The British Left in the twenty-first century has exhibited high levels of ideological antagonism toward Israel per se. The easy-to-hand explanation is that this is a manifestation of "the new antisemitism." While there is undoubtedly commentary that many would interpret as repeating anti-Jewish stereotypes of the past, this does not explain how the British Left has moved from embracing Israel in 1948 to its present position. It is argued here that this transition began to take place before the settlement drive on the West Bank and Gaza during Britain's period of decolonization, but the seeds of such an approach were planted by Lenin well over a century ago.

THE OLD LEFT AND THE NEW LEFT

Since the end of the peace process in the 1990s and the beginning of the al-Aqsa Intifada, an important feature in the debate on the Israel-Palestine imbroglio has been a questioning of the legitimacy of Israel as a nation-state by sections of the political Left and the liberal and cultural intelligentsia in Britain.

Such opinion has broadly moved from passionately supporting the right of the Jews to national self-determination in 1948 by figures such as Aneurin Bevan, Bertrand Russell, and Tony Benn to questioning that right over 60 years later. Israel is often seen as troublesome on a good day and illegitimate on a bad one. Like many Israelis, many on the Left wish to roll the borders back to the 1967 boundaries, but there is also a growing number who wish to continue that process and return to 1948. There is a deepening identification with the Palestinians as the underdog and their depiction as a colonized people strikes a chord deep in the British psyche. The remorse felt after a legacy of slavery, imperial repression, and colonial exploitation is real. However, there is a growing belief that this rollback applies today, not simply to the settlements on the West Bank, but also to Israel as well. No distinction is made between colonialism and colonization.

Yet this disillusionment with Israel, this author would argue, began before 1967, before the conquests of the Six Day War and before the settlement drive on the West Bank.

There is greater identification today with the New Left of the decolonization era of the 1960s than with the Old Left of the post-fascist era after 1945. Whereas the Old Left had fought Mosley’s British Union of Fascists in the East End with the Jews, lived through the Holocaust and the rise of Israel, the New Left came of age during the epoch of decolonization. It was shaped more by Che Guevara’s struggles in Latin America, the fight against apartheid, and opposition to the Vietnam War. While Jews disproportionately participated in those struggles, the Holocaust and the rise of Israel was for many Jews not simply another historical event. Even for those born long after the war, it was understood that all Jews were survivors. This level of consciousness separates the Jewish Left from the broader British Left.

In 2009, the existence of a state with a Jewish majority in the Middle East does not easily fit Marxist doctrine, post-colonial theory, and Islamist belief. As Benedict Anderson remarked in Imagined Communities, nationalism is a real problem for Marxists, largely “elided rather than confronted.”[1] It is this inability to define Zionism and to classify the Jews, which has brought together liberals and social democrats, the Trotskyists of the Social Workers Party (SWP), the Stalinists of the Communist Party of Britain (CPB), and the Islamists of the Muslim Brotherhood front organizations. Together they reaffirm Clermont-Tonnerre’s contention in the French Constituent Assembly in 1789: “Everything must be refused to the Jews as a nation; everything must be granted to them as individuals.” Max Nordau understood this well when he remarked at the first Zionist Congress in 1897 that the great men of the French Revolution emancipated the Jews, not through a fraternal feeling for the Jews, but because logic demanded it. There was a difference between theory and practice. It was this realization that propelled Jews in Eastern Europe to the understanding that the forces of revolutionary change were in general unable to emancipate the Jews in real terms, but only through a process of auto-emancipation could this be done. This spawned numerous ideologies promoting Jewish nationalism.

Yet this idea of national assertiveness impinged negatively on the idea that heaven could be created right here on earth. It was not that Jews did not believe in social change or indeed in revolution, it was that they believed that the theory of emancipation did not reflect their own reality. Many regarded themselves as a nation with a culture, a literature, a history, a plethora of languages, and a religion. A majority did not believe in assimilation and conversion. They did not wish to disappear to appease theory. Moses Hess’s approach to socialism seemed to reflect this.

Hess had renounced Marx’s belief that the actions of humankind could be placed in a scientific framework.

As Isaiah Berlin commented:

Hess believed that social equality was desirable because it was just, not because it was inevitable; nor was justice to be identified with whatever was bound, in any case, to emerge from the womb of time. All kinds of bad and irrational conditions had been produced before now, and persisted. Nothing was to be accepted merely because it had occurred--but solely because it was objectively good.[2]

THE OCTOBER REVOLUTION

Much of currentprogressive thinking can be traced back to the success of the October Revolution in 1917. Lenin, of course, would have no truck with Jewish nationalism and was careful to airbrush out of existence any mention of his Jewish antecedent, Moshko Blank.[3] In 1903, in a dispute with the Bund, he labeled the idea of a separate Jewish people as “utterly untenable scientifically” and “reactionary in its political implication.”[4] In Lenin’s eyes, it would divert Jewish workers from the primary task of class struggle.[5] He recommended the choice of assimilation for the Jewish future. Yet ten years later, Lenin recognized in part the national character of the Jews in his Critical Remarks on the National Question.[6]

Fred Halliday has pointed out that Lenin had quite clearly shifted his position. In 1903, assimilation was the solution. By 1913, the Jews were depicted as a nationality. The Jews, according to Lenin, had skipped the national stage in their historical development. The Jews, therefore, became the pioneers of socialism and moved directly onto assimilation. The dichotomy was that on the one hand the Jews were a national minority in the transitional process of assimilating who deserved protection against antisemitism, on the other they had to be denied the right to national recognition.

Moreover Lenin’s occasional writings on the Jews were written during periods when the question of Jewish nationality was related to larger issues confronting the Russian workers’ movement. Significantly, the great majority of his writings on the Jews were written in those two years, 1903 and 1913. Lenin quoted Karl Kautsky’s earlier works in 1903, which were predicated on the pioneers of the first aliyah and Baron de Rothschild’s munificence and not on the Marxist Zionism of figures such as Ben-Gurion, Ben-Zvi, and Tabenkin of the second aliyah. Lenin’s analysis of Zionism was selective, partial, and outdated. Kautsky, unlike Lenin, analyzed Zionism and the Jewish settlement after World War I. Lenin never produced...

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*Colin Shindler is Professor of Israeli Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. The updated paperback version of his The Triumph of Military Zionism: Nationalism and the Origins of the Israeli Right has recently been published by I. B. Tauris.

*This article is based on Colin Shindler’s inaugural lecture as Professor of Israeli Studies at the School of Oriental Studies, University of London on November 18, 2009.

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MERIA Journal Staff
Publisher and Editor: Prof. Barry Rubin
Assistant Editor: Yeru Aharoni
MERIA is a project of the Global Research in International Affairs
(GLORIA) Center, Interdisciplinary University.

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