Freiheit Calls on Jews to Desert Zionism, Back Soviets

Calling upon the Jewish workers to desert the Zionist cause and to fight for Soviet Russia and Communism, an editorial in Friday’s Freiheit, New York Yiddish Communist organ, enumerates what it alleges to be Jewish failures in Palestine with regard to land settlement, and contrasts this with what it regards as the great success of Jewish land settlement in Russia within recent years.

“During the past five years the Soviet Union has settled three hundred thousand Jews on the land,” says the editorial. “During the coming five years it will build a large new settlement in Bira-Bidjan. Wherever Jews live in compact masses the whole governmental apparatus is conducted in Yiddish. If great Jewish masses will come to Bira-Bidjan a Soviet Republic will be organized there.

“All this is being done by the Soviet Republic without noise, without trumpeting; it is part of the general work of building up the country. The Jews in the Soviet Union have equal rights together with all citizens. Jewish books and periodicals are being issued at the expense of the government. Anti-Semitism is being uprooted with an iron hand.

“In Palestine it is just the opposite. There during the past fifty years hundreds of millions of dollars have poured in, nevertheless only about twenty thousand Jews are settled upon the land. There everything is kept up by philanthropy, and there is no room for a large Jewish population. There the ruler is the British imperialistic power which has encouraged pogroms and which now declares openly that it will give the Jews no governmental power in Palestine. There Jews are being settled upon alien soil from which the peasants are being driven off by force, although they have been living there scores and hundreds of years. There a poisonous hatred on the part of the local population towards the aliens who come with the bayonet and the dollar exists, and the masses have already revolted against the alien oppressors.”

“Down with Zionism! Long live the Soviet Union!”