GRAUER, Mina. “Anarcho-Nationalism: Anarchist Attitudes towards Jewish Nationalism and Zionism”

IsraelnationalismPolitics. Sionism

Modern Judaism , Vol. 14, No. 1, pp. 1-19
Much has been written about socialism and Jewish national revival,
especially in the context of the Zionist movement, the Bund and the
socialist parties in Israel. Yet, there exists no dicsussion in the literature
on the anarchists’ perception of the Jewish national problem.
This article surveys the anarchist attitudes towards nationalism and
examines the various answers given by both Jewish and non-Jewish
anarchists to questions pertaining to Jewish national identity, Jewish
political sovereignty, and Zionism. Theoretically, such a discussion
should be very short; since anarchism and nationalism are incompatible,
it stands to reason that anarchists should oppose all forms of
nationalism whenever confronted with the issue. However, ideological
compromises were not alien to the anarchists. Endowed with a healthy
dose of realism, anarchists frequently realized that ideological purity
should at times be sacrificed for the sake of either advancing their
ultimate causes or providing immediate solutions to problems that
could not wait for such times in which the conditions for supplying
“correct” anarchist answers are met. The issue of Jewish national
identity proved to be exactly such a problem. At the risk of transgressing
the boundaries of anarchist dogma, Jewish anarchists looked
for a scheme that would combine anarchist theory with a possible
solution to the Jewish quest for national identity.