by Antonio Rhodes The claim that Zionism can be redeemed because it has a good side in its political left is nothing more than a weak imperialist attempt to court ignorant circles in favor of the colonial enterprise. The most rudimentary historical knowledge of the conflict in Palestine confirms its sophism.

by Antonio Rhodes

The claim that Zionism can be redeemed because it has a good side in its political left is nothing more than a weak imperialist attempt to court ignorant circles in favor of the colonial enterprise. The most rudimentary historical knowledge of the conflict in Palestine confirms its sophism:

When the British Mandate ruled Palestine, “socialist” Zionists pursued a policy of usurping and ethnically segregating the economy of the country, dubbed “Hebrew Labor.” One of the more important ones, David Hacohen, illuminated the practice of the policy when reminiscing of it in 1969:

[I was] one of the first of our comrades to go to London after the First World War… . There I became a socialist… . I had to fight my friends on the issue of Jewish socialism, to defend the fact that I would not accept Arabs in my trade union, the Histadrut; to defend preaching to housewives that they not buy at Arab stores; to prevent Arab workers from getting jobs there. … To pour kerosene on Arab tomatoes; to attack Jewish housewives in the markets and smash the Arab eggs they had bought; to praise to the skies the Kereen Kayemet [Jewish National Fund] that sent Hankin to Beirut to buy land from absentee effendi [landlords] and to throw the fellahin [peasants] off the land—to buy dozens of dunams from an Arab is permitted, but to sell, God forbid, one Jewish dunam to an Arab is prohibited. [1]

Left Zionists were the principal perpetrators of the Nakba—the 1948 expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from what is now called “Israel” to Gaza and the West Bank, Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, and many other Babylons. As the Haganah demolished homes, expelled villagers, and committed massacres, its more than conscious commanders—Moshe Dayan, Yigal Allon, Moshe Carmel, Yisrael Galili, Yitchak Rabin—were largely ideological “socialist” Zionists, who would affiliate with parties like Mapai, Labor Unity, United Workers, Alignment, and the Israeli Labor Party in their later political careers. Kibbutzes—i.e., Zionist colonial settlements—of self-purportedly leftist ethoses absorbed much of the land which the Haganah cleansed, and the man who was the political face of the cleansing—who directed the commanders of the Haganah, who declared the independence of the State of Israel in the robbed land of Palestine—was the seminal face of left Zionism, then and now: David Ben-Gurion. After the fact, until 1967, the early left Zionist Israeli governments—under prime ministers Ben Gurion, Moshe Sharett, and Levi Eshkol—subjected those Palestinians not removed during the Nakba, now often reductively called “Arab Israelis,” to military surveillance and to land theft laws.

In 1956, the UK and France launched an imperialist and internationally condemned invasion of Egypt; the latter had attempted through nationalization to direct the profits of the Suez Canal toward improving the lives of everyday Egyptians, not foreign Franco-British capitalists, whereas the two parasitic empires wanted the Canal back. Predictably, the State of Israel prostituted itself to the latter side. Under the prime ministership of David Ben Gurion and the general governance of left Zionism, it invaded Egypt through the Sinai Peninsula as the British and French militaries landed on the Egyptian Mediterranean coast. The imperialist onslaught stopped only when the vast majority of the world condemned it at the UN.

Another of the early left Zionist governments, under Levi Eshkol in 1967, conquered, occupied, and commenced the colonization of the Sinai Peninsula, the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and the Golan Heights on winning the Six Day War. Notwithstanding the relinquishing of the Sinai Peninsula in 1982—the action of a*** conservative*** Zionist government—post-Eshkol left Zionist governments up to the present, under Golda Meir, Yitchzak Rabin, Shimon Peres, again Rabin, Ehud Barak, and Ehud Olmert, have all followed that long policy of occupation and settlement.

After a right Zionist Israeli government invaded Lebanon in 1982, succeeding left Zionist governments under Peres and Rabin maintained the military occupation of the south of the country which had been established. In 2006, one left Zionist government under Ehud Olmert attempted to reestablish the occupation after it had ended in 2000—though luckily not to avail, on account of the resolve of Hezbollah and the Lebanese people.

The especially extreme suffering which Gazans have suffered for the past twenty or so years, which is now culminating in a holocaust, has its origin in the policy of a left-liberal Zionist government under Ehud Olmert, coordinated with the imperialist US and the imperialist European Union. When Hamas won the parliamentary elections of the Palestinian Authority fair-and-square in 2006 and threatened to make that puppet into a real body of resistance in both Gaza and the West Bank, this Olmert government and a quartet of the United Nations, the US, the EU, and the Russian Federation demanded that it renounce what made it so popular amongst Palestinians: that it relinquish decolonial armed struggle and legitimize the illegitimate State of Israel. When Hamas rightfully rejected the arrogant, antidemocratic, imperialist ultimatum, this government and the quartet had their Palestinian puppet in the washed bureaucrat-comprador party Fatah orchestrate a coup. [2] Though the attempt was repelled in Gaza, it succeeded in the West Bank; there, the bureaucratic, imperialist-sponsored comprador rule of Fatah has since given Israel almost free reign to colonize. On the other hand, because Gaza managed to effectively remain a province in revolt, this left Zionist government and the US Bloc imposed a siege on its access to food, water, electricity, internet, medical infrastructure, and many other essentials; that was how the economic chokehold, the starvation, and eventually the periodic slaughters began.

Over the past two years, the principal left Zionist in Israeli politics, Yair Golan, has exhibited, at best, only slightly less settler-colonial rhetoric than right Zionist politicians. He outright supported the Invasion of Lebanon and the resulting occupation of southern Lebanese soil, and though he has criticized the War on Gaza—more to release the few remaining Israelis confined in Gaza than to protect the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians massacred and uprooted there—he wants Fatah and reactionary Arab imperialist satellite states like Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates to rule the Strip in the place of a direct Israeli occupation, and thus has a position antithetical to Palestinian self-determination. Other Israeli “opposition” politicians, like Yair Lapid and Benny Gantz, have been even worse; for example, the latter was a member of the vile Netanyahu government for about half of a year, in favor of the Gaza Holocaust, up until June 2024.

But if historical events are not enough, how about a brief exploration of quotations of seminal left Zionists, so thieving and bigoted that one could confuse them to be from Jabotinsky, Begin, or Ben-Gvir?

David Ben-Gurion, 1937: “We must expel Arabs and take their place.” [3] The same year: “[T]he compulsory transfer of the Arabs from the valleys of the proposed Jewish State could give us something which we never had… . This is more than a state, government and sovereignty—this is national consolidation.”[4]

Moshe Sharett, 1915: “We have forgotten that we have not come to an empty land to inherit it, but we have come to conquer a country from people inhabiting it, that governs it by the virtue of its language and savage culture… . Recently there has been appearing in our newspapers the clarification about ‘the mutual misunderstanding’ between us and the Arabs, about ‘common interests’ [and] about ‘the possibility of unity and peace between two fraternal peoples.’… [But] we must not allow ourselves to be deluded by such illusive hopes … for if we cease to look upon our land, the Land of Israel, as ours alone and we allow a partner into our estate—all content and meaning will be lost to our enterprise.” [5]

Golda Meir, 1969: “There was no such thing as Palestinians.”’ [6]

The contradictions between the different tendencies of Zionism are nonantagonistic at best, fake at worst. Indeed, some Zionists want to clothe the robbery of a country and the uprooting of its people in a “socialist” cloak, others want it in a national conservative or national liberal one, others in a religious one, etc. But the point is that all pursue that robbery and that uprooting; if one were not to, it would not actually be under the umbrella of Zionism—it would be distinctly non-Zionist. The problem of the conflict in the land from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean is not merely one Zionist tendency, whether “socialist,” liberal, conservative, religious, or whatever other flavor, and the solution is not merely another. Zionism in general is the problem. Hamas, Islamic Jihad, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, the Mujahideen Movement, the whole anti-Zionist Palestinian Resistance, and all its international allies, from those close, in the Arab World, to those all the way here in the US, are the real solution. Real socialists and anti-imperialists stand with the colonized in their agency, not with the leftwing of colonialism.

Footnotes

  1. Nur Masalha, The Expulsion of the Palestinians (Washington: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1992), p. 25.
  2. David Rose, “The Gaza Bombshell,” Vanity Fair (New York), March 3, 2008, https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2008/04/gaza200804.
  3. David Ben-Gurion to Amos Ben-Gurion, 5 October, 1937, https://www.jewishvoiceforpeace.org/2013/04/06/the-ben-gurion-letter/.
  4. Benny Morris, Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881-2001 (New York: Vintage Books, 2001), p. 142.
  5. Benny Morris, Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881-2001 (New York: Vintage Books, 2001), p. 91.
  6. Alasdair Soussi, “The mixed legacy of Golda Meir, Israel’s first female PM,” Al Jazeera English, March 18, 2019, https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2019/3/18/the-mixed-legacy-of-golda-meir-israels-first-female-pm.