The Socialist Workers Party referenced here appears to be the British
Socialist Workers Party. They are more closely related to the
International Socialist Organization in the United States.
On 4/30/2017 11:08 PM, Miriam Vieni wrote:
This should be of interest to Roger. It is a response to a SWP position on
Israel.
Mondoweiss
No self-determination
Middle East
Tony Greenstein on April 27, 2017 4 Comments
Moshe Machover
The purpose of the article, which first appeared on the Weekly Worker, is to
get people on the anti-Zionist left to start thinking about the question as
to how Zionism can be overthrown. How can a situation which goes from one
horror to an even worse horror be halted? Its other side of course is how
Israel can be denied the sustenance that it receives from the West, which is
really what all the anti-Semitism charges are about.
Moshé Machover, who I count as a friend and comrade, is a legend in his own
lifetime. One of the founders of Matzpen, the Socialist Organisation in
Israel, Machover more than any other single person has helped educate a
generation of socialists in a Marxist approach to the question of Zionism
and Israel.
When I grew up, there was a myth, common amongst the left, that Israel was
an example of socialism. The kibbutzim were held out as the socialist ideal
– a communal way of living and producing. Little did we know that the
kibbutzim were the pioneers of stockade and watchtower colonisation, that
they owned industries which exploited the labour of Arab and Misrahi Jewish
workers, that they were Jewish-only organisations and that they provided the
officer corps for the paramilitary Haganah and Palmach, which spearheaded
the massacres and ethnic cleansing of 1948. But, then again, we grew up with
the fable that the Arabs in 1948 fled Palestine on instructions from the
Arab leaders in order that they could conquer the country and commit another
holocaust.
As a teenager groping my way towards a socialist analysis of Zionism, the
first thing I read that made sense on the subject was an article in the New
Left Review by Moshé, Akiva Orr and Haim Hanegbi, which was reprinted as a
pamphlet by the International Socialists (now the Socialist Workers Party).1
It is therefore with some hesitation that I disagree with my teacher.
Moshé argues cogently and forcefully in his article, ‘Palestine and Hebrew
self-determination’,2 that without an acceptance by the Palestinians that
the Jewish or Hebrew inhabitants of Israel constitute a separate Hebrew
nation there can be no resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Only
by making this concession and accepting the reality of two nations is it
possible to find a solution to the existing conflict.
Firstly let me explain that I agree with Moshé and Matzpen that it is
impossible for the Palestinians, by themselves, to overthrow Zionism. A
solution to Zionist colonisation will not be found within the confines of
what was the British mandate territory of Palestine. The balance of forces
is such that it would be impossible for the Palestinians to repeat what the
black masses achieved in South Africa when they overthrew the apartheid
system.
What then is the pathway to a solution? Moshé argues that the only agent for
change is the Israeli-Jewish (Hebrew) working class: “… the only social
force able directly to achieve this overthrow [of Zionism] is internal: the
Israeli masses, primarily the Hebrew working class.” The Israeli-Jewish
working class must be tempted into abandoning the advantages that it
presently enjoys, or perceives that it enjoys, in a Zionist state based on
Jewish supremacy. How is this to be achieved? By granting it the right to
form either a separate Hebrew state or, hopefully, it will be enticed to
join a wider socialist federation of the Middle East. This is where Moshé
and I part company.
My initial response is that of Martin Luther King when remonstrating with
white clergymen, who argued that he should have kept quiet over segregation
and racism, allowing the law to take its course.
Lamentably, it is an historical fact that privileged groups seldom give up
their privileges voluntarily. Individuals may see the moral light and
voluntarily give up their unjust posture; but, as Reinhold Niebuhr has
reminded us, groups tend to be more immoral than individuals.3
The first thing that should be said is that there is no empirical evidence
to support Moshé’s theory. It is based on nothing more than an assertion
that, in certain circumstances, the Hebrew or Israeli-Jewish working class
will abandon Zionism and act as a revolutionary agent of change. Scientific
theories are usually based on existing facts, which they then try to
explain. Further observations and predictions based on the theory confirm
whether the theory is true or not.
Cross-class alliance
The suggestion that the Hebrew working class is a potential agent of
revolutionary change is based on no existing facts, evidence or
observations. Per contra Israel’s Jewish working class is the most
reactionary section of the Israeli-Jewish population. The Marxist idea that
the working class is the gravedigger of capitalism only applies in
situations where the major cleavage in society is between those who live by
their labour alone and those who live by exploiting the labour of others.
However, there are certain capitalist societies where life is not so simple.
In these societies – ethno-nationalist or based on racial supremacy,
primarily settler-colonial societies – an alliance forms between the ruling
class and its ethnic counterpart in the working class. Such examples include
the deep south of the USA, where the white working class saw its main enemy
as the black working class. It is a situation repeated over and over again
in the white dominions of Canada, Australia, South Africa and New Zealand.
In such situations the Marxist theory of the proletariat did not work.
Lenin observed that in imperialist societies, the proletariat shares in the
oppression and exploitation of the colonised. It is this which is the
material basis of the political backwardness of the western working class to
this day and the attraction of national chauvinism. Lenin described how,
The Roman proletarian lived at the expense of society. Modern society lives
at the expense of the modern proletarian. Marx specially stressed this
profound observation of Sismondi. Imperialism somewhat changes the
situation. A privileged upper stratum of the proletariat in the imperialist
countries lives partly at the expense of hundreds of millions in the
uncivilised nations.4
If the western proletariat, in the heartland of imperialism, was able to
overcome racial/ethnic divisions and extend solidarity to the colonial
masses, to at least a partial extent, the settler-colonial working class was
totally incapable of reaching out to the working class of the colonised
societies. White workers came to the colonies as part of the colonisation
process and from the beginning they identified with their own ethnic ruling
class rather than the natives. They swapped the oppression they experienced
in the mother country for the role of an oppressor in the colonies. Indeed
this was the cure for all manner of social ills by colonial reformers such
as Edward Gibbon Wakefield, who advocated the emigration of the unemployed
to the colonies in order to stave off disorder at home.5 Marx envisaged this
when he wrote that “the nation that oppresses another nation forges its own
chains”.6 Marx was thinking of Ireland, but what he wrote is applicable to
any colonised society. As long as British workers supported British
imperialism in Ireland, so long would it be in hock to its own ruling class.
Moshé’s thesis is a utopian fantasy based on a failure to understand the
class nature of the settler society. In particular he fails to appreciate
that one of the principal characteristics of a settler-colonial society is
the intra-class alliance that is formed between the settler bourgeoisie and
the settler working class. That is what makes Israel such a stable and
reliable state for US imperialism today.
There are, of course, times when the settler bourgeoisie and the settler
working class come to blows. This was true of the seamen’s strike in Israel
in 1951 and the continued militancy of the Ashdod port workers from the
1960s until today. Indeed the Israeli-Jewish working class has often been a
very militant one, even though at the same time it has rejected any alliance
with the Israeli Arab working class. The major organisation of the
Israeli-Jewish working class, Histadrut, was founded on the rejection of any
form of unity between the Jewish-Arab working class and it put this into
practice with its destruction of the joint Jewish-Arab railworkers union,
which had been formed in 1919.7 Repeatedly Histadrut and the Labour Zionist
movement set out to destroy, in the name of Zionism and Jewish intra-class
unity, all attempts at Jewish-Arab collaboration.
For example in the postal, telegraph and railworkers strikes that began on
April 9 1946 in Jaffa and Tel Aviv, before spreading to other cities,
Histadrut exerted every muscle in order to destroy the unity which had seen
joint Jewish-Arab pickets outside post offices.8 Former Hadash MK Tamar
Gozansky described how,
The extensive joint activity of Arab and Jewish workers was not aborted only
by the armed conflict, but, in large measure, by the policy of the
Histadrut, the Jewish labour federation founded in 1920, which pushed for
separation between Arab and Jewish workers.
Nor was Israel unique in this respect. Repeatedly in Ireland the Orange card
was used to prevent the unity of Catholic and Protestant workers and
peasants. The most famous example was in Belfast in the 1930s. The outdoor
relief strike of 1932 had been an example of joint Catholic-Protestant
working class unity, in which two workers had been shot dead. The strike and
riots achieved many of their aims, but the unionist establishment was
determined to destroy this unity. In the words of Lord Brookeborough,
Northern Ireland’s first prime minister, “We are a Protestant parliament and
a Protestant state.” 9 The fruit of British divide and rule was seen three
years later in the sectarian riots in Belfast.10 In the 1920s Catholic
workers had been driven out of the docks in unionist pogroms.
Kevin Johnson describes how, in the Harland and Wolff shipbuilding yard,
Even the unskilled [Protestant] men saw themselves as privileged, better off
than Catholics. Only twice did the downtrodden workers, Catholic and
Protestant, come together to stand against their employers. In 1907, James
Larkin held them together for a whole summer, before the call of
sectarianism became too great. During the depression of the early 1930s,
Protestant and Catholic unemployed managed to stand together for a time.
Once again, sectarianism broke through in the end and working class
solidarity was deferred indefinitely.’11
In South Africa too there was a militant settler working class, which staged
the armed Rand Rebellion in 1922, marching to the chant of “White workers of
the world unite”.12 But Moshé avoids any analysis of the settler working
classes by engaging in the equivalent of a political conjuring trick. He
argues that the settlers as a whole in South Africa formed an “exploiting
quasi-class” – which is to some extent true. But it is equally true in
Israel and similar societies. In such societies there is a distinct
privileged white/settler-colonial working class, protected by the equivalent
of a colour bar, formal or informal, which identifies with its own ethnic
ruling class.
It is arguable that socialist ideas made far greater strides in the white
South African working class than amongst the Jewish workers in Palestine.
Communist councillors were elected and there was even a communist MP, until
the Communist Party was banned in 1950 by prime minister Daniel Malan. There
was nothing that the Jewish working class in Israel possessed that the white
settlers of South Africa did not have – be it language (Afrikaans), separate
religion (Orange Free Church) or territory. Arguably a socialist
consciousness made far greater strides in South Africa than in Palestine,
where Histadrut was viciously anti-communist. In Palestine the major
conflict within the Jewish working class occurred in the 1920’s between the
work brigades, Gdud Ha’avodah, Histadrut and Ahdut Ha’avodah.13
Fatal flaw
The fatal flaw in Moshé’s schema is his belief that the
Hebrew/Israeli-Jewish working class can be won over from their extreme
racism and chauvinism by the prospect of forming their own state. In fact
they already believe they have such a state and there is no possible reason
to believe that they will abandon their ‘Jewish’ state for a pie-in-the-sky
Hebrew state in a socialist confederation in the future. A racist bird in
the hand is far preferable to two socialist birds in the bush.
Moshé’s schema is a mechanistic and economistic one. It contends that a
political alliance between the Israeli-Jewish working class and its ruling
class can be broken by an appeal to the abstract ideas of socialism. I
cannot find any more reason to believe this of Israeli-Jewish workers than I
can for similar working classes in other settler-colonial societies.
The Zionist movement was quite unique, in that it consciously sought to
create a working class under the slogan, ‘From class to nation’. The role of
the working class in labour Zionism was a nationalist one. It is this which
has shaped the political formation of Israeli-Jewish workers.
It is not simply a question of material benefits. No greater advocate of
partition and the ideas of Protestant supremacy in Ireland has there been
than the Protestant working class. Yet it is a class that has objectively
barely benefited at all – it has suffered almost as much as the Catholic
working class. Indeed there are some socialist groups – the former Militant
Tendency for one – which argued that there was no difference between housing
conditions on Shankhill Road and the Falls Road. Sometimes even the tiniest
fragment of political and economic advantage over another section of the
working class is enough to cement unity between workers and the bourgeoisie.
Indeed I would go further: even the illusion of power over another section
of the working class on ethnic grounds is enough. The history of the British
empire is littered with such examples.
Of course, the balance of forces between the settlers and the indigenous
population in South Africa and Israel is completely different. In South
Africa the whites constituted less than 20% of the population and after the
mid-1970s the friendly Portuguese colonies that lay to the north of South
Africa had been replaced by the newly independent countries of Mozambique
and Angola, which gave sanctuary to the African National Congress. By
contrast, conditions could not be less favourable to the Palestinians,
politically, militarily and strategically.
In South Africa there was a militant black working class based on the gold
and diamond mines, whereas Israel has consciously avoided becoming dependent
on Palestinian labour. Faced with hostile Arab regimes of Jordan and Egypt,
Palestinians confront a very different geo-strategic situation to that of
the South African black working class. That is why the Palestinians, by
themselves, are incapable of overthrowing Zionism. To this extent I agree
with Moshé. However, the belief that the Israeli-Jewish working class might
provide a substitute for the black working class and, with the advent of
socialism, throw off the chains of Zionism, if only they are granted the
right to self-determination and a Hebrew republic, is more than just
mechanistic and economistic. It is pie in the sky.
On the contrary, I would argue that until Zionism is defeated socialism will
be off the agenda in Israel and the Arab east. Zionism is the guarantee
against any unity between the Jewish and Arab working classes.
The utopian nature of Moshé’s solution to the Palestine question is summed
up in the first of Matzpen’s theses, which contends that the conflict can
only be resolved as part of a socialist transformation rather than in a
“bourgeois democratic” framework. Socialism is part of the living struggle.
Palestinians cannot wait until socialism is achieved. On the contrary, it is
only with a solution to the problem of the Palestinians and the oppression
of the Arab masses that we will see socialism. Contrary to Moshé’s argument,
the overthrow of Zionism and its reactionary Arab counterparts can only come
as part of a bourgeois democratic struggle that produces a regional-wide
social movement. But in this the Jewish working class will play, at least
initially, a subsidiary role.
Given that nowhere in the world, since 1917, has there been a successful
working class revolution, what Moshé is in effect saying is that the Zionist
dispossession of the Palestinians may never be reversed. Waiting until
socialism has been ushered in for a resolution of the conflict is a recipe
for no solution. This resembles similar arguments over women’s liberation.
Israel is not supported because the imperialist countries feel some form of
guilt over the holocaust and wish to recompense the descendants of those
murdered. Israel is an indispensable ally of imperialism. It was apartheid
South Africa’s closest ally, an indispensable ally to the military juntas in
South America during the 1960s and 70s, and it has acted as a bulwark
against revolution in the Middle East, actively seeking to destroy radical
Arab nationalism through the Suez War and then the 1967 war, through its
interventions in the Lebanese revolution and its support for the reactionary
Gulf States and Saudi Arabia, to say nothing of Jordan and Egypt.
Imperialism operates through its junior partners in the Arab regimes in the
Middle East and Israel is there to ensure that this situation continues –
which is the real reason why it wishes to see an end to the Iranian regime.
Israel brooks no challenge to its regional hegemony.
It would therefore seem obvious that, if Israel is supported because of its
role in supporting reactionary and counterrevolutionary regimes in the
Middle East, conversely, it is only with the building of a movement that
overthrows these regimes that Zionism itself will be overthrown. The defeat
of Zionism through a revolutionary upsurge in the Middle East, which at
least initially will take a bourgeois-democratic form, is far more likely
than via Moshé’s chosen instrument, the poor whites of Israel.
Hebrew nation?
Moshé is quite correct when he points to the absurdity of the attempt to
portray Zionism as a movement of Jewish national self-determination. The
suggestion that there is a Jewish nation that crosses all existing national
and state boundaries originates in the anti-Semitic idea of a Jewish world
conspiracy. A conspiracy based on the idea that, wherever they were to be
found, the Jews formed one coherent transnational political body.
Moshé asserts, however, that there is a Hebrew nation. There is no ‘clean’
definition of what constitutes a nation – it is a metaphysical entity. The
best that can be said is that some of the features of a nation include a
common language, common economy, common territory and also a sense of
self-identity or consciousness. Above all a nation is a political body that
is usually, but by no means always, confined to a single state. As Moshé
quite rightly says, a state might consist of two or more nations and, on the
other hand, a nation may be spread over more than one state: for example,
the Kurds.
Israel is quite unique, in that it is a state not of its own citizens, but
of the Jewish people – those who live both inside and outside that state.
That is the meaning of Israel as a ‘Jewish state’ or more precisely a ‘state
of the Jews’. It is quite uniquely a state without a nationality. The
dominant nationality is not based on residence, but on the myth of a
previous Jewish political presence. The predominant nationality in Israel is
based on an imagined ethnicity.
This was made crystal clear in 1972 in Tamarinv State of Israel, where the
judge stated
… the desire to create an Israeli nation separate from the Jewish nation is
not a legitimate aspiration. A division of the population into Israeli and
Jewish nations would … negate the foundation on which the state of Israel
was established
The court ruled
There is no Israeli nation separate from the Jewish people. The Jewish
people is composed not only of those residing in Israel, but also of
diaspora Jewry.14
This decision has more recently been reaffirmed in Uzi Ornan v State of
Israel 2013.The Israeli state was the creation of the Zionist movement,
which consciously saw the state of Israel as the embodiment of its mythical
Jewish nation. For a Hebrew nation to exist that nation must, at the
minimum, declare itself. It must have a consciousness of itself, yet the
supposed Hebrew nation is not a conscious nation. In the Pew Research
Centre’s ‘Israel’s religiously divided society’ a plurality – 46% – of
Israel’s Jews saw themselves as Jewish first and Israeli second.15 The
latter corresponds to Moshé’s ‘Hebrew’ nation. Only 35% saw themselves as
Israeli first and 20% did not even know. All three religious categories –
Haredit, Dati and Masorti – saw themselves as Jewish first. Only secular
Jews – Hiloni – saw themselves as Israeli first, by 59% to 20%.
Moshé says that “Obliterating the distinctness of the Hebrew nation was
motivated by the need to legitimise the Zionist colonising expansionary
project, past and future.” I think it is more complicated than that. Zionism
has always been predicated on the myth of one Jewish people, of which
Israeli Jews are but a component. It was therefore with this in mind that
the political separateness of the Israeli-Jewish population was downplayed.
In that sense Israel is unique, because the South Africa whites never
considered themselves part of the English or Dutch nation, for example. But
the counterpart to this was the conscious eradication of diaspora Jewish
language and culture in the Yishuv (Jewish community in Palestine). Yiddish,
when it was used in a theatre in Tel Aviv in September 1930 with the staging
of Mayn Yidishe mame (‘My Jewish mother’) provoked a riot outside of several
thousands.16 Zionism faced two contradictory tendencies. On the one hand,
Jewish Israel could not be cut off from the hinterland, the Jewish diaspora.
On the other hand, there was a conscious rejection of the values of galut
(exile), summed in the foundational idea of the ‘negation of the diaspora’.
So how would I describe the Israeli Jews, or Hebrews? They are a settler
people, but, being an oppressor group, it has no right to
self-determination, either now or in the future. National self-determination
means the right to be free from national oppression. What is clear is that
what unifies the Israeli Jews or Hebrews is, like other settler groups,
their antagonism to ‘the other’ – in this case the Palestinians. It is those
they dispossessed or who exist at the margins of Israeli society – its Arab
population – who provide the majority Jewish population with its core
identity, albeit as a negative. As Moshé admits, “More than six decades
after their state was founded, Israelis still grapple with their identity.”
Far from being a solidified nation, the Israeli Jews are a people in search
of an identity.
That is why if, in a future struggle, Zionism is overthrown, it would be
absurd to imagine one could grant the Hebrew population the right to form
its own state without rekindling the very ideas of supremacy and struggle
that led to the overthrow of Zionism to begin with. In such a scenario,
which is admittedly hard to envisage today, such a call would indeed be a
reactionary one. If Zionism were overthrown, then Israel’s Jews would very
likely divide into their politico-religious parts. What holds Israeli Jews
together is the Palestinians.
Moshé argues that my refusal to accept that the Hebrew population in
Palestine constitutes a nation must mean that Israel is an exception amongst
the exclusionary modes of colonisation. Moshé gave as examples of the latter
the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. I would suggest that Canada and
New Zealand incorporated the indigenous population rather than excluded
them. However, with the exception of New Zealand, where the settlers were
unable to defeat the Maoris, all the others decisively defeated the
indigenous population, often exterminating them in the process. Clearly in
such a situation a settler nation emerged, but again the right to
self-determination would be a nonsense, since that nation is not oppressed.
South Africa combined exclusion (Bantustan-isation) with exploitation and
found it did not work. Indeed it is arguable that an American nation is
still a fiction. The mass alienation of its black, former slave, population
continues to this day. The existence of groups like Black Lives Matter
testifies to the deceit that the American nation constitutes. What does a
nation actually mean in such a situation of extreme racial oppression.
What then are the Israeli Jews? It is clear that their ultimate fate is
similar to that of the whites of South Africa and the Protestants of
Northern Ireland They are Jewish Palestinians and the Palestinian nation
will in consequence be part Arab and part Hebrew.
Moshé argues that a democratic, secular state is a bourgeois liberal idea
and therefore should be rejected. No doubt the slogans of liberty,
fraternity and equality to which the French Revolution gave birth were
equally a product of bourgeois liberalism. However, in the context of the
Middle East and Zionism in particular they are revolutionary because they
pose a challenge to the existing order of settler colonialism, religious
chauvinism and sectarianism. When people in this country ask, as they do,
what it is that the Palestinians are fighting for, then it is right to
counterpose a secular and democratic state to that of the existing order.
Democracy is revolutionary in the context of the Arab countries. The problem
of the Arab masses is that they have never had the equivalent of a bourgeois
revolution because of the way in which the west has succeeded in freezing
the organic development of their society.
No national conflict
In one sense, of course, the Palestinian Arabs suffer a form of national or
group oppression by Israeli-Jewish society, but it is wrong to see the
conflict as a national one. It was always a settler-colonial one and the
Palestinians were eradicated or expelled as part of the fate of the
colonised, as they were in other similar situations. Long before the
Palestinians had even coalesced into a recognisable nation they were the
subject of the settler-colonial process.
That is why the interpretation of the conflict as one of two clashing
nationalities, implying a two-state solution, has been so disastrous. Even
were it possible, it would not have been a solution. Partition of Palestine
is not and never has been the answer. In that sense the key fight for
Palestinians, both on the West Bank and in Israel itself, is for equal
rights against the racist regime that subsists. Zionist colonisation was not
and never has been primarily a national conflict, but one of
settler-colonisation. Whether in the US or Israel, what this meant was the
removal, by one means or another, of the indigenous population on a racial,
not a national, basis.
Moshé poses his solution on the basis of a hypothetical future situation:
viz the existence of a Hebrew people in the future that may experience a
form of national oppression. No struggle can be conducted on the basis of a
hypothetical future. If a social and political struggle convulses the whole
region, the Israeli-Jewish population may well divide ethnically or
politically or indeed religiously. We simply do not know, but if Israel’s
Jewish population today is only held together by its antagonism to the
Palestinians it is not going to unify under such a possible scenario in the
future.
Moshé’s other argument in favour of a Hebrew nation is that there are tens
of thousands of people who are not Jewish, but who are assimilated in
Israel’s Jewish or Hebrew society. This is true, for example, of the Russian
Jews, but also of those converted by non-orthodox rabbis, etc. What is
common to these people, however, is that they are predominantly white
settlers. All the indications are that their Jewishness will be accepted by
various sleights of hand in order that the settler community is not divided.
There are already indications that the orthodox rabbinate’s monopoly on
conversion is being breached, as is the control of the orthodox rabbis over
entrance to the settler community. The Jerusalem Post recently reported,
In the latest blow to the religious establishment, the High Court of Justice
ruled on Thursday afternoon that non-Israeli nationals who convert in
private orthodox rabbinical courts conducted in Israel should be eligible
for citizenship under the Law of Return.17
It is but a matter of time before the same is accorded to non-orthodox
conversions.
One of the ironies of Zionist colonisation is that it created the
Palestinian nation from the existing Arab peoples. The other irony is that
the settlers themselves, rather than becoming a discrete national group, are
themselves, like their white South Africa cousins, non-Arab members of the
same national grouping. It is the destiny of the Israeli Jews that they will
become Jewish Palestinians with all the rights that attach to such a group.