Zionism - an Antidote to Socialism (von Plehve – Czarist Interior Minister)

Despite its Pretensions Socialist Zionism was simply an an attempt to reconcile the irreconcilable – Colonisation and Socialism

On Sunday at 5 pm, I will be giving a talk on my book Zionism During the Holocaust to the Communist Party of Great Britain and I intend to focus in particular on the reactionary and counter-revolutionary role of Zionism amongst the Jews of Europe. You can join using this link

I grew up in a Zionist household with all the myths of Zionism. I learnt that what we now call the Nakba (a word never used) was the Palestinians voluntarily leaving in order to make way for the invading Arab armies.

We were told that far from expelling the Arabs, the Zionists had begged them to stay! What was never mentioned was the use of barrel bombs against the Arab population of Haifa and the fact that they were forced to board ships to flee. Far from wanting to ‘drive the Jews into the sea’ the opposite was the case. It was the Palestinians who were driven into the sea, many of whom drowned.

The Idealised View of the Kibbutzim

Israel was seen as an oasis of socialism in a backward, feudal Arab Middle East. The Kibbutzim were held out as socialism in action and many were the times I was told that far from taking part in struggles here I should go and live on a Kibbutz. Of course I was never told that the Kibbutz was a racially pure institution, which no Arab could become a member of or that they were established as stockade and watchtower settlements on confiscated Arab land.

The myths of Zionism could, by themselves, fill a whole volume.  Today of course people are wiser as the true nature of Zionism has revealed itself with the ascent to power of the Jewish Nazi Jewish Power (Otzma Yehudit) and the assorted freaks of Israel’s far-Right.

What is interesting is how it began. Is it true that when Zionism began amongst the Jewish masses in Czarist Russia that it was a progressive movement that over time has moved to the right? Was Zionism a good idea that turned out badly or was it born with the Mark of Cain?

The strategy of the founder of Zionism, Theodor Herzl, was a simple one. He wanted to establish a Jewish State and from the start he sought to find a partner from one of the imperialist powers. This was a strategy that the Zionist movement never deviated.

In 1917 Great Britain agreed to sponsor the Zionist colonisation of Palestine and it formalised its agreement in the Zionism Haifa Otzma Yehudit Balfour Declaration but before then Herzl had traipsed round the rulers of Europe – from the Ottoman Sultan, the German Kaiser, the Pope, Hungary’s King Victor Emmanuel and the Ministers of Czarist Russia.

Before the advent of Hitler and the Nazis the Czar of Russia was seen by most Jews as the symbol of murderous anti-Semitism. Pogroms against the Jews were seen as a means of diverting the wrath of the masses away from the Czarist regime and towards Jews living in the Pale of Settlement where they were confined.

Vyacheslav von Plehve

To this end Czarist Interior Minister Vyacheslav von Plehve organised the Black Hundreds, a group of reactionary, counter-revolutionary, anti-Semitic groups during and after the Russian Revolution of 1905. They were responsible for hundreds of pogroms against Russian Jews and the death of thousands. They were supported by Czar Nicholas II who instructed his ministers to support and fund them.

The Bolsheviks and Russian workers were forced to fight them militarily. Lenin called them ‘tramps, rowdies, hawkers, and similar disreputable characters’. See The Black Hundreds and the Organisation of an Uprising

Brendan McGeever - Revisionist anti-Communist Historian

Russia had been plagued by pogroms against the Jews. Anti-Semitism was seen as the way of dividing the opposition to the Czarist regime. This was why, contrary to revisionist academics such as Brendan McGeever’s Bolsheviks and Anti-Semitism, the Bolsheviks took anti-Semitism very seriously as it was a weapon posed over the heart of the revolution.

The most famous pogrom was in Kishinev on 19- 20 April 1903. Nearly 50 Jews were killed and 92 were severely injured. ‘No Jewish event of the time would be as extensively documented.’ [Zipperstein, Pogrom: Kishinev and the Tilt of History]  Reports in the New York Times and The Times ensured that it had an unprecedented impact internationally. [See Jewish Massacre Denounced’. NYT April 28 1903].

The attitude of the Hayim Nahman Bialik, the Zionist national poet, “In the City of Killing” was to talk of the ‘disgraceful shame and cowardice’ of the Jewish victims of the pogrom. The Zionists of course had done nothing to organise self-defence.

The Czarist regime refused to intervene except when the Jews defended themselves. The international and the liberal press in Russia were outraged by stories of rape, mutilation and the murder of children. The anti-Zionist Jewish Bund organised self-defence units here and elsewhere.

The Governor of Bessarabia, whose capital was Kishinev, was replaced by Prince Serge Urusov, a ‘severe critic of autocracy’. Urusov’s study of the massacre confirmed that it had been instigated by Plehve.

On August 8 1903, barely four months after the Kishinev pogrom, Herzl visited Russia, meeting with Plehve. Herzl was concerned that Zionism should retain its legal status. As he began explaining the merits of Zionism Plehve interrupted him: ‘You don’t have to justify the movement to me. Vous prêchez un converti.’ [You are preaching to a convert].’ [Herzl Diaries, pp. 1522-1525, 10.8.1903]

What was the response of the Zionists?  Did they condemn the Czarist regime?  Not at all. The 6^th Zionist Congress which met on 23 August 1903 said nothing just as 30 years later in Prague, it would remain silent about the Hitler regime. It was more concerned with the Uganda Project.

Herzl asked Plehve: ‘Help me to reach land sooner and the revolt will end. And so will the defection to the Socialists.’ [Complete Diaries, p. 1526] Plehve approved the holding of the second Russian Zionist Conference, the publication of a Zionist daily, Der Fraind and the legalisation of the Zionist movement at a time when all other political organisations were banned.

The Jewish Bund

Herzl promised that the revolutionaries would stop their struggle in return for a charter for Palestine in 15 years. The Bund were outraged. [Henry Tobias, The Jewish Bund in Russia – From Its Origins to 1905, p. 252] Kishinev created a crisis for the fledgling Labour Zionist groups, who realised that they could not ignore the struggle against anti-Semitism.

Herzl had earlier written to the Kaiser describing how:

our movement… has everywhere to fight an embittered battle with the revolutionary parties which rightly sense an adversary in it. We are in need of encouragement even though it has to be a carefully kept secret. [Complete Diaries, p. 59, October 17 1897]

Lucien Wolf - Anti-Zionist Spokesman of the Board of Deputies

Later when he came to London, in an interview with Lucien Wolf of the Board of Deputies, Plehve spoke favourably of Zionism as an encouragement to Jewish emigration. For ‘non-emigrants’ he thought that ‘Zionist ideas... might be useful as an antidote to Socialist doctrines.’ [The Times 6.2.04, ‘Mr Lucien Wolf’s Interview with M. de Plehve’].

Sixteen years later, in February 1920 Winston Churchill wrote in Zionism v Bolshevism of a ‘worldwide conspiracy for the overthrow of civilisation’ by Jewish revolutionaries. In 1935 Ben-Gurion described Zionism as a ‘bulwark against assimilation and communism.’ [ https://tinyurl.com/y269wb72]

Socialist Zionism arose out of the contradiction between the needs of Jewish workers in Russia to fight anti-Semitism where they were and the dream of Palestine. Although Zionism had foresworn the struggle in the here and now, it couldn’t ignore the fact that Russian Jews were the oppressed of the oppressed.  Socialist Zionism arose as a result of the conflict between Zionism’s support for the existing order and the Jewish proletariats' class interests. [Lucas, Modern History of Israel, p. 35]

The myth of Zionist socialism in Palestine rested on the belief that the kibbutzim were socialist. In reality the kibbutzim were the result of an alliance between the Zionist labour movement and the Zionist financial institutions. The socialism of the pioneers did not prevent them from entering into an alliance with the Jewish bourgeoisie.

Collective colonisation was the most efficient and cost effective means of colonising Palestine. They were not a means of changing society. They were ‘tools in forging national sovereignty.’ [Ze’ev Sternhell, Founding Myths of Israel, p. 325] They fooled though westerners like Hannah Arendt who described them as ‘the most promising of all social experiments made in the 20^th century.’  [Hannah Arendt, The Jew As Pariah, p. 185].

The internal social structure of the kibbutzim reflected their political role. Personal space was eliminated in favour of collectivism. They were a Zionist Sparta intended to produce fighters without personal attachments of affection to each other or their children. ‘Everything was the property of the collective including the individual’s thoughts.’ [Bloom, ‘What “The Father” had in mind,’ p. 346].

The kibbutzim were Jewish-only stockade and watchtower settlements, marking out the borders of a future Jewish State. They provided the organisational backbone of Haganah, the pre-state army and Palmach, the Zionist shock-troops. Although never more than 5% of Israel’s population, the kibbutzim produced a disproportionately high number of Israel’s officer corps.

As the pogroms intensified, Labor Zionist parties were drawn into the fight against anti-Semitism. In Poland Poale Zion split into a Right and Left at its February/March 1919 conference, with Left Poale Zion emerging as much the stronger. This was the forerunner of the split at the World Union of Poale Zion’s fifth world congress in Vienna in 1920. LPZ supported the Bolshevik revolution and attended the second and third congresses of the Communist International as observers. LPZ opposed the decision by PZ to rejoin the World Zionist Organisation [WZO], viewing it as bourgeois.

But in Palestine it was the right-wing of PZ which was stronger. Because of the rhythms of colonisation Palestine PZ gravitated to the right whereas Poale Zion’s diaspora sections were pulled to the left as a result of the class struggle and the fight against anti-Semitism.

In Russia the success of the revolutionaries in overthrowing the Czarist regime in February 1917 lessened the attraction of Zionism. At their conference in Petrograd in June 1917 the Russian Zionists omitted all mention of British sponsorship of the Zionists settlement in Palestine. [Leonard Stein, The Balfour Declaration. p. 437].

According to the Labor Zionists, the Jewish and Palestinian workers would unite against the Jewish bourgeoisie at the very same time that they were calling for a Boycott of Arab Labour! We can see the results in Israel today where the Israeli Labor Party and Meretz (Mapam) entered into a coalition government with the far-right. Far from achieving socialism, the ‘left’ Zionists have almost disappeared.

The historic contradictions of the Zionist Left are being played out in the death throes of Meretz

You can no more be a Zionist and a Socialist than you can be a Carnivore and a Vegan

Below is an article from Gideon Levy.  Gideon is one of the few, lonely voices of sanity in an Israel that has veered to the lunatic far-right.  In his article Levy describes the terminal decline of the Zionist left as represented by Meretz, the Civil Rights Party.  Also worth reading is Ron Calili’s Meretz, Israel's 'Zionist Left' Party, Is Finished

In an interview with Arutz Sheva, the settlers' radio station, the Leader of the Israeli Labour Party at the time, Shelly Yacimovich complained that calling the ILP a left-wing party was ‘a historical injustice’.  On the contrary ‘Labor has always drawn its power from being a centrist party.’ Shelly Yacimovich: Labor Is Not a Left-wing Party

Histadrut Poster in the 1930's urged Jewish housewives to only buy 'Jewish' water melons

I agree.  It would indeed be an injustice to pretend that the Israeli Labour Party has ever been left-wing. Indeed it is a wicked calumny.  Only fools or liars such as Emily Thornberry, would ever subscribe to such nonsense (I cannot decide which she is though I tend to the latter).

As Holocaust survivor and Hebrew University Professor Zeev Sternhell showed in his book The Founding Myths of Israel the ILP was never a socialist party.  In 1930 the two existing Labour Zionist parties, Ahdut Ha’avodah and Hapoel Hatzair united to form Mapai, the Israeli Labour Party.  Ahdut was the direct descendant of the right-wing of the ‘Marxist’ Poale Zion and Hapoel Hatzair was an avowedly non-socialist party of Zionist labour and Yosef  Trumpeldor.  It preached 'constructivism'. Hapoel Hatzair only agreed to the merger when it was satisfied that the ‘socialism’ of Ahdut was purely verbal and secondary to its Zionism. The class unity of Jewish workers with the Jewish bourgeoisie was a sine qua non of Zionism and far more important than ideas of class struggle and unity with Arab workers. 

Poale Zion and Ahdut were bitterly opposed to any idea of class unity with the Arab working class.  This came up repeatedly because there were some Jewish workers who genuinely believed in the 'socialism' of Zionism.  Zionism was about class unity with the Jewish bourgeoisie who were financing the kibbutzim.  This issue of class solidarity with Arab workers had split Palestinian Poale Zion before World War I, indeed at its first Palestinian conference in 1906.

The Zionists are fond of saying that the Arabs want to drive Israel's Jews into the sea. In fact the only people who were literally driven into the sea were the Arabs of Haifa in 1948, many of whom drowned

It was a certain von Plehve, Minister of Interior in the Czarist government and organiser of the Kishinev and other pogroms against Russia's Jews in 1903, who in a visit to London described Zionism, which he supported, as an 'antidote to socialist doctrines.' [Interview Lucien Wolfe, The Times, 6.2.04.]

Even the very term ‘socialist Zionist’ is an oxymoron.  A socialist believes in the class struggle, opposing racism, colonialism and oppression.  Socialism is about a society where the ownership and control of wealth is in the hands of those who produce it not the few who own it.  Socialism is about unity of the working class and the oppressed regardless of religion, ethnicity, colour or national origin.  Zionism is about the unity of Jewish people regardless of class.

Ilan Gilon and Zahava Galon - Meretz MKs

These are simple things really.  Socialism is about universal values and the common struggles of humanity. Zionism is about particularism and Jewish chauvinism.  In Palestine David Ben Gurion, the leader of Labour Zionism and Chair of the Jewish Agency in the 1930’s and the first Prime Minister of Israel coined the slogan ‘From class to nation’.  In other words the class struggle of the Jewish workers was transformed into the national struggle against Arab workers.  See Histadrut: Israel’s racist “trade union”

Socialist or Labour Zionism is predicated on colonisation and nationalism.   The first question it asks is not whether something is good for the workers or humanity but whether it is good for the Jews. Socialist Zionism is bourgeois Zionism dressed up in social democratic and collectivist language.  But today even this is not true.  The Israeli Labour Party has abandoned any pretence of being on the left, even verbally. 

David Ben Gurion, Israeli Labour Prime Minister who effected the transfer of 3/4 million Palestinians in 1948

Labour Zionism built the Israeli state.  Labour Zionism pioneered the settlement of the land via its collective agricultural settlements, the Kibbutzim, which were stockade and watchtower collectives that excluded all non-Jews. The kibbutzim were established at first on land bought from absentee Arab landlords. The indigenous peasants were then evicted from the land and because of the policies of Jewish Labour they were not reemployed on the land as was traditional in most colonial societies. Thus the Palestinian refugee situation began from the start of the second Aliyah in 1904.  Until 1948, there was an internal refugee problem in Palestine.  It was only in 1947/8 with the onset of ethnic cleansing and the Naqba that the refugee situation was externalised and the Palestinians were expelled not only from the economy but from the land altogether.

This is not a matter of speculation or partisan propaganda.  In response to the Arab riots of 1929 the British Government sent out to Palestine first the Shaw Commission, which in turn recommended a further Inquiry into the causes of the riots. Thus in 1930 the Hope Simpson Commission under Sir John Hope Simpson went out.  Its Report was titled Immigration,Land Settlement and Development and was issued in October 1930 along with the Passfield White Paper implementing its recommendations (which Ramsay MacDonald promptly nullified in an infamous letter to the Zionist Organisation).

 It's conclusions were devastating. They found that despite the warm words of the Zionists about how much they valued the Arabs, their policies were designed to exclude them from all employment and labour. Indeed the Labour Zionists were going out of their way to force the existing colonies of the Palestine Jewish Colonisation Agency (PICA), which had been founded in 1891 by Baron Maurice de Hirsch, to dismiss their Arab workers and replace them by Jewish workers.  

Apartheid and the colour bar was at the heart of Labour Zionism. Whereas the Revisionist Zionists were happy to employ Arabs as cheap labour, the Labour Zionists fought to exclude Arabs regardless of cost.  Of course the socialist answer would have been for Jewish-Arab workers to combine to fight for high wages but such unity was anathema to the Labour Zionists.  This is important to understand.  Historically Labour Zionism was more racist than its 'right-wing' Zionist opponents.

Ben Gurion, who was the Chairman of Histadrut railed against Moshe Smilansky of the Farmers Federation who, for the sake of narrow calculations of 'petty profit' preferred to hire Arab labour.

it is for this petty profit, not a twentieth of net income, that he would foist on the colonies the evil of mixed labour, which can only provoke trouble on national and social fronts alike

To the Labour Zionists 'mixed labour' was an evil. Clearly the idea of joint working class unity was alien to Labour Zionism. In its submission to the Hope-Simpson Inquiry the General Federation of Hebrew Labour, Histadrut (which excluded Arabs from membership) wrote that:

“The Jewish Labour Movement considers the Arab population as an integral element in this country. It is not to be thought of that Jewish settlers should displace this population, nor establish themselves at its expense. This would not only be impossible both from the political and economic standpoint, but it would run counter to the moral conception lying at the root of the Zionist movement. Jewish immigrants who come to this country to live by their own labour regard the Arab working man as their compatriot and fellow worker, whose needs are their needs and whose future is their future.” 

Here you see an early example of Zionist hasbara at its finest. Zionist leaders would proclaim for all to hear the exact opposite of that which they were doing.  These 'socialist' Zionists would quite happily say that 'It is not to be thought of that Jewish settlers should displace this population, nor establish themselves at its expense.' even whilst they were pursuing exactly this policy! To understand Zionism you need to understand that historically it has always proclaimed its adherence to peace whilst waging war. Indeed to understand Zionism it is best to assume the exact opposite of what it says.

It is worth quoting from this Report, the most important description of Zionist colonisation in Palestine that the British ever produced. It explains succinctly how the policy of Labour Zionism immiserated the Arab workers and thus were responsible for the Arab riots of 1929.

The effect of the Zionist colonisation policy on The Arab:— Actually the result of the purchase of land in Palestine by the Jewish National Fund has been that land has been extra-territorialised. It ceases to be land from which the Arab can gain any advantage either now or at any time in the future. Not only can he never hope to lease or to cultivate it, but, by the stringent provisions of the lease of the Jewish National Fund, he is deprived for ever from employment on that land. Nor can anyone help him by purchasing the land and restoring it to common use. The land is in mortmain and inalienable. It is for this reason that Arabs discount the professions of friendship and good will on the part of the Zionists in view of the policy which the Zionist Organisation deliberately adopted. (my emphasis)

Policy contrary to Article 6 of Mandate.—....The principle of the persistent and deliberate boycott of Arab labour in the Zionist colonies is not only contrary to the provisions of that article of the Mandate, but it is in addition a constant and increasing source of danger to the country. At the moment this policy is confined to the Zionist colonies, but the General Federation of Jewish Labour is using every effort to ensure that it shall be extended to the colonies of the P.I.C.A., and this with some considerable success...

Anyone who seriously wants to understand why there was such bitterness and antagonism between the Zionist settlers and the Palestinian Arabs can do no worse than read the Hope-Simpson Report which is widely available online.

 The early mode of Zionist colonisation necessitated that it be carried out collectively as the most efficient mode.  This was incidentally true in the American and South African settler colonies. Settlements could only be defended on a collective basis.  Private enterprise was incapable of building up the institutions necessary to create the Zionist framework of the future Israeli state.  It was because collectivism was the most efficient and effective method of colonisation that it was the bourgeois Zionists who helped fund the Labour Zionist settlements. As Ben-Gurion remarked:

Private investment, making so many opening for Jews, has done great things and the Jewish worker must not decry its importance and advantage for the Yishuv. But however private his capital, a settler can only possess his land by grace of Zionism and its work. Take away the resources of Jewry, its help and protection which buttress the Yishuv and no Jew here can enjoy peace or property. (Rebirth & Destiny, p. 76, 1954)

In the diaspora things were different.  The contradiction between the fight against capitalism, poverty and anti-Semitism was at its sharpest in Poland and Russia.  Zionism, with its dreams of colonisation, was irrelevant. In the words of Zionist historian,  Dr Noah Lucas, ‘Zionism came into direct conflict with the. Jewish proletariats' perceived interest. It was in this context that the ideas of socialist Zionism were formulated.’ [A Modern History of Israel, p. 35]  

This was the context in which Poale Zion groups formed in Europe at the beginning of the 20^th century, primarily in competition with the much larger and more influential Bund, a Jewish anti-Zionist party.

In the Soviet Union Poale Zion ended up joining the Bolshevik revolution and it fought as the Borochov Brigade. It effectively abandoned Zionism because the essence of Zionism is about postponing the class struggle until the achievement of a Jewish state in Palestine.  Zionism no longer had any relevance because Zionism believed that the struggle in the diaspora was futile because Jews did not belong there in the first place.

The World Union of Poale Zion split into two at its fifth world congress in Vienna in 1920.  The disagreement was on the priority accorded to socialism.  Left Poale Zion refused to join the World Zionist Organisation, seeing it as a bourgeois movement.  Right Poale Zion  moved away from socialism altogether. Palestinian Poale Zion because it was involved in colonisation moved swiftly to the Right.  Ze’ev Sternhell describes the battles in the 1920’s between the left kibbutzim of the work brigades, Gdud Avodah and the right-wing kibbutzim which centred on Kibbutz Ein Harod.  The former were starved out by Histadrut and the Labour Zionists.

In Palestine Poale Zion split into two in 1919 and members of Left Poale Zion ended up forming the Jewish Communist Party. Right Poale Zion became the main engine of Zionist colonisation and Ahdut Ha’avodah.

In Poland where the struggle against fascism and anti-Semitism was at its sharpest Poale Zion split into two with Left Poale Zion drifting away from Zionism.  Right Poale Zion, which was smaller, became more and more irrelevant.  Left Poale Zion’s most famous member was  Emanuel Ringleblum, the chronicler of the Warsaw ghetto.

The Jewish Labour Movements Director Ella Rose was a direct transfer from the Israeli Embassy

Today in Britain the only function of Labour Zionism is as an agent of the Israeli government inside the Labour Party. The Jewish Labour Movement and Labour Friends of Israel are essentially Trojan horses for the Right.  They have no class politics.  They are thoroughly Blairite organisations. The JLM and LFI have been the main engines of the false anti-Semitism smears against the Left.

When the JLM balloted in the 2016 leadership election, they voted 92-4% for Smith.  The wonder is that even 4% voted for Corbyn!

The main target of the Zionist JLM is not British fascists or racists but the former leader of the Greater London Authority, Ken Livingstone, a pioneer of anti-racism in local government

It is clear today that Labour Zionism doesn’t even have a trace of radicalism left. Although the support of the Tribune left of the 1950’s for Israel was part and parcel of its overall support for colonialism, something that the Labour Party as a whole had been guilty of, at least at that time this Labour Zionist left was a component of the Left in the party.  Figures like Ian Mikado, Tom Driberg, Jo Richardson and even Michael Foot combined support for Israel and a version of socialism. 

The Jewish Labour Movement, an affiliated socialist society of the Labour Party occupies its far-Right anti-Corbyn wing.  Seen here at the 70th anniversary of the Battle of Cable Street when Jewish socialists, communists and non-Jewish workers prevented Moseley's British Union of Fascists marching.  At the time the Zionists together with the Board of Deputies OPPOSED confronting the Police who were protecting the British Union of Fascists but 70 years on they claim the credit that belongs to their political anti-Zionist opponents

The alliance with the Left in the Labour Party (& indeed outside it) died with the Lebanon war in 1982.  It was now clear that Israel which was the major watchdog of imperialism in the Middle East.  Both Tony Benn and Eric Heffer resigned from Labour Friends of Israel.  

Historically it had been Labour’s Right that had been sympathetic with the Arabs and the Palestinians.  Pro-Arabists such as Christopher Mayhew, Andrew Faulds and David Watkins were all on Labour’s Right.  Tony Blair changed that.  With New Labour support for Israel as the imperialist war horse was almost an article of faith.

Jeremy Newmark, former Chair of the JLM who led the witchhunt of left-wing anti-racists.  He has since resigned under a cloud of suspicion after being accused by the Jewish Chronicle of fraud.  He is currently under police investigation for financial malpractice at the JLM

The contradiction between socialism and Zionism has been resolved wholly in favour of the latter.  The only function in Britain and other countries of Labour Zionism is as apologists for the Israeli state.  Formally affiliated to the Israeli Labour Party, which they describe as their sister party, the JLM and LFI effectively act as the mouthpieces of the Netanyahu government. It is noticeable that when Netanyahu positioned snipers in Gaza to murder 120 Palestinians and injure 14,000, Labour Friends of Israel immediately tweeted its support blaming the Palestinians for their own deaths.  

Labour Friends of Israel could not find a word of criticism, still less condemnation, of the use of live ammunition against Palestinian civilians.  If this had been Jewish demonstrators in Israel ordinary riot control methods would have been used

Not one word of criticism was made by either organisation of the mass murder of unarmed Palestinians by the Israeli army.  If one hadn't known better, one would have assumed that the killings must have been carried out by Hamas.  Their racist statements denied agency to Palestinians depicting them as pawns of the evil Hamas.  It was a classic example of the conspiracy theory.

Ruth Smeeth and Luciana Berger, part of the white lynch mob of MPs who marched to Marc Wadsworth's Kangaroo Court which expelled  him - both MPs are on the anti-Corbyn wing of Labour

It was only after a massive backlash that LFI's tweets were withdrawn and a cleverer statement, which still blamed Hamas (which is code for Palestinians) was issued.  The idea of condemning unreservedly the actions of the Israeli troops was and is anathema to these Labour apologists for genocide.

The reasons for LFI’s predicament are simple.  Politically there is no difference between the ILP and Netanyahu when it comes to the Palestinians. The ILP supported the massacre of Palestinians in Gaza just as they have supported every war or armed attack by Likud, from Lebanon to Gaza.  Recently the ILP supported Netanyahu’s attempt to deport the Black African refugees from Israel on the grounds that they weren’t genuine refugees and because they are both Black and non-Jewish.

In the same way the ILP has supported the barring of Israeli Arabs from most Jewish communities and villages (the Reception Committee Law).

Poster of MAPAM - the United Workers of Zion

What then of what is left of the Zionist Left, that is Meretz?  Meretz was formed in 1992 by a merger of 3 parties – Ratz, the civil rights party, Shinui – a centre party of Amnon Rubinstein and Mapam, the United Workers Party.  Today it has 5 seats in the Knesset.  In 2015 Meretz was unsure, because of a change in the law that had been designed to eliminate the Arab parties, the threshold for representation in the Knesset having been raised from 2% to 3.5%, whether they would gain representation.  In the end they managed to slip in.

The late Shulamit Aloni - founder of Ratz and then Meretz -  former Education Minister until ousted by Rabin at the instigation of the religious parties.  A dedicated feminist and anti-racist who effectively abandoned Zionism towards the end of her life

The history of the Zionist left is best described by the number of seats they have gained in Israel’s Knesset over the past 70 years. In the first Knesset elections in 1949 Mapam stood with Ahdut Ha’avodah and gained the second highest number of seats, 19.  In 1951 Mapam gained 15 seats.  During the 1955 elections Mapam and Ahdut Ha'avoda had split in two.  Mapam gained 9 seats and Ahdut 10 making a total of 19. In 1959 and 1961 Mapam retained their 9 seats but Ahdut dropped to 7 and 8 respectively. From then on Ahdut disappeared or rather united with Mapai. Ahdut, incidentally, which contained figures like Yisrael Galili, Yitzhak Tabenkin and Yigal Allon, became the most militaristic and racist element of Mapai and it is no accident that the first two became founder members of Gush Emunim, the Greater Israel Movement after 1967.

 In 1965 Mapam gained 8 seats. From 1969 to 1984 Mapam was part of the Israeli Labour Alignment. In 1988 it stood separately again and gained just 3 seats.  In 1992, as part of Meretz it gained 12 seats, a historic high.  From then on it was all downhill – in 1996, 9 seats; in 1999, 10 seats; in 2003, 6 seats; in 2006, 5 seats; in 2009, 3 seats; in 2013, 6 seats; in 2015, 5 seats. 

Between 1973 and 1988, Ratz stood as a separate party and gained 3,1,1, 3 and 5 seats.  Shinui stood between 1981 and 1988 and gained 2, 3 and 2 seats respectively, so that in 1988 the combined total of the 3 separate parties was 10 seats. In the past 30 years the strength of the Zionist left has halved and in the 70 years since the formation of the Israeli state it has decreased by a factor of 4.  This is the context for Gideon Levy’s article.

However the seeds of the political degeneration of the Zionist left, as represented by Mapam, began far earlier. Until 1948 it had, on paper at least, supported a bi-national not a Jewish state, but in practice it had been wholly in support of the racist policies of Histadrut and the ILP.  Its members formed the backbone of the shock troops of the Labour Zionist movement, Palmach in 1947/8. It was Mapam members– Yigal Allon, Yitzhak Sadeh, Moshe Carmel and others – who led Palmach's ethnic cleansing in the Nakba. 

Early policy towards Arabs

Mapam entered the 1948 coalition government with a radically different policy towards Arab civilians from that being pursued by David Ben-Gurion. Mapam's executive committee advocated Jewish–Arab coexistence, opposed the expulsion of civilians and was in favour of the right of refugees to return to their homes after the war.… At a Mapai Centre meeting, 24 July 1948, Ben-Gurion accused Mapam of hypocrisy, citing events at Mishmar HaEmek, he said: 

"They faced a cruel reality ... [and] saw that there was [only] one way and that was to expel the Arab villagers and burn the villages. And they did this, And they were the first to do this."

Mapam was also opposed to the establishment of settlements on Arab land. But this created a dilemma as the kibbutz movement ideologically closest to Mapam, Kibbutz Artzi, was in the vanguard of the settlement movement. Of twelve new settlements created during May and June 1948 six were Mapam-related groups. … In the following months Mapam further diluted its position on the right of refugees to return by adding that there should be no return while a state of war existed and then it should only apply to the "peace-minded".

In November 1948, Eliezer Peri, the editor of Mapam’s newspaper Al Hamishmar, received a letter describing a massacre at al-Dawayima. Benny Morris estimated that there were ‘hundreds’ of dead. [Survival of the Fittest, Ha'aretz 8.1.04.] Agriculture Minister, Aharon Cisling referred to a letter he had received about the atrocities from Eliezer Kaplan, declaring: ‘I couldn’t sleep all night ... This is something that determines the character of the nation ... Jews too have committed Nazi acts.’ [The Birth of the Palestine Refugee Problem Revisited, p.488., Benny Morris] Cisling agreed that publicly Israel must admit nothing; but the matter must be thoroughly investigated. ‘The children they killed by breaking their heads with sticks. There was not a house without dead’, wrote Kaplan, the Jewish Agency [JA] Treasurer and later Minister of Finance.

The Political Committee was briefed on 11 November 1948 by the recently ousted Chief of Staff of the Haganah, Yisrael Galili, about the killing of civilians during Operations Yoav and Hiram. Aharon Cohen led a call for an independent inquiry. [Falsifying the Record: A Fresh Look at Zionist Documentation of 1948, Benny Morris Journal of Palestine Studies, Vol. 24, No. 3. (Spring, 1995), pp. 44-62]. The problem was that the commanders of these operations were senior Mapam members, Yitzhak Sadeh and Moshe Carmel. Ben-Gurion however was opposed to any investigations of atrocities committed by Israel’s military.

In December party co-leader, Meir Ya'ari, publicly criticised the IDF for using the expulsion of civilians as an "imperative of strategy". This was probably directed at Mapam member Yigal Allon, who had been chief of operations during Operation Danny.

The history of the Zionist left has been a history of retreat from socialist principles in favour of Zionist chauvinism and exclusivism.  It has been a history of hypocrisy, saying one thing and doing another.  But in Israel today there is no need for a left-Zionist group.  It appeals only to those intellectuals and academics, a tiny section of the Jewish intellectual elite who still fondly imagine that the Zionist dream can be reconciled with universalist principles.  It is a losing struggle.

Today what is left of the Zionist left is a phantom because it has no objective reason for existing anymore.  Zionism and Israel have moved on. Zionism has no ideological need any longer to maintain one face for socialist and labour parties abroad and another for the home audience.  Israel today is the most right-wing and racist society on the planet.  Just 8% of Israelis even identify as leftists.  Indeed the very term 'leftist' is a term of abuse in Israel. That is why it is an utter disgrace that the apologists for apartheid are still affiliated to the British Labour Party.

Tony Greenstein

The Israeli Left Cannot Commit Suicide, It's Already Dead

The left is bleeding on the floor. The worst advice that can be given to the left right now is the kind that is being offered: to lean more to the right, to repress itself more, to lie more

Gideon Levy Mar 29, 2018 

Tamar Zandberg celebrating after being chosen to be the new leader of the left-wing Meretz party on March 22.Meged Gozani

The dead don’t commit suicide. It’s too late. A terminally ill person usually finds it difficult to take his own life too, even “shooting himself in the foot” is hard for him. That’s how it is in life, and in death. All the lamenting about the “suicidal left” as described by Nehemia Shtrasler (Haaretz in Hebrew, March 27), simulates a non-existent reality: there is a left in Israel, it’s about to thrive, and then it commits suicide.

Well, there’s hardly any left, it’s certainly not thriving, so it is incapable of committing suicide. The left itself may be partly to blame for its dying, but not because it’s “going ho to destroy every possibility of winning,” or because it “excels at killing its leaders,” or because it doesn't lie enough like the right, as Shtrasler notes with envy. The Zionist left has lost its way, it has nothing unique to offer, it is less different than the right than it seems, it has no worthy leadership and it is up against a system of brainwashing and de-legitimization.

That is why it lies bleeding on the floor. The Zandberg affair – in which the new Meretz leader used a campaign consultant who previously worked for the far right, then lied about it – could serve as a positive reminder of what the left should and could have done: fought for its uniqueness. Not suicide.

The worst advice that can be given to the left right now is the kind that is being offered: to lean more to the right, to use the right’s consultants, to practice the right’s methods, to move further to the center, to repress itself more, to lie more, because that’s what everyone does. Even the advice to open its ranks to new groups is hollow. They too must be approached with something new, not with more of the same. The harsh attack on Tamar Zandberg was a reminder that the dying left still has enough libido to rise up and say: We are not the right; neither in content nor method.

Tamar Zandberg, new Meretz leader elected under a cloud

The Zionist left has an almost genetic structural problem — the awful contradiction between the left and Zionism, certainly in the reality of the Zionist apartheid of 2018 and the deliberate blurring of the term Zionism. The Zionist left is trying as hard as it can to hide the contradiction, cover it up, blur it, repress and deny it – but it doesn’t have a chance. As long as it sticks to its Zionism and as long as that Zionism is by definition a non-egalitarian ideology, which deprives, dispossesses, evicts and occupies, grants privileges to only one part of the country’s residents and not the other – that left cannot be a left. It’s merely a softer, more moderate right, a more restrained and liberally-styled version of the nationalist right.

That is not enough. The voter will always prefer the original, which is more authentic. That’s the deceptive web of lies in which the left is enshrouded, and it will be removed only if it touches the truth courageously and draws the necessary conclusions. It can’t have both – it’s one or the other. That’s also why the left is less resolved in its struggle than the right. On the Shomron hills in the West Bank Israelis are fighting for a cause that is clear; on Rothschild Boulevard they’re not. Not only because of temperament and self-indulgence issues, but because of the blurred path they are on.

The Labor Party is of course the mother of this deception, the mother of all sin, but Meretz, most of whose leaders still insist on defining themselves as Zionists, is also a partner to the treachery. Are they jealous of Naftali Bennett and Habayit Hayehudi? There they speak the truth. A fascist truth, but the truth. They don’t sweep it under the rug. That’s why the future is there. The Zionist left wants to have the best of all worlds – both Zionism and egalitarian humanism – and ends up losing them all.

Egalitarian humanism is not possible in an occupying country, with military oppression in its back yard. That’s why this left has no chance, with or without Moshe Klughaft. Zandberg and her party members are filled with good intentions to change the situation, to stop the deportation of asylum seekers, to increase equality for Israel’s Arabs, safeguard the courts and even end the occupation in the framework of a two-state solution. But they want to remain Zionists. And that doesn’t work. It’s an oxymoron.  

Tamar Zandberg, Go Home!

The new Meretz chairwoman betrayed voters by using the services of a far-right spin doctor and compounded the damage by lying about it

Alit Karp

Mar 26, 2018

New Meretz Chairwoman Tamar Zandberg on March 23, 2018.Meged Gozani

Tamar Zandberg, go home. You proved that everything they say about the left is true. From the start, I thought that most of your public appearances in various forums were dedicated to trivial issues such as legalizing marijuana, rather than fighting corruption and making peace with the Palestinians. But now — after it turned out that you used the services of Moshe Klughaft, a political strategist known for his anti-left campaigns; dissembled when asked about it, according to your interview with the Kalman-Liberman radio show on Reshet Bet Sunday morning and in fact openly lied — go home. If you stay at the helm of Meretz, you’ll underscore the arguments of opponents of the left: The left is irresponsible, it likes the easy life, it’s hypocritical, it lies and takes shortcuts it wouldn’t allow anyone else to take. And so, you must free us from you and your kind.

I’ve been a Meretz voter for a very long time, but if you head it I will no longer give the party my vote. For liars who feign innocence, for people who hire the creators of incitement campaigns and then lie about it, I don’t need to vote Meretz. I can vote for any other party with less pretense and a greater likelihood of becoming part of the decision-making process in this country.

Voting for Meretz is like being a fan of a soccer team that never wins. It’s difficult, exhausting and rooted in a belief in the justness of the cause, together with a belief in the integrity of its thought — and certainly in the integrity of those who lead it. I believed in the integrity of Shulamit Aloni, I believed in the integrity of Yossi Sarid, I believed in the integrity of Zehava Galon, and I do not believe in your integrity. It wasn’t enough that you used Klughaft’s services so you could learn from him how to use his morally corrupt tools; you then lied about it.

It doesn’t matter a bit whether you paid him or not, whether he led your party primary campaign or merely poured poison into the ears of those who took part in it. This is hair-splitting that is worthy of other politicians, the kind with which I thought you had nothing in common. Your saying he was not paid for his advice only makes it worse, since it means he volunteered for you. Soon you’ll be telling us that it’s all right for politicians to accept gifts from friends.

Your kind is a dime a dozen in Israeli politics. People of the true left, whose only remaining asset was their honesty and their faith in their leaders, feel, in the wake of this affair, that they were robbed even of this. Don’t dig in your heels. If you genuinely want the good of the party, submit your resignation today, call for a new party primary and do not put yourself forward as a candidate. All your good points, and you undoubtedly have them, are dwarfed by your lies.

The violent roots of Israel's Labor party

The Labor party’s glory days included the Nakba, conquering and settling the West Bank and East Jerusalem and other affairs Israeli society has yet to begin processing.

By Tom Pessah, +972 Blog, March 9, 2015

Senior Labor MK and former leader Shelly Yachimovich (Photo by Yotam Ronen/Activestills.org)

Senior Labor MK Shelly Yachimovich published the following status on her personal Facebook page a few weeks ago:

“Hi this is Shelly. Spot the differences: education minister and member of the diplomatic-security cabinet Yigal Allon moves apartments.”

In an attempt to criticize Prime Minister Netanyahu’s lavish expenditures, Yachimovich, number three on the Zionist Camp list, uploaded a photo of a letter written by Yigal Allon — one of Israel’s revered military leaders and a central figure in the historic Labor Party. The letter, which was written sometime in April 1969, is a request by Allon that the furniture for his new state-owned apartment be imported from his old one, so as to not to waste too much of the budget allocated to him as minister.

Like many in her party, Yachimovich is nostalgic for the “good old days” before Likud came to power in 1977, when Israeli leaders were known for their humility. But these days weren’t exactly good for everyone.

Allon, perhaps more than any other person, can be seen as the architect of the Nakba — the expulsion and dispossession of 750,000 Palestinians during the 1948 war and the establishment of the State of Israel. As the commander of the pre-state Palmach militia, he initiated a “whisper campaign” in April 1948 to terrify Palestinians into fleeing the eastern Galilee. Here is the plan in his own words:

I gathered the Jewish mukhtars [elders from local kibbutzim and villages – T.P.] who had connections with the different Arab villages, and I asked them to whisper in the ears of several Arabs that giant Jewish reinforcements had reached the Galilee and were about to clean out the villages in the Hula, [and] to advise them, as friends, to flee while they could. And the rumor spread throughout the Hula that the time had come to flee. The flight encompassed tens of thousands. The stratagem fully achieved its objective.

But this was just the beginning. Allon served in the Galilee, where he conquered the cities of Tiberias and Bisan; in the central area, where he attacked Lydda and Ramle; and in the south, fighting the Egyptian army. And in every place he went, as his biographer writes, he did his best “not only to conquer areas of Eretz Yisrael, but also to empty them from their Arabness.”

In October, for instance, he ordered transfer of Bedouin who were considered friendly to the Zionist forces from the heart of the Negev to an area close to the Egyptian border.

 Prime Minister Levy Eshkol (left) and Min. Yigal Allon (second from left) in the Negev, May 25, 1967. (Photo: GPO)

While documents from 1948 are beginning to be revealed, state archives still limit our knowledge of another central event in early Israeli history – the tragedy of the Yemenite children. Allon’s wife admitted that she and her husband went to a hospital and took one of the children for their friends in a kibbutz. We still do not know who is responsible for taking these children away from their biological parents, falsely claiming that they were dead, and passing them on to adoptive families.

Perhaps Yachimovich is ignorant of Israeli history, and that of her own party. But she must have read the letter that she herself posted. The letter mentions that Allon’s new government-subsidized apartment is located in the Old City of Jerusalem, which was conquered during the Six-Day War just two years prior. According to the architect who built the apartment, “there was a will to put symbols of government in the Old City, in order to represent our presence there.” Allon’s modest apartment was part of the strategy of annexing large parts of the West Bank, which he himself promoted after 1967.

The historical legacy of today’s “centrist” Zionist Camp is based on the expulsion of Palestinians and the repression of Mizrahim. As MK Jamal Zahlaka of the Joint List once said: “the Ashkenazim took Palestine from us, not the Mizrahim. It’s not the ones saying “death to Arabs” who took the land from us. It’s the ones who said, ‘we come in peace’ [‘Hevenu shalom aleichem’].”

Yigal Allon’s taste in furniture may have been admirable, but in glorifying him, Yachimovich is only whitewashing his crimes.

Tom Pessah is an Israeli sociologist and activist, currently residing in Tel Aviv.