After someone scrawled “Israelis are the new Nazis” near a Chabad menorah at Oakland’s Lake Merritt during Hanukkah, Rabbi Dovid Labkowski got a sympathy call from an unusual corner. Two members of the Socialist Workers Party reached out to express solidarity with Chabad and the Jewish people.
It wasn’t the first time.
Over the summer, when vandals hurled chunks of concrete at the windows of Labkowski’s Chabad Oakland headquarters, SWP member Eric Simpson of Oakland wrote a letter to the rabbi, reading in part: “The Socialist Workers Party views the fight against Jew hatred as a central question of world politics.”
In March, SWP members likewise took to the streets of San Francisco, standing alongside thousands protesting antisemitism in the wake of the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas massacre in Israel. Among them was Rachele Fruit, a Miami resident, a defender of the Jewish state and, at the time, the SWP candidate for U.S. president.
“Israel is doing a very good job at trying to prevent another Holocaust,” Fruit told J. recently. “And we defend this. We think Israel has a right to exist as a refuge for Jews around the world.”
Many on the far left, including other socialist groups, uniformly vilify Israel. In April, for example, the country’s largest such organization — the Democratic Socialists of America — proclaimed, “As socialists, we must not lose sight of our fight for the urgent stop to the genocide in Gaza and the liberation of Palestine, from the river to the sea. We will fight to force all our institutions to divest from the Zionist settler colonial project, end all aid and arms to Israel, and for the complete and full liberation of Palestine.”
The Socialist Workers Party rejects that view.
Instead, SWP members place the fight against antisemitism and support for Israel at the top of their agenda. Right after overthrowing capitalism in a global workers revolution.
“The unity march was great,” recalled Simpson, who is not Jewish. “I wish there were more of them. I’m ready to participate in any fight that takes up the fight against Jew hatred. Our movement does that worldwide.”
Founded in the United States in 1938, the SWP is a Marxist-Leninist political party inspired by the 1917 Russian Bolshevik revolution. Its original members splintered off from the Communist Party, denouncing the regime of Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin and simultaneously supporting Jewish refugees.
Today its members consider themselves “part of the continuity of revolutionary Marxism — from [Karl] Marx and [Friedrich] Engels, V.I. Lenin and Leon Trotsky, and the lessons of revolutionary struggle through to the Cuban Revolution,” as stated in the party’s longtime newspaper, The Militant.
The party has a passionate but apparently small membership. It is based in New York, where it is most active. It has chapters worldwide, including one in Oakland. Fruit would not release membership numbers.
Asked why anti-Zionism is so prevalent in today’s socialist movement, Fruit starkly criticized some activists, who skew younger. She said they don’t represent true socialism.
“They are anti-Jewish and antisemitic to the core,” Fruit said of the anti-Zionist left, “and that’s why they feel Israel should not have a right to exist. They are not pro-Palestinian; they are pro-Hamas, which is basically pro-Nazi. They exist to eradicate the Jews and the State of Israel. They call themselves pro-socialist but what they are is a wing of capitalist politics. They don’t challenge capitalism as a system.”
At the same time, SWP doesn’t see Israel supporters on college campuses as ripe for socialism’s revolutionary message. “Where we get the best hearing for our program is in the working class,” Margaret Trowe, an SWP member in Oakland, told J.
The Militant newspaper has run dozens of articles backing Israel and condemning antisemitism over the past 15 months. An April 2024 statement from Fruit published in The Militant was titled: “Support Israel’s right to exist, defend itself as a refuge from Jew-hatred and pogroms!” She wrote: “Since Hamas launched its war Oct. 7, Israel has been acting to defeat Hamas, to prevent it from carrying out its stated goal. That genocidal goal is one that Hamas shares with the reactionary rulers in Iran: to drive out the Jews, exterminate them and destroy the state of Israel.”
A September 2024 article was headlined: “Fight against Jew hatred! Defend Israel as refuge for Jews!” In it, writer Saul Galinsky criticized the Biden administration’s cautious policy toward Israel: “Washington turns a blind eye to the Jew-hatred that is at the heart of Hamas’ existence and which guarantees more pogroms as long as Hamas is able.… Fighting Jew-hatred is not just a question in the Middle East, but key to advancing the interests of working people everywhere.”
For Fruit, 75, her perspective comes, at least in part, from personal history. She grew up in a Jewish family in Philadelphia, attending Hebrew school and celebrating the Jewish holidays. In her teen years, she was drawn to the Civil Rights Movement and protests against the Vietnam War. That led her to the Socialist Workers Party.
“I was fortunate to meet people in the SWP [and its] youth movement at 19,” she said. ”We strive for everyone in the party to be a leader, so you take as much responsibility as you can, whether building a union or working a mass movement. We’re for workers’ power. There are working class struggles taking place in every corner of this country.”
As a presidential candidate, Fruit appeared on the ballot in six states (though not California) and garnered a total of 4,118 votes in the Nov. 5 election, according to Ballotpedia.
Regardless of the outcome, she used her candidacy to support workers rights and often campaigned by walking picket lines with striking workers.
“Our focus is what’s happening in the working class,” she added. “We went to picket lines explaining the need to fight Jew hatred, and we got a great response.”
Party members don’t consider themselves part of a left-right political divide, and they heap scorn on the two major American political parties as tools of the capitalist class. So why does supporting Israel and combating Jew hatred matter so much to members?
Trowe, 77, who is Jewish, was Fruit’s running mate on the 2024 presidential ticket for a time. Born in Chicago, she moved with her family to Oakland as a teen. As a youth, she was not only greatly impacted by the civil rights and anti-war movements, she also read extensively about the Holocaust.
“I was always troubled by the Holocaust, and I knew it didn’t matter if you were religious or not observant. A Jew was a Jew, according to the Final Solution,” Trowe said, referring to the Nazi policy of total extermination of the Jews. “I ran into [the SWP], and was attracted to the working class and the union movement. One thing the party was steadfast on: Jew hatred is not over, and the most virulent forms would rise again.”
Like her comrades in SWP, Trowe rejects the notion that Israel is a colonialist settler state.
“Once Hitler came to power, the U.S. imperialists led by FDR and governments in the U.K. and Canada would not allow Jewish immigration,” she said. “Our party called to open the borders to Jewish refugees. After the war, Jewish people were living in displaced persons camps and not allowed to go anywhere. So after that, the formation of Israel was inevitable. It is the only sure refuge for the Jews. Israel has a right to exist, and to exist it has to defend itself.”
Oakland resident Simpson, 69, concurs.
“Israel isn’t a project of the imperialist powers,” he said. “Israel was a desperate solution for the Jewish people, who needed a refuge. If Israel was a colonist settler state and the imperialist powers wanted to stick a bunch of Jews [in the region] to make it a European country, they wouldn‘t have prevented Jews from going to Palestine.”
A worker at a Ghirardelli Chocolate factory in San Leandro, Simpson is a member of and organizer with Local 126 of the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers International Union. He proudly wears the socialist label, noting that the workers he lobbies are “dealing with a lot of social, economic and political crises and questions, and they are open to explanations. The explanation — that it’s class based, that the problems come from capitalism and the rich — is something they are open to.”
Israel’s own socialist roots, including the kibbutz movement, don’t form the basis of SWP’s support for the Jewish state, Trowe said.
“We don’t think you can build socialism in one country, through utopian communities or by building kibbutzim. Israel’s development is proof of that,” she said. “The SWP doesn’t support the Israeli capitalist government … but we defend Israel’s right to exist as a refuge for Jews and to defeat the Jew-hating and pogromist currents who try to annihilate Israel.”
Rabbi Labkowski, who noted that the Chabad movement is not political, said he found the sympathy from SWP members to be heartwarming.
“I’m not shocked at all,” he said of the SWP outreach, “because I think all people of conscience should be on the right side of things. The ways of the Torah are pleasant and all of its paths are peace. I’m shocked that the rest of the world has not been more supportive of Jews and Israel.”
Meanwhile, SWP members hope there will be more opportunities to show up in public to support Israel and the Jewish people. And while they’re at it, they will beat the drum for unions, the working class and a socialist revolution.
“Whenever we participate in rallies,” Simpson said, “we bother as many people as we can.”