A new Hebrew nation

Israelis and Palestinians

Reviewed work: Israelis and Palestinians: Conflict and Resolution, Moshé Machover. Chicago, Illinois: Haymarket Books, 2012.
xiv + 302 pages. Endnotes to p. 316. Index to p. 327. $24.00 paper.

By Moshe Behar, Journal of Palestine Studies Vol. XLIII, No. 2 (Winter 2014)

Born in 1936 in Mandatory Palestine, Moshé Machover is an emeritus professor of mathematical logic, a lifelong militant socialist, and—along with such authors as Jabra Nicola, Ibrahim Abu-Lughod, Eqbal Ahmed, and Noam Chomsky—one of the most analytically lucid interpreters of the origins and consolidation of the Arab- Zionist matrix. With a small group of leftist dissidents expelled from the Israeli Communist Party in 1962, Machover co-founded the Israeli Socialist Organization, better known by its journal’s title Matzpen (Compass). With Akiva Orr, he published in 1961 the Hebrew book Peace, Peace, and There Is No Peace. Based on publically available sources, this book explained why David Ben-Gurion’s Israel opted to invade Egypt in 1956 and collaborate with British and French colonial powers rather than inch towards rapprochement with its most powerful Arab rival. It was this pioneering book, in conjunction with the explicitly regional, materialist, and internationalist conceptualization of the conflict, as fashioned by Nicola and Matzpen comrades, that laid the principal Marxist explanatory framework for the understanding of settler colonialism in the context of Palestine/Israel. Subsequent texts that have deepened the settler colonialist framework departed from Matzpen’s foundational terms, yet did not introduce new ones to replace them.

Israelis and Palestinians gathers thirty-five texts that Machover wrote during the past fifty years, either alone or with comrades. It is mindboggling to realize how these crisp and non-pretentious texts remain razor-sharp, relevant, and radical vis- à-vis contemporary Israel/Palestine and the Middle East generally: for analysts of sociopolitical affairs, this lifelong achievement of Machover’s is truly the stuff of dreams. The book’s essays are thematically grouped into six uneven parts: “The Palestinian Struggle and the Arab East: Jabra Nicola and His Heritage,” “Israeli Society,”“Racism and the National Question,”“Polemics Against Zionism,”“Reviews,” and “Final Analysis.” The book engages with all major puzzles shaping the debate over Palestine/ Israel during the past half-century, including the distinct Zionist political economy underlying the conflict (which differentiates Israel from neighbouring cases such as colonial Algeria or apartheid South Africa); the parochialism of the post-1993 one-state/two-states debate; and the hegemonic analysis of Palestine as if it were, or remains, a sociopolitical island confined to its fetishized Lilliputian territory in the caged borders drawn by Churchillian colonialists a mere century ago.

While Machover advances innumerable arguments, there is a pre-1967 one that remains consistent throughout his and Matzpen’s longue durée analysis, and that concurrently distinguished their Marxist conceptualization from those of the PFLP around 1967 and certainly from contemporary religious and liberal anti-Zionist currents. Since its inception, Matzpen emphasized that “Zionist ideology denies the fact that a new Hebrew nation has come into existence because its self-legitimation depends on the fiction that all Jews around the world are one nation that has an eternal right over its God-given homeland” (p. xii). Since this Zionist denial was dialectically shared by the Arab Left (and Right), in May 1967, Nicola and Machover argued:

As a result of Zionist colonization, a Hebrew nation with its own national characteristics (common language, separate economy, etc.) has been formed in Palestine. This nation has a capitalist class structure—it is divided into exploiters and exploited, a bourgeoisie and a proletariat. That this nation has been formed artificially and at the expense of the indigenous Arab population does not change the fact that the Hebrew nation exists. It would be a disastrous error to ignore this fact. . . . Nationalist Arab leaders who call for the liberation of Palestine ignore the fact that even if Israel would be defeated militarily and cease to exist as a state, a Hebrew nation will still exist. If the problem of the existence of this nation is not solved correctly, a situation of dangerous and prolonged national conflict will be re- created which will cause endless bloodshed and suffering. …It is no coincidence that the leaders who advocate such a “solution” are also incapable of solving the Kurdish problem. (p. 13)

In May 1973, Nicola and Machover reemphasized against the dominant left (and right) anti-Zionist current, arguing that “the idea that Israeli Jews do not constitute a nation is a myth, a piece of wishful thinking based on lack of familiarity with the actual facts” (p. 23). (The following quotation was provided by Brian Robinson.)

[The idea that the Israeli Jews do not constitute a nation is a myth, a piece of wishful thinking based on lack of familiarity with the actual facts. In reality, they satisfy all the generally accepted criteria for nationhood. First, they live concentrated on a continuous territory. It is true that they obtained this territory unjustly, by a process of colonization at the expense of another people. But there are many other nations that developed as such on a territory conquered from others. One can, and should, condemn such depredations; but value judgments are irrelevant to the objective question of defining nationhood.

Second, they have a common language, Hebrew. It is true that Hebrew had been for centuries a dead language and has been revived artificially for political motives. But the objective result is nevertheless that the Israeli Jews have Hebrew as their common language, which they use both in literature and in daily life. In this language they have developed a new culture that is quite specific and different from the cultures of the various Jewish communities in the East or West.

Third, the Israeli Jewish community has its own common socioeconomic structure, with its own class differentiation, as in other capitalist societies. That the Israeli economy is heavily subsidized by imperialism does not change the basic fact that the Israeli socioeconomic system exists as a real and specific entity.

Finally, all these factors have helped to create an Israeli national consciousness. It is true that Zionist ideology has helped the formation of this consciousness by artificially fostering a synthetic “Jewish national consciousness,” which is supposed to embrace not just the Israeli Jews but all Jews around the world. The means used by Zionism have been self-contradictory. It revived Hebrew in order to foster the attachment of the various Jewish communities to each other and to their ancient history. But since this revival succeeded only in Palestine, the actual result was to sever the cultural ties of the Israeli Jews to the Jewish communities in their various places of origin.

Similarly, in order to encourage the immigration of Jews to Palestine, Zionism struggled against the culture and mentality of the Jewish communities in the Diaspora; in this too it helped to create a separate Israeli culture and mentality. But since the aim of Zionism is the ingathering of all Jews into Israel, and since it needs the material and moral help of world Jewry, Zionism is at the same time doing its best to combat this feeling of separateness of the Israeli Jews and to strengthen their feeling of identity with all Jews around the world.

Thus under the pressures of Zionist ideology on the one hand and the influence of their real material conditions on the other, the Israeli Jews find themselves in a psychological conflict between a Zionist all-Jewish “national consciousness” and an Israeli national consciousness. When Zionism is defeated, the Israeli Jews will not lose all national consciousness; while their synthetic all-Jewish “national consciousness” will tend to wither away, their specific Israeli national consciousness will on the contrary tend to be reinforced.

It is sometimes argued that the Israeli Jews cannot be a nation, since there is a constant stream of immigration to Israel, so that at any given time a considerable proportion of the Jews there are new arrivals, with their own language, culture, and so on. But in this the Israeli Jews are no different from any other nation created by immigrant settlers. In all such cases, once the national character of the older settlers crystallized, the new immigrants were soon assimilated. Mass immigration did not have to be stopped before an American nation was created.]

They maintained that the resolution of the conflict necessitated the overthrowing of both Zionism and reactionary Arab regimes and the formation of a socialist Arab federation that—if needed—must be socio-politically capable of granting equal national autonomy (rather than individual rights alone) to non-Arab collectivities within it.

For Machover’s publisher, it would have been more powerful to adopt the poetic dictum “less is more” and resist the temptation to lump together too many different texts. Instead, it would have been preferable to only include Machover’s shiniest and historically most momentous writings. Thus the entire fifth part, “Reviews,” could have been omitted and the reader’s attention left to focus on Machover’s foundational formulations. His following eighteen essays should now become compulsory reading for all contemporary students: essays 3–6, 8, 13–19, 22– 24 and 33–35.

Moshe Behar is a senior lecturer in the Department of Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Manchester and co-editor of Modern Middle Eastern Jewish Thought: Writings on Identity, Politics and Culture, 1893-1958 (Brandeis, 2013).