[The following article appeared in the October 19 issue of La Gauche, weekly newspaper of the Ligue Révolutionnaire des Travailleurs (Revolutionary Workers League), Belgian section of the Fourth International. Nathan Weinstock, a leading member of the LRT, is the author of Le Sionisme Contre Israël (Paris: Maspero, 1969), the best available work on the Arab-Israeli conflict.
[The translation of the article is by Intercontinental Press.]
of the founding of political Zionism (as opposed to the earlier sentimental Zionism whose aim was to create a Jewish spiritual home in Palestine and only incidentally to implant a few agricultural villages there).
Such a nationalist ideology that directly coincides with imperialism's game obviously could take root only in the consciousness of those who despaired of defeating the anti-Semitism that permeated the societies of Eastern Europe (where the great majority of Jews were concentrated during the nineteenth century).
Initially, Zionism remained a minority current among Jews, restricted mostly to the young petty bourgeoisie squeezed out by the xenophobia of the rising local non-Jewish bourgeoisie. The great majority of the Jewish masses remained hostile to Jewish nationalism, in any case in its Zionist form, either out of religious traditionalism or out of ideological conviction. The Jewish bourgeoisie was hoping for a liberal reform of the Tsarist empire; the Jewish workers movement-especially the Bund - was struggling for socialism, which would abolish the structural causes of anti- Jewish racism.
The inability of the world workers movement to prevent the victory of fascism and the Stalinist degeneration of the Third International had the effect of transforming the Zionist minority within the Jewish population into a nearly unanimous tendency. Moreover, the Jewish masses concentrated in Eastern Europe were exterminated by Nazism. As for the survivors, traumatized by the genocide and by the masked anti-Semitism in the USSR, which dashed their hopes for a socialist solution to the Jewish problem, they had no other means of salvation than to support the plan for setting up the Jewish state, possible haven in case of renewed persecution; in short, Zionism seemed to assure their survival.
2. Exactly because the Zionist movement aimed at transforming an Arab land, Palestine, into a Jewish state, it necessarily had to come into conflict with the local population (in-
TEL AVIV slum inhabited by Oriental Jews: 1244
cluding, moreover, the Palestinian Jewish minority of the time). In fact, transforming Palestine into a land with a Jewish population implied either displacing or expelling the inhabitants (and in his diaries, the Zionist leader Herzl did not hide that) or, better still, setting up colonial relations between the Jewish immigrants and the Arab peasants.
This resulted in a program that necessarily would involve:
-the opposition of the Palestinian masses (the leaders could possibly be won over);
- getting imperialist protection for the settlers against the native resistance.
The whole history of the Jewish colonization of Palestine is the history of these processes. Zionist land purchases were accompanied by eviction of Arab peasants and they provoked a vigorous opposition that crystallized politically beginning in 1911. In order to implement the program of Jewish settlement, the Zionist movement relied on support from the dominant powers of the region, at first the Ottomans, then the British (during the period of the mandate), then the Americans and the Soviets in 1947-48, then Great Britain and the United States in 1956,
An unpublicized face of the "promised land."
and the United States ever since then. 3. It follows that the tragedy of the Palestinian refugees and the succession of Arab revolts against the Zionist implantation derive from the Zionist program itself. As the fascist Zionist Jabotinsky lucidly pointed out in a work entitled The Iron Wall, there was no reason for the Palestinians to accept the fate that the Sioux had rejected. Hence, he wrote, differences among Zionists are secondary: "Among us there are no 'carnivorous' or 'vegetarian Zionists. We all know that the Zionist program can be carried out only by force." The only serious divergence was over the question of whether the Zionists had to rely primarily on their own armed militia or on the military force of imperialism.
Hence the formation of various Jewish military units during the years between the two world wars and after the second (Haganah, the Irgun, the Stern Gang), which later fused into the Israeli army. These units were especially strengthened by the support of British colonial power during the great Palestinian revolt of 1936-39.
In the course of the six-month-long Arab general strike and rural guerrilla war, Dayan's militias aided the Royal Air Force and the British troops in raking through the Arab villages in Galilee and in guarding the Iraq Petroleum Corporation's pipeline.
The Israeli "war of independence" of 1948-49, which meant in reality Zionist military occupation of most of Palestine, rested on the same policy of force with the combined support of Truman and Stalin.
Likewise, the constant evictions of Arab peasants from the lands purchased by the Zionists between the two world wars-an inevitable consequence of pseudosocialist-Zionism, which aimed at emptying the land of Palestinians in order to have it worked by Jews-culminated in 1948 in the expulsion and flight (consciously fostered) of the majority of Palestinians from the Hebrew state.
Thus, from the beginning, the dispossession of the Palestinians by force was the main political axis of Zionist practice.
4. Zionist foreign policy has been conditioned by these basic facts. To survive as a state founded on the eviction of the native inhabitants,
which in turn provokes hatred among the Arab masses and stimulates their anti-imperialist potential,
Israel is compelled to rely on imperialist support and to make itself an instrument for imperialism against the Arab revolution. It must also seek imperialist support because of its economic unviability.
Thus, it carried out the Sinai campaign of 1956 (against the nationalization of the Suez Canal); it supported the French in Algeria; it supported the South Vietnamese government; it gave military assistance to Ethiopia; it recognized the Chilean junta, and so on.
Economically and structurally, the Zionist state has been incorporated into the world imperialist system. Each of the Arab-Israeli wars has been aimed primarily against revolutionary ferment in the Arab world: Nasserism in 1956, Syrian radicalism in 1967 and today, and the Palestinian resistance from 1967 up to today. And conversely, between Israel and the reactionary Arab regimes there has always been a tacit accord, symbolized, for example, by Tel Aviv's threats to invade Jordan if the regime there is overthrown.
Thus, Israel is a state that can survive in the Middle East only through military terror.
5. Israel's relation to the Arab revolution is very clear: Zionism is the unchained enemy of the popular masses whose awakening could upset the existing relationship of forces that favors Israel. The question is more complex in relation to Israel and the reactionary Arab leaders, who are basically favorable to the status quo (since Israel also protects their own stability) but are forced from below to up the ante of their anti-Zionism to win over the masses.
This is what explains the ambiguity of the positions of these regimes, which is reflected in the current war. The Syrian and
Egyptian leaders are fighting for the implementation of the UN resolution that would restore the territories conquered by Israel in 1967 but would also recognize the right of Israel to exist as a Zionist state.
of oppressed third world peoples, even though the regimes in question are reactionary and petty-bourgeois, even though these two regimes tolerated the crushing of the Palestinian resistance during black September (Syria less than Egypt), and even though they muzzle the fedayeen in their own territory.
Furthermore, the policy of force that Israel must use to maintain itself leads to constant expansionism. The territorial annexations of 1967 have made Zionism a national question for the Egyptians and Syrians as well as for the Palestinians, because the liberation of their own occupied territory (Sinai and Golan) is now on the agenda.
Israel is too useful to the United States as the "Prussia of the Middle East" for Washington to tolerate its existence being challenged. Further, Israel's military superiority is such that only a general revolutionary process in the region can bring about its defeat. Given the oil interests of the imperialists, this struggle would develop into a protracted struggle comparable to the Indochina war, with a massive Israeli intervention. Tel Aviv has already tried to drive Syria back into the Stone Age.
The fact that for the first time Tel Aviv has not achieved victory in a lightning war results from several factors:
• For the first time, the Israelis did not launch a preventive war (as Golda Meir declared).
• The United States and the Soviet Union have tolerated this clash in order to compel Israel, which had become too independent, to be more reasonable in the framework of a settlement. (But the pro-Israeli lobby in Washington is in the process of changing the American position.)
• The Arab forces are conscious that they are fighting to liberate their own territory.
• For the first time the Zionist troops are fighting far from their homes and are therefore emotionally less concerned and committed. (The surrender of whole units in Sinai would have been unthinkable in 1967 or 1948.)
8. The colonial origins of the Hebrew state are reflected in its internal structure:
• Continuation of the emergency regulations passed by British colonialism, which give virtually absolute power to the army.
• Systematized discrimination and oppression of the Palestinians inside the state's borders; they are denied any real right of organization.
• Attempts at any price to maintain a "sacred unity" so as to block any development of consciousness among the Jewish working class, the poverty-stricken and exploited Oriental Jews, the radicalized youth.
9. Since 1967 Israel has undergone a rapid process of South Africanization:
• Organized superexploitation of tens of thousands of Palestinian workers (including youth and children) who find themselves in a purely colonial situation, compelled to return each night to their reservations in the West Bank and Gaza after working all day in Jewish enterprises.
• Accelerated degeneration of the kibbutzim into collective societies resting on the superexploitation of the colonial labor force and assigned to paramilitary tasks (as in Golan).
• Rapid emergence of an Israeli big bourgeoisie that is breaking the former political equilibrium, which was based on the hegemony of the Zionist labor bureaucracy.
• Spectacular militarization of society, the generals possessing an unprecedented degree of independence from the civilian authorities, pressing a policy of their own, and methodically taking on the commanding posts of the country (in the economy, the universities, the political parties).
• Growing repression, which for the first time is falling as heavily on revolutionary Jews as on Arab militants.
• Frontal attack on trade-union and political rights.
• Degeneration of the moral fiber of Israeli society, installation of Zionist satraps in the occupied territories, tortures, witch-hunts against nonconformists.
10. There is no instantaneous solution to the conflict. To defeat Zionism requires a general struggle against imperialism and Arab reaction in the Middle East, that is, a rise of revolutionary struggles directed by a revolutionary leadership.
In fact, the Israeli problem is only one aspect of the general Arab revolution. Therefore, a revolutionary vanguard must be patiently forged uniting all the militants of the region, including those of the national minorities (Kurds, Israelis). It is only in the framework of the revolutionary reunification of the Arab world in a red Middle East that the Israelis can harmoniously integrate themselves.
But before the question of the future of the Israeli community can be posed (let alone resolved), the Palestinians must be able to reintegrate themselves into their homeland and exercise their right to self-determination; the Israeli working masses must opt for overthrowing the structures of colonial domination —that is, the Zionist structures - that constitute the specific form of capitalist domination of the country.
From this revolutionary perspective we support the liberation struggle of the Arab peoples, the fight of the Israeli vanguard against the colonial war of their leaders, and Jewish-Arab military unity against Zionism, imperialism, and Arab reaction in the struggle for a socialist future for the peoples of the region.
Notes
1. The Zionist movement-whose end result was the creation of the state of Israel —had as its goal the establishment in Palestine, an Arab land, of a "Jewish state" under the protection of the great imperialist powers. That was the program adopted by the Zionist Congress held in Basel, [Switzerland] in 1897, the official datel
6. As an imperialist bridgehead and a colonial cyst, Israel must be combated by all revolutionists. In the global context, Cairo's and Damascus's struggle against Tel Aviv is an integral part of the freedom struggle November 5, 1973