Summary
The first major theoretician of socialist Zionism in Zachary Lockman’s account, whose pre-First World War works make no mention of Palestine’s Arabs at all — the case Lockman uses to show that even socialist Zionism shared the dominant representation of the indigenous population as invisible or marginal (Comrades and Enemies: Arab and Jewish Workers in Palestine, 1906-1948, lines 490-500).
Details
- Syrkin (1868–1924) published “The Jewish Question and the Socialist Jewish State” a year after the First Zionist Congress, to which he was a delegate, synthesising an ethical, utopian rather than Marxist socialism with Zionism: only the proletarianised Jewish masses could realise Zionism, which therefore had to be socialist in content, and there could be no solution to the Jewish problem without a Jewish state (Comrades and Enemies: Arab and Jewish Workers in Palestine, 1906-1948, lines 490-494).
- For a few years after the Seventh Zionist Congress (1905) he quit the Zionist Organization and headed the Russian socialist wing of the Territorialist movement, which treated Palestine as only one of several possible sites; by 1909 he had returned to the Palestine-oriented mainstream by joining Po’alei Tziyon, and he came to be regarded as the intellectual godfather of labour Zionism in the non-Marxist, social-democratic form embodied in Mapai from 1930 onward (lines 494-496; Chapter 1 note 24).
- None of his pre-war theoretical or programmatic works makes any implicit or explicit mention of Arabs or of an “Arab problem”. He proposed acquiring Palestine from the Ottoman government by purchase, diplomacy, or European democratic and proletarian pressure, best by aiding the oppressed Christian peoples of the empire — Macedonians, Armenians and Greeks — after whose victory mixed territories would be partitioned with peaceful exchanges of population: “Eretz Yisra’el, which is very sparsely populated and in which Jews are even today 10 percent of the population, should be turned over to the Jews” (lines 496-500).
- Lockman’s judgement: for Syrkin as for Herzl, Palestine’s indigenous population was to be the object of power politics, to be moved elsewhere to satisfy European needs and aspirations, and was not entitled to national rights in Palestine equivalent to those Jews were presumed to possess; where Syrkin envisioned that population’s emigration to make room, Ber Borokhov imagined its disappearance through assimilation (lines 500, 524-528).
Related pages
Comrades and Enemies: Arab and Jewish Workers in Palestine, 1906-1948, Ber Borokhov, Po’alei Tziyon, Labor Zionism, Mapai