In the 1930s, the exiled Trotsky began to take an interest in both the Arab-Jewish conflict and Zionist colonization in Palestine. Unlike the orthodox Stalinists, he was distrustful of the “reactionary Muslim” and “anti-Semitic pogromist” elements in the Palestinian Arab national movement. Unlike the Trotskyists of today, he did not uncritically whitewash the Palestinian riots of 1929 as a revolutionary “liberation” struggle. Indeed, by 1937, though he never became a Zionist, Trotsky had come to radically revise his earlier standpoint on the “Jewish question.” He recognized, for example, that his earlier belief in the inevitability of assimilation was unfounded; that there was a Jewish nation, which required a territorial base; and that the Soviet regime was shamelessly encouraging anti-Semitism to deflect attention from its own failures.

The always insightful Robert Wistrich describes the evolution of Leon Trotsky’s thinking on that topic of discussion known as “The Jewish Question.” Read it all here.

Wistrich adds:

In the West, his legacy is kept alive by the amorphous Fourth International - a motley crew of Trotskyite groups whose sectarianism, internal dissension, sterile scholastic disputes and personal rivalries are legendary.

You know what’s coming now, don’t you…

And if you just can’t sit through that scene again, remember this jaunty little number?