Where Is the Marxist Critique of Israel/Palestine?

Abstract

This essay argues for the urgent necessity of developing a new Marxist analysis and political horizon for Palestine/Israel. Two factors coalesce to affirm this conclusion: the near absence from contemporary academic writing of any discernibly Marxist analyses of Palestine/Israel and the deep crisis of the 1990s leftist project of peace, whose decline has not spurred a leftist alternative to it. The authors suggest several explanations for this state of affairs, from academic trends to the universalization of an older Marxist universalism to the near absence within existing leftist commentary of any attempt to present a materialist totalizing perspective on Palestine/Israel that relates the conflict causally to the contradictions of capitalism. Finally, the authors suggest that the essays included in the Rethinking Marxism symposium on Palestine/Israel (described briefly in this essay) can be used as so many potential starting points for narrating Palestine/Israel anew and reasserting forcefully this narrative’s commitment to the Left’s traditional political goals in Palestine/Israel.

Key Words:

• Israel
• Marxism
• Palestine
• Post-Zionism
• Zionism

Notes

1 See, e.g., Chomsky (1999).

2 This lacuna is not new. In the bibliographical note appended to his landmark essay “Zionism from the Standpoint of Its Victims,” Edward Said (1979, 57) makes reference in passing to the lack of Marxist interpretations, noting that “aside from Isaac Deutscher (in his The Non-Jewish Jew [recently republished by Verso; see Deutscher 2017]), the major European socialist statement on the Middle East has come from the French Orientalist Maxime Rodinson [1968; 1973].” From our vantage, Rodinson (still less Deutscher) did not produce an entirely persuasive Marxist account of Israel and Palestine. And at any rate, their writings on Israel and Palestine have been practically forgotten. The task must be taken up again.

3 Najjar’s (2007) essay on Palestinian Marxist journalism is the standout: a first-rate, incisive piece of original scholarship. The essays by Buttigeig (2004), Renton (2001), and Kaminsky (2010) are thought provoking but short. There are passing references to Israel or Palestine in a few other essays, but that is all.

4 For a robust defense of this claim, see Karatani (2014).

5 On this, see Gozansky (1986), Ben-Porat (1993), Shafir (1994), and Seikaly (2015; 2018); see also Jameson (1979).

6 See Chomsky (1999), Samara (2000), Bichler and Nitzan (2002), Algazi (2006), Sa’di (2010), Abunimah (2014), Dana (2015), and Clarno (2017).

7 This also implies clarifying the U.S. role in shaping the Israeli state. On this point we acknowledge the importance of John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt’s (2007) The Israel Lobby, a book that is not Marxist (nor is it post-Zionist); indeed, they are anti-Marxists, and yet we should rightly celebrate their contributions to the critique of Zionism. The point is not that anti-Marxists have produced important criticisms of Israel but that the Marxist critique of post-Zionism is part of a much larger project of criticizing everything existing—for the sake of producing a genuinely radical conception of the world.

8 On this point it is helpful to recall Isaac Deutscher (1954, 97): “While in the West socialism, liberalism, and Zionism were benevolently related to one another, in Eastern Europe they bitterly competed for the loyalty of the Jewish masses. A deep cleavage always existed there between the Zionist and the anti-Zionist Jew. The anti-Zionist urged the Jews to trust their gentile environment, to help the “progressive forces” in that environment to come to the top, and so hope that those forces would effectively defend the Jews against anti-semitism. “Social revolution will give the Jews equality and freedom; they have therefore no need for a Zionist Messiah”; this was the stock argument of generations of Jewish left-wingers. The Zionists, on the other hand, dwelt on the deep-seated hatred of non-Jews toward Jews and urged the Jews to trust their future to nobody other than their own State.” The former position, represented by Marx, won over most Western European Jews before World War II. Numerically these Jews would comprise only a fraction of the postwar immigrants to Israel, where Zionism was dominated by the latter position. The ideological center of gravity within Zionism thus shifted from West to East. The current effort by left-wing Jewish intellectuals in Europe and the United States to confront Israel could be seen as a belated counter-response.

9 Hess, a Hegelian socialist, helped to bring Marx to communism (see, e.g., Kouvelakis 2003, chap. 3). But after the failure of the great European revolutions of 1848—for which Hess and Marx wrote separate, competing manifestos—Marx turned Hegel on his head to produce his critique of capitalist political economy. Hess (1958) dredged up the most teleological and messianistic interpretations of Hegel to produce Zionism. Hess advocated for socialist secular Jews to move to Jerusalem and create a model socialist society. By weaving Spinoza and Hegel together with communist and nationalist convictions, Hess laid the foundation for seeing Jewish nationalism and revolutionary horizon as not in principle contradictory.

10 Borochov (1937; 1955) advocated the creation of a society in which Jews would be free to occupy basic productive functions, a Jewish homeland with socialist ends: in his conception of Marxist Zionism, proletarian solidarity by Jewish and Arab working classes would facilitate the creation of multinational communism in Palestine. On Marxist Zionism, see Novack (1969), Mintz (1976), Gutwein (1989), Peled (1995), and Sternhell (1997).

11 Douglas Moggach (2017) provides a succinct summary of Bauer’s position on the Jewish question: at question was “whether the explicitly Christian state of Prussia could eliminate restrictions on Jewish participation in civil institutions. While liberals and republicans advocated [Jewish] emancipation, conservative opponents defended the state’s exclusive [Christian] confessional allegiance. Bauer’s interventions attacked the [Prussian] state for defending privilege, and claimed that it used religion as a mask for its interests in maintaining relations of subordination; but he also criticized Jews and their supporters for claiming freedom on the basis of a particular religious identity … [For Bauer,] Christianity demonstrated a historically higher degree of consciousness, since it cancelled the externality of the deity. But this was not a unilateral progress upon Judaism, because Christianity, and especially Protestantism, generalized alienation to encompass all aspects of life. The superiority of Christianity consisted in its radical negativity, making requisite a transition to a new and higher form of ethical life.”

12 We could also add Shlomo Sand’s name to this list. He is the best known post-Zionist among Anglophone Marxists thanks to the publication of a trio of his books by Verso (Sand 2010; 2012; 2017). Sand continues to produce post-Zionist works after the genre has been declared dead (Pappé has written its history). Though his books are not Marxist, in Twilight of History Sand (2017, xx) claims that his earliest motivation for writing history—the epistemological perspective at the start of his career—was “Marxist” and “materialist.” By our reading, Sand’s post-Zionism offers a critical, relativist historiography of Zionism.

13 An antitotalizing post-Zionism becomes more visible only circa 2000: for example, in some writings of Gadi Algazi (2006) or more prominently those of Tamar Berger (1998).

We on the left tend to treat early twentieth-century Zionism as the main culprit in instituting the oppression of Palestinians. However, without detracting from Zionist responsibility, we should also recall the historical role of the British, who pushed for the restructuring of Palestinian society along capitalist lines. The Zionists were degraded to the status of self-deluded watchdogs for the British Empire. A contemporary example is even more troubling: we tend to think of Israeli settlers in the West Bank as wrongdoers, as the main opposition to Palestinian emancipation. But as Gutwein (2001) argues, the growth of the settlements is the result of the neoliberalization of the Israeli economy. The Israeli settlers are in this view also subaltern, victims of state and capitalist exploitation. The ethical conundrums thus produced should not simply lead us to turn the problem into its own solution, arguing that everyone is both a victim and a perpetrator under capitalism and ergo there is no way out of the horror. Rather, it should propel us beyond abstract bourgeois ethics to explore the material contradictions of capitalism that give rise to these surface injustices.

14 Then and now, we would add.

15 We will return to the historical role of post-Zionism, and to the difference between it and a Marxist position on Israel/Palestine today, below.

16 The West Bank Israeli settlement population soared not after the occupation of the area in 1967 but in the late 1980s.

17 Noam Chomsky often implies that Israel’s disastrous fate was sealed in the 1970s (Chomsky and Pappé 2014, 70–6; see also Chomsky 1999). Chomsky’s point is that the prospect for producing something like a socialist society in which Jews and Arabs live together was destroyed by several overlapping events in the 1970s, which have (as both cause and effect) pulled the center of gravity in state and society ever farther to the right. These events include the persistent attempt to expand Israeli territory; the raising of Israel’s “security” to the organizing principal of the state; the consolidation of neoliberalism as de facto economic policy for the entire world; and (after 1979) the double fragmentation of political Islam, igniting conflict between Sunni and Shia that has since only spiraled outward (with particularly negative effects for any hope of positive political influence from a unified Islamic world).

18 See also our interview with Chomsky (Nir and Wainwright 2018) in this issue of Rethinking Marxism and Pappé’s (2014, 70, 74, 86, 97, 101, 119, 140, 160, 170, 185–6, 194, 212, 260-2, 265) references to class, Marx, and socialism in The Idea of Israel.

19 One could go further back, to 1917. Although nothing prior to 1948 determined the fate of Israel and Palestine, two nearly simultaneous events in 1917 shaped the future in fundamental respects: the victory of the Bolshevik Revolution (28 October 1917) and the Balfour Declaration (2 November 1917). The latter provided international legitimacy for Zionist colonization in Palestine. The implications of the Russian Revolution are more complex (too complex to be analyzed here). Lenin elevated the principle of national self-determination (see Lenin 1968) and, particularly after World War II, the USSR supported anti-imperial struggles in many colonized societies. Ironically, the global sweep of postwar decolonization coincided with the creation of the state of Israel in 1948. One reason is that the United States came to support the creation of Israel; the presence of a well-articulated socialist Zionist position may have helped inoculate USSR opposition. At any rate, the USSR was never particularly useful to the Palestinian cause. Indeed, by the 1950s the USSR came to also support Israel on communist grounds. By the start of the First Intifada in December 1987, when the Palestinian struggle to overcome Israeli occupation reached a critical stage, the USSR was too weak to confront or counteract U.S./Israeli power in the region, and by the start of the Second Intifada in September 2000, the USSR was gone. Today, though Palestinian self-determination is a cause célèbre for the international Left, the movement is at a nadir. In sum, Marxism and Palestine have been out of sync for a century.

20 As Aijaz Ahmad (1992, 159–220) argued, Said’s (1978) separation of Orientalist discourse from historical and material processes confused superstructure (Orientalism) and infrastructure (imperialist capitalism).

21 Even when post-Zionist critics write scathing critiques of the 1990s peace process, they do it in the name of a more equitable peace arrangement than that discussed in the actually existing peace process rather than to eschew the goal of peace altogether. This is the truth of Edward Said’s (1996) Peace and Its Discontents, dedicated to a “champion of Peace and Justice” even as it offers its readers a damning critique of the peace process. The same is true of Tanya Reinhardt’s (2006) Roadmap to Nowhere, which exposes the gaps between the offered Israeli concessions, their representation in the Israeli media, and what would be a fair resolution.

22 An argument elaborated more fully by Nir (2018).

23 This claim is also made by Fredric Jameson (2018) and is implicitly rejected by Chomsky in our interview with him (Nir and Wainwright 2018).