The Zionist ‘Left’ has
always preferred Colonisation to Class Struggle, Segregation to Solidarity,
Racism to Workers’ Unity
In Israel’s first Election in 1949,
the two Labour Zionist parties – Mapai and Mapam achieved a majority of seats (65/120)
and vote (50.4%). With minor changes, this situation pertained until 1973.
There were numerous splits and
combinations and name changes such as Zionist Union in 2015 or when Mapai
joined with Ahdut and Rafi to form the Israeli Labor Party in 1968 and merged with Mapam in 1969, a merger which lasted
till 1988.
As the charts show there has been a
cataclysmic decline in their share of the vote and seats. Mapam (Meretz) was theoretically to the left
of Mapai and in 1949 and 1951 David Ben Gurion, leader of Mapai, preferred to
form a coalition government with the religious parties rather than Mapam.
In July 2017 Labor members had the
bright idea that if they voted for a leader as right-wing as Netanyahu then voters
might vote for them. Avi Gabbay, a former Minister in Netanyahu’s government was
elected leader. He declared that all settlements in the West
Bank were sacrosanct and gave fulsome support to Netanyahu’s attempt to deport
40,000 Black African asylum seekers for the crime of not being Jewish (or White).
Not unsurprisingly Israeli electors
preferred the genuine article and voted for Likud. In the April 2019 elections,
having dispensed with Tsipi Livni’s Hatnuah live on television, the ILP went from
18 to 6 seats. Mapam’s decline has also been precipitous and in 1992 it merged
with Shinui and Ratz, to form Meretz.
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| Orly Levy-Abekasis holds hands with Labour leader Amir Peretz |
It was because of the threat that
they would not be represented in the Knesset at all that the two parties united
to fight the 2020 election. They stood with Orly Levy-Abekasis
of Gesher who
had been a Knesset member for
the far-Right Yisrael Beteinu, led by the far-Right thug, former Defence
Minister Avigdor Liebermann.
No sooner had Abekasis regained her old seat
than she refused to support a government dependent on the Arab
Joint List! It is an unwritten Zionist rule that no government should include Arab
parties or rest on their support. As Justice Minister Amir Ohana explained: “The Arab voice is equal to a Jew’s when it comes to the Knesset
elections, but not the government.” This is what a Jewish Democratic state
means.
 |
| Aymen Odeh - leader of the Joint List |
As Jonathan Offir noted when Netanyahu commented on the election bloc results, he didn’t even count the Joint List. “The nation’s decision is clear 58 mandates to the Zionist-right camp and 47
mandates to the Zionist-leftist camp” The Arabs are outside the national
camp. This is the society that calls
itself ‘the only democracy in the Middle East.’
Former Meretz leader Tamar Zandberg complained: “Orly
Levy’s attitude toward the elected representatives of the Arab public is
shameful and racist.’ Which is true but it was Meretz which welcomed Abekasis
into its electoral alliance! As one right-wing activist declared, a government dependent on the
support of Arabs ‘was the end of
Zionism.’
 |
| Miriam Maikin, one of a growing number of Israeli Jews voting for the Jewish-Arab Joint List |
 |
| Aviv Hochbaum is one of an estimated 20,000 Israeli Jews who voted for the Joint List at the last elections |
One welcome result of this is that a
small, but growing proportion of Israel’s Jewish population, now vote for the
Joint List, which contains one Jewish MK, Offer Kassif. It is estimated that 20,000 ‘refugees from the Zionist left’ voted for the Joint List in
February 2020, up from 9,000 in the previous election, accounting for over half
a seat. In Klil, a Western Galilee Jewish community, the Joint List received
12.21%.
Benny Gantz, the leader of Blue and
White has reached a tentative agreement with Netanyahu about forming a
coalition. The ILP demonstrated that its
differences with Likud were not so great as to prevent its leader, Amir Peretz,
agreeing to join Netanyahu in government. This caused Meretz with 3 seats to
split off, taking one ILP member, Merav Michaeli, with them. It is therefore a distinct possibility that
Labour Zionism could cease to exist entirely at the next elections.
Labour Zionist Prime Ministers Ben Gurion and Golda Meir
Why has Labour Zionism declined to almost nothing?
Zionism is based on the creation of
an exclusivist Jewish state. This meant not only the expulsion of ¾ million
Palestinians in 1947-8 it meant the creation of a state whose guiding principle
is a permanent Jewish majority. There are professors of demographics, such as Sergio Della Pergola whose job is to warn of a population ‘time
bomb’ ticking underneath them, namely the Arab birthrate.
As Labour’s former leader, Isaac Hertzog explained, in a speech to the 15th Herzliya National Security
Conference in
June 2015:
In about a decade, the Arabs between the Jordan and
the Mediterranean will be a majority and the Jews a minority.... We will be
again, for the first time since 1948, a Jewish minority in an Arab state. I
want to separate from the Palestinians. I want to keep a Jewish state with a
Jewish majority. I don’t want 61 Palestinian MKs in Israel’s
Knesset. I don’t want a Palestinian prime minister in Israel. I don’t want them
to change my flag and my national anthem. (my emphasis)
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| All smiles - Nitan Horowitz of Meretz, Amir Peretz of Israeli Labor and Abekasis of Gesher |
The desire for segregation and ethnic purity has
been enshrined in the Jewish Nation State Law, a constitutional law. Both the Zionist
‘left’ and right support an ethno-nationalist Jewish state. One of the main reasons
for the Zionist left supporting 2 states, in practice a Bantustan, has been a fear
of an Arab majority. Likud however propose to take all the land and still deny
the Palestinians a state.
This racist mentality inevitably leads to segregation
between Arabs and Jews in Israel itself. For example in 2011 the Knesset passed the Admissions Committee Law
which allows hundreds of Jewish communities to bar Arabs from membership.
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| Tamar Zanderberg - former leader of Meretz |
Separation is fundamental to all
wings of Zionism. The Kibbutzim were all-Jewish institutions. Arabs could not become members.
It was the all-Jewish Histadrut, ‘a great colonising agency’ according to Golda Meir, that campaigned in the
1920s and 1930s for Jewish Labour i.e. a Boycott of Arab Labour.
‘whenever we come across a contradiction between
national and socialist principles, the contradiction should be resolved by
relinquishing the socialist principle in favour of the national activity.
Zionism, which in the West is seen as
an expression of Jewish identity, is an ideology of Jewish supremacy. That is
why when Israeli politicians advocate racist laws they appeal to the ideals of
Zionism.
When Netanyahu sought to deport
Israel’s Black African refugees he phrased it in Zionist terms warning that "illegal infiltrators flooding the country" were threatening
the security and identity of Israel:
"If we don't stop their entry, the problem
that currently stands at 60,000 could grow to 600,000, and that threatens our
existence as a Jewish and democratic state,"
Why has
Labour Zionism Become an Endangered Species?
The Labour Zionist economy which
dominated Israel up to the 1990s has been dismantled. In 1985 Shimon Peres
implemented the free market Economic Stabilisation Programme
in
response to hyper inflation and a massive budged deficit. No longer would bankrupt Histadrut
enterprises be bailed out. Over the next 6 years the Histadrut economy was
privatised.
 |
| Yair Lapid, the racist head of the 'centrist' i.e. right-wing Yesh Atid |
When the colonisation of Palestine
began it was carried out collectively out of necessity. This was the context in
which Labour Zionism became the main political force in Jewish Palestine. In
its initial phases colonisation is not profitable. The development of the land,
security against the indigenous population and building the infrastructure are costly.
It was in this context that Labour
Zionism and its institutions such as Histadrut and the Kibbutzim came into
existence. As Arthur Ruppin, Director of the Palestine Office from 1907 onwards
explained at the 11th Zionist Congress in Vienna, September 1913:
‘those enterprises in Palestine which are most
profit bearing for the businessman are almost the least profitable for the
national effort and per contra many enterprises, which are least profitable for
the businessman are of high national value.’ [Ruppin; Building Israel, September
1965]
All settler-colonial societies in
their initial phases are collective efforts. As Noah Lucas noted, the Kvutzah
(Kibbutzim) were
‘an
alliance between the embryonic labour movement and the Zionist financial institutions..
the pragmatism of the more radical socialists among the pioneers was revealed
in their readiness to enter such an alliance with the Jewish bourgeoisie
abroad.... the Kvutzah did not originate as a deliberate social experiment. Its
forms were elaborated by accretion in the school of circumstances. [A Modern
History of Israel]
Ruppin, who supported the
institutions of Labour Zionism was no socialist. On the contrary he was a
believer in the racial sciences and eugenics. He held friendly talks with Himmler’s
ideological mentor, the racial scientist, Professor Hans Guenther in 1933.
Labour Zionism dominated the
institutions of the Yishuv, the pre-state community in Palestine. Ben Gurion
coined the slogan ‘From Class to Nation’.
The class politics of socialism were transformed into the national struggle –
against the Arabs. Matt Plen wrote
“From class to
nation,” saw the interests of workers and the Jewish people as a whole as the
same. The role of the Histadrut, as he saw it, was to build a Jewish economy
under the leadership of the Jewish working class.
Today Labour Zionism has outlived its
usefulness. Moshe Ben Atar observed that ‘its glorious victories of the past became its errors of the future.’ Israel
has one of the most unequal economies in the Western world. The collectivist
economy has gone. Histadrut’s health service Kupat Holim, which attracted most
of Histadrut’s members, has been taken over by the state. Labour Zionism is a
relic of an age gone by. As Chemi Shalev noted, having gained 6 seats in the most
recent elections, ‘The next and last stop
is six feet under.’
There was a time when the Kibbutzim
provided the majority of senior officers in the armed forces. Today it is the settlements in the West Bank
who have taken over that function.
Because Israel is a settler-colonial
state, its politics are aggressively nationalist and where even the word
‘leftist’ is a term
of abuse. Ideology and practice have come into alignment. For its first 30
years Israel was a racist, expansionist society with a collectivist ideology.
The racism remains, the collectivism has gone.
The result is the virtual
disappearance of Labour Zionism. It has no role to play inside Israel. In
Britain, the Jewish Labour Movement is
proud to proclaim that the ILP is its sister party. The main burden of defending
Netanyahu’s Israel abroad today falls on Labour Zionism! When the JLM attack
its opponents as ‘anti-Semites’ we should remember on whose behalf they are
operating.
Tony Greenstein
