02.02.2023

Barking at the moon

Ignoring the huge catalogue of articles, speeches and resolutions, Daniel Lazare accuses Moshé Machover and the CPGB of silence when it comes to class politics in the context of Israel-Palestine

Even those who have never read the Sherlock Holmes mystery story Silver blaze know the famous exchange about a certain “curious incident”:

Watson: Is there any point to which you would wish to draw my attention?

Holmes: To the curious incident of the dog in the night time.

Watson: The dog did nothing in the night time.

Holmes: That was the curious incident.

The dog’s failure to bark at an intruder turns out to be an important clue: the point is that non-action can be just as important as action and that silence is sometimes as eloquent as speech.

Which brings us to Moshé Machover’s recent discussion in the Weekly Worker of Israel’s new ultra-right government and its implications for Iran: ‘Escalation on every front’, January 19.¹ The article runs through the horrors that the new coalition has in store: a pronounced turn toward homophobia, misogyny, and free-market economics; stepped-up racism; an embrace of messianic theocracy of the most explosive sort, and so on - ad infinitum, ad horrendum.

It is all too true. But what is no less important is the dog that did not bark during the night, which is to say the complete absence of any discussion of a revolutionary way out. “What one can predict with certainty,” comrade Machover concludes, “is that any Israeli-American intervention in Iran is going to end very badly for the Iranian people.” Quite so. But there is no examination of what Iranian workers should do to prevent such an outcome and certainly no mention of joint struggle with the Israeli working class. It is as if the Bolsheviks had gone on and on about the dangers of German militarism without mentioning solidarity with the German proletariat. That would have been unforgiveable, since internationalism was the key to the entire question. But it is similarly inexcusable today, since internationalism is the key to the Israeli crisis as well.

The problem is not just Machover - virtually the entire left is silent too. Of course, such elements will reply that a comparison with Germany and Russia is inaccurate, since both countries were imperialist powers during World War I, whereas Israel and Iran are today the opposite. As comrade Machover puts it, Israel “is looking to assert its status as … a subcontractor of American global hegemony”, while Iran is a leading victim of the same US drive for world domination. Their roles therefore could not be more disparate, but this is a distinction without a difference, as the effect is the same: a tendency to impose a nationalist framework on the conflict at the expense of one based on class.

This is especially striking, because the new government is doing to a growing portion of the Jewish population what Zionists have been doing to Palestinians for generations on end. Examples abound. Netanyahu and his far-right partners are seeking to amend the Israeli Law of Return, so that Jewish immigrants can no longer bring in non-Jewish spouses, children or grandchildren. The goal is to preserve the “purity of the Jewish race”, as Machover notes. But the effect is to place Jewish immigrants in the same boat as Israeli Arabs, who are legally barred from bringing in spouses from Gaza or the West Bank.² Ostensibly, the reason is to safeguard national security, since such people may be supporters of Hamas or Islamic Jihad. But the underlying impulse is the same: to safeguard the race by insuring Jewish purity and dominance.

The same goes for the “new Nakba”, as Machover calls it, that the coalition may also have in store. This would be a follow-up to the original Nakba (‘catastrophe’) of 1948, when some 700,000 Palestinians were put to flight during the Israeli war of independence. Bezalel Smotrich - who represents the new government’s neo-fascist wing, along with the Kahanist, Itamar Ben-Gvir - was unabashed in a blueprint he published in 2017.

“I believe that the state of Israel is the beginning of our unfolding redemption, the fulfilment of the prophecies of the Torah and the visions of the prophets,” he began. Hence, Israel’s god-given mission is to establish Jewish sovereignty not only in Israel proper, but throughout the Holy Land. Smotrich calls for “establishing new cities and settlements” in the West Bank “and bringing hundreds of thousands of additional settlers to live therein”. Palestinians can stay put, he says, but only if they “forgo their national aspirations” and give up any hope of equal rights. Otherwise, they “will receive aid to emigrate”. Those who do stay, of course, are not to be permitted to vote in national elections, since “the Jewish majority in decision-making” must be maintained at all costs in the state as a whole.³

If so, the upshot will be South African-style Bantustans at home, coupled with even more refugee camps in Arab states next door. It is a nightmare that all those on the left must oppose, but the results will also be nightmarish for the great bulk of Israeli Jews, who will find themselves caught in a racist dictatorship that a second Nakba will create. After all, Smotrich is a self-proclaimed “fascist homophobe”, who refers to gay pride parades as “worse than bestiality”. So what kind of life can homosexuals look forward to if ethnic cleansing goes through? With orthodox rabbis already demanding that women move “to the back of the bus”, as Machover describes it, what can they expect, if the ultra-right clinches its power once and for all? Israel is already one of the most unequal high-income countries in the world, with the top 10% earning 19 times more than the bottom 50%.⁴ So how will workers - Jewish and non-Jewish alike - respond, as neoliberal economic policies intensify? What will leftwingers do when the new government accuses them of disloyalty and turns against them as well?

Modern Jewry

Just as Nazism targeted ‘ordinary’ German workers no less than Jews, ultra-right Zionism is targeting ordinary Israelis no less than Palestinians. Quantitatively, Palestinian conditions are not the same - they are plainly worse. But, qualitatively, the similarities are growing. Despite generations of conflict, Jewish and Palestinian workers are facing conditions that resemble one another more and more.

Zionists face a problem. The ‘who’s a Jew’ question is increasingly intractable in an age of growing secularisation. Religious observance may still be strong in Israel, but it is clearly on the wane in the US Jewish community, which is roughly 10% larger. Just 26% of American Jews say that religion is very important in their lives - less than half the level of the US as a whole - while few engage in religious rituals beyond attending an annual Seder dinner on Passover or lighting candles on Hanukah. Intermarriage has stood at 61% since 2010, which means that nearly all Jews have Christians and other non-Jews among their closest relatives.⁵ Even more astonishing is the fact that, where Jews were once victims of widespread prejudice and discrimination, they are now actually the most popular religious group in America, according to a 2014 survey - significantly more so than Catholics or evangelical Christians, not to mention Buddhists, Hindus or Mormons.⁶

This is the most disconcerting of all from a Zionist perspective. After all, nationalism is based on the belief that different groups are condemned to eternal enmity and that they must all retreat into separate enclaves for their own protection. As Theodor Herzl, the founder of modern Zionism, wrote in 1896, “We are one people - our enemies have made us one without our consent, as repeatedly happens in history. Distress binds us together, and, thus united, we suddenly discover our strength.”⁷

But distress is disappearing to the degree that socialism and democracy can advance. The only thing Zionism can do in response is to try to terminate the process by herding Jews into an embattled nation-state, stirring up enmity with their neighbours, while elevating the most backward and obscurantist elements in their own ranks to a position of dominance. This is why the new Israeli government is determined to elevate the ultra-orthodox into a privileged caste. With Jewish identity harder and harder to nail down, the only solution is to raise ‘real Jews’ above everyone else.

This is profoundly reactionary, of course. But it also opens up fields of struggle that did not previously exist. By demonstrating the bankruptcy of nationalism, it creates a basis for internationalism among victims in all countries - Israel, Palestine, Iran, and various points in between. But it does so only to the degree that workers are able to understand what they have in common, despite efforts to wall them off in hostile camps.

This is all quite elementary - no different, in fact, from the socialist struggle to overcome divisions among German, French and Russian workers in the early 20th century or among white and black workers in America today.

So why does it go unmentioned? The answer is that virtually the entire left has adopted the same framework as the various contenders in the great Middle East conflict - not only Zionists, but Palestinian nationalists, pan-Arabists, Syrian rebels, various ‘friends’ of the Palestinian cause, etc. All accept national divisions as a given, and all oppose efforts to subvert, question or undermine them.

This viewpoint is most clearly represented in the capitalist west by the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement - which, in its effort to impose an economic state of siege on the Jewish state, views Israeli workers and capitalists as equally responsible for the crimes of Zionism. Machover is a supporter of BDS, and the Weekly Worker in general is too - as are the Democratic Socialists of America and all those followers of the late Ernest Mandel, who are busily lining up behind Nato’s war in Ukraine. All believe that Israelis should be punished without regard to class and that ‘progressives’ should express unqualified support for Palestinian ‘civil society’ - a category that includes such reactionary anti-Semites as Hamas and Islamic Jihad, both of which are part of BDS’s governing body.

Needless to say, such alliances cause them to turn a blind eye to the problem of anti-Semitism by imposing a nationalist perspective. They close the door to any hope of international struggle and, more to the point, play to Zionist strengths by encouraging Israeli Jews, proletarian and bourgeois, to stand together against what they perceive - not entirely without justification - as a common enemy. Would Bolsheviks have sided with German-haters? (Russia was in fact swept by anti-German pogroms in 1914-15.) Of course not. So why should anti-Zionists have anything to do with Jew-haters today?

The Israeli crisis is rapidly growing. Tit-for-tat violence is exploding inside Israel and the occupied territories, following the new government’s January 26 raid in Jenin, which killed 10 people, including an elderly woman. Israel’s drone attack two days later on an apparent missile production centre in Isfahan shows that the Jewish state is more determined than ever to attack its enemies abroad and may also be an indication that the US is being drawn into the conflict, since it is determined to punish Iran for the ‘crime’ of shipping drones to its arch-enemies in the Kremlin. The uprising inside Iran, meanwhile, continues apace - a sign of how political upheavals are continuing to shake the region as a whole.

The only solution is to connect such struggles via a single international movement. And the only way to do that is by bringing workers of all religions, ethnicities and nationalities together under a single, socialist banner. These are the ABCs of Marxism, so why are they so difficult to say?