More than 40,000 dead and counting, many among them children, whole districts razed, millions displaced, and the conflict spiralling into a wider war engulfing the Middle East – this is what Israel's "right to self-defence", invoked since Hamas' dramatic incursion of 7 October, has meant in practical terms.

For many critics of Israel on both the right and left of capital, Zionism – the expression of a nationalist ideology and movement for the creation and preservation of a Jewish state – is to blame. This is of course not out of any principled opposition to nationalism as such (accompanied, as it is so often, by support for rival nationalist projects in the region). By contrast, for the Communist Left, opposition to Zionism does not stem from the allegedly unique character of Jewish nationalism among all the other forms of nationalism. A critical look at the development of Zionism only reaffirms our analysis of the role that national self-determination and state formation really play in the imperialist epoch.

Birth of Jewish Nationalism

Like many other forms of nationalism, Zionism as a movement and ideology properly took shape in the late 19th century. This was a time of rapid capitalist development which gradually began to break up the old empires into nation-states more suited for the accumulation of capital, creating a basis for the growth of nationalist tendencies everywhere. At the time much of the Jewish diaspora lived in Central and Eastern Europe. Often marginalised within the societies they resided in, they faced discrimination, ghettoisation and pogroms.

It is in this context that Theodor Herzl, the "father of Zionism", came to the conclusion that Jewish assimilation into European culture would not prevent anti-Semitism and the only solution was the establishment of an independent Jewish state in the region of historic Palestine (the "Holy Land" of Abrahamic faiths). Like other forms of nationalism, the Zionist movement also developed its right and left-wings, "reactionary" and "progressive" variants. If the "Revisionist Zionism" of Ze'ev Jabotinsky saw Jewish self-determination as an expansionist colonial project, the "Labour Zionism" of Dov Ber Borochov saw it as an act of national liberation on the way to socialist transformation.

Jewish migration into historic Palestine, then under the British mandate, intensified in the 1930s particularly in response to the rise of Nazism. But it was the outbreak of the Second World War, the Holocaust (in which two-thirds of Europe's Jewish population perished), and the victory of the Allies that provided the most powerful impetus yet, both in moral and geopolitical terms, for the creation of a Jewish state.

The foundation of Israel in 1948 would reflect the dual dynamic between "Revisionist" and "Labour" Zionism – it was accompanied by the brutal expulsion of Palestinian Arabs (Nakba) on the one hand, and the growth of voluntary agricultural cooperatives (kibbutzim) on the other. David Ben-Gurion, Israel's first Prime Minister, was a self-described "socialist" and his party, Mapai, dominated Israeli politics for decades. Simultaneously, by the 1970s some 70% of land previously owned by Arabs within Israel had been expropriated.

Search for Imperialist Sponsors

The Jewish settler paramilitaries which initially sprang up in the territories of historic Palestine to prepare the ground for the creation of Israel realised they needed imperialist sponsors to accomplish their aims. So while the moderate Haganah looked to the British, the more radical Lehi looked first to Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany and then to the USSR. In fact, it was not immediately clear whose imperialist outpost the new Jewish state would become. But it was the US and the USSR which emerged as the real victors of the Second World War and the following decades were to be shaped by the struggle between these two superpowers. The creation of Israel was made possible because it was seen as an opportunity by both.

Today the political descendants of Stalinism try to outbid themselves in their "anti-Zionism" but if the first country to recognise Israel de facto was the US, the first country to give it de jure recognition was the USSR. And under the watchful eye of the USSR, Czechoslovakia provided the arms shipments and military training to the Israeli military which helped to shift the tide in Israel's favour during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. It was only in the 1950s, as the Cold War intensified, that the USSR decided to instead back the burgeoning Arab nationalist movements, aimed as they were against Western imperialism. Israel then found a new sponsor in France, which had a vested interest in stemming the tide of Arab nationalism that threatened the French colonies in North Africa. But by the 1960s, with the loss of Morocco, Tunisia and finally Algeria, France was forced to accept the new Arab states as a living reality and readjust its foreign policy accordingly. French support for Israel diminished, and the Jewish state now began to form its "special relationship" with the US, at the time keen to find ways for driving out Russian influence in the region. It was only at this point that Zionism came to be the tool of American interests in the Middle East for which it is known today.

In a recent article published in our press we have outlined the factors which led to the creation of Israel in more detail,⁽¹⁾ but two facts in particular emerge here:

• In the imperialist epoch, national self-determination requires finding the right imperialist sponsors. The Zionist project was only successful because it managed to orient itself accordingly within the geopolitical puzzle and put itself at the hands of the right superpowers at the right time.
• The process of nation-state formation means dispossession, expulsion and war, in the face of which national self-determination loses its "romantic" character. Whether in Poland, Ireland, India or Sudan, nominal national independence has not done away with ethnic strife, only reframed it. It is the imperialist re-division of the world which continues to change the map of the world and allows for the creation of new states, Israel among them. There are always victors and losers in this process (in Israel, the Palestinian Arabs ended up being the latter).

Zionism and the Workers' Movement

Zionism did originally have some appeal within the workers' movement. Organisations like Hapoel Hatzair, Poale Zion, or the Zionist-Socialist Workers Party sought to organise Jewish workers around their interpretations of "Labour Zionism". But it was by no means the only or even the dominant political tendency among Jewish workers. Notably the Bund and the parties of revolutionary social democracy (which attracted many Jewish militants) were hostile towards Zionism.

Rosa Luxemburg, herself a Polish-Jew, represented the latter tendency:

the Jewish question is formulated in one way in the minds of the Jewish bourgeoisie, and in another for the enlightened Jewish proletariat. For Social Democracy, the nationality question is, like all other social and political questions, primarily a question of class interests. ... the class representatives of the Jewish proletariat firmly resist the position of the Zionists as a harmful and reactionary utopia.⁽²⁾

This is the tradition in which the Communist Left still stands today – unlike much of the left of capital, our political tendency never had any truck with Zionism. Unfortunately, the drive to war and the rise of Nazism and Stalinism undermined the principle of working class solidarity across national and ethnic divides, effectively wiping out such internationalist tendencies within the workers' movement. Even former opponents of Zionism, like the Polish-Jewish Trotskyist Isaac Deutscher, changed their tune:

Naturally, I repudiated my anti-Zionism long ago, which was based on my trust in the European labour movement, or, more generally, on my trust in European society and civilisation, because this society and this civilisation have given the lie to that. If in the 1920s and 1930s I had called upon the European Jews to go to Palestine instead of opposing Zionism, I might have helped to save a few human lives which later were annihilated in Hitler’s gas chambers. For the remnants of European Jewry – really only for them? – the Jewish state has become an historical necessity. Furthermore, it is a living reality.⁽³⁾

This line of thinking was emblematic of the increasing acceptance of nationalism within political circles. In many ways, the 1920s and 1930s were a turning point, after which internationalism could only constitute a tiny minority within a workers' movement increasingly assimilated into the capitalist order. Most so-called socialist, communist and anarchist organisations have embraced the principle of national self-determination, if not outright nationalist demagoguery, as a natural right. The only disagreement being which ethnic group deserves that right more.

Of necessity internationalists today have to swim against the nationalist current. The historical record shows that national self-determination does not lead to liberation. It is only the prelude to ever new horrors in the grips of an imperialist world-system. The development of Zionism is a clear example of this. The modern Zionist far-right, represented in the governing coalition, is currently calling for the expulsion of Palestinians, the further expansion of Jewish settlements into the West Bank and Gaza, and the establishment of a “Greater Israel”. In the widening of the current conflict, some of them see an opportunity to “change the face of the Middle East”. This messianic irredentism may be a far cry from what Herzl originally intended, but it is the natural endpoint of the “reactionary utopia” of all national self-determination projects. The illusions of the left of capital, the ones who back in the day got drawn into supporting Zionism, and today largely support Palestinian nationalism, are revealed to be tragic dead ends.

The only way to break out of the cycle of ethnic strife and imperialist war is for workers everywhere to desert the national cause and realise they have more in common with each other than their ruling classes, no matter where they stand in the imperialist pecking order. National self-determination is now an integral tool for the re-division of the world among imperialist powers which, inevitably, ends in bloodshed. There is neither a “two-state” nor a “one-state” solution to the Palestine-Israel question; only a “no-state” solution in a world human community without borders and without capitalism. This is why we say no war but the class war.

Notes:

(1) leftcom.org

(2) marxists.org

(3) marxists.org