Anti-Semitism, Zionism, Anti-Zionism: all are enemies of the proletariat Part 2

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In the first part of this article we argued that the Zionist movement was a false solution to the revival of anti-Semitism in the late 19th century. False because, in contrast to the proletarian riposte to  anti-Semitism and all forms of racism as advocated by revolutionaries like Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg, it was a bourgeois nationalist movement that arose at a moment in which world capitalism was heading rapidly towards the epoch of decadence in which the nation state, in Trotsky’s words in 1916, had “outgrown itself as a framework for the development of the productive forces…”[1] And as Rosa Luxemburg explained in her Junius Pamphlet (1915), the concrete outcome of this historic change was that, in the new period, the nation had become “but a cloak that covers imperialist desires”: new nations could only come into being as pawns of bigger imperialist powers, while they themselves were compelled to develop their own imperialist ambitions and to oppress those national groupings that stood in the way.  We showed that, from the beginning, Zionism could only become a serious political force by hitching its wagon to whichever imperialist power saw a benefit to themselves in the formation of a “Jewish national home” in Palestine, while Zionism’s colonial attitudes to the population already living there already opened the door to the policy of exclusion and ethnic cleansing which came to fruition in 1948 and is reaching its terrible climax in Gaza today.  In this second article we will trace the main stages in this process, but in doing so we will show that, just as Zionism has clearly revealed itself as a cloak for imperialist desires, the Arab nationalist response to Zionism, whether in its secular or religious forms, is no less caught up in the deadly trap of inter-imperialist competition.     

In the wake of the Balfour Declaration

Prior to the First World War the question of which imperialist power would be most interested in promoting the Zionist project remained open: Theodore Herzl’s initial search for a sponsor took him to the German Kaiser and his Ottoman allies. But the battle lines drawn up for the war made it clear that it would be Britain that had most to gain from the formation of a “little loyal Jewish Ulster” in the Middle East, even if the British were simultaneously making all kinds of promises about future independent statehood to the Arab leaders they needed to recruit in their struggle against the decaying Ottoman Empire, which had thrown in its lot with Germany and the Central Powers. The Zionist leader and accomplished diplomat Chaim Weizmann had become increasingly influential in the highest echelons of British government and his labours were rewarded by the publication of the (in)famous Balfour Declaration in November 1917. The Declaration stated that “His Majesty's Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object” while at the same time insisting that “it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine”.

The Balfour Declaration seemed to be a vindication of the methods of the mainstream of the Zionist movement, essentially supported by the Zionist left, which considered it necessary to follow this mainstream until the achievement of a Jewish homeland had ‘normalised’ class relations among the Jewish population.[2] For these currents, the agreement with British imperialism confirmed the necessity for developing diplomatic and political relations with the dominant powers of the region, while the gathering of the Jews in Palestine would be achieved largely with the financial support of Jewish capitalists in the Diaspora and of institutions such as the Jewish National Fund, the Palestine Jewish Colonisation Association, and the Jewish Colonial Trust. Land would be obtained through the piecemeal purchase of land from the absentee Arab landlords – a ‘peaceful’ and ‘legal’ way of expropriating the poor fellahin and paving the way to setting up Jewish towns and agricultural enterprises as nuclei of the future Jewish state.

But the war had also stimulated the growth of Arab nationalism, and by 1920 the first violent reactions to increased Jewish immigration and Britain’s announcement of its plan for a Jewish national home took shape in the so-called “Nabi Musa riots”[3] – essentially a pogrom against Jews in Jerusalem. These events in turn gave rise to a new “Revisionist” Zionism led by Vladimir Jabotinsky, who had taken up arms alongside the British forces in suppressing the riots. 

In our article More than a century of conflict in Israel/Palestine (International Review 172) we pointed out that Jabotinsky represented a right-wing shift in Zionism which didn’t hesitate to align itself with the extremely anti-Semitic regime in Poland (one of a number of examples of collaboration between the anti-Semitic project of expelling the Jews from Europe and the Zionist willingness to channel these policies towards emigration to Palestine). Although Jabotinsky himself often derided Mussolini’s fascism, his movement undoubtedly sprang from a common root – the development of a particularly decadent and totalitarian form of nationalism whose growth was accelerated by the defeat of the proletarian revolution. This was illustrated by the emergence within Revisionism of the openly fascist Birionim faction and later on the Lehi group around Abraham Stern, who at the beginning of World War Two was prepared to enter into talks with the Nazi regime about forming an anti-British alliance[4]. Jabotinsky himself increasingly saw the British occupiers of Palestine after World War One as the main obstacle to the formation of a Jewish state.

Although Jabotinsky always maintained that the Arab population would be guaranteed equal rights in his plan for a Jewish state, it was the experience of the 1920 anti-Jewish riots which led him to abandon the Herzl/Weizmann dream of a peaceful process of Jewish immigration. Jabotinsky had always been opposed to the ideas of class struggle and socialism, and thus to the alternative dream of the Zionist left: a new kind of colonisation process that would somehow involve the development of a fraternal alliance between Jewish and Arab workers. In 1923, Jabotinsky published his essay The Iron Wall, which demanded a Jewish state not only on the West Bank of the Jordan, but also on the East Bank, which the British prohibited.  In his view, such a state could only be formed through military struggle: “Zionist colonisation must either stop, or else proceed regardless of the native population. Which means that it can proceed and develop only under the protection of a power that is independent of the native population – behind an iron wall, which the native population cannot breach”.

Although the left and centre Zionists strongly criticised Jabotinsky’s position, denouncing him as a fascist, what is so striking about The Iron Wall is that it precisely anticipates the real evolution of the entire Zionist movement,  from the liberal and left factions which dominated it in the first few decades after 1917 to the right which has tightened its grip over the state of Israel from the 1970s on: the recognition that a Jewish state could only be formed and maintained through the use of military force. The Zionist left, including its ‘marxist’ wing around Hashomer Hazair and Mapam, would in fact become the most essential component of the military apparatus of the pre-state Jewish Yishuv, the Haganah; the ‘socialist’ kibbutzim in particular would play a key role as military outposts and suppliers of elite troops for the Haganah. Even the term “Iron Wall” has a prescient ring about it with the building of the Security Wall (also known as the Apartheid Wall…) around Israel’s post-1967 borders in the early 2000s. And of course, even if Jabotinsky can sound like a liberal in comparison to his contemporary heirs on the Israeli far right, the advocates of a Greater Israel “from the river to the sea”, and the unapologetic resort to unrestrained military force, now openly combined with the call for the “relocation” of the Palestinian Arab population of Gaza and the West Bank, have more and more moved to the mainstream in Zionist politics.  This is testimony to Jabotinsky’s harsh realism but above all to the inevitably imperialist and militaristic character, not only of Zionism, but of all national movements in this epoch. 

1936: The dead-end of “anti-imperialist revolt” and the internationalist response

The defeat of the revolutionary wave in Russia and Europe spawned a new surge in anti-Semitism, especially in Germany with the infamous theory of the “stab in the back” by a cabal of communists and Jews, supposedly to blame for Germany’s military collapse. A number of European countries began to adopt anti-Semitic legislation, prefiguring the racial laws in Germany under the Nazis. Feeling increasingly threatened, there was a steady exodus of Jews from Europe, which accelerated considerably after the Nazi seizure of power in 1933. By no means all of the exiles went to Palestine, but there was a significant increase in Jewish immigration to the Yishuv. In turn, this exacerbated tensions between Jews and Arabs. The increased purchase of land from the Arab landlords or “effendi” by the Zionist institutions resulted in the dispossession of the already impoverished Arab peasants or fellahin; the impact of the world economic crisis in Palestine in the early 30s could only increase their economic woes. All these ingredients were to explode in 1929 in a new and more widespread outbreak of inter-communal violence, sparked off by disputes over access to the principal religious sites in Jerusalem, and taking the form of bloody anti-Jewish pogroms in Jerusalem, Hebron, Safed and elsewhere, but also of equally brutal counter-attacks by Jewish mobs. There were hundreds of murders on both sides. But these developments were merely a preface to the “Great Arab Revolt” of 1936.

Once again, events began with an outbreak of pogromist violence, this time sparked off by the murder of two Jews by an Islamic fundamentalist group, the Qassemites, and followed by indiscriminate reprisals against Arabs, including the bombing of public places by Jabotinsky’s Irgun, which had split off from the Haganah in 1931. These bloody terrorist actions were described by the Irgun as the policy of “active defence” of the Jewish population. But this time the Arab uprising was much more widespread than in 1929, taking the form of a general strike in Jerusalem and other urban centres and, later on, of guerilla warfare in the rural areas. However, even if profound economic and social misery fuelled the anger of the Arab masses, at no point did the general strike assume a proletarian character. This was not simply because it mobilised workers alongside shopkeepers and other small property owners, but above all because its demands were entirely framed by nationalism, calling for a halt to Jewish immigration and independence from the British. From the start, the leadership of the movement was in the hands of bourgeois nationalist parties, even though these parties, largely based on old clan rivalries, often clashed violently with each other over who should direct the movement (while other Palestinian factions sided with the British).  The reaction of the British authorities was extremely brutal, inflicting murderous forms of collective punishment on villages suspected of participating in the movement. The Haganah and specially appointed Jewish police squads acted alongside the British military in suppressing the revolt.  By the end of the uprising in March 1939, more than 5,000 Arabs, 400 Jews and 200 British had lost their lives.

The UK-based Socialist Workers Party describes the revolt as the “First Intifada” and claims it as an example of resistance against British imperialism, with a strong social-revolutionary element: 

“The revolt shifted to the countryside where through the winter of 1937 and into 1938 the rebels proceeded to take control, driving the British out. With the countryside in their hands, the rebels began moving into the towns and cities. By October 1938, they had control of Jaffa, Gaza, Bethlehem, Ramallah and the Old City of Jerusalem. This was a massive popular movement with local committees taking control of much of the country and ruling in the interests, not of the Palestinian rich, but of the ordinary people”[5]. 

But let’s not forget that the SWP, like many other Trotskyists, also saw the Hamas slaughter of October 7 as part of the ‘resistance’ against the oppression of the Palestinians[6]. In marked contrast to the SWP’s presentation of the 1936 movement,  Nathan Weinstock, in his authoritative book Zionism: False Messiah, expressed the view that in the end “the anti-imperialist struggle had been diverted into an inter-communal conflict and deformed with a venture in support of fascism. (The Mufti had grown closer and closer to the Nazis)”[7]. At this point Weinstock was a member of the Trotskyist 4th International.

Weinstock concludes from this that the “the evolution of the Arab revolt appears as a negative confirmation of the theory of permanent revolution”. In other words, in semi-colonial countries, “democratic” tasks such as national independence could no longer be led by a very feeble bourgeoisie but could only be implemented by the proletariat once it had established its own dictatorship. This theory, whose essential components were developed by Trotsky in the early 1900s, was in its origins a genuine attempt to resolve the dilemmas posed in a period in which the ascendant phase of capitalism was coming to an end but without it being totally clear that capitalism as a world system was about to enter its epoch of decline, thus rendering obsolete all the “democratic” tasks of the previous period. Thus, the primary task of the victorious proletariat in any one part of the world is not to push through the vestiges of a bourgeois revolution within its own borders but to help spread the revolution across the world as quickly as possible, or else face isolation and death.

The corollary of this is that, in the decadent period, in which the entire globe is dominated by imperialism, there are no more “anti-imperialist” movements, but only shifting alliances on an overarching inter-imperialist chessboard. Weinstock’s remark about the Mufti – the title of a high-ranking cleric in charge of the Muslim holy places in Jerusalem, in this case Amin Al Husseini, who was notoriously friendly with Hitler and his regime – points to a wider reality: that in opposing British imperialism Palestinian nationalism in the 1930s was compelled to ally itself with Britain’s main rivals, Germany and Italy. The Italian Fraction of the Communist Left, in an article written in response to the 1936 general strike, already pointed to the inter-imperialist rivalries at work in the region: “Nobody can deny that fascism has a great interest in fanning the flames. Italian imperialism has never hidden its designs towards the Near-East, that's to say its desire to substitute itself for the mandatory powers in Palestine and Syria”[8]. This pattern could only repeat itself in subsequent history. As our introduction to the Bilan article points out “Bilan shows that when Arab nationalism entered into open conflict with the British, this merely opened the door to the ambitions of Italian (and also German) imperialism; and from our vantage point, we can see that the Palestinian bourgeoisie would later turn to the Russian bloc, and then France and other European powers, in its conflicts with the USA”.

In 1936, faced with the capitulation of former internationalists to the pressure of anti-fascist ideology, the comrades of Bilan acknowledged the “isolation of our Fraction” that had been seriously intensified by the war in Spain. This isolation can also be applied to the problems posed by the conflicts in Palestine: the Bilan article is one of the very few contemporary internationalist statements about the situation there. However, it is worth mentioning the articles written by Walter Auerbach, who had been involved in a left communist circle in Germany which included Karl Korsch[9]. Auerbach fled Germany in 1934 and lived for a few years in Palestine before settling in the USA, where he worked with the council communist group around Paul Mattick. Auerbach’s articles are of interest in showing how the Zionist colonisation of Palestine, by introducing or developing capitalist relations of production, had resulted in the dispossession of the fellahin and thus in the intensification of their social discontent. They also insist that the ultra-nationalist and even fascist elements within Zionism were bound to become an increasingly dominant element within it.  But above all the articles remain on a clear internationalist terrain. In response to the events of 1936, the article entitled “The land of promise: report from Palestine” says:

“The sharpening of the Arab-Jewish relations, beginning in April 1936, which led to guerilla warfare and to an Arab strike, covered over the social unrest of the working class with a lively and warlike national sentiment. On both sides the masses were organized for ‘self-protection and defence’. This self-protection was participated in, on the Jewish side, by the members of all the organizations. The various parties in their appeals laid the blame for the clashes either upon the Arabs or else on the competing parties. It is only to be observed that in this situation not a single organization sought to conduct the struggle against its own bourgeoisie”.

Bordiga is credited with the motto “The worst product of fascism in anti-fascism”: the extremely brutal nature of fascism, itself preaching the unity of all truly ‘national’ classes, tends to give rise to an opposition which in turn aims to subordinate working class interests to those of a broad Popular Front, as happened in France and Spain in the 1930s. In either case, the working class is pushed into abandoning its class identity and independence in favour of this or that faction of the bourgeoisie. Ultimately, fascism and anti-fascism are ideologies for dragooning the proletariat into imperialist war.

We can equally say that the worst product of Zionism is anti-Zionism. The starting point of Zionism is that Jewish workers can only fight anti-Semitism by allying themselves with the Jewish bourgeoisie or surrendering their class interests in the name of national construction. Anti-Zionism, produced by the harsh consequences of this national construction in Palestine, also starts with an all-class alliance of “Arabs”, “Palestinians” or “Muslims”, which in practice can only mean the domination of the indigenous bourgeoisie and, behind that, the hegemony of world imperialism. The deadly cycle of inter-communal violence we saw in 1929 and 1936 was utterly inimical to the development of class solidarity between Jewish and Arab proletarians and this has remained true ever since.  

From Shoah…

“….the mere tendency towards imperialism of itself takes forms which make the final phase of capitalism a period of catastrophe” (Rosa Luxemburg, The Accumulation of Capital, chapter 31)

The war in Spain, which unfolded at the same time as the revolt in Palestine, was a much clearer indication of the essential drama of the time. The crushing of the Spanish proletariat by the forces of fascism and the ‘democratic Republic’ completed the world-wide defeat of the working class and opened the door to a new world war which – as the Communist International had predicted in its early proclamations – would far exceed the first in plumbing the depths of barbarity, above all in the far greater toll it took of civilian life. Already the forced population transfers and gulags implemented by the Stalinist regime in Russia gave a foretaste of the deadly revenge of the counter-revolution against a defeated working class, while the war itself illustrated the determination of capital to maintain its obsolete system even at the cost of spreading destruction and mass murder across the planet. The Nazi regime’s systematic programme of extermination of Jews and other minorities such as Gypsies or the disabled was certainly the product of a qualitatively new level of calculated and yet utterly irrational inhumanity; but this Shoah, this catastrophe which fell on the Jews of Europe, can only be understood as part of a greater catastrophe, a wider Holocaust which was the war itself.  Auschwitz and Dachau cannot be separated from the razing of Warsaw after the uprisings of 1943 and 1944, or the millions of Russian corpses left in the wake of Germany’s invasion of the USSR; but neither can these crimes of Nazism be disconnected from the Allied terror bombing of Hamburg, Dresden, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, or the deadly famine imposed on the masses of Bengal by the British under Churchill’s direction in 1943.

Furthermore, no matter how much the democracies used the evident savagery of Nazism as an alibi for their own crimes, they were largely complicit in the capacity of the Hitler regime to carry through its “Final Solution” to the Jewish question. In an article based on a review of the film The Pianist[10], we gave several examples of this complicity: the Bermuda conference on the refugee question organised by the USA and Britain in April 1943, which took place at the exact same moment as the Warsaw ghetto uprising, decided that there would be no opening of the doors to the huge mass of desperate people facing starvation and annihilation in Europe. The same article also refers to the story of the Hungarian Joel Brandt who came to the Allies with an offer to exchange a million Jews for 10,000 trucks: “as the PCI’s pamphlet[11] puts it, ‘Not only the Jews but the SS as well were taken in by the humanitarian propaganda of the Allies! The Allies didn’t want this 1 million Jews. Not for 10,000 lorries, not for 5,000, not even for nothing!’ Similar offers from Romania and Bulgaria were also rejected. In Roosevelt’s words ‘transporting so many people would disorganise the war effort’”

The official Zionist movement also played its part in this complicity, because they systematically opposed “refugeeism”, ie projects aimed at saving European Jews by allowing them to pass through the borders of countries other than Palestine. The keynote for this policy had already been sounded by Ben Gurion, the ‘Labour’ leader of the Yishuv, before the war:

“If the Jews are faced with a choice between the refugee problem and rescuing Jews from concentration camps on the one hand, and aid for the national museum in Palestine on the other, the Jewish sense of pity will prevail and our people’s entire strength will be directed at aid for the refugees in the various countries. Zionism will vanish from the agenda and indeed not only world public opinion in England and America but also from Jewish public opinion. We are risking Zionism’s very existence if we allow the refugee problem to be separated from the Palestine problem.”[12]. Ben-Gurion’s true indifference to the suffering of the European Jews was even more explicit when he said on 7 December 1938 that “If I knew that it was possible to save all the children of Germany by transporting them to England, but only half of them by transporting them to Palestine, I would choose the second - because we face not only the reckoning of those children, but the historical reckoning of the Jewish people”.

Any idea of direct collaboration between Zionism and the Nazis is treated as an “anti-Semitic trope” in numerous western countries, although there are certainly well-documented cases, notably the Havara agreement in Germany in the early days of the Nazi regime, which enabled Jews who were prepared to emigrate to Palestine to retain a sizeable portion of their funds; in parallel to this, Zionist organisations were allowed to operate legally under the Nazis, since both had a common interest in achieving a ‘Jew-free’ Germany as long as Jewish emigrants went to Palestine.  

This doesn’t contradict the fact that there have indeed been presentations of this kind of agreement which enter the realm of actual anti-Jewish conspiracy theory. The President of the present “Palestine Authority”, Mohamed Abbas, wrote a PhD thesis in the early 80s which can certainly be included in this category, since it makes the claim that the Zionists had exaggerated the number of Jews murdered by the Nazis in order to win sympathy for their cause, while at the same time Abbas casts doubt on the reality of the gas chambers[13].

However, collaboration between factions of the ruling class – even when they are nominally at war with each other – is a basic reality of capitalism and can take many forms. The willingness of warring nations to suspend hostilities and combine forces to crush the common enemy, the working class, when the misery of war provokes it to come out in defence of its own interests, was demonstrated during the Paris Commune of 1871 and again at the end of the First World War. And Winston Churchill, whose reputation as the greatest anti-Nazi of all time is more or less the officially recognised truth in Britain and elsewhere, did not hesitate to apply this policy in Italy in 1943 when he ordered a pause in the Allied invasion from the south to let the “Italians stew in their own juice” – a euphemism for allowing the Nazi power to crush the mass strikes of the workers in the industrial north.

What is certainly true is that the Zionist movement, and above all the state of Israel, have constantly used the experience of the Shoah, the spectre of the extermination of the Jews, to justify the most ruthless and destructive military and police actions against the Arab population of Palestine, and at the same time to assimilate all criticism of the Israeli state with anti-Semitism. But we will return, towards the end of this article, to the maze of ideological justifications and distortions developed by both (or all) sides in the current conflicts in Palestine.

To go back to the course of events set in motion by the war, the massacre of the Jews in Europe sped up immigration into Palestine, despite the desperate attempts of the British to keep it to a minimum, carrying out an extremely repressive policy which resulted in Jewish refugees being deported back to camps in Germany and to the tragedy of the Struma, a boat full of Jewish survivors which was denied entry to Palestine and, after being abandoned by the Turkish authorities, eventually sank in the Black Sea with nearly all on board. British repression provoked an outright war between the Mandate power and the Zionist militias, with the Irgun in particular leading the way in the use of terrorist tactics, such as the blowing up of the King David Hotel and the assassination of Swedish diplomatic mediator Count Bernadotte. The proposal to end the British mandate and partition Palestine between Arabs and Jews had already been made by the British Peel Commission in 1937, since the ‘Arab revolt’ and Zionist discontent had made it clear that the British Mandate was on its last legs; and now the two main powers emerging from the world war, the USA and USSR, saw it in the interest of their own future expansion to eliminate older colonial powers like Britain from the strategically vital Middle East region.  In 1947 both voted in the newly-formed UN for partition, while the USSR supplied the Yishuv with a large number of weapons via the Stalinist regime in Czechoslovakia. Having been largely suppressed by the Allies during the war itself, the truth about the Nazi concentration camps was now emerging and no doubt aroused much sympathy towards the plight of the millions of Jewish victims and survivors, and strengthened the determination of the Zionists to use all means at their disposal to achieve statehood. But the underlying dynamic towards the formation of the state of Israel derived from the post-war imperialist realignment and in particular the relegation of British imperialism to a purely secondary role in the new order.

…to Naqba

As with the question of the relations between the Nazis and the Zionists, the causes of the Naqba (which like Shoah, means catastrophe) are a historical and above all an ideological minefield. The “War of Independence” in 1948 ended with the flight of 750,000 Palestinian refugees from their homes and the expansion of the borders of the new state of Israel beyond the areas originally designated by the UN partition plan. According to the official Zionist version, the refugees fled because the Arab military alliance which launched its offensive against the fledgling Jewish state called on Palestinians to flee areas affected by the fighting in order to return once the Zionist project had been crushed. It’s no doubt true that the Arab forces, which were in reality poorly equipped and coordinated, made all kinds of grandiose claims about an impending victory and thus the possibility of the refugees returning rapidly to their homes. But subsequent research, including that of dissident Israeli historians like Ilan Pappe, has amassed a vast amount of evidence pointing to a systematic policy of terror by the new Israeli state against the Palestinian population, of mass expulsions and destruction of villages which justify the title of Pappe’s best-known work: The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (2006).

The massacre at Deir Yassin, a village not far from Jerusalem, in April 1948 carried out principally by the Irgun and Lehi, and involving the cold-blooded killing of over 100 villagers, including women and children, is the most infamous atrocity of the 1948 conflict. It was actually condemned by the Jewish Agency for Palestine and the Haganah, who blamed it on the ‘dissident’ armed groups. Although some Israeli historians continue to deny that this was a massacre rather than a simple battle[14], it is generally presented as an exception which did not conform to the “high moral standards” of the Israeli defence forces (an excuse we hear again and again over the current assault on Gaza). In fact, Pappe’s book demonstrates convincingly that Deir Yassin was the rule rather than the exception, since many other Palestinian villages and neighbourhoods – Dawayima, Lydda, Safsaf, Sasa, entire districts of Haifa and Jaffa, to name a few - suffered from similar acts of terror and destruction, even if the number of victims in each one was not usually so high. The Irgun and Lehi were explicit about their motivation in attacking Deir Yassin: not only to gain control of a strategically important site, but above all to create feelings of panic in the entire Palestinian population and convince them that they had no future in the Jewish state. This and similar ‘exemplary’ attacks on Palestinian villages certainly fulfilled this aim, accelerating the massive exodus of refugees who understandably feared that they were facing the same fate as the villagers of Deir Yassin.  Israeli historian Benny Morris wrote in The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem (1988) that Deir Yassin "probably had the most lasting effect of any single event of the war in precipitating the flight of Arab villagers from Palestine." Neither can responsibility for the massacre be laid at the feet of the right-wing gangs alone. The Haganah, including elite units from what is known as the Palmach, provided support for the action and did nothing to stop the slaughter of civilians[15]. And away from the front, Ben Gurion and the leadership of the new state were coordinating all the military actions aimed at ‘neutralising’ the areas inhabited by Arabs and of widening the boundaries of the Jewish state.

There has been much argument about the degree to which there was a coordinated plan to expel as many Arabs as possible beyond these boundaries, often centred around the so-called “Plan Dalet” which presented itself as a strategy for the defence of the Jewish state but which certainly involved precisely the kind of ‘offensive’ actions against areas inhabited by Palestinian Arabs that took place before and during the invasion by the Arab armies. But the fact that the mass exodus of Palestinian Aabs in 1948 coincided exactly with the interests of the Zionist state is surely verified by the fact that so many of the destroyed villages (including Deir Yassin itself) immediately became Jewish settlements or disappeared under the trees of newly planted forests, and that the former residents have never been allowed to return.  

It is not accidental that the mass expulsion of the Palestinians coincided with the fearful inter-communal massacres that took place in India and Pakistan following another partition in the British empire, or that the war in ex-Yugoslavia in the first half of the 90s made the term “ethnic cleansing” a commonplace. The whole period of capitalist decadence, as Rosa Luxemburg predicted, has meant that nationalism – even, and perhaps especially, when it is the nationalism of a group that has suffered the most horrific persecution - can only achieve its ends by the further oppression of other ethnic groups or minorities. 

The Zionist state in the service of imperialism

The state of Israel was thus born into the original sin of the expulsion of a huge proportion of the Arab population of Palestine. Its claims to be “the only democracy in the Middle East” has always been contradicted by this simple reality: despite the fact that it granted the right to vote to those Arabs who remained in the original boundaries of the state of Israel, the “Jewish character of the state” can only be maintained as long as Arab citizens remain in a minority; and, in the same logic, since 1967 Israel has reigned over the Arab population of the West Bank with no intention of ever making them Israeli citizens. But this aside, the existence even of the purest bourgeois democracy has never meant an end to the exploitation and repression of the working class, and in Israel this also applies not only to Arab proletarians, but also to the Israeli Jewish workers, whose struggles for class demands always come up against the “iron wall” of the state trade union, the Histradut (see below). Externally, Israel’s declared commitment to democracy and even ‘socialism’, which were the preferred ideological justifications of the Zionist state up until the late 1980s, never prevented Israel from maintaining very close links, including the supply of military aid, to the most obviously ‘undemocratic’ and openly racist regimes like South Africa under apartheid and the murderous – but also anti-Semitic - Argentine junta after 1976. Above all, Israel was ever willing to further its own imperialist appetites in close collaboration with the dominant imperialism of the post-war period, the USA. Israel participated in the 1956 Suez adventure of the older imperialist powers Britain and France, but after that it knuckled down to being the gendarme of the US in the Middle East, notably in the wars of 1967 and 1973, which were in essence proxy wars between the US and USSR for domination of the region.

Since the 1980s, Israel has more and more come under the sway of right-wing governments which have largely abandoned the old democratic and socialist verbiage of the Zionist left. Under Begin, Sharon and above all Netanyahu, the justification for maintaining Israel as a militarist and expansionist power in its own right tends to rely almost exclusively on references to the Holocaust and the fight for Jewish survival in a sea of anti-Semitism and terrorism. And there has been a lot to justify, from facilitating the massacre of Palestinians in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Lebanon by Falange militias in 1982 to the repeated reprisal bombings of Gaza (2008-2009, 2012, 2014, 2021) which were the predecessors of today’s all-out destruction. The irrational barbarism unfolding in front of our eyes in Gaza today retains its imperialist character, even if in the global atmosphere of ‘every man for himself’ Israel is no longer the reliable servant of US interests that it once was.

‘The Anti-Zionist Resistance’: apologies for a rival imperialist camp

The crimes of the Israeli state are widely chronicled in the publications of the left and far left of capital. Not so much with the repressive and reactionary policies of the Arab regimes and the guerilla gangs sponsored by them and by more global imperialist powers. In the 1948 conflict, the inter-communal massacres that had featured so strongly in 1929 and 1936 also made their appearance. In reprisal for Deir Yassin, a convoy heading towards the Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem, guarded by the Haganah but mainly carrying doctors, nurses and medical supplies, was ambushed. Medical staff and patients were slaughtered as well as Haganah fighters. Such actions reveal the murderous intent of the Arab armies aiming to crush the new Zionist state. Meanwhile the Hashemite monarchy in Transjordan, following a backroom deal with the British, showed their deep concern for Palestinian statehood by annexing the West Bank and renaming itself simply as Jordan.  As in Egypt, Lebanon, Syria and elsewhere, the majority of Palestinian refugees who had fled to the West Bank were crammed into camps, kept in poverty, and used as an excuse for their conflict with Israel. Unsurprisingly, the misery inflicted on the refugee population not only by the Zionist regime that expelled them but also by their Arab hosts made them a highly volatile element. In the absence of a proletarian alternative, the Palestinian masses became the prey of armed nationalist gangs which tended to form a state within the state in the Arab countries, often linked to other regional powers as a proxy force: the case of Hezbollah in Lebanon being an obvious example.  In the 1970s and 80s, the growing power of the Palestine Liberation Organisation in Jordan and Lebanon led to bloody clashes between the state forces and guerilla gangs – the best-known examples being Black September in Jordan in 1970 and the mass murders in Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Lebanon in 1982 (carried out by the Lebanese Falange with the active support of the Israeli army).

The left wing of capital is quite capable of denouncing the “reactionary Arab regimes” in the Middle East, of exposing their frequent repressive actions against the Palestinians, but this has not prevented Trotskyists, Maoists and even some anarchists from supporting the same regimes in their wars against Israel or the USA, whether by calling for the victory of Egypt and Syria in the 1973 war[16] or rallying to the defence of the “anti-imperialist” Saddam Hussein against the US in 1991 or 2003. But the speciality of the far left is support for the “Palestinian resistance”, and this has remained constant from the days when the PLO proposed replacing the Zionist regime with a “secular democratic state where Arabs and Jews enjoy equal rights” and the more leftist Popular Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine talked about the Hebrew nation’s right to self-determination, to today’s jihadist organisations like Hamas and Hezbollah which make no secret of their desire to “throw the Jews into the sea” as the Hezbollah leader Nasrallah once put it. And in fact the ‘marxist’ Palestinian Resistance in the 70s and 80s did not flinch from carrying out indiscriminate bombings in Israel and the murder of civilians, as in 1972 when the Black September group killed the 11 Israeli athletes they had taken hostage, or the Lod Airport massacre perpetrated in the same year by the Japanese Red Army on behalf of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. The use of such methods has never troubled the Trotskyists, often with the excuse used by the SWP after the Hamas raid of October 7 2023: “the Palestinian people have every right to respond in any way they choose to the violence that the Israeli state metes out to them every day”[17]

Neither has the left wing of capital been troubled by the fact that the ‘anti-imperialism’ of the Palestinian nationalist movements has from the very beginning meant the search for alliances with other imperialist powers whose sordid interests conflict with those of Israel or the USA.  From the Mufti’s efforts to gain support from Italian and German imperialism in the 30s, to Yasser Arafat courting the USSR or the PFLP’s George Habash looking to Mao’s China, and the “Axis of Resistance” that links Hamas and Hizbollah to Iran and the Houthis, not forgetting further ‘liberation’ groups directly set up by regimes like Syria and Iraq, Palestinian nationalism has never been an exception to the rule that makes national liberation impossible in the epoch of capitalist decadence, offering no more than the replacement of one imperialist master with another.

But within this continuity, there has also been an evolution, or rather, a further degeneration that corresponds to the advent of the final phase of capitalist decadence, the phase of decomposition, marked by a clear increase in irrationality both at the ideological and the military levels. The replacement of democratic and ‘socialist’ mystifications in the ideology of Palestinian nationalism by Islamic fundamentalism and overt anti-Semitism – the Hamas Charter makes extensive and direct use of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a pamhlet about the Jewish plot for global domination fabricated by the Tsarist secret police – reflects this irrationality at the level of thought and ideas. At the same time, the October 7 action, genocidal in its readiness to kill all Jews that came into its sights, but also suicidal in that it could only provoke a much more devastating genocide of Gaza itself, reveals the self-destructive, scorched Earth logic of all of today’s inter-imperialist conflicts.

And of course, the rise of Jihadism is exactly paralleled by the growing domination of Israeli politics by the ultra-religious Zionist right, which claims a God-given right to reduce Gaza to ruins, sends its goons to block the trickle of food supplies to Gaza, and aims to replace the entire Palestinian Arab population of Gaza and “Judea and Samaria” (the West Bank) with Jewish settlements. The religious right in Israel is the death’s head face of Zionism’s long-standing manipulation of the dreams of the Biblical prophets. But for marxists like Max Beer the best of the prophets were a product of the class struggle in the ancient world, and although their hopes for the future were rooted in a nostalgia for an earlier form of communism, they nevertheless looked forward to a world without Pharaohs and kings, and even to the unification of humanity beyond tribal divisions[18]. The call by the religious Zionists for the annihilation of Arab Gaza and the state enforcement of religious/ethnic divisions only shows how far these ancient dreams have been trampled in the mud under the reign of capital.

Finding the exit to the ideological maze

The weaponisation of the Holocaust and of anti-Semitism by the present government of Israel is increasingly overt. Any criticism of Israel’s policies in Gaza or the West Bank, even when it comes from respectable figures like Emmanuel Macron or Keir Starmer, is immediately assimilated with support for Hamas. The Trump regime in the US also sells itself as an intransigent opponent of anti-Semitism and uses this fable to push through its repressive policies against students and academics who have taken part in protests against the destruction of Gaza. Trump’s opposition to anti-Semitism is of course the purest hypocrisy. The “MAGA movement” has numerous links to a number of openly anti-Semitic, fascist-type groups, while its “pro-Israel” stance is largely fuelled by the evangelical Christian right, whose belief system “needs” the return of the Jews to Zion as a prelude to the return of Christ and Armageddon. What the evangelicals are usually less vocal about is their conviction that in the course of these Last Days the Jews will be offered the choice between acknowledging Christ - or death and the fires of hell.

And at the same time, the anti-Zionist left, despite its insistence that anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism are totally separate and the fact that many Jewish groups, both ‘socialist’ and ultra-religious, have taken part in demonstrations for “Free Palestine”, adds further grist to the right-wing mill by its congenital inability to denounce support for Hamas and thus for the outright Jew-hatred which is part of its DNA. Furthermore, when the right harps on about the increase of anti-Semitism since October 7, they don’t have to invent anything, because there has indeed been a growing number of attacks on Jews in Europe and the USA, including the murders and attempted murders that took place in America in May (Washington DC) and June (Boulder, Colorado) of 2025. The right and the Zionist establishment then exploit these events to the hilt, using them to justify more ruthless action by the Israeli state. And this in turn contributes to the further spread of anti-Semitism. In 1938, Trotsky warned that Jewish emigration to Palestine was no solution to the tide of anti-Semitism sweeping Europe and could indeed become a “bloody trap for several hundred thousand Jews”[19]. Today Israel has the potential of being a bloody trap for several million Jews; and at the same time the increasingly murderous policies carried out in its ‘defence’ has created a new variety of anti-Semitism which blames all Jews for the actions of the Israeli state.

This is a true ideological maze and no exit can be found by following the mystifications of the pro-Zionist right or the anti-Zionist left. The only way out of the maze is the uncompromising defence of the internationalist proletarian outlook, founded on the rejection of all forms of nationalism and all imperialist camps.

We have no illusions about how weak this tradition is in the Middle East. The international communist left, the only consistently internationalist political current, has never had any organised presence in Palestine, Israel or other parts of the region. Within Israel, for example, the best-known example of a political tendency opposed to the founding principles of the state, the Trotskyist Matzpen and its various offshoots, saw their internationalist duty in supporting one or another of the different Palestinian nationalist organisations, in particular the more leftist versions like the PDFLP. We have made it clear that supporting an ‘opposing’ form of nationalism has nothing in common with a real internationalist policy, which can only be based on the necessity for the unification of the class struggle across all national divisions.

Nevertheless, the class divide exists in Israel and Palestine and the rest of the Middle East just as in all other countries. Against the leftists who see the Israeli workers as no more than colons, as a privileged elite who benefit from the oppression of the Palestinians, we can point out that Israeli workers have launched numerous strikes in defence of their living standards – which are continually being eroded by the demands of the hugely bloated war economy – and frequently in open defiance of the Histadrut. The Israeli working class announced its participation in the international revival of struggles after 1968: in the strikes that erupted in 1969, they began to form action committees outside the official union. The strikes were spearheaded by the Ashdod dockworkers who were denounced as Al Fatah agents in the press.  In 1972, in response to the devaluation of the Israeli pound, and rejecting the Histadrut’s calls for sacrifices in the name of national defence, workers demonstrated for wage rises outside the union’s headquarters and fought pitched battles against the police. In the same year, in Egypt, especially Helwan, Port Said and Choubra, a wave of strikes and demonstrations broke out in reaction to price rises and shortages; as in Israel, this quickly led to confrontations with the police and many arrests. As in Israel, the workers began to form their own strike committees in opposition to the official unions. At the same time, the leftist students and Palestinian nationalists who began to participate in the workers’ demonstrations calling for the release of imprisoned strikers made “declarations of support for the Palestinian guerilla movement, with demands for the setting up of a war economy (including a wage freeze), and for the formation of a ‘popular militia’ to defend the ‘homeland’ against Zionist aggression…the complete antimony between class struggles and ‘national liberation wars’ in the imperialist epoch is highlighted by these events”[20]. In 2011, in the street demonstrations and occupations against welfare cuts and the high cost of living, slogans targeting Netanyahu, Mubarak and Assad as part of the common enemy were raised, while others pointed out that Arabs and Jews both suffered from the lack of decent housing. There were also efforts to develop discussions that went across the divide between Jews, Arabs and African refugees[21]. In 2006, thousands of state employees in Gaza came out on strike against the non-payment of wages by Hamas.

All these movements implicitly reveal the international essence of the class struggle, even if its expressions in this region have long been profoundly hampered by the hatreds fuelled by endless rounds of terrorism and massacre, and by the readiness of the different bourgeoisies to divert and stifle the slightest hint of opposition to inter-communal violence and war between states. In Gaza recently we have seen some street demonstrations calling for Hamas to step down and for an end to the war. Very soon afterwards it emerged that the Israeli government has been supporting and even arming certain clans and factions within Gaza to take control of these anti-Hamas sentiments. In Israel, a growing number of military reservists are not showing up for duty and a few of these have issued an appeal explaining why they are no longer willing to serve in the army. For the first time, small minorities are questioning the aims of the continuing war against Hamas – not only because it will inevitably reduce the possibility of any of the surviving hostages being released, but also because of the terrible suffering it is inflicting on the Palestinian population, which has been a taboo subject in the atmosphere of mass trauma created by October 7 and its deliberate manipulation by the Israeli state.  But the pacifist ideology that dominates the Israeli dissident movement will act as a further block on the emergence of any authentically revolutionary opposition to the war.

Nonetheless, this incipient asking of questions on both sides of the conflict shows that there is work to be done by internationalists to encourage it to break out of its pacifist and patriotic envelope. Certainly, we can only hope to reach very small minorities at the moment, and we understand that, given the level of ideological intoxication in Israel and Palestine, the most important steps towards a real break with nationalism will require the example, the inspiration, of new levels of class struggle in the central countries of capitalism.

Amos, August 2025

 

[1] Nashe Slovo 4 February 1916

[2] See the first part of this article in International Review 173, section headed “Workers of Zion”: the impossible fusion of marxism and Zionism

[3] Nabi Musa is a Muslim festival which at that moment (20 April 1920) drew large crowds in Jerusalem. The riots took up a ‘Muslim’ slogan such as “The religion of Mohamed was founded by the sword” alongside the one favoured by pogromists of many faiths: “Slaughter the Jews”, now mirrored in the favourite rallying cry of the Jewish pogromists in Israel: “Death to the Arabs”. (See Simon Sebag Montefiore, Jerusalem: The Biography, 2011, p516)

[4] The ideology of the Stern group was in fact a strange mixture of fascism and leftist anti-imperialism, a sort of “National Bolshevism” that happily described itself as “terrorist” and was prepared to move from an alliance with Nazi Germany to one with Stalinist Russia, all in the cause of chasing the British out of Palestine.

[7] Zionism: False Messiah, London, 1979, p178

[8] “Bilan & the Arab-Jewish conflict in Palestine”, International Review 110

[9] https://endnotes.org.uk/posts/auerbach-and-mattick-on-palestine

[12] Memo to the Zionist Executive, 17.12.1938, cited in Greenstein Zionism During the Holocaust p 297

[14] See for example Eliezer Tauber, Deir Yassin: the Massacre that Never Was. Menachim Begin, former Irgun terrorist and later Prime Minister of Israel, also presented Deir Yassin as an entirely legitimate military conquest. He denied it was a massacre but did admit that, following the attack, “Panic overwhelmed the Arabs of Eretz Israel. Kolonia village, which had previously repulsed every attack of the Haganah, was evacuated overnight and fell without further fighting. Beit-Iksa was also evacuated. [...] In the rest of the country, too, the Arabs began to flee in terror, even before they clashed with Jewish forces. [...] The legend of Deir Yassin helped us in particular in the saving of Tiberias and the conquest of Haifa,” Begin, The Revolt, 1977, page 227

[15] We should point out that a key factor in stopping the killing was the intervention of the neighbouring village of Givat Shaul, home to a group of Haredi (ultra-orthodox) Jews who had been living on good terms with the residents of Deir Yassin. When the Haredim heard what was going on in Deir Yassin, they rushed over to the Arab village, denouncing the Zionist gunmen as thieves and murderers, and demanded – and seem to have achieved - an immediate end to the slaughter. There is a vast moral gulf between this intervention and the activities of the ‘religious Zionists’ in the present Israeli government.

[16] The ‘orthodox’ Trotskyists who published Red Weekly (12 October 1973) argued that in this war “the aims of the Arab ruling classes are not the same as ours”, but that “support for the Egyptian-Syrian war effort is obligatory for all socialists”; the forerunners of the SWP, the less orthodox Trotskyists of International Socialism (number 63) insisted that since Israel was the gendarme of the US, “the fight of the Arab armies against Israel is a fight against western imperialism”. See “The Arab-Israeli war and the social-barbarians of the ‘left’” in World Revolution number 1.

[20] World Revolution 3, “Class struggle in the Middle East”.

Rubric: 

Ideologies of imperialist war