This article is based on the talk that Moshé Machover gave to a Zoom meeting organised by Talking About Socialism…from a Marxist point of view on 25 November 2024, addressing the question: What is a communist position for resolving the colonial conflict in the Middle East?
You can watch the full talk, the discussion, and Moshé’s response to points raised in the discussion, here.
The analysis and position I will elaborate here are essentially those I have been putting forward for nearly six decades, since the mid-1960s. They can be found in the archive of Matzpen, the Socialist Organisation in Israel, which was set up in 1962 but which no longer exists.
I am going to address the question: what would be a communist, Marxist, programme for a resolution of the colonial conflict in Israel/Palestine.
I take it that I do not need, for an audience such as this, to explain that this is really a colonial conflict, a conflict due to colonisation. This is not a value judgment. It is a matter of fact. Although you will hear Zionist ideologues and propagandists deny that the conflict in Israel/Palestine is a colonial one, this is based on ignorance and deceit. It assumes the ignorance of people who are subjected to this false argument; because if one looks at the literature of the Zionist movement itself in its early days, at least until the the middle of the 20th century, it refers to its project as a project of colonising Palestine by Jews, aiming to achieve a majority Jewish nation state in Palestine. However, this definition is not sufficient for understanding the real parameters of the problem; it needs further elaboration, as I shall explain later.
But let me start by putting forward an abstract description of what we would take as a resolution of the conflict. What would it look like? This is simply a list of of minimum conditions that must be satisfied in order to count as a benign resolution of the conflict. I use the term ‘benign’ as opposed to envisaging the defeat of the colonised – the Palestinians – and the ultimate victory of the Zionist colonisation project.
First of all, there would have to be equal rights to all; equal rights to all individuals living in this territory, in this space of Israel/Palestine.
Secondly, there would have to be equal national rights. There are two national groups today in the Israeli/Palestinian space. There is the Palestinian national entity (which is part of a broader pan-Arab national entity that embraces several nations across the Arab world). And there is a new Hebrew nation that formed in Palestine through Zionist colonisation. This is denied by many but it is an objective fact.
Thirdly, I would add the Right of Return of the Palestinian refugees of the1948 nakba and later wars.
Equal individual rights is self-evident; it needs no argument. Any situation which fails to grant equal rights to all cannot be regarded as a benign solution.
There must be equal national rights simply because if one nation has inferior rights to the other, if one nation is dominated and the other dominates, then this is not going to be a stable situation. The subjugated nationality will not be resigned to its fate and will not accept its position as a subordinate people.
The Right of Return is simply a basic right recognised by international law and by elementary justice.
But this is very abstract. It just tells us what kind of thing would count as a benign resolution of the conflict. It doesn’t specify the geometry of the resolution. Will it be one state, two-states, a confederation? Would it be something else?
I don’t think this should be part of the minimum conditions that the resolution has to satisfy because at this stage we cannot prescribe what will be the exact geometry of this resolution. It can take several forms, so I would leave this open.
More importantly, this abstract list of conditions doesn’t tell us anything about the possibility of achieving them, or the conditions in which they will be achievable.
Alternative proposals
Let me examine the various solutions that are proposed by individuals or political bodies in the world discourse about the colonial conflict in Israel/Palestine.
There is the so-called two-state ‘solution’. I’m not talking here about the the abstract notion of a two-state solution. I’m talking about the two-state ‘solution’ as it is promoted by the ‘International Community’ – which is just another name for the United States and its camp followers. This two-state ‘solution’ has been explicitly rejected by Israel, yet it is still advocated by the US and British governments. (It is also advocated by Jeremy Corbyn.) But this so-called two-state ‘solution’ is not simply an abstract geometry. It is loaded with particular conditions.
If one looks at the details of this proposal, it doesn’t satisfy the minimum conditions for a benign solution because it violates the basic condition of equal national rights. It envisages a dominant Israel with a subservient Palestinian one-quarter of a state, which is not really sovereign. It would be demilitarised and completely subject to Israeli dictat and supremacy. This doesn’t begin to satisfy even the minimum condition of national equality.
If one looks at the ‘one-state’ solution, there are various versions of it, including more recently advocated versions of a confederal or a federal arrangement. Some versions of this do satisfy the minimum conditions. (Some other versions don’t, as they bypass the issue of equality of national rights.) But what is problematic about these one-state proposals, as a conrete way of resolving the conflict, is the question of feasibility and agency.
Under what conditions would it be possible to implement a given plan? And who is going to to be the agent for implementing it? Marxists are obliged to pose these questions.
People had been advocating socialism ages before Marx came along. One of the things that was novel in the Marxist concept of socialism was that it addressed the questions of which social agent is going to lead to the desired outcome and what would be the process through which the socialist transformation of society would come about.
Similarly, a Marxist point of view on resolving the Israel/Palestine colonial conflict must address these two questions. And here is the crux of the matter. What is not discussed – and from a Marxist point of view this is the weakness of these positions – is the question of process and agency. How is the two-state or one-state solution going to come about? And who is going to achieve it?
As I have explained, we are talking about a colonial conflict brought about specifically by the project of Zionist colonisation, which started at the beginning of the 20th century, and is still ongoing in the space of Israel/Palestine. One only has to open a newspaper or look at look at the news to realise that this is what is going on.
However, If you look at the literature on the colonial question and colonial conflicts in the Marxist literature in the tradition, for example, of the left in the Second International or in the Comintern and later, then unfortunately you will not find clues as to an approach that would be that would be useful for addressing the problem that we are talking about, because the colonisation of Palestine has followed a model that was not really discussed in the tradition of the socialist movement starting from the early 20th century or even of the late 19th century.
The model of colonisation followed by the Zionist project is not at all the same or similar to those that were discussed in the Marxist political movement from that period.
What sort of settler colonialism?
It is very common to refer to the kind of colonisation that has been taking place in Israel/Palestine as ‘settler colonialism’, as opposed to other forms of colonialism. In my opinion this description is misleading. Not because it is incorrect – it certainly is correct to classify the Zionist colonisation of Palestine as settler colonialism – but because this classification, which originates as far as I can tell in academic post-colonial discourse, is too wide and doesn’t address the conflict in the way that Marxists should.
Marxists should address colonial situations by examining their basic political economy. ‘Settler colonialism’ puts into one bag the colonisation of South Africa and Algeria with those of Australia and North America. They are all examples of settler colonialism but if you look at them from a Marxist point of view you realise that they differ fundamentally in their political economy. The first question to ask is: who are the direct producers?
There is a vast difference between the South African or the Algerian model on the one hand and the Australian or North American model on the other.
The crucial difference is that in Algeria and South Africa the main direct producers were the indigenous people, not the colonisers. The indigenous people were for the colonisers a valuable resource in the same way that the proletariat is a resource for the capitalist class. The capitalist class is antagonistic to the proletariat but it also needs the proletariat. This is elementary Marxism. I’m not innovating anything here.
In the case of South Africa, the indigenous people were the source of surplus value. They were direct producers in the political economic system. They were dispossessed of their land but they were needed for their labour-power. This was not the case in Australia. This was not the case in North America.
But when the modern socialist movement started to address the colonial question at the end of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th century, the exclusionary type of colonisation seen in Australia and North America, in which indigenous people were not exploited as labour but were excluded as being surplus to requirement, had already passed into the history books with the victory of the colonisers. It was no longer considered a live question.
What the modern socialist movement was concerned with was a different type of colonisation: an exploitative colonisation, that is, one in which the labour of the indigenous population was exploited in production for profit.
Whether the position of the socialist movement at that time towards the colonial question was correct or incorrect is really irrelevant to the situation we see in Israel/Palestine because it is a question of a different type.
Since the middle of the 20th century there has been a process of decolonisation in virtually all the colonial situations, the last case being in South Africa. Some people hoped that the decolonisation of South Africa would be associated with a socialist transformation. That didn’t happen. There was no departure from capitalism in South Africa but it was decolonised. The largely indigenous working class is still exploited, but it has gained political freedoms.
What remains is the exceptional, anachronistic colonial conflict in Israel/Palestine, which follows the much older type of exclusionary colonisation that elsewhere – in Australia and North America – was resolved in favour of the colonisers a long time ago. In this respect the perspective in the Middle East does not inspire optimism.
Decolonisation
Why did decolonisation occur in South Africa and elsewhere but not in Australia or North America? First, in the exploitative type of colonisation the colonisers were a relatively small minority, in some places a very small minority. The demographic balance was heavily against them. Second, the colonisers depended on the indigenous people for labour. Whatever iniquities were perpetrated by the settlers in South Africa, one thing they couldn’t do was exterminate or ethnically cleanse the indigenous people of the colony. The same applied to Algeria – the second-to-last instance of decolonisation. The exploitation of the indiginous population in both cases was essential to the colonial project.
In the model of colonisation followed by the Zionist project and by the Zionist State the numerical balance was very different. It has taken time and it is still not complete. The colonisers were initially a very small minority in Australia and in North America but eventually became an overwhelming majority. They had always the option of implementing their colonisation through ethnic cleansing, including the extermination of the indigenous population, as in Tasmania, where there was the total physical extermination of the indigenous people. In the rest of Australia it was approaching, but not quite total extermination, with a similar situation in North America. So if you look at at these precedents the outlook in Israel/Palestine is not very optimistic. I think it would be wrong to indulge in false optimism in such a situation.
But fatalism is not justified either. We can still ask: are there any possible conditions under which the colonial conflict in Israel/Palestine can be resolved in a benign way, fulfilling the minimum conditions that I delineated earlier?
I think there is such a possibility. Clearly, decolonisation will require de-Zionisation, the overthrow of the Zionist regime. This raise raises the question of how the Zionist regime can be overthrown and by whom? I shall argue that decolonisation leading to a benign resolution cannot be achieved under conditions that result in a capitalist outcome.
Since the beginning of this conflict external forces have not been capable of overthrowing the Zionist regime of Israel. This has been tried in various ways and has always failed. In fact, it has led in each case to an actual extension of Zionist colonisation and to a further changing of the balance of forces in favour of the Zionist project.
The Palestinian people on their own cannot achieve the overthrow of the Zionist Israeli state. This has been tried and it has not succeeded for the simple reason that, unlike the situation in Algeria or in South Africa, the Palestinian people have for the most part been externalised, and do not have the leverage that the indigenous people in South Africa did, being indispensable as the direct producers.
The movement of the indigenous black working class of South African put the apartheid regime in a position where it became very costly and inefficient – and ultimately impossible – to try to repress the indigenous people on whom they depended for production and profit. The white South African regime had to to compromise and apartheid was overthrown, while capitalism remained in place.
This situation does not pertain in Palestine. The Palestinian people do not have the economic leverage that the indigenous people of South Africa had.
A socialist and regional transformation
Who is capable of overthrowing the Israeli regime? I argue that the Israeli people, that is the majority, predominantly Israeli Jewish working class, is certainly capable of overthrowing the Zionist regime. It has the potential leverage.
But will it have an interest in doing so? What would the Israeli working class gain by overthrowing the present Zionist regime if the outcome would be a single capitalist state? In a capitalist decolonised state the Israeli working class would exchange its present position of being an exploited class with the benefit of national privileges, to a position of still being an exploited working class but without any national privileges. This is not a deal that that can attract the majority of the Israeli working class.
And here we come to the logic that drove Matzpen from its early days. A socialist resolution can offer, at least in principle, the possibility that the Israeli working class could exchange its present position as an exploited class with national privileges to a position in which it would be a part of the regional dominant class, without national privileges. This is at least in principle a deal that makes some sense.
The position I am advocating is based on the idea that the resolution of the colonial conflict in Israel/Palestine cannot be achieved independently of a socialist transformation. Clearly, this could not be a transformation in just the one small area of Israel/Palestine. Of course, we cannot have socialism in one country. It would have to be, at the very least, a regional socialist transformation, leading to a regional socialist union.
Whether in Israel/Palestine this will take the form of a one-state geometry or a two-state geometry, a confederation or something else – that is not something that I think is profitable to discuss at at this stage. But it would have to be part of a regional socialist union.
It may be that this conflict will end in the way that it ended in Australia or in North America. This is still a possibility and it is certain that the Zionist regime will do its utmost to achieve this kind of malign resolution to the conflict. It is doing so as we speak. What is happening in Gaza and elsewhere in the Middle East is part of of this drive to achieve the victory of the colonisers. Whether they will be able to do so is a still an open question. Our political duty is to mobilise politically to help thwart this drive.