Towards A Pro-Zionist Left
The left today has a basically hostile attitude towards Zionism and the state of
Israel. Some denounce Zionism as a racist, colonialist, imperialist movement and
call for the complete elimination of the state of Israel and its replacement by
an Arab Palestinian state. Others, perhaps the majority, accept the existence of
Israel as a regrettable necessity caused by the Holocaust but demand that Israel
immediately accept the establishment of an Arab Palestinian state in the entire
territory conquered by Israel in the 1967 war. Completely absent from the left
stance is the slightest hint that Zionism might be a progressive movement or
that Israel might have something positive to offer to the world. The only time
anyone on the left ever says anything positive about Israel is when Israel makes
some concession to the Palestinians. Otherwise all we ever hear from the left,
including those leftists who accept the existence of Israel, is a constant
stream of criticism and condemnation of every aspect of Israeli policy and
society.
I cannot even begin to describe the sense of outrage which this situation
creates in me. For close to 2000 years, ever since we were driven from the land
of Israel by the Romans and Byzantines, the Jewish people has faced unrelenting
persecution in both the Christian and Muslim worlds. The present day Jewish
population of Israel consists almost entirely of either refugees from
persecution in Europe and the Middle East or the descendants of such refugees.
The present day Jewish population of Israel speaks the language of the original
inhabitants of the land, the Hebrews, and is actually descended from them to an
indeterminate degree. Yet even though the Hebrew language is closely related to
Arabic, and even though close to half of the Jewish population of Israel
consists of Middle Eastern Jews or their descendants, the left portrays us as
imperialists and colonialists. Even though the Arabs have been trying to kill us
out of sheer prejudice ever since we began returning to the land in large
numbers in modern times, the left portrays us as racists and aggressors. Even
though there are approximately 200 million Arabs in the world and 1 billion
Muslims, the left portrays the less than 6 million Jews in Israel as an intolerant
majority lording it over an oppressed minority. Just how stupid are we supposed
to be? Why would we want to pick a fight with an immensely wealthy, well armed,
heavily populated Arab and Muslim world? To the contrary, we are the ones who
accept 1 million Arabs as citizens of Israel, whereas there are hardly any Jews
permitted to live anywhere in Arab or Muslim countries. That the left should
refuse to notice these obvious facts is shameful, and that it should choose to
depict us as the new Nazis for trying to defend ourselves against constant
attack is despicable.
What can be done about this situation? There already
exists an extensive literature setting forth the pro-Zionist side of the
picture. Most leftists have had ample opportunity to study the pro-Zionist
position and have chosen to either ignore or reject it. Precisely because the
current leftist critique of Israel is so grossly unjust and inaccurate, rational
argument alone will not affect it. What is needed is first an understanding of
how and why the left has arrived at its current position and second an awareness
of what a pro-Zionist left might look like. The time has past when the left
could afford to adopt an essentially neutral position relative to Israel and
Zionism. So much attention has been devoted to this issue that it has become
necessary to take a stand one way or the other. The purpose of this article is
to show why a pro-Zionist position is not only compatible with leftist tradition
and values but in fact represents the only way in which the left can escape from
its current condition of weakness and irrelevance.
Left wing anti-Semitism
Left wing anti-Zionism has its roots in left-wing anti-Semitism. Those
unfamiliar with the history of the left may be surprised to learn that a large
part of the 19th century left was openly anti-Semitic. Derogatory comments about
Jews and Judaism are sprinkled throughout the published writings of Karl Marx
and appear in a much more vulgar and insulting form in his private letters. The
founders of the modern anarchist movement, Proudhon and Bakunin, were still
bigger anti-Semites and even attacked Marx himself because he was born a Jew.
The initial response of the Russian left to the start of the pogroms in 1881 was
to commend the pogromists for showing political initiative and independence.
Even though most European Jews in the 19th century were impoverished peddlers or
workers, the European left at that time usually portrayed the Jews as
prototypical capitalists sucking the blood of the working class. This wildly
inaccurate, unjust image of the Jews was mainly derived from right wing
anti-Semitic stereotypes traditionally associated with the Roman Catholic and
Greek Orthodox churches..
However, during the first half of the 20th century overt displays of
anti-Semitism came to be considered politically incorrect on the left. This was
mainly due to the rise of the fascist anti-Semitic movements which eventually
resulted in the Holocaust. The left could not help noticing that the fascist
anti-Semites also attacked the left and constantly sought to portray it as a
tool of the Jews. In response the left developed an analysis according to which
anti-Semitism was actually a tool of the capitalists and therefore had no place
on the left. Yet at the same time, the left also developed a completely negative
attitude towards the emerging Zionist movement during this same period. With the
exception of a few Jewish leftists such as Leon Blum, Zionism was universally
portrayed on the left as a deviation from the class struggle and a tool of
British imperialism. The standard position of the left with regard to the
so-called "Jewish question" in the decades prior to the Holocaust was that Jews
in the Diaspora should not be discriminated against or denied civil rights but
that Zionism was a manifestation of right wing Jewish nationalism and therefore
reactionary and unacceptable.
During a short period in the late 1940s immediately following the Holocaust,
this position underwent a certain modification. The evidence of the Holocaust
and the fact that the Jewish underground in the land of Israel had waged a
guerilla war against the British led most leftists, including Stalin, to accept
the birth of the state of Israel as legitimate. Although the Soviet Union
resumed its anti-Zionist stance in the early 1950s, its recognition of Israel in
1948 was never completely repudiated. The official position of the international
Communist movement became that Israel had a right to exist but was basically an
imperialist offshoot whose nefarious activities were justly opposed by the
Arabs. However, prior to the 1967 war, the left as a whole did not devote all
that much attention to the Israeli-Arab conflict. What little sympathy for
Israel that had existed on the left during the late 1940s gradually disappeared
as memories of the Holocaust faded, but Nasser and the virulent anti-Zionist
movement in the Arab world were not viewed as above criticism either. The
Israeli-Arab conflict was seen by many on the left as a local quarrel without
the world shaking implications that the left now ascribes to it.
If we review the entire history of left attitudes towards Jews, Zionism and
Israel prior to 1967, certain points stand out. In the first place, the left
never completely abandoned the anti-Semitic attitudes which had characterized it
in the 19th century. The blatant anti-Semitism of Karl Marx was either ignored
or justified as a legitimate critique of Judaism. In the Soviet Union,
anti-Semitism was reinstated during the 1930s as an unofficial component of
Stalinist policy. Jewish Communists were the main targets of the purges of the
1930s, and the few Soviet Yiddish language cultural figures who survived the
purges were executed in 1952. Many jobs and professions were barred to Jews from
the 1950s onwards. Soviet anti-Zionism came to serve as the overt expression of
Soviet anti-Semitism, rationalizing and legitimizing a prejudice against Jews
which the Soviet leadership still hesitated to express openly in the traditional
language of anti-Semitism.
In the second place, even that sector of the left that did come to sincerely
oppose anti-Semitism never developed a realistic understanding of it or of the
true nature of Zionism. The standard leftist critique of anti-Semitism as a
capitalist tool was superficial and misleading. You will search in vain through
the entire corpus of left wing literature for one single word of recognition of
the long history of Christian and Muslim anti-Semitism and persecution of Jews.
Likewise, insofar as it accepted Zionism as legitimate after the Holocaust, the
left viewed it solely as a result of recent anti-Semitic persecutions and
remained more or less completely unaware of the long history of attempts by Jews
to revive the ancient Jewish state prior to modern times. The fact that the
ancient Jewish state had been overthrown by the Romans in the context of a
campaign of mass murder resulting in the death of at least 2 million Jews also
never entered the consciousness of the left. In short, the left had no interest
in the historical roots of either anti-Semitism or Zionism, preferring to view
Jews solely as victims of fascism whose culture and history were of little
importance or relevance.
Yet in the third place, the left prior to 1967 received the support of the great
majority of the Jewish people. Jewish leftists played a leading role in the
formation of socialist parties and trade union organizations in many countries,
and Jews everywhere, if allowed to vote, voted overwhelmingly for parties of the
left. Jewish support for the left was due in part to the deep roots of the
leftist ideals of democracy, socialism and national self-determination in Jewish
tradition, but it was due even more to the simple fact that the right prior to
1967 was so completely anti-Semitic. Virulent anti-Semitism was characteristic
not only of the fascist right but also of "conservative" political groupings
throughout this period. Compared to the right, the left had to look good to most
Jews everywhere. And of course, as is often forgotten, Israel was founded by
socialists, who constituted the dominant force in Israeli politics until well
into the 1970s. For all these reasons, Jews prior to 1967 made little or no
effort to combat the residual anti-Semitism of the left but rather accepted one
or another left wing movement, whether communist, socialist, democratic or
liberal, as the only available alternative to the overt, murderous anti-Semitism
of the right.
Zionism and racism
The victory of Israel in the 1967 war created a new situation which contributed
to the formation of the anti-Zionist left which exists today. Israel's
occupation of Judea, Samaria, Gaza. the Golan and the Sinai made it easy to
depict Israel as an imperialist aggressor in a much more convincing way than had
previously been possible. At the same time, the defeat of the Soviet allies
Egypt and Syria led to a major intensification of the Soviet anti-Zionist
campaign, with reverberations that were felt throughout the left on a world
scale.
Prior to 1967, Egypt and Syria had not been precisely the darlings of the left.
The "Arab socialist" regimes which ruled these countries, and also Iraq, bore
too close a resemblance to the fascist regimes after which they were in fact
patterned. The founders of "Arab socialism", namely the Free Officers movement
in Egypt and the Ba'ath party in Syria and Iraq, had sided with the Nazis during
the Second World War and were "national socialists" in every sense of the term.
Even after the defeat of the Nazis, Egypt and Syria provided a refuge for many
Nazi war criminals, including Alois Brunner, Eichmann's chief lieutenant, who
escaped to Syria. The "Arab socialists" crushed the genuine left in Egypt, Syria
and Iraq and ground out a steady stream of anti-Semitic propaganda which drew
heavily on Nazi sources, including the so-called "Protocols of the Elders of
Zion". Viewed objectively, "Arab socialism" was a classical fascist ideology
which combined a limited amount of state ownership with dictatorial rule,
virulent anti-Semitism and preparations for war.
However the Soviet Union in the 1950s and 1960s found it convenient to form an
alliance with the "Arab socialists", who received large scale Soviet military
aid in return for siding with the Soviet Union against the United States and the
"free world". The defeat of Egypt and Syria by Israel in 1967 was viewed by the
Soviet Union as a severe blow to Soviet power and prestige, leading to the start
of an anti-Zionist campaign of unprecedented scope and fury. Almost all of the
few thousand Jews who remained in Poland after the Holocaust were expelled from
that country in 1968 by its Communist government on charges of Zionist sympathy.
Soviet anti-Zionist propaganda began to draw on traditional anti-Semitic themes,
something which had been frowned on prior to 1967, and the friends and allies of
the Soviet Union around the world were asked to break relations with Israel, as
the Soviet Union itself had done. This campaign, combined with the continuing
opposition of the entire Arab world to the very existence of Israel, led to a
significant shift in the attitude of the Third World towards Israel.
There was never any chance of Israel competing successfully with the Arabs for
the favor of the Third World. When the "Non-Aligned" movement first started,
Israel - which really was non-aligned at that time - applied for membership but
was rejected due to Arab pressure. Nonetheless Israel did enjoy fairly good
relations with a number of African and Asian countries during the 1950s and
early 1960s due mainly to Israeli willingness to provide useful technological
assistance without strings to these countries. But once the Communist world
joined with the Arabs in demonizing Israel, one Third World country after
another either broke relations with Israel or adopted a much more hostile stance
than previously. The decisive change came after the Yom Kippur war in 1973, when
many African countries and also Cuba broke relations with Israel. Cuba had
resisted Soviet pressure to break relations in 1967, but when it did so in 1973,
it was rewarded by the Arabs with membership in the "Non-Aligned" movement
despite the fact that it was in reality so obviously aligned with the Soviet
Union.
The ideological vehicle for the inclusion of the Third World in the campaign
against Israel was the charge that "Zionism is racism". This accusation, which
was formally endorsed by the General Assembly of the United Nations in 1975, has
come to constitute a key component in the left-wing case against Israel. It
draws its strength from the fact that the term "racism", although theoretically
applicable to any form of ethnic prejudice, is used almost exclusively in
practice to describe the prejudice of lighter skinned people against darker
skinned people. And since Israelis are as a group, somewhat lighter skinned than
Arabs as a group, anyone who blames Israel for its conflict with the Arabs can
easily be convinced that Israelis are motivated by racism. The absurdity of this
charge is shown by the fact that an actual majority of Israelis, including both
Israeli Arabs and Israeli Jews of direct Middle Eastern descent, have a Middle
Eastern physical appearance. Israeli Jews come from almost 100 different
countries and do not constitute an ethnically homogeneous population. What
prejudice and hostility that does exist towards Arabs in Israel is not motivated
by racism to any significant degree but rather by the simple fact that Arabs
have been trying to kill Israelis ever since Israel was founded and even before
that as well.
In practice, the absurd charge of racism against Israel served as an ideological
smokescreen to conceal the introduction of Nazi anti-Semitism into the heart of
the international left movement. Nothing symbolized this process more clearly
than the fact the Secretary General of the United Nations at the time of the
passage of the "Zionism is racism" resolution was none other than Kurt Waldheim,
an actual Nazi who had served as an officer in the German army during the Second
World War. The packaging of neo-Nazi ideology in a pseudo-leftist format was
pioneered by the "Arab socialists" and then further refined by the Soviet Union
and its Eastern European Communist allies after 1967. Often citing the
"Protocols of the Elders of Zion" as proof, the left wing neo-Nazis developed an
analysis of the world situation in which "Zionism and imperialism" were working
together to impose their racist, colonialist system on the entire world. Uniting
behind this doctrine, the Arabs, Communists and Third World were able to take
control of the General Assembly of the United Nations away from the United
States and create an entire bureaucracy dedicated solely to subsidizing,
rationalizing and promoting Palestinian terrorism against Israel.
However, until the early 1970s, there was one sector of the left that still
remained relatively free of left wing anti-Semitism. This was the "New Left"
that had emerged during the 1960s in the advanced industrialized countries. Jews
played a leading role in the "New Left", which was inspired by democratic and
communal ideals much like those which characterized the kibbutz movement in
Israel. Israel's victory in the 1967 war did not horrify the "New Left"; to the
contrary, it played a certain role in promoting an upsurge of militancy among
student radicals in countries like Czechoslovakia, Poland, France.and the United
States. To many on the "New Left", Israel's victory appeared as just what it
was, the victory of a small democratic socialist country over its fascist
enemies. As an active participant in the "New Left" in the United States during
the 1960s, I can testify to the fact that I rarely encountered either
anti-Semitism or anti-Zionism in "New Left" circles until the mid-1970s. When
anti-Zionism did appear, it came as an import from various Third World
movements, especially those associated with the Algerian revolution and the
writings of Frantz Fanon. But in the past 30 years, the "New Left" has been
transformed into something quite different from what it was in the 1960s, and
the further this transformation has proceeded, the more anti-Semitic the former
"New Left" has become.
Blaming the Jews
Many people do not realize that there took place a basic change in the
leadership and direction of the "New Left" in the United States in the early
1970s. Watergate was just the tip of the iceberg of a massive program of
repression and "dirty tricks" directed against the left by the Nixon
administration that took office at the beginning of 1969. Radical "New Left"
organizations such as the Students for a Democratic Society and the Black
Panthers were broken up and many of their leaders forced underground or even, in
the case of the Black Panthers, killed. The "New Left" lost its radical edge and
leadership of what remained of "the Movement" passed into the hands of people
who had played it safe in the 1960s and were mainly concerned with advancing
their own professional careers. In place of the democratic and communal ideals
of the 1960s, these people put forward a new doctrine called "political
correctness". This doctrine treated what you said as more important than what
you did, which was an appropriate stance for a movement of aspiring left wing
professors, lawyers, publishers, journalists and social workers. Thanks to this
doctrine, you could become a well paid part of the capitalist system so long as
you always spoke well of any group considered to be "oppressed".
Starting in the early 1970s, these people began to move into prominent positions
in the professions, and the vehicle which they developed for their advancement
was called "affirmative action". In pursuit of "affirmative action", each of the
various sub-groups that made up the "politically correct" movement developed a
narrative highlighting their real or alleged "oppression" and thereby showing
why they should be promoted while others should not. Among the others were the
Jews, who were for some mysterious reason denied recognition as an "oppressed"
group and had therefore to seek professional advancement solely on their own
merit or as members of some other sub-group. Moreover, the narratives developed
by the various sub-groups all turned out to have one thing in common: they
tended to blame the Jews for their plight. This was usually not done in an
overtly anti-Semitic manner, but the net effect was to create a climate of doubt
and suspicion in the "politically correct" left regarding anything Jewish,
including of course the Jewish state.
The feminists and homosexuals blamed the Jews by identifying "patriarchy" as the
enemy, which was then attributed to the influence of the so-called "Old
Testament" on "Western" culture. Another popular Jewish target of the feminists
and homosexuals was Sigmund Freud, whose ideas on the subject of sex were said
to be responsible for many of their problems. Among Afro-Americans, the bizarre
idea that the Jews were somehow to blame for the institution of slavery
gradually gained ground, until it was formally adopted by the followers of Louis
Farrakhan. And since the entire Third World was, by definition, "oppressed", and
since the Third World was hostile to Israel, it was only natural to conclude
that Zionism was in fact what the United Nations said it was, a racist,
colonialist doctrine. Those who did not arrive at this conclusion on their own
could always derive it from the works of Noam Chomsky. Like Chomsky, Jews who
wanted to be accepted as "politically correct" learned to sing with the choir,
validating or even inventing accusations against this or that aspect of Jewish
tradition, belief and culture without ever actually coming out and saying that
the Jews as a group were no good.
Why did this happen? In the first place it happened because so many of the
leaders of the "New Left" of the 1960s were Jewish and dumping on the Jews was a
good way of discrediting these people whose courage and self-sacrifice might
otherwise be compared favorably with the opportunism and careerism of the
"politically correct" left. In the second place it happened because of the
growing influence of the Christian and Muslim religions on the post-1960s left.
The tradition of profound and often violent anti-Semitism associated with both
of these religions could not help but enhance the climate of doubt and suspicion
regarding anything Jewish among "politically correct" leftists. And in the third
place it happened because so much of the left outside of the United States was
increasingly anti-Zionist and anti-Semitic from the early 1970s onwards. Insofar
as American leftists were influenced by world trends, the effect of this
influence was to promote anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism within the American left
as well.
The final step in the transformation of the "New Left" into its opposite came
with the cooptation of the "politically correct" left as an instrument of US
imperialism under the banner of "human rights". This process began in the late
1970s under the Carter administration and was carried to perfection in the 1990s
under Clinton. The concept of "human rights" was the logical extension of all
the other "rights" - civil rights, women's rights, gay rights - which the
"politically correct" left espoused. It soon became attractive to the liberal
wing of the US capitalist system, first as an ideological weapon against the
authoritarian practices of the Communists, then as a way of justifying US
intervention in all those countries whose dictatorial anti-Communist regimes,
previously installed with US aid, had become so corrupt as to constitute a
barrier to greater US economic penetration. In the name of "human rights", the
US and its European allies now claim the right to intervene in the internal
affairs of every country on earth so as to bring about "reform", meaning first
and foremost the elimination of all obstacles to US and European trade and
investment. To this end, a whole network of "non-governmental organizations"
staffed by the "politically correct" left and funded by liberal capitalist and
church groups has come into being to roam the world looking for abuses of "human
rights" to publicize and correct.
It did not take long for the advocates of "human rights" to discover
"Palestinian rights". No other accusation against Israel is so characteristic of
the contemporary left in Europe and the United States than the charge that
Israel is violating "Palestinian rights". Yet you will seek in vain throughout
the entire body of left wing literature on a world scale for one single mention
of either "Jewish rights" or "Israeli rights". Do Jews have a right not to be
eaten in effigy every Sunday for 2000 years? Do we have a right not to be
slandered in nasty little tracts called the New Testament and Koran currently
being distributed to literally billions of people? Do Israelis have a right not
to be threatened with obliteration by the Arabs for the past 50 years and more?
Evidently not. And until we get such rights, we must be forgiven for viewing the
ideology of "human rights" with a certain degree of scepticism. We are not alone
in this, for as many others have already noticed, all the rights in the world
are of little use to those who cannot avail themselves of the necessities of
life such as food, clothing and shelter, to say nothing of education and a
decent job. The left used to say this too, but thanks to the discovery of "human
rights", it has become unnecessary to focus on economic issues.
In fact, if you look at all the different components of the left wing
anti-Zionist movement, you will find that they all have one thing in common: an
opposition to the political and economic system on which Israel was founded, the
system of democratic socialism. This opposition is equally characteristic of
"Arab socialism", Soviet-style Communism, Third World military dictatorships and
the liberal capitalist ideology of "human rights". Conversely, the one sector of
the left where some sympathy for Israel persisted for more than a few years
after the Holocaust was in the democratic socialist sector. Unfortunately, as
anti-Zionism has grown, this sector has declined and today exercises little
influence on world politics. Democratic socialism is nonetheless the one system
that holds out a genuine promise of a peaceful and prosperous world. And
advocacy of democatic socialism is the one way that the left can arise from its
current condition of weakness and irrelevance and become once more a force for
progress in the world. But in order for this happen, the anti-Zionist left of
today must disappear and be replaced by a new left, a pro-Zionist left.
Democratic socialism
If you will examine the history of the last 100 years or so, you will find that
no group on earth has contributed more advocates and supporters of democratic
socialism than the Jewish people. Democratic socialism was the preferred
alternative to Czarist rule of the millions of Jews in the Czarist Pale of
Settlement prior to 1917 as reflected in their mass support for the Jewish Bund
and heavily Jewish Mensheviks. Democratic socialism was the ideology of the
Jewish labor movement in the United States throughout its heyday from roughly
1900 to 1950. And democratic socialism was the system which was actually
instituted in Israel at the time of its founding in 1948. For decades the
Israeli economy had a state owned sector of about 40% of the total, a
cooperative sector of about 20% and a private sector of about 40%. This flexible
economic system was combined with a multi-party democracy, a free press and the
rule of law. It resulted in the creation of a thriving modern economy despite
the extremely limited natural resources of the land of Israel. Israeli
democratic socialism might have served as a model for the entire world, and
especially the developing world, but it was prevented from doing so by the
strident anti-Zionism of the authoritarian "Arab socialists", the authoritarian
Communists and the many authoritarian rulers of the emerging Third World.
Instead Israel was forced into the arms of the capitalists. Those on the left
who denounce Israel on this account should first explain how else Israel was
supposed to survive. Israel allied with the British and French to attack Egypt
in 1956 because hundreds of Israelis were being killed in cross borders raids
carried out by the Egyptians. Israel went to South Africa for uranium to build
atom bombs after 1973 because almost every country in Africa had already broken
relations with Israel at the behest of the Arabs, Muslims and Communists. And
Israel formed a close alliance with the United States after 1967 because no
other country was willing to supply Israel with the military hardware which it
needed to survive. Israel has paid for this alliance in many ways, not the least
being the gradual privatization of a considerable part of the Israeli economy
due to American influence and pressure. Those who bemoan the price should state
the alternative, and it will soon be seen that they have none. For Israel,
survival has to be the primary goal, and there will never a democratic socialist
movement worthy of the name until it too comes to regard the survival of Israel
as a top priority.
Battered and bruised as it may be, democratic socialism still thrives in Israel
to a greater extent than elsewhere. Israel is one of the few countries in the
world where agriculture is almost exclusively in the hands of cooperative
organizations (kibbutzim or moshavim) rather than wealthy landowners, private
corporations or small farmers. Israel's highly democratic system of proportional
representation with a low threshold results in the inclusion of virtually every
shade of political opinion in Israel's parliament (the Knesset). Public
discussion and planning of economic priorities still plays a key role in
Israel's economic system. Almost all land in Israel is still owned by the
government and only leased to private individuals, corporations and
cooperatives. And Israel has maintained its democratic and socialist traditions
despite being under almost constant attack by its hostile neighbors and their
many allies ariound the world. Those democratic socialists who spit on Israel
are actually spitting on themselves. Why should anyone take what they say
seriously if they have nothing but bad things to say about the greatest
democratic socialist success story of modern times?
Moreover, those democratic socialists who denounce
Israel do so in the name of a Palestinian movement fundamentally hostile to
everything that democratic socialism is supposed to stand for. What is
called Palestinian nationalism is nothing other than a disguised form of
anti-Semitism. It is for this reason that the Palestinians rejected partition of
the land of Israel between Arabs and Jews when the British offered it to them in
1937, rejected it again when the United Nations offered it to them in 1947, and
rejected it yet again when Barak and Clinton offered it to them in 2000 at Camp
David. It is also for this reason that the founding charter of the PLO, which
was established in Cairo in 1964, explicitly disavowed any Palestinian claim to
either the West Bank or Gaza, which were then in the hands of the Jordanians and
Egyptians respectively. From the start the main goal of the Palestinian national
movement was to prevent the establishment of a Jewish state in the land of
Israel, and now that a Jewish state exists, its main goal is to overthrow it and
replace it with an Arab state. Whether this Arab state is independent, federated
with Jordan or part of some larger Arab entity is, from the Palestinian point of
view, a secondary question; what is important is that it replace Israel.
What the whole world pretends not to understand is that the Palestinian attitude
is rooted in the Arab attitude, and the Arab attitude is rooted in the Muslim
attitude. Is it a trivial detail that Mohammed was directly responsible for the
murder of hundreds of Jewish men in Medina and Khaybar and did not hesitate to
enslave and violate their wives and daughters? If Mohammed is the hero of the
Arabs and Muslims, then what must be their attitude towards the Jews? We know
what it is: traditionally an attitude of arrogant contempt, presently one of
undisguised fury that we have dared to challenge their authority. And since we
have defeated them a number of times in battle and possess nuclear weapons, they
have been forced to channel this fury into the one weapon that they are still
able to use on a regular basis, the weapon of Palestinian terrorism. The entire Arab and Muslim
world, with the partial exception of the Turkic speaking peoples, supports,
subsidizes and incites Palestinian hatred of the Jews. And to add insult to
injury, they point to the measures we have taken to defend ourselves against
Palestinian terrorism and say, look, here is the cause of the problem.
In short, the left has no business supporting a Palestinian nationalism
whose only goal is the destruction of Israel. Regardless of whether or not a
Palestinian state is imposed on Israel by the "international community", the
left ought to condemn the entire Palestinian national movement for its rabid
anti-Semitism, authoritarian methods and corrupt leadership. The left should
have nothing to do with either Fatah or Hamas but only with that small minority
of Palestinians who do accept the existence of Israel and believe in democracy.
The left ought to recognize that a Palestinian state, if it does come into being
under present conditions, will serve only as a springboard for terrorist
aggression against Israel. The only possible principled stance of the left
relative to the so-called Arab-Israeli conflict (meaning the Arab assault on
Israel) is, on the one hand, unconditional support for the survival of Israel,
and on the other, active support for all Arab efforts to democratize and unite
the Arab world. Only in this way can the left consistently uphold the principle
of national self-determination, the one principle which, more than any other, is
supposed to characterize the left as a whole.
Nations founded by runaway slaves are rare in human history, and such nations
that have endured for 3000 years rarer still. It has been the fate of the Jewish
people to imbue the entire world with its ideals and in return to endure
sustained persecution and massacre such as no nation on earth has ever endured
for such a long period of time. Our enemies accuse us of wanting to rule the
world, but all we have ever actually demanded is to rule over one tiny corner of
it. What appears to some as our world rule is simply the process by which our
ideals have gradually made their way into the consciousness of large numbers of
people. Those who envy us our influence should ask themselves whether they also
want to endure the martyrdom which our ideals have cost us. In any case, a
pro-Zionist left need not worry about being accused of Jewish influence; it
ought to proudly proclaim this influence and justify it by demonstrating to all
concerned the progressive role which the Jewish people has in fact played in
world history. Sticking up for the Jews may seem difficult at first, but it is
the only way that the left will ever succeed in regaining the initiative that it
once had before it succumbed to anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism.
Robert Wolfe