That-Never-Dies-Antisemitism/dp/031609787X

Bolshevik leader Leon Trotsky wrote in 1931 describing the developing situation in Germany after the First World War:

“What we are talking about is workers’ control under the capitalist regime, under the power of the bourgeoisie. However, a bourgeoisie that feels it is firmly in the saddle will never tolerate dual power in its enterprises. Workers’ control, consequently, can be carried out only under the condition of an abrupt change in the relationship of forces unfavorable to the bourgeoisie and its state. Control can be imposed only by force upon the bourgeoisie, by a proletariat on the road to the moment of taking power from them, and then also ownership of the means of production. Thus the regime of workers’ control, a provisional, transitional regime by its very essence, can correspond only to the period of the convulsing of the bourgeois state, the proletarian offensive, and the falling back of the bourgeoisie, that is, to the period of the proletarian revolution in the fullest sense of the word.”
—https://www.pathfinderpress.com/products/struggle-against-fascism-in-germany_by-leon-trotsky

The NSDAP, led by Hitler, was a fascist party—“fascism” being a term derived from the symbol of Mussolini’s National Fascist Party in Italy—and was founded in 1919 as an outgrowth of pre-existing extreme right nationalist and antisemitic groupings. The main purpose of fascism is to restore the capitalist order by using forceful methods against the rebellious workers and farmers. The postwar inflation ignited by the exhaustion of Germany’s gold reserves during the war (converting the German mark into a “pariah currency”) was exacerbated after the victorious allies imposed the conditions of the Versailles Treaty in 1920. This treaty required the German government to pay massive financial reparations, initially set at 132 billion gold marks (around $33 billion USD) to cover Allied damages, payable in gold, goods, and exports.

We can readily understand why the wealthy masters of industry and commerce—the German ruling class—were seething. The treaty had converted them into intermediaries between the allied capitalists and the German working class. The workers produced the profits, and the profits were immediately handed over to them. How could they solve this nightmare of economic slavery? They believed that if they could truly control the German nation, and sweep aside all the dissidents and oppositionists, they might have a chance. What they needed was a “strong hand” to provide them with a way to achieve dictatorial power. Much of the impetus for the growth of Hitler’s party was the desire to escape from the suffocating straitjacket of this treaty. Throughout the 1920s, the efforts by the Nazi thugs against the political and trade-union organizations of the working people were to intimidate them and weaken their resolve. Many prominent Germans, such as Hindenburg, were unwilling to admit that their soldiers had been defeated in a fair fight, but had been betrayed.

“The German army had been weakened by the revolutionary atmosphere in the army and at home. He quoted an English general, who had allegedly said: ‘The German army has been stabbed in the back.’

“Hindenburg’s quotation refers to the ‘Stab-in-the-back’ myth. According to this conspiracy theory, the German army had not been defeated on the battlefield, but because social democratic politicians had signed the truce in order to take control. In reality, the army command had made mistakes, and the German army was in no shape to keep on fighting. But generals like Hindenburg and Erich Ludendorff spread the story to avoid having to admit the mistakes they had made.

“Right-wing extremist, nationalist, and antisemitic groups believed that this ‘stab in the back’ was the work of an international Jewish conspiracy.”
— https://www.annefrank.org/en/timeline/193/the-stab-in-the-back-legend/

In the eyes of leading industrial magnates, Hitler was to fulfill the role of the savior of German capitalism by taming the workers and putting them to the new task of preparing for war. And this was to be the all-out war against the Jews. After all, the Jews had conspired to undermine Germany’s military performance on the battlefield, and had also corrupted the vitality of the Russian monarchy, making the victim of the Jewish-inspired Bolsheviks.

Only the genuine Marxists of the world, aided by their intensive studies of the ongoing national and class struggles, were capable of recognizing the catastrophe that was being prepared in the 1930s. In Leon Trotsky’s 1938 “Appeal to American Jews Menaced by Fascism,” he pointed to this interconnection between the coming war and the fascist imperative to destroy the Jews:

“The number of countries that expel the Jews grows without cease. The number of countries able to accept them decreases. At the same time, the exacerbation of the struggle intensifies. It is possible to imagine without difficulty what awaits the Jews at the mere outbreak of the future world war. But even without war, the next development of world reaction signifies with certainty the physical extermination of the Jews.”
— https://www.pathfinderpress.com/products/the-fight-against-jew-hatred-and-pogroms-in-the-imperialist-epoch-1

And as we see from Dave Prince’s introduction to the book The Fight Against Jew-hatred and Pogroms in the Imperialist Epoch, the German working people, betrayed by their leaders, were forced to become cannon folder in a new war. And this war—to the east and to the west—had to be waged against the nations that Hitler claimed had fallen under the control of the Jews.

“The ‘international Jewish conspiracy’ became the common banner of fascist movements. Under that banner, they sought to justify attacks on the working class and its political vanguard, as well as other toilers, and to smash their unions and parties. The triumph of fascism across much of Europe, intertwined with the advancing Stalinist political counterrevolution in the USSR, guaranteed the conflagration to come. Over these decades there was a sharp rise of pogroms—the brutal slaughter of Jews—and then the intensified assault with Adolf Hitler’s ‘Final Solution,’ the mass extermination of six million Jews, in the final years of the war.”
—ibid.

Increasingly, the traditional parties that ruled in the interests of the German bourgeoisie were seen to be at fault for losing the war, for the harsh penalties imposed on Germany by the Versailles treaty, and for the failure to defend the German people from economic misery. These parties fell out of favor in the regularly scheduled elections for parliamentary and local offices throughout Germany in the 1920s. In place of the ordinary liberal and conservative parties, there emerged three parties capturing the bulk of the votes: Socialists, Communists, and Nazis. Hitler’s Nazi party called itself the National Socialist German Workers Party (NSDAP). In the election of 1932, the Nazis won a majority in the Reichstag, so Hitler was appointed Chancellor by President Von Hindenburn in 1933.

As soon as Hitler’s SA (Brownshirts) and Gestapo thugs recognized that the power was in their hands, they began to move against the political opponents of the Nazis, issuing orders for the arrests of Socialists and Communists—these activists were sent to a prison camp in Dachau, Bavaria. The Nazi authorities worked on taking a census of the German population so that all the “Jews” could be identified as such, whether German citizens or residents with some other national identity. Jews were defined as anyone having a Jewish grandparent, and they were expelled from civil service positions in 1933. A policy was adopted to remove Jews from university positions.

In 1935, the Nuremberg laws were promulgated, which outlawed marriages between Jews and non-Jews, prohibited Jews from hiring German employees, and banned the display of the German flag by Jews. On November 9, 1938, the Nazi regime promoted a pogrom centered in the streets where Jewish businesses were located, and this produced widespread destruction, and promoted many to escape from Germany at all costs. By 1939, a majority of German Jews had managed to escape to other countries.

The Holocaust extermination project began in June 1941, when German troops invaded the Soviet Union. Battalions of German soldiers—the Einsatzgruppen—followed the advancing troops into areas of Ukraine, Belarus, Russia, and the Baltic states, rounding up Jews and Communist Party members and killing them, usually with machine guns. Meanwhile, in Chelmno, Poland, starting in December 1941, Jews were transported to a Nazi death camp near the town and gassed in the rear compartment of vans. Then, five other death camps were established in Poland: Auschwitz, Treblinka, Sobibor, Belzec and Majdanek, to which Jews were transported in trains and killed in gas chambers, mainly with hydrogen cyanide gas, known as Zyklon-B. The number of Jews murdered mounted to around 6 million, according to expert estimates.

For more information, visit the Yad Vashem website or the Holocaust encyclopedia:
—https://www.yadvashem.org/holocaust,
—https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/introduction-to-the-holocaust

Also, there are many excellent books that describe how and why the Nazi regime carried out its program of extensive mass murder. I recommend Nora Levin’s Holocaust: Destruction of European Jewry.
—https://www.amazon.com/Holocaust-Destruction-European-Jewry-1933-1945/dp/0690398638

And I recommend The War Against the Jews, by Lucy Dawidowicz
—https://www.amazon.com/War-Against-Jews-1933-1945/dp/B09BSGDYT9

Antisemitism has been centered in Europe and the Middle East since ancient times, but became widely analyzed and documented in Europe, especially after the invention of the printing press in 1540. In the 1930s, the intensification of antisemitic propaganda and action was primarily focused in Western Europe, especially Germany. But now, in the 21^st century, the focus has shifted to Israel, and now Israel is identified as the focus of Jew-hatred, and antisemitism takes the form of slanders and false accusations directed at the Israelis. The form of Jew-hatred is spreading rapidly throughout the world.

After the conclusion of WWII, once news about the Holocaust had been widely disseminated, world leaders began to say, “Never Again”—meaning that such massive crimes would never be repeated in the modern world. U.S. President Truman joined with other world leaders in the United Nations to promote and approve the 1948 Genocide Prevention resolution. If we think back to the prevailing attitudes toward the Holocaust in the post–WWII period, we recognize that there was a moral stain on Germany’s character because of the criminal behavior that was attributed to that nation. A lingering air of disrepute clung to products manufactured in Germany, such as Volkswagen automobiles or Krupp and Thyssen elevators.

The European Parliament established “Holocaust Remembrance Day,” which was established by the United Nations in 2005. In 2002, the president of the European Parliament stated:

“On Holocaust Remembrance day, we remember crimes committed against humanity in the past, but we also remember the importance of speaking up in the present. United in diversity, we speak up against Holocaust deniers, against conspiracy myths, against disinformation and against violence of every kind that target and single out members of our communities.”
—https://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/press-room/20220120IPR21417/never-again-ep-commemorates-international-holocaust-remembrance-day

The menace of antisemitism has become virulent again

But history took a turn, and the evaluation of the Holocaust—and of the Jewish population of the world—began to change in the late 20^th century. As the 21^st century advanced, a new upsurge of Jew-hatred emerged in North America and Europe, once again raising the question whether modern nations could “tolerate” the presence of Jewish communities within the borders, or whether the Jewish presence should be eliminated.

But we must try to understand why antisemitism emerged in the early 21^st century—what motivated it? What forces moved in the direction of making Jews appear to be scapegoats for a broken system? Hitler’s motivation for punishing Jews, and for providing a method to eliminate them from European politics and economics, was that Jews were responsible for the suffering experienced by the German people. Jews were made to appear as inherently malicious corrupters of normal society, and therefore the enemies of good people.

But now, it is not just the Germans who are uniquely prepared to persecute the Jewish people—persecute them to a degree never before imagined—it is the United Nations, the International Criminal Court, and the leaders of most countries in the world. And of course the antisemitic movement is gathering its forces in the name of the struggle to protect the rights of the Palestinians. But how did this come about? And what are the links of continuity that connect the Holocaust of the 1940s to the rising threat of a repetition of something similar in the 21^st century?

We must recall that the Holocaust of the 1940s was initiated and carried through because Germany had suffered an immense economic crisis, impoverishing millions—most of them middle-class professionals and small business operators. While these petty-bourgeois families suffered horribly, most of the workers in industry, mining, construction and transportation were kept on the job, albeit at wages that barely sustained them and their families. And—we should not forget—these workers had gained a high level of class consciousness and were not inclined to heed the warnings and demands of their supervisors on the job.

It was the extreme exasperation of the wealthy ruling class families that demanded that the crisis be resolved through war—war against the Jews and war against the states that were said to be under Jewish control: France, England, Belgium, Denmark, and Holland. Later, the U.S. was included as well.

Now, in the 21^st century, a new economic crisis has slowly taken shape and has brought the advanced capitalist economies to the point of near collapse. Starting from the setbacks experienced by major industries in the U.S. and Europe in the recession of 1974–75, the profit rate has been falling in production sectors where massive quantities of capital have been invested. As Socialist leader Jack Barnes explained,

“We are witnessing a crisis in the world capitalist system. This is expressed in the long-term tendency toward lower rates of economic growth, as well as in sharpening business cycles that have included steep slumps in the mid-1970s and at the opening of the 1980s and of the 1990s. Low rates of investment, generalized indebtedness, socially unsustainable rates of unemployment, and a decline in the rate of profit are just a few of the symptoms of the delicate health of the system.”
—https://www.pathfinderpress.com/products/us-imperialism-has-lost-the-cold-war_by-jack-barnes

When the profit rate declines—a natural consequence of the long-term growth of the capitalist system—each subsequent dollar of capital that is advanced in ongoing production operations (manufacturing, mining, construction, transportation, etc.) reaps less profit than the previous one. Thus, capitalist investors seek more profitable sectors to invest in. This process spurs the growth of financial sectors, such as we began to see in the late 1990s in the innovative tech sectors, and later, in the lead-up to the 2008 crisis, the bundling of real estate mortgages into collateralized debt obligations.

This process has become irreparable in the 2020s. The outstanding debts are unpayable, the fiat currencies are stripped of real value, and the advanced economies are on the brink of collapse. See my essay The irresolvable crisis of the U.S. Dollar:
https://jmiller803.substack.com/p/the-irresolvable-crisis-of-the-us

The crisis demands a deep-going rescue effort, which the existing parties in power are incapable of providing. With no alternative parties on the horizon, the exasperated ruling classes of the advanced countries demand something new—something that does not exist yet. They are thinking they need a “strong man” to make the bold moves that ordinary politicians won’t dare attempt.

Meanwhile, Jew-hatred emerges spontaneously, its progress aided by the stifling atmosphere of “cancel culture” which has achieved the allegiance of the bulk of the professional middle-class professionals in politics, administration, education, and journalism. In my essay on the meritocracy and cancel culture, I wrote:

“Thus, it is not surprising that we see the enlightened “woke” meritocracy on college campuses insist that the faculty and students conform to their ideological dictates. This is their mode of proving their worth to the billionaire class they serve. They utilize “equity, diversity, and inclusion” policies in order to lay down the law that all others under their authority must follow. In this way, they strengthen their commanding role in the universities, as well as in the mass media and the political parties of the rulers. The more they act as infallible authorities, the more secure they feel in their occupations, and the more income they can demand. It does not matter that they remain scientifically ignorant. The criteria that determine their success in the bureaucracies they inhabit have nothing to do with science, democracy, or justice. Their success is rooted in the degree to which their subordinates adhere to the approved “woke” formulas. In this way, they strive to become immune to all challenges and criticisms.”
— https://jmiller803.substack.com/p/cancel-culture-identity-politics

In this stifling atmosphere, whatever becomes a central preoccupation for the pace-setters becomes obligatory for all those subject to the pressures coming down upon them. Cancel culture—identity politics—casts a suspicious eye at those who were born to Caucasian parents. It is their accident of birth that classifies as either guilty, or most likely guilty, of “white supremacy.” One of the most quoted “experts” within the meritocracy, Robin DeAngelo, has given her view of what’s wrong with people who are “white”:

“White people in North America live in a society that is deeply separate and unequal by race, and white people are the beneficiaries of that separation and inequality. As a result, we are insulated from racial stress, at the same time that we come to feel entitled to and deserving of our advantage. Given how seldom we experience racial discomfort in a society we dominate, we haven’t had to build our racial stamina. Socialized into a deeply internalized sense of superiority that we either are unaware of or can never admit to ourselves, we become highly fragile in conversations about race.”
— https://www.amazon.com/White-Fragility-People-About-Racism/dp/0807047414

On the other hand, those individuals born from one or more Black parents are considered as being inherently part of a victimized category of human beings, and, due to this, likely to be virtuous and blameless. It was a characteristic of Hitler’s eugenic system that people had to be characterized as “honorable” or “disreputable” depending on whether their parents were “Aryan” or “Jewish.”

Cancel culture fetishizes the “marginalized communities” (which of course include the Palestinians) as victims. The Israelis, along with the entire world Jewish population, are seen as being the colonizers, the oppressors. As Dr. Aaron T. Walter writes on the website of the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy (ISGAP):

“The premise of this creed is simple. A war is being waged in which the forces of justice and progress are arrayed against the forces of backwardness and oppression. As such, in this war, the normal rules of the game—due process, political compromise, the presumption of innocence, free speech, even reason itself—must be suspended. Indeed, such rules themselves are corrupt, designed by dead white males to uphold their own power.

“Therefore, the absoluteness. Any feature of human existence that creates disparity of outcomes must be eradicated: The nuclear family, courtesy, even rationality itself can be defined as inherently racist, or as evidence of so-called white supremacy. For Jews, this is the ancient hatred, expressed by the silver tongue of anti-racism. Jews undermine the vision of a world without difference. And so the things about Jews that make them different must be demonized so that they can be erased or destroyed:

—Zionism is refashioned as colonialism;

—Government officials justify the murder of innocent Jews;

—Jewish businesses can be looted because Jews ‘are the face of capitalism’.
— https://isgap.org/flashpoint/woke-up-cancel-culture-is-a-form-of-antisemitism/

And of course, the growth of meritocratic authoritarianism in the professional middle class in the early 21^st century came about as a response to the surging levels of inflation and unemployment affecting the masses of workers and farmers. The masses were becoming restless and had to be placed under the firm control of their “superiors.” The ruling class promoted the growth of existing tendencies within the educated middle-class which moved towards the solidification of a bulwark of dictatorial absolutism within the ranks of the political, educational, journalistic and juridical bureaucracies.

Thus, the practices of woke meritocracy became a buffer between the multi-millionaire power brokers on the one side, and the turbulent laboring masses on the other. This buffer emerged, building itself organically, putting together a rigidly “politically correct” atmosphere wherever these meritocrats were in control. They were sure to remain loyal to their wealthy sponsors—not because of any contract or agreement—but because they were very well paid, and were never required to do any genuine work. They created nothing and produced nothing, but they laid down the law—diversity, equity and inclusivity—and won praise for their “intelligence,” “creativity,” and their “irreplaceable service to humanity.”

For a more in-depth analysis of the rise of cancel culture, see my essay: “Cancel Culture, Identity Politics, and the Meritocracy”:
—https://jmiller803.substack.com/p/cancel-culture-identity-politics

Israel as a refuge for the world’s Jews

Well before the Holocaust of the 1940s, the question of the survival of the Jews of the world had been posed in Europe. In 1881, a wave of anti-Jewish progroms swept through western Russia and southeastern Europe. This widespread persecution brought to the fore the reality that Jews had no nation of their own—no police, no army, no military equipment at all. The need had long been felt for a territory where Jews could inhabit in safety.

In this atmosphere, Theodor Herzl’s book, The Jewish State, was published in 1895 and the first Zionist congress was held in 1896. Among millions of European Jews, the idea of targeting Palestine as a location for the “ingathering of the exiles” was natural, since the vast majority of them were already familiar with the Torah, the Pentateuch, or the Old Testament, which contained lengthy stories about of the Jews, or Hebrews, as a powerful nation which existed in that area, with its capital city in Jerusalem. But Jews had become stateless after their defeat by the Roman Empire in the year 70. So, with funding from Jewish benefactors, many adventurous European Jews began emigrating to Palestine, seeking to start a new life there.

As the Jewish immigration increased, the Palestinian Arab resistance grew. The Hebron massacre of 1929 marked a turning point. Yardena Schwartz examined this process in her book Ghosts of a Holy War. She stated:

“The massacre of Jews in the Holy Land nearly a century ago was on a scale far smaller than October 7 [1923]. Yet it transformed the region into what we know today. Hebron, the burial place of Abraham, became ground zero of the world’s most enduring conflict. The massacre in Hebron did not just destroy one of the world’s most ancient Jewish communities. It set the stage for the Holy War still raging at this time. Jews had lived in Hebron, their second holiest city, since the days of Abraham. Their pious lives were centered around the Tomb of the Patriarchs and Matriarchs, where the Jewish forefathers and mothers are believed to be buried. The 1929 massacre ended centuries of peaceful coexistence between Jews and Muslims in Hebron. Today that city is the face of the settlement movement, the place where Israeli control over Palestinian life is on fullest display. Hebron has since produced some of the most radical Israelis and Palestinians.”
—https://www.amazon.com/Ghosts-Holy-War-Palestine-Arab-Israeli/dp/145494921X.

Much has been written about the subsequent years of Arab-Israeli conflict and wars, but it has been summarized succinctly by Dave Prince in his introduction to the 2020 updated version of The Jewish Question: A Marxist Interpretation, by Abram Leon

“With borders still shut tight by Washington, London, and other imperialist powers, Jewish survivors of the Nazi extermination effort looked to Palestine as a refuge from misery and persecution. They looked to, and some 700,000 found ways to go to, what in May 1948 was proclaimed the State of Israel, a Jewish state. It was recognized within hours by U.S. president Harry Truman, followed soon by the Soviet Union—the first two governments in the world to do so.

“Leon explains that his treatment in this book of the Zionist movement is limited to its inability to offer a solution to the Jewish question. The place of ‘Zionism in Palestine, of course, is another question,’ he writes. There is no answer to that question that does not address what has been wrought since the end of World War II by capitalism and the class struggle in the Middle East and internationally. That includes both the enduring fact of Jew-hatred, as breakdowns of the imperialist world order multiply, and the unresolved national dispossession of Palestinians.

“Israel is nearing its seventy-fifth year as a state, with a population encompassing working people who are Jews, Arabs, and others. For decades, workers, peasants, and the oppressed across the Mideast and North Africa have been wracked by the treachery, bankruptcy, and rot of Stalinist, bourgeois nationalist, and Islamist political currents falsely claiming to speak and act on their behalf. And never have the Palestinian people been more bereft of political leadership either capable, morally fit, or above all of a proletarian class composition and outlook able to advance the struggle for their national aspirations.”
— https://www.pathfinderpress.com/products/jewish-question-a-marxist-interpretation_by-abram-leon_2

The offensive against Israel

Recognizing that the growth of anti-Zionist antisemitism started well before the formation of the state of Israel, we should also note the world-wide spread of the influence of the Islamic-based antisemitism represented by the Muslim Brotherhood, and its spin-off group Hamas. The organization of anti-Israel activity by these organizations based in Egypt and Palestine, starting in the late 1920s, evolved into an alliance with Hitler’s forces, and open support for the mass murder of Jews by the Nazi regime.

And, as we know, the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas, and other Islamist groups promoted their influence on a world scale. It is well known by now that they were able to gain wide support in the countries composing the United Nations, especially in the wake of the founding of Israel in 1948. The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) came to be dominated by Hamas and was effectively used to undermine support for Israel’s existence in world politics. In North America and Europe, the influence of Islamist Jew-hatred took the form of the “Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions” movement, based primarily on college campuses. As former Harvard professor Daniel Jonah Goldhagen wrote:

“More generally, the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, known as BDS, which was established in 2005 after a call for such action in the official final declaration of the NGO Forum at the United Nations’ World Conference Against Racism 2001 in Durban (discussed more below as the antisemitic conclave that it was), is driven mainly by Palestinian NGOs. Tapping into the world of NGO alliances that Arab and Palestinian politics have formed, and employing the antisemitic tropes and rhetoric discussed here, it has been gaining steam since its founding.”
—https://www.amazon.com/Devil-That-Never-Dies-Antisemitism/dp/031609787X

While the BDS movement did not have a strong presence on many college campuses, its activity on the campus of Columbia University in New York was particularly successful. As the National Association of Scholars, in a in a history of the BDS movement in the United States (available for download free of cost) titled “The Company They Keep”:

“The success of BDS at Columbia University derives from the combined effort of SJP [Students for Justice in Palestine] and JVP [Jewish Voice for Peace] that resulted in the founding of Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD).69 At Columbia, CUAD acts as an umbrella for the pro-BDS movement, despite the SJP serving as its core activist engine. After several failures to pass a BDS resolution, Columbia passed its first BDS referendum in 2020.70 At Columbia, SJP’s efforts were far from isolated, as the group’s intersectional appeals led to multiple endorsements from student groups far-removed from the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. The expanse of such endorsements highlights SJP’s organizational reach and collaborative power. The BDS movement is not a fringe campus element, but rather a part of the campus mainstream.”
— https://www.nas.org/reports/the-company-they-keep

The wave of organized student protests that began in 2023 after the October 7, 2023, murderous Hamas massacre in Israel demonstrated to the world not only how deeply ingrained anti-Israel had become among college students, but also how often they insisted that there was no connection between antisemitism and opposition to Israel’s war. The waged by the Israel Defense Force in Gaza was characterized as “genocidal,” as if the Israelis had become cold-blooded killers of innocent men, women and children, akin to the Nazis.

But there is nothing “genocidal” about Israel’s attempts to defend its existence as the only place on earth that is devoted to the defense of Jewish lives. Clearly, the slogan “from the river to the sea” implies the eradication of the state of Israel. We often hear calls for a “two-state solution.” But these invariably include pledges to cease hostilities, or lay down arms. But Israel cannot agree to stop defending itself militarily. In the present circumstances, and for the foreseeable future, the powers that govern Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen, and Iran will take advantage of any opportunity to renew their offensives against Israel. Israel is truly fighting for the existence of a Jewish community in the only place it currently exists. While Jews live in the United States, Canada, Europe, and elsewhere, the Jewish population in Israel is the bastion of Jewish survival.

And we must recognize that Israel’s military action against its enemies: the Iranian regime, the Houthis in Yemen, Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Palestine, is defensive, not aggressive, and not genocidal. To recognize this clearly, we need to examine the function of the tunnels of Gaza. These tunnels were built to protect Hamas operatives in the context of a future bombing campaign in Gaza by the IDF. John Spencer, instructor at the Urban Warfare Institute, explains the strategy of Hamas to successfully deal blows at Israel:

—“For the first time in the history of tunnel warfare, however, Hamas has built a tunnel network to gain not just a military advantage, but a political advantage, as well. Its underground world serves all of the military functions described above, but also an entirely different one. Hamas weaved its vast tunnel networks into the society on the surface. Destroying the tunnels is virtually impossible without adversely impacting the population living in Gaza. Consequently, they put the modern laws of war at the center of the conflict’s conduct. These laws restrict the use of military force and methods or tactics that a military can use against protected populations and sites such as hospitals, churches, schools, and United Nations facilities.

“Almost all of Hamas’s tunnels are built into civilian and protected sites in densely populated urban areas. Much of the infrastructure providing access to the tunnels is in protected sites. This complicates discriminating between military targets and civilian locations—if not rendering it entirely impossible—because Hamas does not have military sites separate from civilian sites. Hamas’s strategy is also not to hold terrain or defeat an attacking force. Its strategy is about time. It is about creating time for international pressure on Israel to stop its military operation to mount.

“Hamas is globally known for using human shields, which is the practice of using civilians to restrict the attacker in a military operation. The group wants as many civilians as possible to be harmed by Israeli military action—as one of its officials put it, ‘We are proud to sacrifice martyrs.’ It wants the world’s attention on the question of whether the IDF campaign is violating the laws of war in attacking Hamas tunnels that are tightly connected to civilian and protected sites. It wants to buy as much time as is needed to cause the international community to stop Israel. Its entire strategy is built on tunnels.”
—https://mwi.westpoint.edu/urban-warfare-project-podcast-the-tunnels-of-gaza/

The crisis of capitalism and the changing role of Israel

As we look through Maxime Rodinson’s book Israel, a Colonial-Settler State, we soon come across the statement:

“Thus, for the Arabs, Israel is an imperialist base set up in the Middle East by British imperialism in collusion with others; it is part of a worldwide imperialist system; and therefore the activity it carries on throughout the world, whether on its own behalf or on behalf of American and European imperialism, is of an imperialist nature. This at least is the most common view; and while it comes out of left-wing circles, it is accepted on a much broader scale.”
—https://www.abebooks.com/9780873488662/Israel-Colonial-Settler-State-English-French-0873488660/plp

By the beginning of the 20^th century, the world had become divided into two sectors: the oppressors and the oppressed—the colonizers and the colonized. Many politically aware people in the Arab and Persian Middle East recognized their own countries as being among the colonized peoples of the world. Algeria had already suffered the heavy hand of French colonialism in the 1870s; Egypt was familiar not only with Napoleon’s army, but the British forces as well. Further east, all the nations that were included under Ottoman rule were well familiar with the defeats suffered over centuries in their wars with Western Europe, which included, in the late 19^th century, the Crimean war and the Serbian war.

During the gradual rise of capitalism in the West, and its growing mastery of the seas and rapid development of expertise in gunpowder, cannons, and rifles, victory over the Ottomans was increasingly assured, although it wasn’t complete until 1918. These European and North American adventurers, trailblazers, colonists, and warriors were rewarded with conquest, wherever they chose to fight—from Mexico to Argentina, and from Oceania to Indonesia. And the Middle Eastern regimes, Sunni or Shiite, Arab or Persian, experienced the sting of defeat, whether directly or indirectly. Victory was the prize for those who had become best prepared to seize it.

The facts leading to the creation of the state of Israel are undeniable. We should look back at the First World War and its aftermath. The winners of that war, especially France and Britain, not only sought to squeeze whatever wealth they could out of the defeated Germans, but their defeat of the Ottoman empire, based in Turkey, opened up new sources of wealth for them in the Middle East. The British and French imperialist regimes, anticipating their victory negotiated what became the “Sykes-Picot Agreement,” which relegated Palestine, Jordan and, Iraq to be under British control (referred to as a “mandate”), while Lebanon and Syria were assigned to the French mandate. This is one of those arrangements that reveals the imperialist character of that war. Given the British control over Palestine, there was nothing to stop them from granting to the Zionist movement the opportunity to freely move Jews into Palestine and to settle there. This support for Jewish settlement was codified in the Balfour Declaration, written in the form of a letter by the British foreign secretary Arthur Balfour in 1917, inviting the Zionist movement to make a “national home” for the Jews in the territory of the British mandate. The Balfour letter states:

“His Majesty’s Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavors to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.”
—https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/text-of-the-balfour-declaration

As of 1917, there were already some 60,000 Jewish settlers in Palestine, having moved there hoping to establish a new life in a land that was considered to be the homeland of the Jews prior to their defeat by a Roman army in the year 70 AD. This expulsion of Jews created the Jewish diaspora—a people without a land. Thenceforth, the Jews lived in cities throughout Europe and the Middle East, maintaining their distinct customs and religion, deriving the bulk of their income from commercial and financial activities. There are many excellent resources to study the history of the Jews, but for a good summary, see my essay, “Why Blame the Jews?”
—https://jmiller803.substack.com/p/why-blame-the-jews

As the Jewish colonists gradually increased their population in Israel, the Arab resistance grew, leading to a major clash in 1936 in which the Jewish settlers formed military organizations and the Palestinian semi-feudal leadership bodies moved towards forming an alliance with Hitler. In 1921 the British mandate authorities had appointed Amin al-Husseini to be the Mufti of Jerusalem, the Palestinian’s most authoritative leader. Husseini was a committed antisemite who celebrated Hitler’s rise to power and met with the Fuhrer in 1941, thereafter working as a publicist for the Nazis during the Holocaust.

But the Jewish colonial settlers in Palestine had survived, and in 1945 Palestine became a very desirable destination for many thousands of Jewish Holocaust survivors in Europe, as well as Jews in Middle Eastern countries. While the British armed forces, still operating to enforce the mandate, sought to stop many ships bringing Jews to Palestine, thousands of them broke through, and by 1948 there were over 600,000 Jews in their designated “holy land.” The formation of the state of Israel was approved by the United Nations.

In 1948, the armies of the newborn state defeated the attempts by the military forces of Egypt, Jordan, and Syria to crush the Jewish baby in its crib. Thus, Israel survived and prospered, fighting additional defensive wars in 1956, 1967, 1973 and 2006, and in so doing preserved its character as a colonial settler state. And, though the Israeli army did not invade or conquer Egypt, Lebanon or Syria, it did, in fact, occupy Gaza (under Egyptian administration) and the West Bank (considered under the authority of the Jordanian ruler, King Hussein) in the wake of the 1967 war, and in this way continued to reveal its character as a colonial-settler state.

The occupation of the West Bank territories (called Judea and Samaria by the Israelis) was considered by many Israeli leaders, especially those influenced by religious concerns, to be a fulfillment of the destiny of the Jewish people in the land of their ancestors. However, many Israelis with a more practical sense of political priorities considered the occupation of Jordanian territory a bad idea. A debate broke out after the Six-Day War over whether the occupation of the West Bank should continue. Two movements emerged: one in favor of making Israel’s occupation permanent, and one for withdrawing all Israeli forces. This division of opinion is still reverberating in Israeli politics to this day. We read in an article by Omer Einav titled “The Watershed Moment: The Influence of the Soldiers’ Talk and the Movement for Greater Israel on Israeli Discourse”:

“Nonetheless, the two movements were very different. The Movement for Greater Israel unambiguously opposed returning the territories that Israel had captured during the war. This was the message conveyed in the collection of articles Everything: The Peace Borders of the Land of Israel, at the movement’s founding meeting, and in the manifesto of the movement.”
—https://www.inss.org.il/publication/six-days-fifty-years/

And as Maxime Rodinson wrote in 1973:

“But in 1967, Israel clearly emerged from the war in the role of an annexationist, expansionist, and occupying power, ruling over vast new Arab territories and population masses who remained ‘stuck’ to them. On the other hand, this outcome badly discredited all the Arab governments to whom the Palestinian refugees had looked for rescue. Israel thus promoted the very conditions for the growth of disillusionment at home and a shift in public opinion abroad, an increasing loss of faith in its democratic image and in the honor of its war aims, especially among the young. Simultaneously, it spurred the development of an independent and popular resistance movement among the Palestinians.”
—Rodinson, ibid.

But now, we need to step back and take a wider look at the world in the Israel-Arab conflict is taking place. It is a world in which the capitalist system prevails in the world’s most powerful nations. But we see that the history of capitalism has passed through and beyond its creative and progressive phase. This phase ended for North America and Europe in the 1970s. That’s a rough estimate for a break in the curve of development—the point at which the downward phase began. In my essay “The Irresolvable Crisis of the U.S. Dollar” I pointed to this break:

“But if we accept the conclusion that capitalism cannot be indefinitely prolonged with an endless series of modifications, repairs, amendments, and restorations—generation after generation, century after century—then we must consider the idea that it will become outmoded and due for replacement in the future, or that it is due for replacement even now. Of course, this is what Marx discovered, understood, and explained. The process that calls forth capitalism’s decline and demise is the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. Marx stated in Capital, Vol. III.
—https://jmiller803.substack.com/p/the-irresolvable-crisis-of-the-us

Later, I quoted from Socialist Workers Party leader Jack Barnes, who explained the impact of the falling rate of profit:

“The falling average rate of industrial profit accruing to the ruling capitalist families in the imperialist countries lies behind the evolution of the economic factors that make the initiation of a worldwide depression inevitable in the coming years. As a result of this fall, starting as early as the mid-l 960s in Britain and as late as the mid-l970s in Japan, a crisis of decelerating capital accumulation has been deepening throughout the major world capitalist economies.

“The postwar high point in the average profit rate of the industrial capitalists in the United States came within a half-decade of the end of World War II. At that time, the U.S. employing class was still riding the crest of a war-driven rise in capital accumulation initially fueled by massive military production and by the rulers’ success, with the union officialdom’s jingoistic collaboration, in sharply increasing the exploitation of labor.”

—https://www.pathfinderpress.com/products/new-international_number-10_imperialisms-march-toward-fascism-and-war_by-jack-barnes

Given the intensification of crisis conditions throughout the world in the late 20^th and early 21^st centuries, the Jewish question has come to the fore again, as it did in the German crisis of the 1920s—and for the same reason. Now another Holocaust is posed, even on a much wider scale than in the 1940s. “The Jews are to blame,” say many voices. Or they might say “from the river to the sea.” It’s the same thing. Let’s finish this with a statement of the newspaper of the Socialist Workers Party, the Militant:

“Jews and the imperialist epoch

“The right of Israel to exist is not rooted in ancient history, when Jews, Arabs, and countless other tribes lived side by side in the same part of the world millennia ago.

“The necessity for Israel to exist was decided in the imperialist epoch, opened in the final years of the nineteenth century. It was decided amid the disintegration of feudal relations across Eastern Europe, home to millions of Jews; the growing dominance of industrial capitalism; and the imperialist conflicts that led to World Wars I and II and their deadly consequences for hundreds of millions.

“The right and necessity for Israel to exist were decided by the virulent targeting of Jews by Hitler’s Nazi regime, which seized power in Germany in 1933 and culminated in the mass slaughter of Jews across Europe in the Holocaust. In the epoch of imperialism, the fight against Jew-hatred is a class question for workers, wherever we live and toil. At the same time, it is a national question intertwined with the fight against all national oppression everywhere in the world.

“As history has shown us, at times of deepening capitalist economic and social crisis, especially as the propertied classes begin fearing a challenge by workers and farmers to their own wealth and political rule, sections of the rulers promote Jew-hatred as one of the principal banners of reaction. They try to convince insecure layers of the middle classes, who fear being driven into the working class, as well as demoralized workers, that Jews are the cause of their social misery — not capitalism, not the exploiting classes, not the imperialist world order. Under such conditions, groups of capitalists begin financing and fostering fascist and Nazi thugs to assault and try to destroy trade unions and working-class political parties, spewing Jew-hating demagogy as they do so.”
—https://themilitant.com/2025/06/27/defend-israels-battle-to-prevent-another-holocaust-us-troops-bases-and-warships-out-of-the-mideast/