Yossi Schwartz ISL (RCIT section in Israel/Occupied Palestine) 16.09.2025
While there are few grown-up Israelis who don’t contribute and actually oppose the oppression of the Palestinians, when the time comes for trials for war criminals, some Israeli soldiers will not be punished. Those who will be punished are the top politicians – high-ranking officers and soldiers who enjoyed killing children, old men and women.
Tom Levinson in Haaretz wrote:
“The continuous stay in the battle zones in Gaza is exhausting for many. Others can no longer bear the arbitrary killing. According to estimates, since the war began, thousands of regular soldiers have already left the front with no intention of returning, and the numbers are only increasing.
A group of soldiers walks between houses, or rather, dilapidated buildings that were once used as residences. Walls that remained in place, remnants of life. It’s a force of the Nahal Brigade on a search mission, and soon the bulldozer will come and destroy a little more of the destruction. The soldiers will surround him and cover him, trying not to fall asleep. Usually, nothing happens; no one comes closer, and no character intervenes between the intentions. “I never imagined that this would be what I would do in the service,” admits Yoni, one of the fighters. “That I will become a security guard for engineering tools.”
However, on that day in Beit Lahia, something happened, Yoni (his name is pseudonymous, like the names of the other interviewees in the article). “Terrorists, terrorists,” one of the soldiers shouted. “We go into a frenzy, and I immediately go up with the Negev (a kind of machine gun), and start spraying, firing hundreds of bullets. Then we rushed forward, and then I realized it was a mistake.” There were no terrorists there. “I saw two bodies of children, maybe eight or maybe ten, I have no idea,” Yoni recalls. “It was all blood, full of signs of gunfire. I knew it was all about me, that I had done it. I wanted to vomit. After a few minutes, the company commander came and said coldly, as if he were not a human being, ‘They entered an extermination zone, it’s their fault, that’s how it is in war.'”
It was at the end of last May, but the scene had not passed the statute of limitations, nor did what happened afterwards. Yoni told his commanders that he wanted to see a Kaban, but he didn’t reveal why. “I told him everything, and he explained to me that there is such a thing as a ‘moral injury,’ he said it’s a situation in which you act contrary to your values, and then you find yourself in a kind of dissonance between the values you believe in and your behavior.” At the end of the meeting, the Kaban recommended that Yoni not return to the fighting, and he was transferred to the role of combat supporter. “I suffer from flashbacks to this event,” he shares, “Their faces come back to me, I don’t know if I’ll ever forget them”.
According to sources in the Personnel Department, since the beginning of the war, the service of thousands of soldiers in regular service has been stopped. Other officers who spoke to Haaretz claimed that the actual number is higher. “Only here there were dozens of soldiers who wanted to go down to combat,” admits an officer at the headquarters of one of the infantry brigades, “It’s a phenomenon that has always existed, but never in those numbers.”
Haaretz spoke with several soldiers in regular service who, in recent months, have realized that they can no longer serve in combat roles. Most of them explained this in terms of burnout or their mental state, but there were also others, albeit relatively few, who justified their decision with “moral wounds” that scratched their souls. The overall testimonies that have reached Haaretz in recent months, both of them and of the other, make it clear that this is not an anomaly or a statistical anomaly. Moreover, according to sources in the Manpower Division, since the beginning of the war, the service of thousands of soldiers in regular service has been stopped; Some were discharged from the IDF completely due to their mental state, while others were transferred to combat support positions or to rear positions. Other officers who spoke to Haaretz claimed that this was an underestimate and that the actual number was higher.
The assessments, along with the stories, paint a very different picture from the IDF Spokesperson’s publications that appear in the media day and night. “Only here there were dozens of soldiers who wanted to go to war,” admits an officer at the headquarters of one of the infantry brigades, “This is a phenomenon that has always existed, but never in those numbers, it’s out of control. The soldiers are worn out, they can’t do it anymore.” The other regular combat brigades also describe a similar reality. “There is hardly a day that I don’t hear of a soldier begging to be allowed to change his duty,” says a tertiary officer in one of the armored battalions.
Benny, a sniper in the Nahal Brigade, a change of position is no longer enough. The wound he describes is already too big, penetrating very deeply. “It started about two months ago,” he says, “Every day we have the same mission, to secure humanitarian aid in the northern Gaza Strip.” His and his friends’ day starts at 3:30 a.m. Accompanied by drones and armored forces, they set up a sniper position and wait. He said that between 7:30 and 8:30 a.m., the trucks arrived and began unloading their contents. In the meantime, the residents are trying to move forward to take a good place in the queue, but there is a border in front of them that they don’t notice. “A line that if they cross, I can shoot them,” Benny explains. “It’s like a game of cat and mouse. They try to come from a different way each time, and I’m there with the sniper rifle, and the officers are shouting at me, ‘Get off, get off.’ I shoot 50-60 bullets every day. I stopped counting Xs. I have no idea how many I killed, full. Children.”
He said that many times he did not want to shoot, but he felt he had no choice. They forced him, threatened him. “The battalion commander would scream on the radio, ‘Why don’t you take it off, they’re advancing towards us, it’s dangerous,'” he says, describing an example of the pressure base. “The feeling is that we are being put in an impossible situation, and no one prepared us for it. The officers don’t care about children dying, they don’t care what it does to my soul, as far as they’re concerned, I’m just another tool.”
“There is a line that if Gazans waiting for food cross it, I can shoot them. It’s like a game of cat and mouse. They try to come from a different way each time, and I’m there with the sniper rifle, and the officers are shouting at me, ‘Get off, get off.’ I shoot 50-60 bullets every day. I stopped counting X’s. I have no idea how many I killed, full. Children”
Already after a few days of killing, he says, there were psychological effects. Since then, they have intensified. “It killed me, scarred my life. The thoughts of all this death don’t leave my head, I smell a bad smell and my head immediately interprets it as if it were the smells of corpses.” And it’s not just about what he remembers, but also about what he experiences during the day – and at night. “Three times I peed on myself like a four-year-old. I once even dreamed that I was murdering my family. I wake up five or six times a night. I see all the people I killed again. You have to understand, a sniper is not like a pilot – he sees his victims through the crosshairs. It’s terrible, it can’t be explained.”
“I can’t stay there even for a minute,” he clarifies. “I did it because I thought I was protecting my friends and family, but it was a mistake. I don’t believe the officers, I don’t believe the government. I just want to get out of the army and start my life. Actually,” he sighs, “I don’t know if I’ll succeed, is it even possible?”
Fifteen soldiers move in a line. The sun is hot, the socks stick to their feet, and their whole body is drenched in sweat. These are the days of the heat wave of last July. “When we were told that we were going back to fight there, the only feeling I had in my head was confusion,” Aharon recalls his feelings as he walked among the remains of houses in the streets of Beit Hanoun. There are no living humans in them anymore, only packs of dogs. “After we finished last time, they told us that we had decided that we had destroyed everything.”
However, it became clear to him that the work of destruction was not over, and once again, he was forced to secure engineering forces during the routine demolition. They go up to buildings, place explosives, explode, and cause the subsequent destruction. But one day, before the signal was given, he heard a huge explosion. “Everyone thought we had run into it, so we started shooting like crazy,” Aharon recalls, “I felt my pulse go crazy, I couldn’t breathe, I thought it was the end of me, that in a moment ten terrorists would jump on us.”
However, no terrorist was injured. “The investigation determined that one of the explosives was accidentally activated prematurely,” he explains. “Operational accident,” in the army’s parlance, is one of many. This time, no soldier was killed, so it’s not “news,” and the commanders weren’t excited either. “In the evening we returned to the post and everyone behaved as if nothing had happened, they didn’t even give us a conversation with the Kaban,” Aharon testifies. The next day, he went out to his home in Jerusalem and began to notice that something had changed in him.
“I was walking around the market and every sound made me jump, every scream of a child,” he says, “When I got home, I went into the room and started crying. I didn’t understand what was happening to my body. My parents tried to ask me if I was okay, and I tried to hide it; I didn’t want them to worry. For four days, I left the room just to eat.” When he returned to the army, he asked his commander to see a Kaban. “He said to me, ‘What do you have? It’s all a small explosion. What are you excited about? Are you trying to run away from us? Switch to being Jobnik Zero? Do you want to betray the people of Israel?’ I felt humiliated. I couldn’t believe that was what he was thinking of me.”
Aharon did not give up, and in the end, the commander granted his request. However, in the meantime, until the Kaban’s appointment, he was asked to return to fighting in the Gaza Strip. “I was scared, but I didn’t want to show it to my friends. There was even one time when someone shot next to me and I started peeing in my underwear.” “He heard everything I said, but explained that it was a shame that I would stop being a fighter, that it was a shame that the IDF would lose someone like me. I came out of it angry, I felt that no one was seeing me, that I was air.”
As a result, he requested a meeting with the battalion commander. “I told him that I was very sorry, but I am no longer capable of being a fighter,” he recalls. “He told me that I would regret it for the rest of my life, that if something happened to my friends I wouldn’t forgive myself, that it would haunt me, but after I burst into tears, he sighed, and said to me in a dismissive tone, ‘Okay, I’ll take you down to the PLSM (Operational Assistance Company, formerly Headquarters Company, TL), we need people in logistics.’ I was finally able to breathe. Just don’t go back to Gaza, that’s all I wanted, that’s all”.
Officially, the army refuses to provide relevant data, which would clarify how many soldiers in regular service can no longer afford it. The argument is that no follow-up was done on the matter. “But even if they pass something like that, it will be distorted,” says a former officer in the Personnel Division, “like they do with reporting for the reserves, without numbers, only at the percentage that no one knows exactly what they are saying.” However, not only is the scope of the phenomenon in the dark, but also the way in which it is dealt with. In fact, the army admits that no uniform policy has been established regarding soldiers who wish to move from combat duty. In cases where a military officer or other medical professional determines that a soldier is unfit to continue fighting, the officer is required to follow their orders. However, what do they do in other cases? Each battalion commander decides independently.
“I saw two bodies of children, maybe eight years old, maybe ten, I have no idea. It was all blood, full of signs of gunfire, I knew it was all about me, that I had done it. I wanted to vomit. The Kaban explained to me that there is such a thing as a ‘moral injury.'”
“I don’t bring a soldier into the fight who is not interested,” said a commander of one of the battalions in the Kfir Brigade in a conversation with Haaretz. “I’d rather go into combat with fewer soldiers than with a soldier who doesn’t want to be there and could endanger the other fighters. Anyone who is not suitable to be a fighter should go and become a cook or a driver.” However, not all commanders take a similar approach. This is what three soldiers in the Nahal Brigade testified that last July they asked not to enter the Gaza Strip. The fighters, whose case was first reported by Kan 11, said that they had lost many friends, were exposed to difficult scenes and were suffering from a “deep internal crisis.”
One of them even said that in one of the operations in the Gaza Strip, soldiers from the platoon accidentally killed a woman and her two children, who had entered an arbitrary extermination zone set by the military. “We didn’t know, we saw three figures and we fired according to orders,” he said. “After this incident, three of our fighters went down because of PTSD, who suffered from nightmares and insomnia. They would have seen these children.” But he said no one spoke to them afterwards, “everything went on as usual.” How much as usual? The Kaban, who met with them after the refusal, also determined that they were fit to enter the fighting, according to him. Then the brigade commander decided to sentence them to prison. It was only following the uproar caused by the incident in the media and social networks that the military decided to retract the decision. “The brigade commander made a mistake in his decision,” the IDF Spokesperson hurriedly briefed the military reporters.
However, not all cases come to the public’s attention. Haaretz has learned of at least 23 soldiers in regular service who have been tried in recent months for refusing to enter the Gaza Strip; Most of them are from the Nahal and Givati Brigades, as well as from the Armored Brigades. Soldiers testify that the threat of a prison sentence sometimes causes them to retract their demands.
“The battalion commander told me that if I don’t return to the tank, he will throw me on a rocket to prison, and will also make sure to revoke my fighter’s certificate,” illustrates an armored fighter in the 7th Brigade. “It made me nervous, but mostly insulted. After everything I’ve been through, after everything I’ve given, is that what you’re telling me? All I wanted to do was finish my service in a position that would allow me to get my soul back to functioning.” According to the commander, he did not have enough fighters. The soldier was angry, but decided to give up, so he recounts the conversation. “I’m back to the of Gaza. Today I feel like a zombie, barely functioning, waking up at night, just getting nervous, kicking everything I see,” he admits. “From time to time, the thought crosses my mind to break my own leg. Once I even tried but it didn’t work, I just limped for two weeks like some idiot.”
The army admits that no uniform policy has been established regarding soldiers who wish to leave combat roles. In cases where a military officer or other medical professional determines that a soldier is unfit to continue fighting, the officer is required to follow their orders. However, what do they do in other cases? Each battalion commander decides on his own
According to him, he already sees himself dead, not as an expression – literally. “People don’t understand how hard it is to get up at night, sweating all over, after dreaming that your tank was on fire after it got on a payload. Sometimes I can hear the screams, imagine what it will be like,” he explains. “I don’t share these thoughts with the members of the company so they don’t think I’m crazy, even though I think it happens to some of them as well. Occasionally, you can hear someone talking in their sleep, sometimes shouting. Personally, the only thing that keeps me going is the thought that it’s over in a moment. And after that, I’m not going ever to put on a uniform again – so that they don’t dare send me a warrant.”
Khan Yunis, early August, shortly after 3:00 A.M. A platoon in the Kfir Brigade is preparing for a routine attack. It’s a veteran department; they’re already practicing the preparations. They’ve done it dozens of times. We fill up with water, put food in the vest, check that the cartridges are full, and leave. For many hours, they won’t do anything, they say. Around 11:00 A.M., they enter an abandoned house that is still standing. “Locating,” they call it in the army. They will wait there for hours for orders to continue the action, and in the meantime, they are stuck in a limbo of heat and boredom.
At some point, an argument develops. Three of the soldiers ask the platoon commander to remove the ceramic vest for a few minutes, but he refuses. “I felt like I was about to lose consciousness, that in a moment I would faint,” says Omer, one of them. “I just wanted to freshen up, but the officer wouldn’t agree, so I started cursing him.” But the officer, according to three soldiers in the platoon, remained silent – and pulled the trigger. “He just shot on the ground, next to me,” Omer recalls, “Miraculously, it didn’t hurt anyone. I was in shock; everyone was there.”
Afterwards, he says, the officer tried to convince them that it was a joke. “He said he was just laughing, and that he did it on purpose to make us stronger, but it didn’t make me laugh at all. As far as I was concerned, it was my sign that I had to get out of there,” he explains. “Everything suddenly floats. I realized that I didn’t trust him, that I was tired of just rushing in and shooting, that I could no longer pee in a bottle in some house with rats in Gaza and suffer itching all over my body.” And to all of this, he adds, there is also a broad context: participation in “more and more missions whose purpose no one really understands.”
“We asked the officer to take off the vest for a few minutes. We just wanted to freshen up, but he wouldn’t agree, so I started cursing him,” says Omer, a fighter in the Kfir Brigade. But the officer, according to three soldiers in the platoon, remained silent – and pulled the trigger. “He just shot on the ground, next to me,” the soldier recalls. “Miraculously, it didn’t hurt anyone. I was in shock, everyone was”
After they finished the activity, Omer approached the officer and made one request – to stop being a fighter. “He told me, ‘I’m proposing a deal – you won’t talk about what happened, and I’ll make sure you move to whatever position you want.’ I felt it was a dirty act, but I agreed. I was already finished, exhausted, I just wanted to get out of there.” About a week later, Omer was transferred to the position of cook. The incident was never reported to the brigade’s senior commanders.
However, this is not the only unusual incident that occurred in Khan Yunis at the time. In another platoon in the Kfir Brigade, several soldiers told Haaretz that one of their comrades threatened suicide twice after his commander refused to allow him to meet the Kaban. “If you don’t take the weapon out of your mouth, you have a day to go out,” the officer threatened him. According to the soldiers’ testimony, they also had to take the weapon out of his mouth on their own. After the second suicide attempt, the soldiers contacted the battalion commander, and only then was the soldier referred to the IDF for treatment, which immediately released him from the IDF. “The incident is serious and lessons will be learned accordingly,” the IDF Spokesperson told Haaretz at the time. At the end of the process, it was decided to disperse the fighters in different platoons within the battalion.” As far as Haaretz knows, the officer was not dismissed from service.
However, disregard for the mental health of soldiers is not reserved only for junior officers in the brigade. At the end of June, Haaretz contacted the IDF regarding a soldier who had been exposed to several serious incidents in the Gaza Strip and made it clear that he was no longer able to continue in combat duty due to severe mental difficulties. After a struggle, he was removed from combat service, but although he stopped accumulating new difficult experiences, the old ones did not leave him, and the mental health treatment he received in the army did not help him enough. “Whenever something doesn’t He is doing well for this soldier, he is turning to the media,” the brigade’s commander at the time, Yaniv Barut, told Haaretz at the time. “He’s just making himself.” A few weeks later, following another request from Haaretz due to concerns that the soldier would hurt himself, he was summoned for treatment at the Empowerment Clinic, which provides intensive treatment to soldiers suffering from mental injuries. Lt. Col. Michal Lifshitz, a psychiatrist and former head of the clinical branch in the Medical Corps, was quite decisive after an initial examination of his condition. “Suspicion of severe PTSD,” she wrote.
Haaretz has learned of six suicide attempts by regular soldiers in the Gaza Strip over the past year. How many cases were there in practice? The IDF refuses to provide information on this matter. The military also refuses to provide data on the number of soldiers and officers who have been discharged due to mental illness since the beginning of the war. IDF Spokesperson Delays Response to Haaretz Request Under Freedom of Information Law More Than Three Months Ago – Illegally
In addition to the incident in the Kfir Brigade, Haaretz has learned five other cases of suicide attempts by regular soldiers in the Gaza Strip over the past year; All the soldiers involved in them were released from the ranks of the army. How many cases were there in practice? The IDF refuses to provide any bit of information about this. Not only are suicide attempts in the Gaza Strip hidden from the public, but also the number of soldiers and officers who have been released due to mental illness since the beginning of the war. The IDF refused to provide data on the matter, and the IDF Spokesperson even delayed responding to a request submitted by Haaretz under the Freedom of Information Law more than three months ago – illegally. “This is a request that requires the collection of a lot of information from several entities involved in the field, and therefore the response has been delayed for a long time,” the army said in response, but sources in the Personnel Division admit that the army “has a tendency to delay the publication or delivery of data that does not serve one of its goals.” According to a source in the IDF’s mental health sector, “the figures are dramatic, especially with regard to soldiers in regular service.”
In a discussion in the Knesset’s Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee last July, following Haaretz’s exposure of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) enlistment in the reserves, a relevant statistic was allegedly revealed. The head of the army’s mental health department, Col. Yaakov Rothschild, said at the time that from the beginning of the war until then, 1,135 soldiers in the regular and reserve forces had received a mental exemption for post-traumatic stress disorder. However, Haaretz’s investigation revealed that this was only a partial figure, which included only regular soldiers diagnosed with PTSD in the army. And not those who were discharged due to other mental health problems, including those who were diagnosed with the disorder after their discharge.
And there is another statistic, which he classifies against his will: cases that did not end only in suicide attempts. “There was a very unusual incident in Gaza, I’m fine, don’t worry,” a combat engineering officer wrote to his family in July last year. The next day, he committed suicide by detonating a mortar grenade in the southern Gaza Strip. His name was not allowed to be published.
The IDF Spokesperson refused to respond to the claim regarding the number of soldiers in regular service who requested to stop serving in combat roles, and gave a general response regarding mental health treatment in the army: “The IDF invests a lot of resources in treating individuals and mental health. The policy on this issue is to provide professional, accessible, and sensitive care proactively, reaching as many service members in distress as possible, diagnosing, and offering appropriate treatment. Centers were set up to contact thousands of servicemen. Any case that deviates from the expected treatment in the individual is treated immediately and optimally. If individual cases are brought, they will be dealt with as soon as possible.”[i]
The genocide of the Palestinians amounts to a counter-revolutionary activity. It is interesting to discover the attitude of the Russian Revolution and, in particular, the Bolsheviks in power towards anti-Semitism. On this subject, Brendan McGeever wrote: “The Bolsheviks and Antisemitism”
Antisemitism was found across the political divide in Russia’s year of revolution.
Early morning, October 25, 1917. Workers are taking up strategic points on the windswept streets of Petrograd. In the Winter Palace, head of the Provisional Government Alexander Kerensky anxiously awaits his getaway car. Outside, Red Guards have taken control of the central telephone station. The Bolshevik seizure of power is imminent.
There are no lights or phones in the palace. From his window, Kerensky can see the Palace Bridge: it is occupied by Bolshevik sailors. Finally, an American embassy car is secured, and Kerensky begins his escape from Red Petrograd. As the vehicle turns a corner, Kerensky notices some graffiti, freshly painted on the palace walls: “Down with the Yid Kerensky, long live comrade Trotsky!”
The slogan retains its absurdity a century on: Kerensky, of course, was not Jewish, whereas Trotsky was. What the slogan does point to, however, is the messy and contradictory role that antisemitism played within the revolutionary process. In much of the existing literature on the Russian Revolution, antisemitism is understood as a form of “counterrevolution,” as the preserve of the anti-Bolshevik right.
There is, of course, much truth to this claim: the tsarist regime was defined by its antisemitism, and in the devastating wave of anti-Jewish violence that followed the October Revolution in the civil war years (1918–1921), the bulk of the atrocities were carried out by the White Army and other forces opposed to the nascent Soviet government. Yet this is not the whole story.
Antisemitism traversed the political divide in revolutionary Russia, finding traction across all social groups and political loyalties. Within Marxism, racism and political radicalism are often framed in contestation; in 1917, however, antisemitism and class resentment could be overlapping, as well as competing worldviews.
February: A Revolution in Jewish Life
The February Revolution transformed Jewish life. Just days after the abdication of Tsar Nicholas II, all legal restrictions on Jews were lifted. More than 140 statutes, totaling some thousand pages, were removed overnight. To mark this historic moment of abolition, a special meeting was convened by the Petrograd Soviet. It was the eve of Passover, March 24, 1917. The Jewish delegate who addressed the meeting immediately made the connection: the February Revolution, he said, was comparable with the liberation of Jews from slavery in Egypt.
Formal emancipation, however, was not accompanied by the disappearance of anti-Jewish violence. Antisemitism had deep roots in Russia, and its persistence in 1917 was closely connected to the ebb and flow of revolution. Over the course of 1917, at least 235 attacks on Jews were carried out. Though totaling a mere 4.5 percent of the population, Jews were victims of around a third of all acts of physical violence against national minorities that year.
From the moment of the February Revolution, rumors of impending anti-Jewish pogroms circled on the streets of Russian cities, so much so that when the Petrograd and Moscow soviets assembled for their first meetings, the question of antisemitism was high on the agenda. Actual outbreaks of violence were rare in those early weeks. By June, however, the Jewish press began to report that “crowds of workers” were gathering on street corners to welcome pogromist speeches that declared the Petrograd Soviet to be in the hands of “the Jews.” Bolshevik leaders sometimes came face-to-face with such antisemitism. When walking the streets in early July, Vladimir Bonch-Bruevich — Lenin’s future secretary — encountered a crowd openly calling for anti-Jewish pogroms. Head bowed, he hurried on. More and more reports came in of similar gatherings.
At times, class resentment and antisemitic representations of Jewishness overlapped. Later in July, speakers at a street-corner rally in Petrograd called on the crowd to “smash the Jews and the bourgeoisie!” Whereas, in the immediate aftermath of the February Revolution, such speeches had failed to gain any real traction, they were now drawing large audiences. It was in this context that the First All-Russian Congress of Soviets of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies gathered in Petrograd.
The Question of Antisemitism
The First Congress of Soviets was a historic gathering. More than a thousand delegates from all socialist parties attended, representing hundreds of local soviets and some twenty million Russian citizens. On June 22, as reports flooded in of yet more antisemitic incidents, the Congress produced the Russian socialist movement’s most authoritative statement yet on the question of antisemitism.
Drafted by the Bolshevik Evgenii Preobrazhenskii, the resolution was titled “On the Struggle against Antisemitism.” When Preobrazhenskii finished reading it aloud, a Jewish delegate rose to his feet to give it his wholehearted approval, before adding that while it would not bring back Jews murdered in the 1905 pogroms, the resolution would help heal some of the wounds that continued to cause so much pain in the Jewish community. It was passed unanimously by Congress.
The resolution essentially restated the long-held social-democratic view that antisemitism was tantamount to counterrevolution. It contained, however, a necessary admission: the “great danger,” read Preobrazhenskii, was “the tendency for antisemitism to disguise itself under radical slogans.” This convergence of revolutionary politics and antisemitism, the resolution continued, represented “an enormous threat to the Jewish people and the whole revolutionary movement, since it threatens to drown the liberation of the people in the blood of our brothers, and cover in disgrace the entire revolutionary movement.” This admission that antisemitism and radical politics could overlap broke new territory for the Russian socialist movement, which until then had tended to frame antisemitism as the preserve of the far right. As the revolutionary process deepened in mid-late 1917, the presence of antisemitism within sections of the working class and revolutionary movement became an increasing problem that required a socialist answer.
The Soviets’ Response
By late summer, the soviets had initiated a broad campaign against antisemitism. The Moscow soviet, for example, organized lectures and meetings in factories on antisemitism throughout August and September. In the former Pale of Settlement, local soviets played a crucial role in preventing the outbreak of pogroms. In Chernihiv (Ukraine) in mid-August, Black Hundred accusations that Jews were stocking up on bread led to a series of violent anti-Jewish disturbances. Crucially, it was a delegation from the Kiev Soviet that organized a group of local troops to put down the unrest.
The Provisional Government attempted to initiate its own response to antisemitism. In mid-September, the government passed a resolution promising to take “the most drastic measures against all pogromists.” A similar statement released two weeks later ordered government ministers to use “all powers at their disposal” to put down pogroms. However, with the transfer of power to the soviets already underway, the Provisional Government’s authority was in a process of disintegration. An editorial in the pro-government newspaper Russkie Vedomosti on October 1 captured the situation well: “the wave of pogroms grows and expands . . . mountains of telegrams arrive daily . . . [yet] the Provisional Government is snowed under . . . the local administration is powerless to do anything . . . the means of coercion are completely exhausted.”
Not so with the soviets. As the political crisis deepened and the process of Bolshevization continued apace, scores of provincial soviets established their own campaigns against antisemitism. In Vitebsk, a city 350 miles west of Moscow, the local soviet formed a military unit in early October to protect the city from pogromists. The following week, the Orel Soviet passed a resolution to take up arms against all forms of antisemitic violence.
In the Russian Far East, a meeting of the All-Siberian Soviet issued a resolution against antisemitism, declaring that the local revolutionary army would take “all measures necessary” to prevent any pogroms. This revealed how deeply ingrained the fight against antisemitism was within sections of the organized socialist movement: even in the Far East, where there were comparatively few Jews and even fewer pogroms, local soviets identified with the Jews on the Western Front suffering at the hands of antisemites.
Without doubt, the soviets had become, by mid-1917, the main political opposition to antisemitism in Russia. An editorial in the newspaper Evreiskaia Nedelia (the Jewish Week) captured this well: “It must be said, and we must give them their dues, the soviets have carried out an energetic struggle against [pogroms]. In many places, it has only been thanks to their strength that peace has been restored.”
It is worth noting, however, that these campaigns against antisemitism were primarily aimed at workers in factories and sometimes at activists within the broader socialist movement. In other words, antisemitism was identified as a problem within the social base of the radical left, and even sections of the revolutionary movement itself. What this revealed, of course, is that antisemitism did not simply emanate from “above,” from the former tsarist establishment; it had an organic base within sections of the working class, and it had to be confronted as such.
The Enemy Within
For the Bolshevik leadership, revolutionary politics weren’t simply incompatible with antisemitism; they were antithetical. As a front-page headline in the leading party newspaper Pravda would put it in 1918: “To be against the Jews is to be for the Tsar!” Yet it would be a mistake to take Lenin and Trotsky’s statements on antisemitism and “read off” the thoughts and feelings of the rank-and-file. As the events of 1917 demonstrated, revolution and antisemitism were not always in conflict.
Newspaper reports from the summer and autumn of 1917 reveal that local Bolsheviks were frequently accused by other socialists of perpetuating antisemitism and sometimes even harboring antisemites within the party’s social base. For example, according to Georgii Plekhanov’s newspaper Edinstvo, when Mensheviks tried to speak at the Moscow barracks in the Vyborg region of Petrograd in mid-June, soldiers, apparently egged on by Bolsheviks, shouted “Down with them! They’re all Yids!” Plekhanov, we should note, was obsessively anti-Bolshevik by mid-1917, so this source should be treated with caution.
The claims were widespread, however. Around the same time, the Menshevik newspaper Vpered reported that Bolsheviks in Moscow shouted down Mensheviks, accusing them of being “Yids” who “exploit the proletariat.” When hundreds of thousands of workers took to the streets of Petrograd on June 18, some Bolsheviks reportedly tore down Bundist banners and shouted antisemitic slogans. In response, the Bundist Mark Liber accused the Bolsheviks of even being “pro-pogromist.”
Come October, such accusations become more frequent. In the October 29 edition of Evreiskaia Nedelia, an editorial went so far as to claim that antisemitic “Black Hundreds” were “filling up the ranks of the Bolsheviks” across the whole country.
Such claims were evidently wide of the mark. The Bolshevik leadership opposed antisemitism and much of the party membership took part in developing the cross-party response to antisemitism at the factory and soviet levels. Nevertheless, the notion that Bolshevism could appeal to far-right antisemites was not entirely without substance. On October 29, an astonishing editorial in the antisemitic far-right paper Groza (Thunderstorm) declared:
The Bolsheviks have seized power. The Jew Kerensky, lackey to the British and the world’s bankers, having brazenly assumed the title of commander-in-chief of the armed forces and having appointed himself Prime Minister of Orthodox Russian Tsardom, will be swept out of the Winter Palace, where he had desecrated the remains of the Peace-Maker Alexander III with his presence. On October 25th, the Bolsheviks united all the regiments that refused to submit to a government composed of Jewish bankers, treasonous generals, traitorous landowners, and thieving merchants.
The newspaper was immediately closed down by the Bolsheviks, but the unwelcome support alarmed the party leadership.
What underscored moderate socialist concern about the capacity of antisemitism and revolution to overlap was the way Bolsheviks mobilized the masses, and channeled their class resentment. On October 28, when the revolution was in full flow, the Mensheviks’ Petrograd Electoral Committee issued a desperate appeal to workers in the capital, warning that Bolsheviks had seduced “the ignorant workers and soldiers,” and the cry of “All power to the Soviets!” would all too easily turn into “Beat the Jews, beat the shopkeepers.” For the Menshevik L’vov-Rogachevskii, the “tragedy” of the Russian revolution lay in the apparent fact that“the dark masses (temnota) are unable to distinguish the provocateur from the revolutionary, or the Jewish pogrom from a social revolution.”
The Jewish press echoed these concerns. According to a lead article in Evreiskaia Nedelia, “comrade Lenin and his fellow Bolsheviks call on the proletariat to ‘turn their words into action’ (pereiti ot slovo k delu), but wherever Slavic crowds gather, the turning of ‘words into action’ means, in reality, ‘striking out at the Yids.’”
However, contrary to these alarmist predictions, in the hours and days immediately following the Bolshevik seizure of power, there were no mass pogroms in the Russian interior. Insurrection did not translate into the antisemitic violence that had been predicted. What the warnings cited above reveal is just how deeply ingrained the fear of the “dark masses” was among sections of the socialist left who claimed to speak in their name. This was especially true of the intelligentsia, who generally approached the notion of a proletarian uprising with horror due to the violence and barbarity they believed would inevitably flow as a result.
What defined the Bolsheviks during this period was precisely their closeness to the Petrograd masses so greatly feared by the intelligentsia.
However, the overlap between antisemitism and revolutionary politics was real. Just days after the October Revolution, the writer Ilia Ehrenburg — soon to be one of the most prolific and well-known Jewish authors in the Soviet Union — sat down to collect his thoughts on the momentous events that had just taken place. His account stands as perhaps the most vivid description of the articulation between antisemitism and the revolutionary process in 1917:
Yesterday I was standing in line, waiting to vote for the Constituent Assembly. People were saying, ‘Whoever’s against the Yids, vote for number 5! [the Bolsheviks]’, ‘Whoever’s for world-wide revolution, vote for number 5!’ The patriarch rode by, sprinkling holy water; everyone removed their hats. A group of soldiers passing by started to belt out the International in his direction. Where am I? Or is this truly hell?
In this startling recollection, the distinction between revolutionary Bolshevism and counterrevolutionary antisemitism is blurred. In fact, Ehrenburg’s account prefigures the haunting question that would be posed in Isaac Babel’s civil war stories, Red Cavalry: “Which is the Revolution and which the counterrevolution?”
Despite Bolshevik insistence on framing it as a purely “counterrevolutionary” phenomenon, antisemitism eluded such neat categorization and could be found across the political divide in highly complex and unexpected forms. This would be most sharply revealed six months later, in the spring of 1918, when the first pogroms since the October Revolution broke out in the former Pale of Settlement. In towns and cities of northeast Ukraine such as Glukhov, Bolshevik power was consolidated through anti-Jewish violence on the part of the local cadres of the party and Red Guards. The Bolshevik confrontation with antisemitism in 1918, then, was often a confrontation with the antisemitism of its own social base.
As we mark the centenary of the October Revolution, we rightly celebrate it as a moment of radical social transformation, when a new world seemed possible. The revolution, however, should also be remembered in all its complications.
Antiracism needs to be cultivated and renewed, continually. A century on, as we grapple with the damage done by racism to class politics, 1917 can tell us much about how reactionary ideas can take hold, but also how they can be taken on and confronted” [ii]
Endnotes:
[i] https://www.haaretz.co.il/news/magazine/2025-09-15/ty-article-magazine/.premium/00000199-379d-d336-addd-7fffd8c50000
[ii] https://jacobin.com/2017/06/russian-revolution-antisemitism-pogroms-reactionary-workers