A Communist’s Divination: For A New “Jewish” State

In a daydream, one of many liberatory fantasies that infect my daily routine, I had a vision; a communist divination.

Somewhere in the world a state arose, no doubt in revolution, and that state came to being, in part, embracing the ideas and traditions, the achievements and leadership of millions of Jews; as it would the same of so many other, different traditions.  Some of those Jews are well-known to us, but most are nameless to history.  They are those Jews, those millions, that worked and died as proletarians; that lived and fought as socialists.  Those that studied philosophy and the sciences, who helped to light the candle of reason in the world.  Those that wrote poetry and produced art; reflecting and questioning the world around us.  Those whose remarkable, heroic resistance against humanity’s defilers in Warsaw, Bialystok, the forests of Galicia and the death camps of Europe forever affirmed that humanity.  Those who now stand, as heroically, against the ghettoization, oppression and displacement of a despised and abandoned people, the Palestinians.

Of course, none of these accomplishments required any specific Jewish trait, since such traits do not exist.  But who could deny that their experiences as Jews, however different, helped to inform many of their actions and ideas?  This new, internationalist, state (which would very likely have ‘Peoples’, ‘Workers’ or ‘Socialist’ somewhere in its name), with a representative looking suspiciously like Leon Trotsky, would answer the Israeli government’s (US aided and abetted) lies and obstruction at the UN by slamming his shoe on the table and shouting: “We will bury you!  Your children will be anti-Zionists!”  Ah, the visions of a man possessed by The Class Struggle and living in this nightmarish, this Kafkaesque, world.  I don’t know whether to task Karl Marx, Niels Bohr or Sigmund Freud in unraveling the sources of these dreams.  Perhaps a combination of their explanations will be necessary.