Summary
Belgian Jewish revolutionary socialist whose The Jewish Question is, in Israel: The Hijack State — America’s Watchdog in the Middle East, recognised as the authority on the Jewish question by Jewish and non-Jewish opponents of Zionism, and whose analysis of Jews as brokers for imperialism frames the work’s closing argument (lines 1429-1437).
Details
- The Acknowledgements name Leon among the authors exhaustively quoted throughout the work, mostly Jewish anti-Zionists (lines 71-79).
- The Origins of Zionism chapter’s note 1 states that its argument on the economic roots of antisemitism forms part of the basis for Leon, The Jewish Question (New York 1970) (lines 819-821).
- Leon was a Jewish leader of the illegal revolutionary socialist movement in Belgium during the Nazi occupation; on the eve of the war he completed The Jewish Question, attempting the first thorough Marxist analysis of Jewish history; he was arrested by the Gestapo and gassed to death in Auschwitz (lines 1429-1431).
- His analysis is sharpened, in Rose’s account, by his own previously deeply-held Zionist commitment and his personal struggle to understand and overcome it; it anticipated Jews transformed into Zionists and then “brokers” for British and American imperialism in the Middle East: “Using the Jews as a counterweight to the Arab threat” (line 1431, Leon p.251).
- The Jewish role of broker or “middleman” in nineteenth-century Poland and Russia is, in Leon’s account as Rose presents it, the key to understanding the roots of modern Antisemitism (lines 1433-1435).
Related pages
Israel: The Hijack State — America’s Watchdog in the Middle East, Antisemitism, Zionism, Socialism