The Self-Emancipation of the se journalist, Theodor Herzl, expanded on the theme in his book The Jewish State. In 1897 Herzl chaired the first congress of the World Zionist Organisation in Basle.
The most immediate problem for the Zionist movement was where the new state was to be located. By 1897 virtually the entire world had been divided up by the Western powers. The same processes which had created modern anti-Semitism, and thus Zionism, had also given rise to imperialist capitalism. The giant capitalist monopolies in Western Europe and the US had integrated the non-industrialised areas of Asia, Africa and Latin America into the world market, and had politically subordinated them as overseas colonial possessions.
Consequently, a new Jewish “national” state could be created from just two sources -- either from out of the imperialist countries themselves, or from a colonial territory under the control of one of the imperialist powers.
The former course was excluded by the fact that within the imperialist countries the Jews did not constitute a oppressed national group, but an persecuted religious community. If they had constituted oppressed national groups like the Irish, Scots and Welsh did in the United Kingdom, or the Quebecois in Canada, then a movement for Jewish national self-determination would have directed itself against the imperialist ruling classes.
But being a middle-class movement with the aim of creating a separate “homeland” for a religious community, Zionism did not have the strength to act independently for its aims. The Zionist leaders therefore sought to persuade one or another of the European imperialist ruling classes that the establishment of a Jewish state in the colonial world would be in their interest.
Herzl petitioned the Russian tsar, the German kaiser, the British king, even the pope, to obtain support for a Jewish state in Palestine. In return for their support, Herzl promised these rulers Jewish backing for their imperial aims in the Arab East.
In a letter to the German Duke of Baden in 1898, Herzl declared: “With the Jews a German cultural element will enter the East. The fact that the Zionist movement is headed by German writers even though of Jewish origin can serve proof of this. The [Zionist] Congress language is German. The great majority of the Jews belong to the German culture. We need protection. German protection is therefore the best for us: we alone cannot do this.”
`Historical claim' to Palestine?
Porzsolt asks, “what is illegitimate about the idea of a national homeland for Jews in the land where they have historical links, links which have been kept alive in their cultural memory throughout the period of the expulsion from it”? She here repeats the grotesque Zionist myth of the purported “historical rights” of Jews in Palestine. This myth is a central element of Zionist ideology. As Abram Leon observed in his book The Jewish Question: A Marxist Interpretation:
“Whereas Zionism is essentially a reaction against the situation created for Judaism by the combination of the destruction of feudalism and the decay of capitalism, it affirms that it constitutes a reaction against the state of things existing since the fall of Jerusalem in the year 70 of the Christian era...
“Zionism sees in the fall of Jerusalem the cause of the dispersion, and consequently, the fountain-head of all Jewish misfortunes of the past, present, and future...
“Zionism has never seriously posed the question: Why, during these two thousand years, have not the Jews really tried to return to this country? Why was it necessary to wait until the end of the Nineteenth Century for a Herzl to succeed in convincing them of this necessity?
“In reality, just so long as Judaism was incorporated in the feudal system, the `dream of Zion' was nothing but a dream and did not correspond to any real interest of Judaism. The Jewish tavern owner or `farmer' of Sixteenth Century Poland thought as little of `return to Palestine' as does the Jewish millionaire in America today. Jewish religious Messianism was no whit different from the Messianism belonging to other religions. Jewish pilgrims who went to Palestine met Catholic, Orthodox and Moslem pilgrims. Besides it was not so much the `return to Palestine' which constituted the foundation of this Messianism as the belief in the rebuilding of the temple of Jerusalem.”
Even before the Roman conquest of Judea in 70 AD, three-quarters of the Jewish population lived outside Palestine. As for the indigenous Jewish community, it was gradually absorbed by neighbouring populations during the following centuries, just as were the Philistines, the Phoenicians, the Nabateans, and other tribes of the ancient Orient.
Moreover, if the Jews have a historical claim to Palestine, then it why don't the Arabs have a historical claim to Spain and Sicily which were once integral parts of the Islamic Empire?
Zionist colonisation of Palestine
After Herzl's death in 1904 the Zionists carried on his efforts to secure imperialist support for their plan to colonise Palestine. This negotiation process resulted in 1917 in the Balfour Declaration, in which Britain declared its support for the establishment of a “national home for the Jews in Palestine.”
The Balfour Declaration was designed to win Jewish backing of Britain in the first world war. It was later revealed that Britain had promised independence to the Palestinian Arabs, who outnumbered the Palestine Jews by about eight to one at the time, in return for Arab support in the war.
When the League of Nations finally “legalised” the spoils of World War I, Britain received a mandate to rule over Palestine and to establish a Jewish “national homeland” there.
The attempt of the Zionist leaders to establish an exclusively Jewish state in Palestine dictated their policy toward the indigenous inhabitants. Generally, when European settlers came to colonial countries, their aim was to exploit the wealth of the country, including the labour power of the inhabitants. The Zionists, however, wanted not just the resources of Palestine, but the country itself, to serve for the creation of a new national state. The Arabs, therefore, were not to be exploited economically, but replaced by Jewish settlers. It was this fundamental aim that determined Zionist policy in Palestine from 1917 to 1948. Until there was sufficient Jewish settlement to constitute a Jewish state, the Zionist supported British control of Palestine and opposed repeated uprisings of the Palestinian Arabs fighting for their national independence. An independent Palestine would have put an end to the Zionist scheme of establishing a Jewish state at the expense of the Arab majority. Therefore, “whoever betrays Great Britain betrays Zionism”, declared Zionist leader David Ben-Gurion -- later to become Israel's first prime minister -- in 1935.
While supporting British rule over Palestine, the Zionists proceeded to construct a “society within a society”. The Jewish National Fund purchased land from absentee Arab feudal landlords and then evicted the Arab tenant farmers. Selling or leasing Jewish lands to Arabs was prohibited. The JNF opposed land reform, as this would have put land into the hands of the Arab farmers who worked it and who, unlike the feudal sheiks, would refuse to sell.
A policy of “Jewish labour” and “buy Jewish” was established. Arab labour and production were boycotted by the Jewish settlers. This meant that Arab farmers who were evicted from their land were unable to find work in Jewish-owned businesses.
Throughout the period of the British Mandate, the Zionist colonisers confronted the Palestinian Arabs as a foreign invading force, intent on ousting them from their own country, opposing Palestinian independence, fighting alongside the British Army, opposing land reform. This process of colonisation initiated in 1917 culminated in 1948 with the establishment of the Israeli colonial-settler state.
The creation of Israel
After World War II, the Zionist organisations came into armed conflict with the British, who tried to hold on to Palestine as a colony instead of supporting the creation of the Israeli state. But in the meantime, the Zionist forces had gained the support of the United States.
Although some Zionists try to portray their conflict with the British as an anti-colonial struggle, it was really a conflict between two thieves. The establishment of Israel in 1948, with the full support of Washington, was made possible only by the expulsion of 900,000 Palestinian Arabs from their homeland and the confiscation of their land. The Palestinians who remained became, by Israeli law, second- class citizens in their own country.
Porzsolt denies that Zionist forces usurped power in Palestine. She writes: “The Zionists (along with Jordan) certainly took by ruthless force areas of territory which the UN had assigned to the Palestinians in their 1948 plan for the partition of Palestine. Both states thus denied the Palestinians their independent state. But the UN partition plan itself created two states, Israel and Palestine. The creation of the state of Israel was thus legitimised by the left and the right, the Soviet Union and the western powers.”
The first thing wrong with this argument is that it ignores the whole process of Zionist colonisation of Palestine before 1948. Secondly, simply because the UN approved the partition of Palestine, does that make it right? If the UN were to endorse the British partition of Ireland, or to decide to partition South Africa into black and white “homelands” would that make the decision legitimate?
The UN's decision to partition Palestine -- a decision made under extreme pressure from US imperialism -- violated the right of the Palestinian Arabs to national self-determination. The demands of the Palestinians Arabs (who at that time constituted 76% of the country's population) for an independent, united Palestine were ignored.
The fact that the Stalinist bureaucracy in the Soviet Union (which Porzsolt identifies as “the left”) approved this plan doesn't make it any less reprehensible. Did the approval by the Stalinist left and the Nazi right of the partition of Poland in 1939 make it “legitimate”?
While the creation of Israel was “legitimised” in the interests of imperialism, through the UN, it was not legitimised by Palestinian Arabs. As Palestine Liberation Organisation Chairman Yasser Arafat observed in his address to the UN General Assembly in 1974:
“This General Assembly, early in its history, approved a recommendation to partition our Palestinian homeland... The General Assembly partitioned what it had no right to divide -- an indivisible homeland...
“Furthermore, even though the partition resolution granted the colonial settlers 54% of the land of Palestine, their dissatisfaction with the decision prompted them to wage a war of terror against the civilian Arab population. They occupied 81% of the total area of Palestine, uprooting a million Arabs.”
Porzsolt asks, “Why should national independence for the Jews be, of itself, any more racist than independence for the Palestinians or the Kanaks or any other people?” The “national independence” of Israel is racist because it is based on the dispossession and eviction of the indigenous inhabitants of Palestine by a colonial-settler state. Colonialism is, above all, racism.
The Holocaust and Israel
“Holocaust denial or revisionism by the subtle dilution of the pression of the Jewish people which was their impetus to struggle to found the state of Israel. Without the Holocaust, it is certain that Zionism would not have gained the near universal allegiance of Jews or won their determination to implement it. Where else did they have to go?”, Porzsolt writes.
It's true that without the Nazi attempt to exterminate Europe's Jews, the Zionists could not have won the “near universal allegiance of Jews” (which they did not enjoy before World War II). However, it is false to say that the Nazi extermination program was the Jews' “impetus to struggle to found the state of Israel”. As we have already noted above, the Zionist colonisation of Palestine began long before the rise of Nazism in Germany.
During the 1930s the Zionist leaders actively opposed Jewish resistance to the Nazis and refused to launch a campaign to force the Western “democracies” to open their doors to the Jews. Immigration to the West would have destroyed the Zionist goal of creating an exclusively Jewish state in Palestine at the expense of its indigenous inhabitants. It is the Western “democracies” who, by systematically refusing to open their borders to the Jews seeking refugee from fascism during the 1930s, condemned millions of European Jews to the Nazi genocide.
Porzsolt's question about where else European Jews had to go after the defeat of the Nazis implies an acceptance of the Zionist argument that only the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine could save Jews from anti-Semitic persecution. But the Jewish community in Palestine was not saved from genocide because of its presence in the “holy land”, but simply because of the fortunate fact that Hitler did not conquer the Middle East. As Nathan Weinstock observed in his introduction to Abram Leon's book The Jewish Question: A Marxist Interpretation:
“... the results of the Zionist enterprise in Palestine offer further proof of the impossibility of finding a lasting solution to the Jewish problem within the framework of capitalism. Zionism is based on the assumption that the concentration of the Jewish masses in a national homeland would insulate them from anti-Semitism. For the Zionist considers anti-Semitism to be an inevitable phenomenon in non-Jewish society -- or, as Pinsker put it, a psychosis peculiar to the gentiles -- and not an outgrowth of the social structure. But it is an illusory solution. Aside from the fact that at most it could only provide a partial answer to the Jewish problem (since more than four-fifths of world Jewry live outside Israel) it ignores the fact that the fundamental roots of anti-Semitism lie in the worldwide crisis of capitalist society. If a new wave of fascism were to arise, there is no reason why its racist policies should mysteriously stop short at Israel's frontiers. After all, if Hitler had conquered Palestine would he have exempted Palestine Jewry from the gas chambers?
“Still, it is true of course that within the almost purely Jewish society of Israel (at any rate before the 1967 conquests), anti-Semitism is out of the question. But it is a dubious achievement: ironically, the Israelis appear to be today the only Jewish heir physical existence.”
Of course, what the Palestinian Arabs objected to was not Jewish immigration to Palestine, but Zionist colonisation of their country. In his 1974 speech to the UN General Assembly, Arafat pointed out that “if the immigration of Jews to Palestine had had as its objective the goal of enabling them to live side by side with us, enjoying the same rights and assuming the same duties, we would have opened our doors to them as far as our homeland's capacity for absorption permitted...
“But that the goal of this immigration should be to usurp our homeland, disperse our people and turn us into second-class citizens -- this is what no one can conceivably demand that we acquiesce in or submit to.”
As Arafat and other PLO leaders have repeatedly explained, the real issue in the Middle East is not whether or not the Israeli Jews can live there, but whether they have the right to dispossess and oppress another nation.
Israel and the US
Porzsolt says that Israel “would be in no position at all to act out its historical trauma on the world stage in this way if it were not in the interests of the United States which bankrolls it. Israel is to the United States as the Lebanese Phalangist militia is to Israel. In our support for the Palestinians, let us keep the real enemy in mind, and not waste to much venom on its cats paw, the Israeli government.”
But if Israel is the realisation of Jewish “national independence” how can it be simply a “cat's paw” of the United States?
Because of its particular origin as a colonial settler-state, Israel has always pitted itself as an ally of the US against the anti- imperialist movements of the Arab peoples. The character of Israel as an imperialist outpost in the Middle East was clearly demonstrated in October 1956 when Israel responded to the anti-imperialist measures of the Egyptian government, capped by its nationalisation of the Suez Canal, by joining Britain and France in invading Egypt.
Israel's aggression against Egypt, Syria, and Jordan in June 1967 was motivated by the same aims as its 1956 invasion of Egypt. The Israeli ruling class hoped to be able to hold on to any territory it could grab. In addition, it sought to topple the nationalist governments in Egypt and Syria and replace them with governments that would be more amenable to recognising Israel.
The June 1967 war was a turning point for Israel. Before the 1967 war, Israel's capitalist economy had been heavily subsidised by aid from the US and West Germany. This imperialist aid, which continued and increased after 1967, combined with Israel's territorial expansion in the war, laid the basis for Israel's transformation into an imperialist power in its own right.
While Israel remains dependent on inflows of US financial aid, this does not mean it is simply Washington's “cat's paw” in the Middle East. Israel is an imperialist ally of the US, but like Australia it has interests which can conflict with those of the US. For example, the US would like to see some token accommodation to the Palestinians demand for the liberation of that part of their homeland occupied by Israel in 1967, in order to stabilise the political situation in the Middle East. But Israel refuses to make any such accommodation, because any weakening of its control over the West Bank and the Gaza Strip could undermine its colonial super-exploitation of Palestinian Arab labor.
Porzsolt's argument that the “real” enemy of the Palestinians is the United States is simply an attempt to avoid taking a position against the source of the Palestinians' national oppression -- the existence of the Israeli state.
What is national self-determination?
Porzsolt writes, “the aspirations of peoples for self- determination are universally recognised. Whatever we may think about the limitations of nationalism as a vehicle for social liberation, the contemporary form of that aspiration is the independent nation state. The complexity of the Israel/Palestine conflict is that at its root is a conflict between two fundamentally legitimate national aspirations.” This is another common Zionist argument -- the appeal to the right to national self-determination, abstracted from the actual relations between nations.
According to this line of argument, the Jewish people, after being oppressed throughout the world, have a right to “national self- determination.” The establishment of the state of Israel was the realisation of that “right”. Because of the historical persecution of the Jews, their right to maintain the state of Israel supersedes the national rights of the Palestinian Arabs, including their right to return to their country.
This argument mixes together the plight of Jews elsewhere in the world, as an often persecuted religious community, and the situation of the Hebrew-speaking people today in Israel, who have come to constitute a distinct nation dominating a state that oppresses the Palestinian Arabs.
National self-determination, as Porzsolt observes, means the right to form a separate state. But the claim that the Israeli Jews have an equal right to self-determination with the Palestinian Arabs ignores the fact that the Israeli Jews already have a separate state -- one founded on the homeland of an expelled nation, the Palestinian Arabs. That's the source of the problem, not one possible solution.
As Marxists, we do not view the right to self-determination as some abstract moral right belonging to all nations at all times and under all circumstances. National self-determination is a progressive demand only insofar as it mobilises an oppressed nation against its oppression. Moreover, support by the working people of an oppressor nation for the right to self-determination of the oppressed nation nternationalist alliance between the working people of both nations directed against the ruling class of the oppressor nation.
National self-determination means that an oppressed nation has the right to choose whatever state forms it decides are necessary to end its national oppression. To reverse their national oppression, the Palestinian Arabs demand the dismantling of the colonial-settler state that took over their country, the right of the refugees to return, and the establishment of a united, democratic, secular Palestine.
A democratic, secular Palestine
Usually, struggles for national self-determination take the form of the oppressed nation demanding the right to separate from the oppressor nation and form its own independent state, as today in Puerto Rico, Quebec or British-occupied Ireland.
Palestine presents a different variant. There, national oppression was carried out by the establishment of a colonial-settler state through the forcible partition of the country and the expulsion of much of its indigenous population.
The demand for a democratic, secular Palestine arose out of this specific history. It flows from the reality that the Israeli state is anti-democratic, since it denies the rights of the majority of the country's indigenous inhabitants and prevents them from returning or even participating in its future.
The PLO calls for a secular state in opposition to the sate of Israel where Jews, by virtue of their religion, are granted rights that are denied to Christians and Muslims. Jewish religious law bears down heavily on Israeli life, regulating everything from marriage to public transportation. The fight for separation of church and state has been a part of the program of democratic revolutions for more than 200 years.
Finally, the demand for a unitary Palestinian state addresses the forcible partition of “an indivisible homeland”.
Much of the Israeli left and many Jewish leftists around the world are imbued with the contradiction of supporting the existence of Israel and an end to the national oppression of Palestinians. But the national oppression of the Palestinians cannot be ended as long as the Israeli state is maintained. Self-determination for the Palestinian Arab nation means the dismantling of the Israeli state and its racist, colonialist institutions. How can the Palestinians exercise their right to national self-determination if they are not allowed to return to their country? Yet if the Palestinian Arabs do return, and are accorded their full rights, then, as the Zionists themselves point out, it would mean the end of Israel as a separate Jewish state.
To demand self-determination for the oppressor nation robs the concept of national self-determination of its democratic content. It gives the oppressor nation -- in this case the Israeli Jews -- a veto f the oppressed nation and thus guts the demand for self-determination of the oppressed nation.
At the moment the majority of the Hebrew-speaking workers in Israel support the maintenance of the Jewish state. This support helps keep them ideologically enslaved to the Israeli capitalist ruling class, blocking them from fighting for their own class interests. Unless and until the Israeli Jewish working class ends its support for the Israeli state and supports the demand of the Palestinian Arabs for a united, democratic, secular Palestine, it will remain the “cat's paw” of Zionist colonialism.
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