Zionism as Heresy: Why Socialism and Islam Can't Tolerate the Jewish Collective
Long before Israel existed, Jews were cast by socialists and Muslims as an existential threat - not for their actions, but for what they symbolized. Zionism simply made that perceived threat visible.
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Unlike Germany’s National-Socialism, the earlier form of international socialism , which continues to exist to this day, as well as Arab socialism (which cloaks itself in the international model while preserving strong nationalist features, as seen in Iraq, Syria, and Algeria), does not seek the racial extermination of Jews, but rather their elimination as a national-economic factor. Therefore, it is inherently anti-Zionist.
Interestingly, both Marxist socialism and Arab socialism view Jews similarly: as individuals worthy of existence, but not as a legitimate national collective. The root of this lies in the perceived danger of Jews as a distinct collective entity. In Marxist theory, this danger stems from the association of Jews with the core of the bourgeoisie. In Arab Islamic socialism, Judaism is seen as a religion that must remain in a state of humiliation to preserve the proper religious hierarchy.
Unsurprisingly, most Muslims perceive Jews as a religion, not a nation - a view not unlike that of Marxist orthodoxy, which also reduces Jewish identity to religion alone. But unlike Islam, which permits this religious identity to persist under subjugation, Marxism holds that even this identity should eventually disappear. Jewish nationalism, like the jewish religion as a whole, in this framework, is simply another facet of inherent Jewish bourgeois identity.
In a sense, then, Zionism itself is not the root problem for Islam and global socialism, but rather a symptom of a deeper issue: the existence of Jews as a religious group and as an economic class.
This perceived “problem” is reflected most sharply in the success of the Zionist project - religious in its cultural identity and bourgeois-capitalist in its economic nature.
Even when Israel was a social democracy, the issue remained unresolved. This explains the ideological frustration of non-Jewish socialists with early Jewish Marxist thinkers such as Ber Borochov or Yaakov Hazan, who believed that a “Jewish socialism” was possible.
According to Marxist orthodoxy, however, the attempt by a Jew to become a socialist is merely an effort to shed their bourgeois skin - a futile effort, as absurd as a Jew trying to become part of the Aryan race. While rarely admitted outright, orthodox Marxism - true to the writings of Marx and his mentor Bruno Bauer - is compelled to view Jewish identity as intrinsically bourgeois.
This explains the longstanding tension between Israel’s Mapam party and the broader Western left. Similarly, this pre-Zionist determinism regarding the Jewish identity - as seen through a socialist lens - also shapes the attitude of post-colonial and Arab leftists toward their Israeli counterparts. Hence the futility in efforts to forge peace with Muslim actors who do not recognize a distinct Jewish national identity separate from its religious one.
The convergence of socialist and Islamic narratives is far more dominant in the post-colonial discourse than in African socialist thought, which - aside from South Africa - generally lacks a distinct anti-jewish charge.
As such, post-colonialism ends up deferring not only to socialism, which already views Jews as inherently problematic, but also to Islam, which shares that view. And since neither socialism nor Islam are acknowledged as forms of colonialism in and of themselves, their pre-Zionist antagonists - the Jews - become their natural targets, while Zionist Jews are cast as the political-economic manifestation of an enemy which has come to mature.
The “occupation” merely serves as a photogenic backdrop, a convenient justification that can be placed within the socialistic and Islamic paradigms of "master-slave," and the post-colonial framework of "power relations," which is aimed at reinforcing the religious-ideological dichotomy in which Jews already exist in both socialism and Islam, hundreds of years before Israel even existed, and for that, Zionism helps maintain not only stereotypes about the Jew, but also the justification for Islam and socialism to keep fighting their defining otherness.