Palestine and Marxism

By Joseph Daher

This comprehensive history lays out the essential background for understanding Palestine and its place in the struggle for socialism. Unlike many accounts that focus simply on Israel's on-going human rights atrocities, Joseph Daher situates Palestine in the context of more than a century of imperialist intervention in the Middle East. An importa

• Language: English
• Publisher: Resistance Books
• Release date: Aug 5, 2024
• ISBN: 9781872242248

Book preview

Palestine and Marxism

Palestine and Marxism

Palestine and Marxism

Joseph Daher

Resistance Books and the IIRE

Palestine and Marxism

Joseph Daher

Cover design by Adam Di Chiara

Published 2024 by Resistance Books  (London) and the International Institute for Research and Education (Amsterdam).

Palestine and Marxism is Issue No.78 of the Notebooks for Study and Research published by the International Institute for Research and Education.

ISBN: 978-1-872242-23-1 (pbk)

ISBN 978-1-872242-24-8 (e-pub)

Joseph Daher is an internationalist, anticapitalist and an academic. He teaches at Lausanne University, Switzerland and is a part time affiliate professor at the European University Institute, Florence (Italy). He is the author of Syria after the Uprisings (Pluto, 2019) and Hezbollah: The Political Economy of Lebanon's Party of God (Pluto, 2016). He is the founder of the blog Syria Freedom Forever.

Contents

1 Introduction

2 Antisemitism, Zionism, and the Nakba

3 Israel and imperialism

4 Politics and ideology in the Middle East

5 The Palestinian national movement

6 The development of Hamas

7 Palestine and the revolutions in the Middle East

8 What solution?

9 Annex 1 - The birth of Islam

10 Annex 2 - The Oslo Accords and their aftermath

11 Annex 3 - From the river to the sea

12 Annex 4 - Draft Theses on the Jewish Question

Notes

Bibliography

About the publishers

1

Introduction

In October 2023 the Israeli occupying army began a genocidal war against the Palestinian population in the Gaza Strip. The 2.4 million inhabitants of the Gaza Strip have been living under constant Israeli bombardments of unprecedented violence. In May 2024 more than 35,000 people had been killed by Israeli strikes, including more than 14,000 children. The number of children reported killed in just over four months in the Gaza Strip was higher than the number of children killed in four years of wars around the world combined. More than 1.9 million Palestinians were displaced in the Gaza Strip, representing more than 85 per cent of the territory’s total population, and 95 per cent of the population was at risk of food insecurity in April 2024. Destruction is also unprecedented in the Palestinian territory of the Gaza Strip, with over 60 per cent of buildings damaged or destroyed, of which around 45 per cent are residential buildings, leaving 1 million people homeless out of a population of 2.4 million.

This is in many ways a new Nakba (Catastrophe), following that of 1948, during which more than 700,000 Palestinians were forcibly removed from their homes and became refugees. This process of ethnic cleansing, which has never stopped, continues today.

This followed an armed attack by Hamas in the southern territories of the historic Palestine of 1948, within the existing State of Israel, leading to the death of 1,139 persons, including 695 Israeli civilians, 373 members of the security forces and 71 foreigners. It should be noted that Israeli occupying forces also killed many Israeli civilians on this day, including by tank shells fired at houses where Israelis were detained. This information has, however, not been reported by mainstream Western media.

The occupied Gaza Strip is an open-air prison that has suffered from a deadly blockade for more than 18 years. Its population has suffered a succession of terrible wars by the Israeli occupying army since 2008, killing several thousand Palestinians and causing massive destruction.

Its occupation forces and settlers have also escalated violence against Palestinians in the West Bank, assassinating more than 480 people since October 7. They have seized 1,100 hectares of land, declared them state property, and given Israeli Jews exclusive rights to lease them. 

These new acts of violence and repression prove why the internationalist left must stand in solidarity with the Palestinian resistance. But we must also engage in the strategic debates about how to win liberation and our role in this process. Socialists¹ must consider that the Palestinian struggle is inextricably linked to revolutionary processes in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) against all states in the region, especially Israel. This combination of resistance in Palestine and regional revolution is the only realistic way to liberate Palestine and all the peoples of the region.

In this context, let us analyse the dynamics of the Palestinian question at the historical level and with the perspective of emancipation and liberation. This book seeks to provide an introduction to the Palestinian issue, and does not claim to cover all historical and other aspects of the subject. Each chapter could be developed into a book in its own right. But more importantly, we hope this book will provide the determination and tools to readers to further strengthen solidarity with the struggle for the liberation and emancipation of the Palestinian people.

2

Antisemitism, Zionism, and the Nakba

In examining the creation of Israel it is necessary to look at the history of Europe, including the campaigns of antisemitism, the rise of nationalism and the expansion of European colonialism.

Political Zionism, theorized by Theodor Herzl, although motivated by the suffering of Jewish communities, particularly in Eastern Europe, and by the resurgence of antisemitism in the west of the continent, was part of a colonialist logic consistent with the European context of the time.

Therefore it is important to remember that this is not a conflict between Jews and Arabs, which dates back to the birth of the Islamic region and the tensions between the two religions, but is part of local, regional and international dynamics and of a colonial history.

The development of the Jewish population

In the 19th century the majority of Jews in the world lived in the Russian Empire and were victims of antisemitic decrees and regular pogroms. In 1881 a new imperial decree prohibited Jewish populations from acquiring new land. The decree prohibited Jews from working the land, and concentrated them in the cities of the Pale of Settlement (a region in the west of the Russian Empire). This was the only territory where the Jews in the empire were allowed to settle until 1917. The Pale of Settlement was only abolished by the October Revolution of 1917, which repealed all segregation measures and recognized the Jewish nation as a nationality in its own right. The Pale of Settlement extended into regions that are today in Lithuania, Poland, Ukraine and partly Russia.

In 1897 the Jewish population of the Russian Empire was estimated at some 5 million individuals (or 4 per cent of the empire’s population). A little more than 30 per cent of them had an industrial job compared to 14.6 per cent of the population of the Pale of Settlement. However, the vast majority of these workers were employed in small businesses occupying a marginal place in Russian capitalism, the development of which destroyed the economic bases of Jewish society at the time. The possibilities of finding employment in large-scale industry were very low, in particular because of the immense reserve army of labour constituted by the Russian peasantry.

Under the reign of Tsar Alexander II, however, many of these laws were significantly relaxed, including those restricting the enrolment of Jewish students in universities. However, when the Tsar was assassinated on 1 March 1881 his successor Alexander III reversed many of his decrees and launched antisemitic campaigns. Under Alexander III pogroms took place between 1881 and 1883. Pogroms were the incitement of the poor and the destitute to massacre Jewish populations.

Here is an extract from Leon Trotsky in his work 1905 on the pogrom of that year:

The gang rushes through the city, drunken on vodka and the smell of blood ... the doss-house tramp is king. A trembling slave an hour ago, hounded by police and starvation, he now feels himself an unlimited despot. Everything is allowed to him, he is capable of anything, he is the master of property and honour, of life and death. If he wants to, he will throw an old woman out of a third-floor window together with a grand piano, he can smash a chair of an infant with a chair, rape a little girl while the entire crowd looks on, hammer a nail into a living human body… He exterminates entire families; he pours petrol over a house, transforms it into a mass of flames, and if anyone attempts to escape, he finishes him off with a cudgel ... He is capable of anything, he dares everything ... The victims, bloodstained, charred, driven frantic, still search for salvation within the nightmare ... In reply, they hear only drunken laughter. ‘You wanted freedom? Here, look, this is it.’ In these words is contained the whole infernal morality of the pogrom policy… the doss-house tramp, gorged with blood, rushes further. He is capable of everything, he dares everything, he is king. The ‘White Tsar’ has permitted him everything: long live the ‘White Tsar’.²

Sources indicate there were 215 pogroms in 1881 alone, most of which took place in Ukraine. Between 700,000 and 800,000 Jews were pushed into the cities of the Pale of Settlement. Jewish populations were often designated as being responsible for the social and economic suffering of the popular masses by the ruling and dominant classes in the regions of Eastern Europe. Pogroms had become the standard mechanism used by the landlords and the Tsars of Russia as a violent form of social control and to divert the hostility of the popular masses away from themselves. To deal with these pogroms, self-defence combat groups were subsequently formed.

At the same time, the Jewish French officer Alfred Dreyfus was accused in 1894 of sharing military information with the German state. This affair, which became a rallying cry for antisemitic persecution in France, dealt a heavy blow to the Jewish middle classes of Western and Central Europe, who considered themselves fully assimilated and European. This period of resurgence of antisemitism, against both the rapidly proletarianized Jews of Eastern Europe and the more assimilated and middle-class Jews of Central and Western Europe, was marked by profound transformations in the political life of European Jews.

A mass Jewish exodus began at the end of the 19th century and continued into the 20th century. The preferred emigration destinations for Jews – along with millions of others fleeing persecution in Europe – were traditionally the United States and the United Kingdom. By the end of the 1920s more than 3 million Jews had left Eastern Europe and Russia for the United States over a period of 40 years. Nearly half a million fled to Western Europe.

By comparison, the number of Jews who had immigrated to Palestine only reached 120,000 by 1930. The first wave of Jewish settlers (or the first Aliya,³ 1881–1903) was organized by a small religiously inspired group called Hibbat Tziyon (Love of Zion) which appeared after the pogroms of 1881. Small groups of its followers went to establish themselves in Palestine, in order to recreate a spiritual centre in what they considered to be the original land of the Jews and, once there, to revive the ‘eternal spirit of the earth’. The majority of Hibbat members were middle-class European Jews who had immigrated in very small numbers to Palestine. They bought land and employed Arab workers at low wages, and depended on philanthropic donations from foreign capital.

It was only with the rise of fascism in Europe and the closing of the American and British borders that larger-scale Jewish immigration arrived in Palestine. The numbers speak for themselves:

1927: 3,000 Jews immigrated to Palestine;

1930: 3,265;

1933: the year Hitler came to power in Germany, the number of Jewish immigrants increased almost tenfold to reach 30,227;

Immigration reached 61,358 Jews in 1935.

After the Second World War, Palestine remained the only viable option for many: ‘by the end of 1949 [...] almost 350,000 Holocaust survivors lived in Israel, almost a third of the population’.⁴ In Palestine these new migrants were integrated into the colonial structures and institutions.

The reaction to the Jewish population

European Jews were developing new political responses to the situation. The majority of Jewish communities that were already well established in Western Europe observed with growing concern the rising waves of antisemitism, which often followed the arrival of large numbers of Jews from Eastern Europe in Western European societies.

The Jewish bourgeoisie hoped for a liberal reform of the Tsarist Empire, while the Jewish labour movement – and in particular the Bund – fought for socialism, which would abolish the structural causes of anti-Jewish racism.

The main political movement that was developing, particularly in Eastern Europe, was the socialist Bund, which remained the largest European Jewish organization until World War II. Large numbers of Jews in Western Europe, and especially new immigrants, were also joining socialist movements and other progressive organizations as the best way to combat this form of racism. They viewed antisemitism as a cruel mechanism of social control that protected the status quo in favour of the ruling classes and divided the opposition.

At the same time, others, primarily assimilated middle-class Jews from Central and Western Europe, viewed antisemitism as a permanent feature of European societies that could never be called into question, and theorized that Jews needed their own nation-state: Zionism. Zionism was a nationalism which postulated the existence of a Jewish people on racial criteria and the impossibility of its assimilation with other Europeans.

It was a colonial project which advocated the installation of a European population on land predominantly populated by Arab people, in this case Palestine. Its main advocate, Theodor Herzl, situated himself in