The declaration of an intent to “rethink” something is often, particularly for the Left, an ominous sign. When the social-democratic parties openly declared such an “intent” and dropped Marx from their program, their decline quickly emptied their positions of content, leaving them just one more center-left or “liberal” party (in the American sense) among others, with little more than human rights, anticorruption, and identity politics to show for themselves.
But surely there are good reasons to rethink the Palestinian-Israeli struggle: in particular an experience of defeat become a way of life, an Israeli power so long identified with that of the United States that its “defeat” has come to seem unthinkable, and the famous “two-state solution” an old-fashioned pipe dream, yesterday’s fantasy. We are then tempted to “rethink” this struggle into a wish fulfillment that might at least be up to date: what about a single nonconfessional democratic state in which the two sides fight it out in free elections and by parliamentary majorities? Is this not, after all, the Washington Consensus: free elections as the outward and visible sign of the inner free market? But perhaps it was this Consensus, along with the category of the nation-state in which it is articulated, that was the problem in the first place?
The present collection has a dramatic proposal for us, one which identifies two separate streams of faulty thinking and leaves us with the even more shocking implication that they might somehow be deeply interrelated with each other: on the one hand is the inconsistency of the older nation-state categories in a situation of globalization (that is to say, the world coordination of late capitalism); on the other is the assumption that leftist politics is to be reduced to the classic bourgeois concepts of civil rights and human rights, of equality before the law and voting rights, of multiculturalism and the end of ethnic, racial, and gender intolerance. “Rethinking” does not mean abandoning these programs (which liberals like to call “values”) but rather presupposing them, just as the socialist tradition has always presupposed the achievement of bourgeois freedoms as the foundation on which a new and distinctive, radically different form of economic freedom might be built. However, if all politics are local, the traditional objections to such “rethinking” assume that the larger perspective inevitably saps the energies of local, everyday struggles against injustice, struggles which are difficult enough to launch in the first place. On the other hand, the Palestinian struggle is uniquely one in which the everyday and the ultimate end are inextricable and have to be solved together or not at all.
Unfortunately, not-at-all seems to have come out the winner, with the result that Palestine fatigue joins Israel fatigue, and the individual sufferings that have horrified and energized generations on the left now pale into seeming insignificance before the virtual Völkerwanderung of refugees and exiles, asylum seekers and boat people, from the Middle East in general. That unique struggle which was once considered to be the single festering open sore that poisoned Middle Eastern politics has now become a minor, well-nigh forgotten exception in the midst of a regional upheaval of “world-war” proportions. Why even bother to rethink it?
My own position on twenty-first century politics in this area has always been that the Americans were so successful in their overt or covert efforts to stamp out Middle Eastern Communist parties and left-wing movements (beginning, for example, with the massacres of Communists in an older Iraq—the forerunner of their virtual genocide in Indonesia) that they created a situation in which only religion remained as a terrain of opposition and revolt. To be sure, the Americans did not feel that there was anything to revolt against (inasmuch as they were the target), and they failed to understand that there were whole populations who thought otherwise and who had only religion to fall back to as an oppositional ideology. But disposing of a religious opponent (save, perhaps, in Iran) does not automatically restore the coordinates of an earlier secular situation.
Indeed, even though the Palestinian struggle was and remains the most secular form of opposition in the Middle Eastern world (a term I continue to use inasmuch as Palestinians are not exclusively Muslim and Muslims not exclusively Arab), its nationalism might well be seen as a misleading ideological masking of deeper contradictions that only Marxism is capable of “rethinking” with any precision and comprehensiveness.
This is, at any rate, the proposal argued from a variety of directions by the present issue. It sees Fatah as a form of liberal or social-democratic alliance politics with all the weaknesses and vices of the Western versions, defects too visible now that Fatah has in effect come to power in the Palestinian Authority. And it seeks to rectify the misunderstanding of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a settler-colony struggle between colonists and the “native” or indigenous population by insisting on the development of capital in the Palestinian world and on the shared interests of Israeli and Palestinian workers who in fact—if not in political fiction—may not even constitute two distinct national proletariats but versions of that new globalized workforce coming into being in this third stage of capital. We may well remember American history here and Werner Sombart’s famous answer to the perennial question of why no viable socialism emerged in the United States: namely, race! The most significant radical movement in U.S. history, indeed, that of late nineteenth-century populism, foundered on its opponents’ strategic ability to set white farmers against black (see Larry Goodwin’s pathbreaking work on American populism). Race is indeed a fictive concept with only too real consequences, and its analogous role in Israeli politics, articulated according to successive waves of immigrants from different class situations, has clearly played a decisive role in the staging of the so-called Israeli-Palestinian struggle, a role to be attributed not only to the rhetoric of an increasingly nonsocialist Israeli power structure but also to the “nationalist” appeal of a centrist Fatah, in which Marxists and socialists have played an ever more insignificant part. Here is then a momentous “revision” of the history of this period as it has been seen by the propaganda for both sides for generations. Indeed, since decolonization the international Left of whatever persuasion has considered “national liberation” to be a more urgent cause than class struggle and has given priority to the former under various political agendas. The essays collected in the present issue may indeed serve to shake the hold of this conviction.
But this changed conviction goes hand in hand with another one: namely, the development of capitalism in both Israel and Palestine alike. This is the “great transformation” some of us have called postmodernity, or late or finance capital, and others the neoliberal or neoconservative turn, or the end of history, the end of ideology, and so on. It is the local form of this transformation—situated in the early 80s with the Reagan-Thatcher moment and the liquidation of Keynesianism—which bears the name “post-Zionism,” a term that suffers the ambiguous fate of all such formulations, depending on whether you grasp it as an ideological affirmation or simply as a marker for a fundamental structural break and transition.
In our context, the post-Zionist situation signifies the emergence of a full-fledged capitalist economy from the heroic (or ideologically heroic) period of Israeli state formation and the concomitant transformation of its political reality along with the residual survival of its older political rhetoric. Few will doubt the historical reality of this evolution, but many are likely to be astonished by the affirmation, in the present collection, of a similar development in Palestine, where the existence of an analogous Palestinian capitalism seems to have been either a well-kept secret or an unmentionable fact of life.
With this revision of Israeli-Palestinian history from a Marxist perspective, we are suddenly confronted with the astonishing conclusion that, far from being a glaring exception in contemporary world politics, this seemingly eternal “open wound” of the global situation is in fact exemplary and offers something like a pure laboratory experiment in which theoretically to observe the dynamics of the latest stage in world capitalism. As to practice, however much it complicates the thinking of anticapitalist forces today, the rethinking of this experiment may well have strategic lessons for the forms that resistance can take today and the shape of some global Marxism to come.