Israel: An Unexceptional Case? A Response
22 February 2024
“If you mean whose side should one be on Israel or the Arabs, I would certainly say Israel because it's the advanced, technological, civilized country, amidst a group of almost totally primitive savages who have not changed for years and who are racist and who resent Israel because its bringing industry and intelligence and modern technology into their stagnation.”
— Ayn Rand
For many years, Zionism had been an attractive idea not only for the Marxist Left but also for humanists of many stripes searching for new historical possibilities. The utopian idea of a political body designed for free association and achieving the highest level of individuality was something to be expected from different human political organizations spanning from the Reconstruction Era after the American Civil War to the Soviet Union to the Jewish Nation.
While the idea of the Jewish Nation became less attractive to the rising New Left in the 1960s and 1970s, it is the very desire for anti-New Left contrarianism, coupled with what Felix Baum calls “macabre desire for the “revenge for the [Jewish and Socialist] dead” in the Second World War, and an “unfulfilled wish to settle scores with those Nazis” lead to politics that compensate the anti-New Left incapacity to build large mass Leninist parties in the West by identifying with Israel; “the last republic of free association and individuality.”
Unlike some of the delusional anti-New Left, Ralph Leonard is a thoughtful Marxist. He wishes for “that” version of Israel to exist but laments the fact that it does not -the same way many of us dream of a good version of the Soviet Union but know that it was a horror show. Leonard is right about the fact that many aspects of Israel, highlighted by the New Left, are quite unexceptional. It is a 19th-century national movement that sought to have a state of its own, and it is body politic constructed by a settler-colonial society just like Australia and Argentina.
Nevertheless, If Israel was completely unexceptional, then, it would not be in the news cycle. (Ironically, a populist and Israel-loving newly elected president is the only Argentinian item dominating the news cycle.) The neoconservative and Zionist response to my claim would be the fact that Israel is not to be blamed for being singled out by its haters. I technically agree with them; it is not the Israeli colonizer that makes Israel exceptional, it is the colonized Palestinian that does.
It is not the 1948 Independence that makes Israel exceptional but the Nakba. It is not relevant that Israel was built on land stolen by its cultural natives, as the New Left claims. Israel was built upon one capitalist bourgeois society destroying another capitalist bourgeois society, a thing that never happened in the United States, Australia, Argentina, or Liberia. The destroyed bourgeois society was particularly Mediterranean, like the Egyptians of Alexandria, the Tunisians, the Cypriots, and the Sicilians.
The pro-Israel claim that “there has never been a Palestinian State” is irrelevant because, for a long period, there has always been a Palestinian city and a Palestinian working class. The modern Palestinian city was not developed under the capitalism of European colonialism but under the capitalism of the Ottoman defensive modernization era in the 18th and 19th centuries. After the fall of the Ottoman Empire, the Palestinian city inhibited, alongside its sister cities in the region, a larger Arab cosmopolitan civil society in Greater Syria and Iraq, which had aspirations for a multicultural modern nation led by an American Mandate under the League of Nations. This vision never materialized after the French and British divided Greater Syria and Iraq among themselves, and yet the capitalist bourgeois society in the Palestinian city continued to develop and mature under British rule which also nurtured another parallel Zionist bourgeois society, the state of contradiction became too heightened.
Zionism has its inherent crises, being a Bonopartist ethnonationalist project that was realized after the failure of socialism in Europe. But there is another external aspect to this crisis; you cannot get rid of another bourgeois society. The fact that Zionist ideology has evolved to inhibit the achievement of this goal, either peacefully or forcefully, represents an end to all hopes for unexceptionality and normalization.
Chaim Weizman’s predictions expressed to Arthur Balfour in 1918 showcase an inflated optimism when it comes to the Palestinian bourgeois society magically and automatically liquidating itself; “The present state of affairs would necessarily tend towards the creation of an Arab Palestine… It will not produce the result because the fellah [Palestinian peasant] is at least four centuries behind the times, and the effendi [Palestinian bourgeoisie] is dishonest, uneducated, greedy, and as unpatriotic as he inefficient.” In reality, there could have never been a Palestinian national movement for self-determination without its early 20th-century working class, its diaspora from its major cities, the displacement of its capital from Palestine to the Middle East and the world, and the authentic connection between Palestinian civil society and other surrounding Middle Eastern civil societies.
Zionist failure in the major historical task of undoing another capitalist society -In a historical window much smaller than the ones other settler-colonial societies had- required further developments to Zionism. While Ralph Leonard slams the New Left's claims that Zionist Ideology is about white supremacy, once again, striving to prove or negate such a hypothesis is irrelevant. Zionist ideology is not about white supremacy, it is about the Eurocentric civilizational supremacy that makes the war for the Zionist cause a war for the whole Judeo-Christian Civilization.
I agree with Leonard that Zionist ideology, on paper, was not supposed to be based on supremacy but upon national cohesion, like many other national ideologies in Europe. But the reason why Zionists needed an orientalist civilizational discourse during the Cold War and the War on Terror was that it was essential for them to turn the Palestinian civil society into a “non-society.” While many New Leftists had an anti-capitalist romantic attitude towards the Palestinians as a pre-capitalist society, the Israeli establishment yearned for a Palestinian pre-capitalist society and worked thoroughly and strategically on reproducing and promoting the image of Palestinian backwardness, while promoting itself as a bootstrap libertarian and socialist utopia, a Stalinist cartoonish image that even the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs is happy to promote.
Israeli scholar Mordechai Kedar is an emblematic example of such a policy. He proposes what he calls the “Palestinian Emirates” or the “Eight State Solution;” a rejection of a modern -westernized- Palestinian national bourgeois society, and an embrace of local traditional tribal leadership structures based on what he claims as the “sociology of the Middle East.” Kedar even praised the governance of Hamas as an example for his preferred political structures saying that: “Hamas started an emirate in Gaza, which is a full state. They have a judiciary, education ministry, army, police, industry, etc. They have everything a state needs. Kedar wants this project to be implemented not in one but in eight different enclaves and bantustans in the remaining Palestinian land, a dystopia that is reminiscent not of Aldous Huxley’s World State itself, but of its remaining reserves of premodernity.
Another major factor that sealed the historical door before an “unexceptional and normalized” Israel, was the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza since 1967. It is that occupation that never allowed Israel to move from a settler colonial society to a post-settler colonial society. Through the occupation, the crisis of Zionism escalated when Israel found itself reigning over new Palestinian cities and bourgeois societies, this is where sociocide becomes necessary for creating and recreating a new Palestinian “non-society,” from turning Palestinian Jerusalemites into strangers in their own ghettos in the “unified capital,” to utilizing settlement construction to siege and surround smaller cities like Bethlehem, Hebron, and Nablus, to the violent mass destructive urbicide of Gaza we are witnessing these days, of course.
If there is one thing in common between pro-Israel and New Left activists, it would be that both require a Palestinian “non-society,” an oppressed victim, or an absolute barbarian. The fact that the besieged occupied territories have several Palestinian universities, Catholic and Orthodox high schools, public libraries, newspapers, theaters, orchestral conservatories, women's societies, union halls, Hebrew language classes for workers, mixed martial arts centers, an annual marathon, theme parks, and even a zoo -to name a few examples- should prompt the anti-New Left and other socialists to have a more open-minded understanding on civil societies and socialism. In the end, when it comes to the 20th-century socialist horror show, Israel is pretty much unexceptional.
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