Theses on Zionism, Israel, Palestine and Arab nationalism - part 1

Theses on Zionism, Israel, Palestine and Arab nationalism
Trotskyist International No. 02, Winter 1989
Jews: race, nation or “people-class”?

1. The Jews are clearly not a race. The original Hebrew people and language belonged to the Semitic family but two and a half millennia of residence amongst non-Semitic peoples, widespread proselytism to Judaism in earlier periods and intermarriage has made these communities like most other peoples a “racial mixture”.

Mass conversions to Judaism of entirely non-Semitic peoples—the Khazars in the Russian Steppes and the Falashas in Ethiopia are the most striking examples. But Jewish communities in the centuries before their medieval and modern persecution regularly proselytized on a similar scale amongst those gentiles performing the same economic functions as themselves.

Only the malign fanatics of anti-Semitism and the extreme far right racist element of the Zionist movement claim that the Jews are a “race apart”.

Nor are the Jews a nation! Modern nations are the product of the bourgeois epoch not eternal or millennia-long communities. Bourgeois nationalisms, however, usually claim to be re-founding ancient nations when they are in fact forming a new nation. This is equally true of the Jewish nationalism of the 19th and 20th centuries. That an ancient Hebrew state existed during the first half of the first millennium before the Christian era is incontrovertible. This state—later two states—was however destroyed by the Assyrians and Babylonians.

The Hebrew ruling and priestly classes (not the whole people) were transferred to Babylon where their social function and the religious ideology that expressed it underwent a complete transformation. The monotheistic religion of Judaism was born. An exploiting class of priests and merchants developed performing an economic function within the Persian, Macedonian and Roman Empires.

The Diaspora—the scattered Jewish communities of the Mediterranean basin, the Fertile Crescent and beyond—were not the product of forced exile but of the functioning of merchant capital. The religious ideology with its myth of the scattered people and its retention of Hebrew as a sacred language served to link these communities.

Priestly rabbinical authorities were allowed to exercise authority over these scattered communities—some quite large as in Egypt and Palestine. After the Babylonian deportation most Jews lived outside Palestine and the majority of the population of Palestine were not Jews (although they were undoubtedly descendents of the old Hebrew peasantry as well as Canaanites, Philistines etc).

The non-assimilation of these communities vaunted as a unique expression of fidelity to nationhood both by orthodox religious Jews and by Zionists is no mystery. There was no world of nations in the ancient and medieval worlds to be assimilated into. The Jewish communities were not atypical or in contradiction with the world in which they performed a vital role. Other “exiled” or minority communities have played analogous roles—Armenians, Copts, Indian and Chinese communities in South East Asia and Africa.

2. This phenomenon has been analysed most systematically by the Trotskyist Abram Leon in his work The Jewish Question published in 1946. He terms this formation a “people-class”. The essential axis of the Jewish communities was their functioning as merchant and usurers capital in pre-capitalist modes of production. Around the big merchants and usurers oscillated strata of shipping workers, artisans, caravan traders, peddlers, shopkeepers etc, and making up the Jewish community. Jews did move into other trades and occupations but to the extent that they were estranged from money economy they tended to be assimilating not into other “nations” but into other religions.

This analysis explains the longevity of the Jewish communities and the preservation of their religion and sacred language. Leon shows that “It is because the Jews have preserved themselves as a social class that they have likewise retained several of their religious ethnic and linguistic traits.” “Judaism” he maintains “mirrors the interests of a pre-capitalist merchant class”.

This people-class constituted a series of self governing communities ruled by scribes and later rabbis who related directly to the gentile rulers. The Law (Torah) and the teachings of the rabbis (Talmud) constituted a basis to link the far flung communities and keep them from dissolving into the peoples surrounding them. However, the flourishing of the communities of the people-class was only compatible with an economy otherwise dominated by subsistence agriculture. Thus the stable conditions of economic life of the Middle East and Mediterranean allowed for the survival into the modern period of these communities. In Europe, however, the middle ages saw the process of the destruction and expulsion of the Jewish communities.

With the development of merchant and then banking capital in the cities of Europe from the 13th to the 15th centuries the Jews were restricted more and more to usury. The simultaneous emergence of debt bondage for the peasants and petty nobility as feudalism began to break down motivated the vicious pogroms and expulsions of the Jews during these centuries.

The German Jews speaking a dialect of Middle High German (Yiddish as it came to be known) moved eastwards into as yet less developed Poland. Here, between the 15th and 17th centuries under the Polish monarchy they flourished, being allowed complete autonomy and self government in their network of small towns (stetls).

However economic development caught up with them. Their role as innkeepers, shopkeepers, pawn brokers, but above all as bailiffs of the feudal lords and kings meant that class hatred developed between them and the Ukrainian and Polish peasantry. Thus the great peasant revolts of the 17th and 18th century all saw massacres of the Jews. The dark age of the Eastern European Jews (Ashkenazim) began. At the other end of the continent in 1492 the Spanish monarchy expelled or forcibly converted the old Jewish communities of Spain. Some 150,000 Jews moved into Europe, North Africa and the Ottoman Empire becoming the Sephardic communities where they remained untroubled until the advent of Zionism.

Anti-Semitism and Zionism

3. The development of industrial capitalism in the 18th and 19th centuries in Western, then Central and last of all in Eastern Europe began the dissolution of the people-class. Class differentiation—into big bourgeois financiers, petit bourgeois trades and proletarians—led to the rapid assimilation of large numbers of Jews and to the conversion of Judaism into merely one religion amongst others. Jews in Western and Central Europe adopted the culture and national identities of the countries where they lived.

Had the development of capitalism proceeded evenly and in the same way in Eastern Europe then a similar process of the dissolution of the people class would undoubtedly have taken place. But whilst capitalism performed its destructive mission—the dissolution of pre-capitalist relationships, the impoverishment of peasants and artisans—it did not absorb all of these classes into modern capitalist production.

This impoverishment hit the once prosperous Jewish communities particularly hard since the Tsarist Empire—a Bonapartist dictatorship of late feudalism desperately resisting the disintegrative tendencies of capitalism and bourgeois democracy—blocked the absorption of the Jews into Russian and Polish economic, social and political life. Whilst the Jews were no longer able to continue their old people-class role neither could they assimilate. They became a pariah caste within the Tsarist Empire.

The bourgeois revolutions in England, Holland, the United States and above all France liberated the Jews from their late medieval discriminatory laws or allowed them to officially “return” to countries from which they had been expelled. From the mid-18th to the mid-19th centuries a rapid process of modernisation and enlightenment developed within the Jewish communities leading to powerful assimilationist tendencies. However, by the last quarter of the 19th century a counter-active tendency developed; namely, anti-Semitism.

This had its social roots in the decaying classes, the half-ruined aristocracy, the peasants, the artisans and small shopkeepers. In Central Europe modern capitalist development was rapidly and ruthlessly ruining all these classes. Yet none could turn against the capitalist class as a whole. In addition the spread of universal suffrage drove sections of ruling class politicians like Bismarck to create a reactionary electoral base.

The anti-Semitic pogroms of 1882-3 in Russia started a process of westward emigration towards Germany, France, England and the USA. A tiny group of Jews (Lovers of Zion) emigrated to Palestine where they bought land. In France and England wealthy and respected leaders of the Jewish community were terrified that mass immigration by “backward” (i.e. unassimilated) “eastern” Jews would provoke a backlash. They started to fund and encourage colonisation schemes in North Africa and in Palestine too.

Zionism came together as a political movement under the inspiration of Theodor Herzl. Herzl became convinced that the anti-Semites were right about one thing: the Jews were a “foreign body” in Europe. He conceived it their task to create a Jewish state as a colony outside of Europe. Having considered Argentina and Uganda the Zionist movement founded in 1898 realised that only the “ancient home” would appeal to religious Eastern European Jews (the only ones wishing to emigrate anywhere) and Palestine was a tempting prize to Russian, German, British and French imperialists because of the mineral resources located there and its geo-political strategic location.

Zionism aimed to achieve its goal through approaches to a succession of imperialist powers in the years before the First World War. But with the defeat of the central powers in this war and the Russian Revolution Zionism switched its attention to British imperialism which was poised to gain from the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire.

The Zionists however remained a tiny minority within the world wide Jewish communities and in Eastern Europe which as a whole remained committed either to Bourgeois liberalism (the upper classes and some petit bourgeois) or to the labour movement. Zionism remained a minority current in the Eastern European Jewish communities until the rise of fascism and the triumph of Stalinism.

4. Through the welter of small parties and their coalitions two fundamental traditions exist within Zionism whose founding figures were, respectively, Ber Borochov and Vladimir Jabotinsky. Jabotinsky started his political activity in Tsarist Russia as a leader and polemicist of the Union for Equal Rights, the Jewish bourgeois organisation with a mixed liberal and Zionist membership. He was a bitter enemy of the Bund (a Jewish workers’ organisation) and of the left Zionists who looked to the working class.

In the early 1920s he became disillusioned both with official bourgeois Zionism and hostile to the ascendancy that Labour Zionism was establishing in Palestine. In addition he lost all faith in the British Mandate Authorities who were limiting settlement to an annual quota. In 1924 he founded the Revisionist Party whose tactics and strategy were to force the British to allow unlimited entry, to form Jewish military and police units and to seize the Arabs’ land. His objective was an autonomous Jewish state on both sides of the Jordan. In 1935 Jabotinsky split from the World Zionist Organisation. His party, and especially its youth wing, flirted with Mussolini and Italian fascism. The Labour Zionists denounced it as fascist. By 1939 the Revisionists formed the terrorist Irgun Zvai Leumi as an alternative to the labour dominated Zionist army (Hagana).

Labour Zionism on the other hand has its roots in the period around the 1905 Revolution in Russia and its influence on the Jewish artisan, petit bourgeois and less class conscious worker. Bev Borochov started his career as a convinced Zionist although for a few months he was a member of the RSDLP (1900-01) before being expelled. He was also active in the local groups that called themselves “Poale Zion” (Workers of Zion). Before 1905 Borochov was moving rightwards however, pouring scorn on the hopes that revolution in Russia would ease the plight of the Jews. At this stage he believed that the Palestinian Fellaheen would be absorbed into the Jewish nation.

However the 1905-07 revolution had a powerful impact on him and in 1906-07 he altered his positions substantially. He became organiser and coordinator of the Poale Zion groups and helped centralise them into a party, founded in February 1906 with the name Jewish Social Democratic Labour Party (Poale Zion). Whilst it demanded “personal autonomy” and a Jewish parliament (seyni) as steps towards territorial independence it placed most of its stress on participation in the Russian Revolution against Tsarism. Clearly it was influenced by the Bund and on tactical questions stood closer to Bolshevism than Menshevism.

On Palestine Borochov believed it would “naturally” develop as the centre for Jewish capital and labour given the unwillingness of the western states to let in Jews. The Poale Zion movement should create labour exchanges and organise workers in Palestine but “it would be a great error to suggest that we call for emigration to Palestine. That we leave to the natural process”. Borochov’s reasons for clinging to the Palestine project was that the Jews, because of economic development, did not have a large proletariat. To obtain this they would have to settle in their own territory. Thereby the over-large bourgeoisie and petit bourgeoisie would disappear and then a “normal” labour movement would move on to socialism. It was this latter idea that triumphed as Labour Zionism. During the 1920s Poale Zion developed branches in America, in Western Europe and in Palestine. In Russia Poale Zion took an anti-war stand in 1914 and rallied to the defence of the workers’ state after 1917.

The Mandate and colonisation

5. The project of a mass colonisation of Palestine by Jewish settlers from Eastern Europe would never have got beyond the literal state of a utopia had it not been for the plans of the imperialist powers to dismember the Ottoman Empire, a process that had begun in the 1840s. As early as May 1916 French and British imperialism embodied this plan in the notorious Sykes-Picot Agreement.

They developed a scheme for dividing the Arabs by developing allies who would help them dominate the region. One of these was to be a project of colonial settlement of Palestine. Imperialism found the projects of big bourgeois like Rothschild, for exploitation of the Palestinians, directly to hand. The Balfour declaration of November 1917 proclaimed that the British supported the setting up of a “national home” for the Jews in Palestine.

The main reasons of the British were military/strategic; control of the Suez Canal, the railway lines to the Persian Gulf and stop-over points on the projected air links to India. In addition it would facilitate economic control of the Iraqi and Persian oilfields. From 1918 under the protection of the British military authorities Chaim Weizmann and the Zionist Commission began to organise the settler community in Palestine. A quota of 16-17,000 immigrants a year was agreed. Between 1918 and 1939 this led to a rise of the Jewish population from 60,000 to 445,000 or nearly 30% of the population. Land was purchased by the various Zionist agencies usually from big absentee landlords resident in Beirut or Egypt. Arab peasant tenants were unceremoniously bundled off the land their forebears had worked for centuries.

Yet even in 1939 this only resulted in 5% of the total land area of Palestine being in Jewish hands. Only by theft, mass expulsions and terror could the Palestinian peasantry be dispossessed. As well as settlers and land only a massive influx of capital could have established the settlers. Jewish bourgeois immigrants from Germany, prevented by racist immigration laws from entering Britain, France and the USA brought substantial quantities of capital between 1920-35.

6. To land, immigrants and capital had to be added the crucial element of Jewish Labour. Here the Labour or Socialist Zionists of Poale Zion played a crucial role. Rothschild and the big bourgeois Zionists were quite happy to super-exploit Arab labour in their settlements and factories but the “Marxist” Zionists realised that this would turn the Jewish settlers into a privileged petit bourgeois stratum, dependent on the exploitation of Arab labour and thus ultimately doomed to be overthrown by them. Hence they campaigned and organised for Jewish labour only.

This led to the formation of the Histadrut (General Federation of Jewish Workers in the Land of Israel) in 1920. Its General Secretary and founding leader of Israel, David Ben Gurion said “Without it, I doubt whether we would have had a state”. In the inter-war years it was the Zionist state in embryo. It organised a systematic boycott and exclusion of Arab labour and increasingly of Arab farm products. Next to the government it was from the 1930s the largest single employer.

Up to 1936 this process had the benevolent support and protection of the British Mandatory Authorities who systematically refused to recognise the Arabs and Palestinians as a people or nation at all, recognising only religious communities. The Arabs were given no civil or political rights, whereas the Jewish Agency was consulted as a quasi-official body.

The Jewish settlers, coming from an imperialist state, albeit a backward one, were used to and expected European wage rates. Palestinian Arabs were paid at a historically lower subsistence rate. Therefore in purely economic terms Jewish labour would never be able to compete for employment by a neutral capitalist. Hence the necessity for an isolated separate Jewish economy. The Jewish workers were thus from the outset a labour aristocracy within Palestine. Average personal income was in a ratio of 2:1 for unskilled workers and even with skilled workers the Jewish settler earned 70% more than his Arab equivalent.

Whereas the class profile of the yesuv (Jewish community under the mandate) showed a basically advanced capitalist structure the Arab population showed a profile of “backward” economic development. For the Arabs in 1943 59% worked in agriculture whereas for the Jews the figure was 19•1%. In construction, industry and mining the figures were 11•9% and 30•6% respectively.

None of the left Zionist or Labour Zionist parties opposed this vicious violation of class solidarity and internationalism. Indeed the Labour Zionists were the main proponents of this apartheid-like policy. The Histadrut was a Zionist-chauvinist labour front which tied the Jewish workers to the state and the employers, whilst impeding the class organisation of the Arab proletarians. It fought hard to split and destroy unions that united Arab and Jewish workers (e.g. the railway workers’ union). Eventually in 1934 the Histadrut set up a pathetic and subordinate Arab section.

The Arabs in Palestine

7. Palestine was conquered by the Arabs in the seventh century AD from the Byzantine Empire. They neither found an empty country nor did they drive out the existing population and settle it en masse. They found living there a peasantry descended from the Canaanites, the Hebrews, the Philistines (from whom the country takes its name) and minorities of Greeks, Syrians etc. From these peoples as well as the Arab tribes the modern Palestinians are descended. Gradually Arabic replaced the earlier related Semitic language, Aramaic, which the population (including the Judaeans) had spoken.

Palestine passed in the early 16th century into the hands of the Ottoman Turkish Empire. It remained a part of the Empire but its large landowners exercised considerable autonomy. Palestine did not constitute a single province or unit nor did the Palestinians as a whole distinguish themselves from their surrounding fellow Arabic speakers. The country was in fact ruled by the head of a series of clans (ashair) each headed by a sheikh appointed by the most powerful households within the clan.

In 1858 a new land law greatly stimulated the break up of clan property and the emergence of great landowners and impoverished landless peasants. The landlords became landowners more easily, shedding the traditional restrictions on the buying and selling of land. The sheiks of the clans lost their power in favour of the newly “enfranchised” landowners.

The losers in this “land reform” were the peasants who, even as late as 1922, formed 81% of the population. They lost their communal rights and having no written title to their lands was often evicted. Whereas seed and tools had been advanced to the individual peasant family by the clan organisation before now the peasants had to turn to urban moneylenders for loans. Debt bondage, foreclosure and evictions followed on a massive scale.

Into this already class divided countryside dominated by rich landlords who lived in the cities—Jerusalem, Jaffa, Nablus but also Beirut and even further a field—came the Zionist settlers. Well funded they found it relatively easy to buy land from the effendis (feudal landowners).

The other component of the ruling class were the urban merchants. Often they belonged to non-Muslim and sometimes non-Arab communities—Greeks, Italians, Armenians, Jews. They held a privileged position because of the “capitulations” the Ottoman government made to the western powers whereby extra-territorial rights were granted to various communities. Amongst these were freedom from paying customs dues.

The drawing of Palestine into the world economy dominated by European capitalism as well as the development of capitalist agrarian relations enormously increased trade and consequently the growth and importance of the ports of Gaza, Jaffa, and Haifa. Amongst the Arab population the Christians almost monopolised big and small scale trade and became a prosperous petit bourgeoisie.

8. The Palestinian bourgeoisie was weak because of the whole development of the country and moreover was largely made up of minority communities. It therefore fell to the landowners to lead or rather mislead the resistance of the Palestinians to the Zionist settlement. The key figure between the wars was the Mufti of Jerusalem, Hajj Aminal Hussaini. Against him was ranged the Nashashibis who held the mayoralty of Jerusalem. Both oscillated between opposition to the British and the Zionists and concession and conciliation.

The Mufti and the landowners in general tried to divert hostility from the big landowners—who were themselves evicting peasants and selling land to the Zionist agencies—onto the settlers. This led to vicious attacks on the Jews by mobs of the urban and village poor and the Mufti evinced strong anti-Semitic tendencies. Their resistance to the British—who paid their salaries and could dismiss them from office—was far more circumspect.

Only in 1936 did a truly national and popular uprising against the British develop. The world economic crisis and stagnation meant a rise in unemployment amongst Arab and Jewish workers after 1936. Since Hitler came to power three years before the flood of immigration had increased and with it the increases in land purchase and evictions. Conflicts between Jewish settlers and evicted Arab villagers increased. In October 1936 Arab dock workers struck and were replaced with Jewish scabs.

Guerrilla warfare broke out in Gallilee. Rioting in Egypt against the British and a general strike in Syria inspired the Arabs in Palestine. Local committees were formed from below and a general strike proclaimed which lasted for six months. Gradually the strike movement developed into an all out rebellion aimed at the British and to a lesser extent the Zionist settlements. In 1936 at least 5,000 guerrillas were fighting in the hills. As a result of British repression the Palestinian elite fled to surrounding states and the movement in 1937 became a spontaneous, largely peasant movement.

The landowner-bourgeois leaders betrayed the peasant struggle—calling an armistice in 1936 and entering into secret negotiations with the Zionists and the British, coquetting with Nazi German imperialism. They were terrified of the peasant uprising and indeed most landowners fled the countryside. The rebellion was in the end crushed but it did alert the British to the need to shift the axis of their Middle East policy towards Arab nationalists and away from sole dependence on the Zionists.

From fascism to founding Israel

9. Before 1945 Zionism never became a majority ideology amongst the Jewish communities of Europe or North America. However, the holocaust with its murder of six million Jews allowed Zionism to triumph and the state of Israel to be founded.

Anti-Semitism was central to Nazi ideology. The Jews constituted the historic foe of the Aryan “master race”. The attacks on Jewish world finance involved an attack on Germany’s rivals—British, American and French imperialism—which were said to be at the service of Jewish bankers. However, Nazi anti-Semitism was not simply the most violent form of an all-pervasive anti-Semitism that contaminated the whole world as the Zionists claim.

This fails to recognise the specific class roots of German fascism which was a product of a tremendously acute social crisis in a defeated imperialist country “robbed” of its few colonies by rival imperialism. The failure of the KPD or SPD to take power in the revolutionary crisis of 1923 allowed fascism to grow amongst the petit bourgeoisie and lumpenproletariat.

Before 1933 anti-Semitism was not the most central part of fascism’s appeal to these layers. In the big cities even after 1933 anti-Semitism was met with indifference and sometimes with hostility. Apart from the Storm troopers there was little “popular” participation in the pogroms. In Austria and southern Germany, however, there was a greater degree of spontaneously occurring violent acts carried out against the Jews by the peasantry and urban petit bourgeoisie; the former often found themselves in debt to Jewish merchant capital and the latter faced competition from a broader layer of Jewish urban petit bourgeoisie than elsewhere.

After 1933 anti-Semitism was a state policy. The first wave of anti-Jewish measures was a strictly limited concession to the petit bourgeois mass base of fascism. But it went alongside the destruction of this mass base’s political influence (e.g. the “Night of the Long Knives”, June 1934) by Hitler at the behest of the big German monopolists who allowed Hitler to come to power but wanted their interests safeguarded from the dangers of the “rabble”.

The removal of German citizenship from most Jews in September 1934, the restrictions on the flight of Jewish capital and the setting up of emigration offices gave way to less intense discrimination between 1935 and 1937 as economic recovery took off and the Storm troopers demobilised. The threat of renewed recession and the imminence of war in 1938 led to a more vigorous campaign. From November 1938 Jewish property was confiscated wholesale, and Jews were excluded from education and entertainment and forced to wear the Star of David in public. At this those wealthier Jews who could fled, leaving the rest together with socialists, gays and gypsies to face imprisonment, ghettoisation and then extermination in the camps.

By 1939 the failure of German autarchy posed the need to break out to the east and south to plunder the industrial and agricultural riches of Poland, Czechoslovakia, Austria and the Ukraine. But in these war zones there was a major concentration of world Jewry.

That the Germans were able to wipe out nearly all these people was a uniquely horrible act of planned genocide—unique, that is, in the high proportion of a people wiped out in an extremely brief period. However, it was far from unique if by this is meant that Nazi genocide applied only to the Jews. German imperialism, of which Nazism was the “chemically pure distillation”, wished to occupy and colonise the rich agricultural lands of Poland and the Ukraine. Most of the populations of these areas were unwanted.

Thus the Germans slaughtered and starved to death millions of Slavs—more than the sum total of Jews. At first the Jews, too, were meant to be worked to death. But after the Blitzkrieg failed to achieve a lightening victory over the Soviet Union the liquidation of enemies in the rear was stepped up. The SS was charged from early 1942 with the “final solution”. Between 1939 and 1941 Jews had already been herded into ghettoes and specially constructed concentration camps. From 1942 death camps were constructed or converted, designed to liquidate eleven million Jews, first through forced labour and then by wholesale extermination. By 1943 knowledge of all this was filtering abroad. By 1945 between five and six million had been massacred—the most concentrated act of genocide so far attempted in human history.

Zionist accounts of the holocaust present this genocide as an isolated fact in human history, linking it only to anti-Semitism. Yet this is clearly not the case. Millions of Native Americans from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, untold numbers of Africans in two centuries of slave trade have been victims of genocide too. Modern imperialist racism arose to justify these horrors. Marxists have no wish to detract from the special horror of the holocaust—special in the concentrated and intense nature of the genocide—in any way but we do insist that it was not unique and nor was its fundamental origin in anti-Semitism. Rather, it was a product of imperialism’s extreme crisis.

10. Much dispute has raged over the evidence of collusion between the Zionists and the Nazis. Zionists deny or minimise it. For overzealous “anti-Zionists” and some conservative Arab nationalists it is evidence of an absolute identity between evil genocidal Nazi-ism and Zionism. The historical evidence confirms neither view. Zionism before 1933 played no significant role in Jewish resistance to the rise of Nazi-ism. It looked on Nazi-ism with a sanguine eye. The Zionists too wanted a Germany free of Jews provided that these Jews could emigrate to Palestine and nowhere else. As a result while socialists, communists and even liberal Jews were courageous fighters against Hitler, the Zionists attempted to do a deal with him.

Thus the Zionists Federation of Germany was in direct negotiations with the SS for several years. The SS allowed Zionist periodicals and even a uniformed Zionist youth movement to exist when all other political organisations were persecuted. Even during the war itself Rudolf Kastner, Secretary of the Zionist Committee in Budapest, negotiated with Adolf Eichmann for 1,000 wealthy Jews to escape to Switzerland in return for the Zionists good offices in persuading Hungary’s 800,000 Jews to be deported “peacefully”.

As a result over 200,000 were deported to Auschwitz and other death camps. Yet this degree of collusion was special and at heart contradicted the project of Zionism which aimed to get as many Jews as possible to Palestine. In order to realise this, during the war the Zionists inside the USA and Europe were opposed to any relaxation of racist immigration controls operated by the imperialist democracies.

Zionism in an attempt to negate anti-Semitism ends up confirming the law of the unity of opposites. This is not to equate or identify the two but to insist that firstly Zionism is a product and a response to anti-Semitism and that secondly; it is a response which cannot overcome it because it accepts anti-Semitism’s definition of the widespread Jewish religious communities and their tendency to see their assimilation under capitalism as a problem.

Zionism sees Jewishness as unambiguously good whereas anti-Semitism sees it as an evil. But Zionism needs anti-Semitism; it is its raison d’etre. It believes it is the force that will continue to drive the Jewish communities towards Palestine. Thus Zionists have negotiated with anti-Semites to facilitate this process.

Does this mean that the Zionists colluded with the “final solution”? No, but it does mean that that they did nothing to aid the plight of its victims (although Zionists could and did join in heroic uprisings such as in the Warsaw Ghetto) whilst it was being prepared and even after it was underway they did little beyond smuggling a relative handful of refugees into Palestine.

The creation of Israel.

11. Zionism, as a colonial settler movement had to be strategically allied to one imperialist power or another. Not only did these powers provide the funds for settlement but more importantly they controlled the Middle East. British imperialism was hegemonic there from 1918 until 1947-53 when it was supplanted by the USA.

The conflict between Zionism and Britain was not an anti-imperialist struggle by the former. Rather, it was a conflict provoked by a switch of policy by Britain in 1939. By then British imperialism accepted that in order to maintain control over strategic resources, such as the Suez Canal, rail and air routes, and the oil fields of Iraq and the Gulf, it would have to oversee the creation of pliant Arab semi-colonial regimes. This involved propping up the monarchies of Egypt, Iran, Transjordan, Iraq and the Gulf states. But this in turn meant scaling down Britain’s commitment to the Zionists.

This change was evident from 1936, when the Palestinian uprising indicated the threat of Arab nationalism. But it was retarded by the outbreak of World War Two and the support for Britain given by the Zionists. But during the war the Zionist right prepared for the eventual conflict with Britain. While the Irgun guerrilla group suspended operations against the British in the war the “Stern Gang” (LEHY) did not and even tried to make contacts with the fascists.

While the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem helped the SS in the war, Irgun and Haganah fought with the British. This helped transform Haganah into a professional armed force. Meanwhile the British disarmed and crushed the organisations of the Arabs in Palestine.

With the end of the war the conflict between Britain and Zionism resumed. The Zionists lobbied hard with US imperialism to get immediate permission for 100,000 survivors of the holocaust to be allowed into Palestine. But the dominant Arabist faction within the British ruling class aimed to block this and negotiate a partition of Palestine between the Zionists and Transjordan, which would allow a strategic military presence for Britain.

But Britain both underestimated the strength of the new US-Zionist alliance and the resistance of the Palestinians to this plan. Three years of struggle to stop “illegal” immigration, to suppress both Arab and Zionist “terrorism” failed completely. In February 1947 Britain announced it would end its mandate by August 1948. In fact, they withdrew unilaterally in May 1948 in order to try and realise their plans by proxy, by co-ordinating an invasion of the so-called “Arab armies”. In truth the only force capable of fighting the Haganah was the Arab Legion, led, trained and armed by Britain.

No serious threat was posed by the Arab forces (e.g. Egypt, Syria and Lebanon), partly because they were under trained and under armed as a result of previous British policy; partly because the Transjordan monarchy was only interested in a deal with the Zionists for partition around the UN proposed borders which would allow Britain a role. But the USA was opposed to any British presence and so rushed to aid the newly founded state of Israel. Stalinism too rushed to aid Israel. The Kremlin supported the creation of the state of Israel because it believed that it may have been able to exert political influence over the Zionists and so fill the vacuum created by the departure of British imperialism. In the face of this balance of forces the Palestinians suffered a historic catastrophe.

They were brutally driven out of their towns and villages throughout the area that the Zionists decided was militarily conquerable and hold able. Jaffa was attacked by Haganah and Irgun and its Arab population of 100,000 was reduced in days to 5,000. Atrocities such as Dir Yassin (250 murdered) were calculated acts of barbarity designed to spread panic and induce the Palestinians to flee.

Why did the Zionists not settle for the UN plan which the USA and Britain were happy to see? In essence because even the undemocratic UN planned partition (which awarded 54% of the area to 33% of its population that was Jewish) still left the Arabs as a bare majority in the proposed Jewish state, where they would own three-quarters of the land.

The pogroms and 1948-49 war was conducted to carry out a radical extension of the area under the control of Israel and a much reduced presence of Arabs within it. In the war the Arab states cynically grabbed what they could (e.g. Egypt, the Gaza Strip, Transjordan, East Jerusalem) but the Palestinians were left with nothing. Israel finished with 73% of the area (including the mineral rich Negev desert) and in the process 750,000 Palestinians were driven off their land and from their homes in the wretched refugee camps into the surrounding pro-British semi-colonial Arab states.

In the conflict between the Palestinian Arabs and the Zionists it was necessary to have been defeatist in relation to the Zionists and militarily supported the resistance of the Arabs. The “War of Independence” was in fact a war to establish a pro-imperialist colonial-settler state in the Middle East, under the dominance of the USA. It was a war which denied the right of the Palestinian Arabs to self-determination.

It was correct to be defencist in relation to the struggle waged by Transjordan and later Egypt in the War of Independence. The defeat of Israel was a lesser evil as it would have seriously disrupted the attempt of Israel to establish a stable pro-imperialist regime in the region, and one based on the expulsion of the mass of Palestinians from their land. However, we would not have supported the war aims of the Arab League which were annexationist. We would have fought the Arab League’s attempt to enforce its own version of partition, exposed the attempted deals struck with Israel against the interests of the Palestinians and been intransigent foes of the Arab league’s anti-Semitism.
Class and nation in Israel

12. Despite the political role that Israel plays in the Middle East Israel itself cannot be considered an imperialist country in economic terms. Although it possesses many unique features, it should be understood as a special type of advanced, privileged, “subsidised semi-colony”. The most decisive structural feature of Israel’s economic subordination to imperialism has been its overwhelming dependence on capital imports for investment. Between 1952 and 1985 Israel has received some $40 billion of long term capital imports in the form of grants, reparation payments from West Germany and donations from the Jewish diaspora, none of which have needed repaying. In addition, low interest long term loans from the USA have furnished the means for capital investment in Israel. Since Israel’s exports of goods and services have never been more than 65% of the level of imports (including capital) as a consequence Israel has run a permanent balance of payments deficit.

Over time the weight of reparations payments and donations from world Zionism has fallen and loans and grants from the USA have risen. Since 1973 the USA has contributed between 45% and 51% of all capital imports on an annual basis and between 60% and 80% of all long term loans.

In the period between 1950 and 1973 Israel’s economy grew at a fast pace, suffering only one recession in 1965-66. The massive influx of immigrants together with the import of capital allowed expanded accumulation to take place in the context of a long boom for world imperialism. This period witnessed the displacement of citrus fruit production and diamond polishing industries by the growth of import-substitution manufacturing industry, especially in textiles, food processing and later in chemicals and mining. Despite this growth the main structural change in imports has been in consumer durables. In the forty years of existence Israel has reduced its share of these in overall imports from 31% to 8%. But dependency on oil for energy has tripled and raw materials imports have grown while the proportion of capital investment goods imports has only dropped from 22% in 1949 to 18•7% in 1984.

Throughout the transformation process there was negligible foreign ownership of fixed capital. This remains the case today with the virtual absence of exploitation in Israel by imperialism. Moreover, the export of capital from the USA and Europe was undertaken not in order to realise a “surplus profit” but to sustain the state of Israel for political reasons.

The import of capital in such huge amounts allowed the rapid accumulation to take place without the super-exploitation of an internal section of the working class or through massive taxation as in many of the less developed countries (LDC’s). On the contrary, the accumulation took place alongside an expansion of living standards for the majority of the population.

By the end of the 1960s Israel possessed a highly monopolised and modern industrial economy, including a banking sector. Its internal market was saturated, its export orientated industries growing. But, unlike South Africa these were not to prove sufficient preconditions for Israel to make the transition to a minor imperialist power. There are several reasons for this;

(a) The end of the long boom during 1971-73, the massive shock to Israel of the 1973-75 recession, the curtailment in export markets.

(b) The inwardly directed nature of investment by Israel state and private monopoly capital due to the very nature of the Zionist state. Finance capital had up until 1973 small amounts of foreign capital abroad (petro-chemicals, loans) but insignificant in scope; since 1973 Israeli banks have persistently had net foreign liabilities. Between 1980-84 net total portfolio investments of Israeli finance capital abroad was a mere $1•2 billion; net direct fixed investments was negative for the same period.

Above all, the need to consolidate the whole Jewish population behind the state undermined the process of class differentiation and compelled investment to be internal to sustain jobs, welfare, housing, wages, rather than look for super-profits abroad by recycling externally the capital imports from the USA and elsewhere. On the other hand it has been impossible politically to mimic South Africa and rely upon a massive super-exploited working class within the nation. The contradiction of a “Jewish closed economy” prevented the evolution of Israeli finance capital into an imperialist capital. Israel’s development was frozen. There is no internal self-sustaining dynamic of capital accumulation and this leads to limited class polarisation.

(c) Finally, Israel cannot be considered an imperialist country even by virtue of its relationship with the occupied territories since 1967. The West Bank and Gaza do provide a constant source of surplus cheap labour for Israel and a captive market for the high productivity citrus fruit agribusiness of Israel. But this has to be set against the fact that as a result of the war of 1967 Israel was cut off from its large natural hinterland in the rest of the Middle East. It has to be set against the fact there is no industrial or infrastructural development in the Occupied Territories under the spur of Israeli finance capital. The parallel here is more the economic relationship that exists between the Philippines and the more developed LDCs in South East Asia or even Peru’s dependency on Brazil. Finally, it has to be set against the huge costs to Israel of military occupation.

Israel then is not even a minor imperialist power, despite its pro-imperialist proxy role in the region (and in Latin America and South Asia etc). Israel is a special type of semi-colony, one whose condition is masked by its relationship to imperialism rather than fundamentally altered. We can characterise its advanced or privileged semi-colonial status thus:

(a) Its semi-colonial dependency is not based on the repatriation of super-profits from fixed investments. Between 1952 and 1984 there was a mere total of $2 billion of foreign investment in Israel.

(b) The debt burden, while it is a channel for exploitation through interest repayments, is more a burden on its future than its present. On the one hand, as the size of the capital imports has grown in the 1970s and 1980s, as weight of loans over grants has increased and as the Israeli economic growth has faltered badly in the post-1973 period, then the foreign indebtedness of Israel has grown apace. In the 1980s this has been exacerbated by an increasing tendency for Israel to rely on short term loans. By 1986 Israel’s foreign debt was $24 billion and growing. In 1985-86 debt repayments were $8 billion out of a government spending total of $21 billion.

On the other hand, interest payments are a much smaller proportion of export earnings (17%-20%) than in Brazil or Mexico and they are far outweighed by the inflow of new capital on favourable terms as well as grants. Since 1982 while there has been a heavy net drain of capital from Latin America, Israel continues to enjoy a net surplus (i.e. new loans exceed net repayments).

(c) The subordinate nature of Israel’s economy flows from its dependency on continued privileged treatment over its debt and from the privileged access that Israeli exports have to many European and US markets as well as access to markets that the major imperialists would prefer not to have, or have only through Israel. Like certain other semi-colonies in Africa, Israel is not an economically profitable semi-colony considered in isolation. But its presence and role in the Middle East helps to ensure the continued super-exploitation of other Arab semi-colonies in the region.

The political independence that Israel shows vis a vis the USA flows not from any independent economic power but through its ability to lean upon the economically powerful Jewish community in the USA itself whose Zionist big bourgeoisie is an important sector of the US ruling class.

Whereas Israel’s growth rates were favourable in comparison with the OECD nations in the 1960s in the 1970s and 1980s they have been lower than OECD and LDC (especially Newly Industrialised Countries) averages. In terms of material consumption levels, provision of social welfare, literacy etc Israel is comparable to Spain, a level sustained only by massive external aid rather than any internal self-sustaining cycle of accumulation. In general falling immigration and rising emigration bear witness to the unfavourable development of Israel since 1973.

Since 1973 Israel’s economy has lurched from crisis to crisis; massive inflation, spiralling indebtedness, low growth. Unlike Brazil and others, Israel was not able to undertake accelerated industrial growth after the 1973-75 recession via recycled OPEC petro-dollars, partly due to political reasons and partly because of its already heavy debt burden. The internal structure of the manufacturing sector did change in the 1970s and 1980s with electronics and weapons coming more to prominence in the export sector. This has been mainly as a result of US and South African investment whose purpose is to sustain outlets for these goods to areas of the world which South Africa and the USA find it difficult politically to relate to directly.

The 1980s have brought the highest inflation in the world (1981), a disastrous and costly military adventure in Lebanon (1982), and a stock market collapse (1983) with growth hovering at an average below 2% per annum for the decade.

It has taken an unprecedented national coalition since 1984 to be able to stabilise the economic situation to a degree, introduce monetary reform, get inflation down to low double figures and introduce austerity.

Hence we conclude that Israel is a capitalist state, a relatively well developed one. But it is not an imperialist country; rather it is a type of semi-colony, one which is subordinate to US (and to a lesser extent European) imperialism. The majority of its workers in no way suffer exploitation or super-exploitation by imperialist capital. On the contrary, its non-Arab workers benefit from the import of imperialist capital.

The unique character of this state is to be understood in the colonial project of Zionism and imperialism to have a local gendarme in the Middle East. This coincidence of interests alone accounts for the materialisation and continuation of the reactionary-utopia that is Israel. Were imperialist finance capital to remove its support the Zionist state would collapse into economic chaos, class conflict and heightened struggle by the Palestinians for national liberation.

13. The structural features of ownership and control of Israeli capital in the post-1948 state were laid down in the Yishuv. The colonising project of Labour Zionism under the British Mandate was controlled by the Histadrut, founded in 1920 by the left Zionist parties. It sponsored and organised the growth of the Zionist agricultural settlements in Palestine—the kibbutzim and later the moshavim (rural settlements, mainly oriental Jews using larger landed tracts based on individual ownership but marketing goods on a co-operative basis). Indeed, in the immediate post-foundation years the bulk of Israel’s GDP and exports were products of the kibbutzim. Apologists for Zionism have long pointed to these settlements as evidence of Israel’s social democratic nature or as islands of “socialism” within Israel.

In origin they were the advanced guards of colonisation. After 1948 they were the border garrison posts of the new state. In reality their famous co-operativism and egalitarian self-denial was a product of economic necessity. Jewish labour came from an area with a higher historic cost of reproduction than Arab labour which would in Palestine mean that Arab labour would always undercut Jewish labour in a free market.

Jewish labour thus had to exclude Arab labour from competing and at the same time “exploit itself” voluntarily to promote rapid accumulation. They have always been organised in order to create a surplus for profitable sale in the export market. The post-1948 formation of the moshavim was a further sacrifice of the “co-operative” ideal to the laws of the market.

Today, the kibbutzim are more marginal to the economic life of Israel, more capitalistically run (capital intensive), are regarded by many Jews as a “planter aristocracy” and are almost totally supporters of Labour Zionism. They only embrace 3% of the Jewish population (almost exclusively Ashkenazi) and involve the super-exploitation of the oriental Jews in the menial tasks who do not live on the kibbutz.

As a result of its origins in the “pioneer settlements” of the Mandate period the Histadrut in the early 1980s was responsible for nearly 80% of the total employment in agriculture. It played a decisive military, economic and political role in the colonisation project of Zionism by driving Palestinians from their land. They did nothing to promote class based unity and solidarity among all workers of the region. Rather they deliberately sought to bar the Palestinian workers from the unions and denied them their democratic rights in general. In sum the Histadrut was never in its predominant character a trade union and has become less and less so in the forty years of the existence of the Israeli state. We must flight to break up the Histadrut and build new unions.

Since 1948 the Histadrut has diversified its capital ownership into construction, banking, some transport and manufacturing. Its industrial conglomerate, Koor, employs 20% of the Histadrut membership; its construction monopoly, Soheh Boneh, employed 26% of the membership in 1976. It owns Bank Hapoalim, one of the three big banking monopolies. In all the Histadrut owned businesses account for some 23% of GDP (1980).

Consequently, it is naive to portray the Histadrut as a trade union even though today some 60% of all Israelis are members of this “trade union” which embraces workers, housewives and employers of five or less workers all of whom are eligible to join. In origin it was the main institution of colonial settlement, run by Labour Zionism. As its economic interests evolved beyond the petit bourgeois confines of the early kibbutzim into industry it developed a Labour Department to represent the interests of the employees that it in part employed! The top personnel of the Histadrut’s companies, unions and the Labour Party are interlocking or even identical. In addition it also organises the health insurance for the whole of Israel’s population, which accounts for over 60% of the membership’s dues. Nevertheless, it is where the Jewish (and Israeli Arab) workers are organised as workers on the economic front and it is necessary to work within it to accelerate the development of class consciousness, both trade union and political.

In its totality the Histadrut is one of the three pillars of Zionist capitalism serving to retard and repress class differentiation and polarisation. Alongside the Histadrut the state sector (a coalition of government, Jewish Agency, National Fund and United Jewish Appeal to the USA) controls up to 25% of the economy (30% of employment in 1982) and is the main conduit for capital imports. The state and Histadrut embrace the large modern plants in weaponry, chemicals and are heavily export oriented and, with the exception of construction, are mainly employers of Jewish labour. Private sector business interests are overwhelmingly concentrated in small and medium sized manufacturing units with an emphasis on consumer produced goods for the home market. Some two-thirds of the workforce in this sector are Arabs from inside and beyond the Green Line. As a result the weight of the private monopoly sector has grown in Israeli economic life as manufacturing has accounted for an increasing proportion of domestic production and exports.

Sun 01, October 2006 @ 21:51