19.02.2009

Death of Labour Zionism

Tony Greenstein assesses the effects of the recent poll

Israel’s general elections, coming as they do in the wake of the Gaza war, mark a defining moment in the country’s political history. The elections saw Kadima emerge with 28 seats and Likud with 27, in a poll which treats the whole country (excluding the Palestinians of the occupied territories, of course) as a single, 120-member constituency. Highly significant, however, was the further marginalisation of the Zionist left.

Israeli politics cannot be compared with those in normal bourgeois democracies. The terms ‘left’ and ‘right’ are not the same as elsewhere. In the west they bear some relationship to class, New Labour notwithstanding. The left has represented, in however distorted a fashion, the interests of the working class and relies on workers for voting support. The right bases its appeal on private capital and appeals to the middle and bourgeois classes.

In Israel ‘left’ and ‘right’ apply to one’s position on whether to support peace with the Palestinians or a Greater Israel. In addition Mizrahi/oriental Jews tend to vote by a large majority for Likud, the traditional party of the Zionist revisionists - as a way of saying ‘thank you’ to the Labour Zionists for the racism and bad treatment suffered at their hands. When Menachem Begin came to power in 1977, it was directly as a result of the vote of the working class. Israeli Labour was historically the enemy of the oriental Jews and was rightly seen as their oppressor.

Hence Ratz, the Citizens Rights Movement, one of the three groups which formed Meretz in 1992, had been the most liberal of Israeli parties when it came to its attitude to the Palestinians, with founder and ex-leader Shulamit Aloni supporting the refuseniks (soldiers who refuse to serve in the occupied territories) and adopting a non-Zionist position of opposition to the racism of a Jewish state. Economically, however, it had a free-market position, yet it could join forces in Meretz with Mapam, a traditional party which originally described itself as ‘Marxist’ (in fact Stalinist), and the centre party, Shinui.

The irony, therefore, is that it is the Israeli working class which has generally voted for the right and the middle and upper classes that have tended to vote Labour. Except that now they vote Kadima, an opportunist coalition created by two war criminals - Ariel Sharon and Shimon Peres - and now led by Tsipi Livni.

The Israeli Labour Party, which is erroneously seen as a party of peace, has always contained a pro-settlement wing, of which Yigal Allon and Israel Galili of the ‘left’ Ahdut Ha’avodah faction were the most conspicuous representatives. It should never be forgotten that it was Israeli Labour, not Likud, which established the first settlements and it was the Allon Plan which outlined the strategy, followed to this day, whereby the Jordan valley remains colonised in order that any Palestinian state be surrounded by Jewish settlements on all sides.

The traditional parties of the Zionist left, based on the kibbutzim and the ‘trade union’ Histadrut, have been reduced to electoral insignificance, with 13 seats. In 1949 Labour and Mapam had an absolute majority in the Knesset. Indeed David Ben Gurion, leader of Mapai (which merged with Labour in 1968), opposed building a coalition based only on the Zionist left parties and reached out to the United Religious Front and the Progressives as partners, excluding Mapam in the process. And Israeli Labour has accepted the Zionist rules of the game from the start. No government coalition must ever depend on the votes of Arab parties. After all, this is a Jewish state!

Until the 1977 elections that brought Menachem Begin of Likud to power, the Zionist left parties had never gained fewer than 54 seats and even as late as 1992, with the fateful election of Yitzhak Rabin (later to be assassinated), they won 56 - including the 12 seats gained by Meretz.

But since the 1999 election the decline has been rapid. From 36 to 25 to 24 to 16 and now 13 seats, the traditional parties of the Zionist left have become irrelevant, as former chief of staff Ehud Barak, leader of the Israeli Labour Alignment, sought to prove his macho credentials with the genocidal attack on Gaza. The explanation for the dramatic decline in Labour Zionism and the equally rapid rise of the openly racist and semi-fascist right is twofold.

As Zeev Sternhall shows in The founding myths of Israel, the Zionist left parties were never based on class struggle. How could they be, since their main goal was to build a Jewish state in conjunction with Zionist and Jewish capitalists? They could hardly promise to accept such money on the basis that they were going to overthrow capitalism! Instead the Palestinians and Arab labour were defined as the class enemy, hence the boycott of Arab labour campaigns of Histadrut in the 1920s and 30s.

Colonialism in its formative and early years often takes on a cooperative form, which western social democrats mistake for socialism. Hence the kibbutzim were on the surface egalitarian, but they operated within a colonial conquest; they were stockade-and-watchtower settlements. There was never a time when they were profitable and it is little wonder that, as industries were developed, they began to employ cheap oriental Jewish and Arab labour. In short they became collective capitalists. And, of course, kibbutzim, including those of the ‘left’ Mapam Hashomer Hatzair kibbutz federation, always excluded Arabs from membership. In other words, they were thoroughly racist institutions, established on the confiscated land of the expelled Arabs.

The late Noah Lucas, a prominent but critical Zionist, described how the kvutzah (forerunners of the kibbutzim) were a result of “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.” As professor Franz Oppenheimer, who was closely involved in their formation, explained, “The kvutza did not originate as a deliberate social experiment. Its forms were elaborated by accretion in the school of circumstances” (N Lucas Modern history of Israel New York 1975, p56).

Arthur Ruppin, the father of land settlement in Israel and a fervent believer in eugenics and the ‘racial sciences’, summed it up thus: “I can say with absolute certainty: 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” (A Ruppin Building Israel New York 1949, p47).

Indeed the most vicious anti-Arab militia, the Palmach shock troops of the 1947-48 war, were based on the ‘Marxist’ Mapam and ‘socialist’ Ahdut Ha’avodah. It was they, under Yitzhak Rabin and Yigal Allon, who in 1948 expelled 50,000 Arabs from Lyddah and Ramleh, and massacred thousands of others.

But today, when Israel is an openly capitalist society, aligning itself internationally with the most rightwing, authoritarian police states, there is no room left for cooperative capitalism. Hence Histadrut’s industries were privatised in the early 1990s. Put simply, the social base of labour Zionism has all but disappeared.

The other reason that the socialist Zionist parties have declined is that their ‘peace’ proposals were based on naked racism - the need to preserve the Jewish nature of the Israeli state. In other words, there were too many Arabs. That was the basis of their support for two states - in reality one state, Israel, and a Palestinian reservation.

Every racist aspect of Israeli society was pioneered by Israeli labour. It was not for nothing that the settlers in the West Bank could say that their right to settle in Ariel and Kiryat Arba was based on the same justification as the original settlement of Tel Aviv. Except that, whereas today’s settlers base their claims on the fact that god ‘gave them the land’, the ‘left’ Zionists claimed their right to settle was based on the Tanakh, the existence of whose god they denied!

The settler-right represent the logical culmination of Zionism and no-one personifies it better than the leader of the rightwing Yisrael Beiteinu, Avigdor Lieberman, who is a former member of the Jewish Nazi party, Kach. YB openly questions the right of Israeli Arabs to be citizens of the Jewish state, demanding a McCarthyite ‘loyalty oath’. It wants to hive them off to a Palestinian reservation in the West Bank. In a comparison that recalls the revanchist nationalist myth of the ‘stab in the back’ that allegedly lost Germany World War I, Lieberman openly describes Israel’s Palestinian citizens as a fifth column.

It is therefore a mark of just how far and how fast Israel has moved to the openly racist, expansionary right that Lieberman’s YB obtained 15 seats, only one less than the combined total of Israeli Labour and Meretz.

Socialists and genuine anti-racists should not be disappointed at the outcome of Israel’s elections. On the contrary, the disappearance of the hypocritical ‘shoot and cry’ brigade of ‘left’ Zionists and the ascendancy of the openly racist right is a welcome clarification of the political situation. Of course, this will be blamed on Arab intransigence, but this was always the explanation of settlers - from Algeria to South Africa - of why they had to engage in yet more bloody reprisals and repression. It was Israeli Labour under Barak which led the recent attack on Gaza, just as it was Amir Peretz, ex-Histadrut chairman and defence minister, who launched the attack on Lebanon in 2006.