Oh, You Foolish Zionists! – Yiddish Anti-Zionist Song

Here’s another little ditty I found on YouTube that’ll really, really get up the noses of Keir Starmer and the Jewish Labour Movement (formerly Paole Zion – Workers of Zion’ and the other Zionist organisations that have smeared good, decent, anti-racist people as anti-Semites and had them thrown out of the Labour party. So I’ve definitely got to put it up. Jewish critics of Zionism like David Rosenberg, Ilan Pappe and the mighty Tony Greenstein have amply demonstrated that, contrary to what the Zionists would have us all believe, Zionism was actually a minority political movement before the Second World War. Mainstream European Jews wanted to remain in their own countries, working to be accepted as equal fellow citizens with their gentile friends, neighbours and comrades. This was the policy of the Bund, the mass Jewish socialist party of the Russian empire. And this piece of music from the GetChan channel on YouTube goes further supports it.

The piece is trilingual, first in Yiddish, then English and finally Russian. The English lyrics attack the Zionists as Utopians for wanting to take them to Israel where they can ‘die as a nation’. Instead it urges them to go into the factories and see how the workers live. It states that they want to stay in the diaspora where they’ll work for their liberation. I think in the Yiddish and Russian lyrics this is altered to Russia, reflecting the writers’ origins.

The thumbnail to the video is a photograph showing a Jewish workers’ demonstration. There’s placard with the legend ‘May the First 1947’ and ‘the Redemption of Israel, but it also promotes the Brotherhood of nations and solidarity between the workers of the world and Jews and Palestinians.

The song’s short, with a good, jaunty melody which sounds like it’s played on the accordion. It’s therefore excellent for playing at socialist and trade unionist rallies to defy any suggestion that criticism of Israel make you automatically an anti-Semite.

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Tags: anti-semitism, Anti-Semitism Smears, Bund, English, Jewish Labour Movement, Jews, Keir Starmer, Labour Party, Palestinians, Purges, Russian, Workers, Workiers, World War II, Yiddish, Zionism