Socialist Politics and Israel’s ‘Right to Exist’: Probing a Strange Alliance
Virginia Tilley
Johannesburg, South Africa
In all its variations, socialist theory has an inherent advantage in analyzing the conflict in Israel-Palestine. Yet this strength can become a disadvantage. Its principal strength is its concern with global capitalism, which makes easy what other perspectives find difficult: that is, identifying the conflict’s glaring imperialist and settler-colonial character.
The history of Israel-Palestine is indeed a veritable pageantry of neo-colonial and imperialist western interventions, from the nefarious Balfour Declaration and the Sykes-Picot Agreement through the “special relationship” between the US and Israel today (with ongoing European complicity). Much of the obvious racism associated with the conflict can also be understood through this lens, which clarifies how its geopolitics reflects a Western Orientalism that serves imperialist agendas. Today, classic Orientalism has evolved into neo-colonial arguments about an East-West “clash of civilizations” or phantom enemies like “Islamo-fascism.” But the spirit and goals of this new rhetoric are the same as the old: conquest, oil, trade routes, manipulation of compliant local elites, and military hegemony.
Still, this lens does not explain much about the internal character of the conflict: for example, it doesn’t explain why Zionist doctrine mandated ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians rather than allowing what was, originally, a mostly western settler movement to incorporate the indigenous people as a cheap native labour force. And indeed, too many leftists remain cloudy about how to understand the ethnic nationalism of political Zionism. We see this confusion especially in their striking failure to recognize and endorse the only solution that is both consistent with socialist ideals and capable of creating a stable peace: a unitary democracy.
Instead, the majority of leftists still endorse “the vision of two states, Israel and sovereign, independent, democratic and viable Palestine, living side-by-side in peace and security” (to quote the odious Road Map) on the confused premise that this “balanced” position is both fair and consistent with progressive socialist values. When they are confronted with the obvious obsolescence of the two-state solution — Jewish settlements and the Wall running rampant across the West Bank countryside, reducing the Palestinian state to a chopped-up Bantustan — we find leftists holding to the two-state solution anyway, partly by reiterating the standard, knee-jerk objection to a one-state solution, “the Jews will never accept it.”
This unique leftist passivity to “Jewish” views (demonstrably not held by all Jews) is bewildering precisely because leftist sensitivity to imperialism is so keen. Where else do leftists routinely accept, as an immovable political fact, the wishes of a settler society to deny citizenship to the native people? Within the orbit of leftist thought, “the Jews will never accept it” is as nonsensical as “the whites will never accept” black rule in South Africa. One does not ask settler-colonists whether they want to share their state with the native people; one explains to them that they must do so, and then tries to further and smooth the inevitable path to democracy. Yet, regarding Israel-Palestine, many leftists have inexplicably privileged Jewish rejection as enjoying some mysterious moral standing that excludes Israel from such universal standards of justice and equality.
Many explanations for this exceptional treatment can be offered. I discuss several in my book, but I will just point out two obvious ones here because they are more specific to socialist politics. The first is the ambivalence about ethnic nationalism that is endemic to socialist political theory. The second is the thoughtless acceptance of the long-standing yet entirely fictional notion that Israel is indeed, at root, a progressive, socialist or proto-socialist society, with which the left is in solidarity or at least sympathetic..
The Left and Israel: Ambivalence and Ethnic Nationalism
The problem of ambivalence stems from an inherent weakness in leftist politics regarding the politics of culture and ethnicity generally. Ethnic politics have always been problematic for leftist movements because they arise and persist from social forces that have only conditional relationships to class and that, in their behaviour and tenacity, often contradict the class-centric assumptions and predictions of leftist theory. Rather than deal seriously with this conundrum, however, leftists have too often resorted to insisting that ethnic identities are mere spin-offs of class dynamics — e.g., inventions by capitalist classes to preclude working-class solidarity or false consciousness instilled in the masses by their own self-serving ethnic entrepreneurs.
In trying to coordinate with indigenous movements in Latin America, for example, leftist ideologues were infamously slow to recognize the specifically cultural needs and agendas of native peoples, tending to insist on the primacy of working-class alliances well into the 1980s. Openly challenged by the wave of indigenous mobilizations in the 1980s and 1990s, whose intellectuals denounced the clear inadequacy of a purely class-based approach to indigenous dilemmas, leftist progressives eventually came to see ethnicity as a potentially liberating identity discourse through which cultural groups could mobilize, reclaim power, and construct a new politics of equality. Hence ethnic nationalism — in which peoples identified by race and culture seek to seize their own state from imperialist or colonial ethnic others — can be endorsed by leftists as liberating, even if the ethnic premise itself is considered fundamentally flawed.
This contingent view of ethnic nationalism — it is okay as long as it is leading to socialism — has been linked to an ambivalent relationship to nationalism itself. For example, leftists may deride first-world nationalisms as the “mere tool of the whole committee of the [national] bourgeoisie” or view the nation-state as a hegemonic global system launched and defended by global (i.e., non-nationalist) capital in the name of its own ruthless interests. Yet, they may also endorse third-world nationalisms as the essential (if hopefully temporary) anti-imperial instrument for the liberation of oppressed peoples from precisely those global imperialist forces. In these struggles, liberation movements adopt the terms of the oppressor to redignify and mobilize the oppressed identity and develop a liberating discourse. For example, African decolonization struggles were celebrated as black liberation from global capitalist exploitation, but they were also assumed to be admissible primarily as an essential stage in the epic progress toward world socialism, which would culminate ultimately in the dissolution of all states. Even pan-Arabism, under Nasser, could be celebrated as anti-imperialist and redemptive.
As a result, it is possible for leftists to see Israel simultaneously as the nefarious tool and ally of western colonialism and as the essential expression of “the national liberation movement of the Jewish people.” In this dualistic view, a Jewish liberation movement has been led astray only by global forces, while Zionism’s abuses of the Palestinians are tragic accidents of geography — i.e., one national liberation movement happened to conflict with another in the same territory. The solution is to provide both “peoples” with states. The essential legitimacy of Zionism, in this model, is not questioned, as Jews are deemed to deserve a state. The Holocaust narrative and the deeper history of Jewish suffering from Christian-European anti-Semitism here casts Jews as the colonized, stateless people, warranting their “decolonization” through self-determination and creation of an “independent Jewish state.” Thus a settler-colonial project has seized the legitimacy of the colonized.
It is not so surprising that a settler society would do this. European settlers in North America and South Africa did the same, in claiming a divinely granted indigeneity (Chosen People doctrines) in order to assume the mantle of a liberation movement as they expelled or killed the native peoples. What is notable, regarding Israel, are leftist failures to identify and denounce a manoeuvre so transparently specious. Aside from anti-Arab racism (always a problem), this error can be traced to the failure to differentiate between ethnic liberation and the political exigencies of territorial statehood.
Today, the “nation-state” formula does not assume that each ethnic nation has, or should have, its own territorial state. The world has hundreds of thousands of ethnic groups and obviously each of them cannot have its own state. Moreover, the late-nineteenth century notion that nation-states represent nations defined by a common ethnicity (culture, race, spirit) fell to ruin in World War II, when ruthless projects to craft mono-ethnic states resulted in dreadful sins: ethnic cleansing, ethnocide, forced population transfer, even genocides. Hence the “nation-state” formula after World War II shifted to assume that everyone within a state’s territory comprises its nation and all citizens must be accepted as equal nationals. In France, for instance, every citizen is “French” by virtue of his or her citizenship, no matter his or her religion or ethnic background.
Of course, the real picture is more complicated. All nation-states grapple with ethnic notions and problems of assimilation, difference, and prejudice. Complications arise especially from the tension between genuine democratic demands and the rights of minorities. That is, states may legitimately develop laws designed to represent the cultural interests of most citizens — e.g., by inscribing the majority religion into the constitution or basic law — but not in ways that create bias against other citizens. (For example, the United Kingdom is legally associated with the Episcopal Church, of which the Queen is the head; yet British law prohibits legalized bias against non-Episcopalians and other religions are practiced freely.)
Many nations retain tensions about sustaining their ethno-nationalist character (as France’s notorious obsession with the French language attests) and may express this nervousness in immigration and naturalization policies. But once people become citizens, they are legally equal. And no state today seeks to defend its ethnic character to the point of excluding whole portions of the territory’s native population from citizenship. Except Israel.
In short, it has become unacceptable, in today’s world, to create a state that legally privileges one ethnic group over others. What was formerly considered romantic nationalism is now called “racism.” And Jews have no more right to an ethnic state than anyone else. Jews may work to create a state in which the laws are favourable to values and practices understood as “Jewish,” but they cannot create a state in which non-Jews lack rights to practice different social values or have equal access to the state’s resources, like land and public funding. Especially, a Jewish state cannot legitimately expel and exclude the native population of the country. Certainly, it should not be supported for having done so.
The Myth of Israeli Socialism
The second error is the assumption that Israel itself is somehow a leftist-liberal democracy, whose success in consolidating peaceful existence is therefore a sympathetic goal for leftist progressives. It is one of the marvels of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that Israel has successfully projected the entirely unsubstantiated idea that it is actually a socialist society driven to militarism and nasty practices like torture and censorship only by its tragic geographic circumstances (that is, its location in a “sea” of reactionary Muslims).
This myth takes its kernel of truth from an atypical thread of early Zionist history. In the early twentieth century, some socialist Jews of the Second Aliyah brought their dreams for a utopian socialist society to Palestine by inventing experimental communist communities. These efforts obtained much of their allure by fusing socialist utopian visions with Judaic enlightenment values. This socialist element never represented more than a tiny fraction of Zionists in Palestine, but over time, the concept of a politically progressive Jewish mission became important both to justifying and to denying Zionist projects of ethnic cleansing.
For instance, the Sabra ethos, which imagines the native-born Israeli Jew as the robust gun-toting socialist, combines the Jewish idea of escaping the earlier, passive Jewish stereotype of urban ghetto or east-European shtetl with the Soviet-socialist ideal of the “New Man,” freed of stultifying old-world cultural and mental strictures and restored through manual labour to a liberating and purifying relationship with the soil. This national-liberation icon then makes both ethnic and socialist sense of a militarized Israel, which defends Jews and progressive values as a package.
Similarly, the Jewish “light unto nations” biblical concept, cynically appropriated for Jewish state-building in order to attract western-educated Jews to the Zionist enterprise, became fused with “vanguard” notions of an ideal socialist society that can demonstrate progressive democratic values to the world. This enlightened (and foggily divine) mission then serves Zionism by explaining the otherwise confounding fact that Israel remains in a permanent state of hostilities with the Arabs. Rather than offended by settler-colonial brutalities, Arabs are just innately hostile to progressive values, so Israel is only fulfilling its “light” or “vanguard” mission by holding them at bay.
This entire picture is, of course, a galloping myth. Leftist visionaries were quickly eclipsed and absorbed by the racial-nationalist leadership of Ben Gurion and the Jewish Agency, who entrenched ethnic cleansing of “Arabs” as a pillar of modern Zionism. Not that these visionaries disappeared entirely. The formation of Israel required an uneasy deal with progressive-liberal Jews, Orthodox religious Jews, militarized nationalists, and refugees from European pogroms, wars, and Nazi genocide to consolidate the essential nationalist coalition. But the result of this deal was not a progressive socialist society. It was a state that assumed a righteous liberal veneer as it continued the Zionist program of the 1940s: expulsion of the native people, ethnic prejudice, military aggression, and a myriad of sins (torture, extrajudicial imprisonment, rampant censorship, land expropriation, crop destruction) associated with war and the military occupation of Palestinian land.
Many Israelis sustain the conceit that the progressive veneer is the real Israel, despite these glaring contradictions of modern Israeli life. Some believe Israel went tragically wrong only in 1967, when it occupied additional territories. The ethnic cleansing of 1948 and 1967 is either forgotten entirely or justified by the exigencies of wars cast as arising from irrational Arab hostility. But the actual existence of Israel was built from prejudice and through mass cruelties, and its dilemma is becoming increasingly comparable to apartheid South Africa: oppressive, secretive, surviving on censorship, repression, while lying to its own citizenry, under siege in a hostile region, and suffering from crumbling morale.
Is this the state that has a “right to exist”? Is this the liberation movement of the Jewish people that must command the world’s respect? Is its survival essential to peace in the region — or is its survival the guarantor of continuing war? No ethnic state has avoided the pitfalls of ethnic cleansing and oppression. No matter what bundles of myths and rationalizations are deployed to defend its exceptionalist claim to ethnic statehood, Israel will not escape that trap just because it was set up for Jews.
[Dr. Virginia Tilley is a US citizen and former professor of political science, now working as a senior researcher at the Human Sciences Research Council in South Africa. She is author of The One-State Solution: A Breakthrough for Peace in the Israeli-Palestinian Deadlock (2005) which explains why the one-state solution is inevitable and argues why it is feasible. She can be reached at tilley@hws.edu]
