Islamic Pogroms/Communist Support
The American Communist Party (CP) often expressed intense loathing of Zionism, using antisemitic terminology, and conflated Zionism with fascism. On several occasions, it justified Muslim pogroms against Jews in Palestine and North Africa. In the early twentieth century, as the US became the world’s leading economic power, Communists increasingly conceived of Jews as plutocrats and Zionism as an imperialist menace. When Islamic pogroms broke out across Palestine in 1929, sparked by the antisemitic harangues of the grand mufti and other Muslim clerics, the CP cast the Arab pogromists as peasants fighting a class war against British imperialists and Zionist as “land robbers” (Norwood, 2013, p. 29).
In the 1929 pogroms in Palestine, the Arab slaughter of the Jews was unrestrained, with men, women, and children massacred indiscriminately. More than 130 Jews were killed. Jews were beheaded, castrated, and had their eyes gouged out, women were raped, and synagogues desecrated (Auerbach, 2009). The CP newspaper dismissed reports of these well-documented atrocities as Zionist fabrications. It went so far as to publish a cartoon invoking the Christian deicide accusation, depicting a huge cross with a Star of David on top of the vertical bar and “for Arabs” on the horizontal bar (Norwood, 2013). In 1934, the CP similarly blamed the Zionists’ “fascist conduct” and French imperialism for the Islamic pogrom in Constantine, Algeria, in which Muslims murdered probably more than 40 Jews, with whole families burned alive (Norwood, in press).