Israel and the left – Lessons from one who knows
JVL Introduction
Sixty years ago, Moshe Machover was one of the co-founders of a small Israeli socialist organisation, Matzpen (Compass). Despite its modest membership, it occupied a significant place within the global New Left, promoting an internationalist socialist vision that preached self-determination for all peoples.
Talking to Ben Reiff of +972 magazine, Machover reflects on Matzpen’s history and legacy. There are lessons in it for us, here and now.
For a look back at the earlier history of Jews who sought both Palestinian and Jewish liberation, see a +972 piece from 2018 – The untold story of Jewish anti-Zionists in Israel.
This article was originally published by +972 on Thu 24 Nov 2022. Read the original here.
The last first Israeli anti-Zionist
Sixty years after co-founding the radical leftist group Matzpen, Moshé Machover reflects on the organization’s enduring legacy, the internal splits that led to its demise, and its lessons for today’s anti-Zionist left.
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“Colonization is like a gas” — those not familiar with Moshé’s wide-ranging intellectual work may miss the full significance of this analogy.
See his book with Emmanuel Farjoun, “Laws of Chaos” (Verso 1983), a groundbreaking contribution to Marxist economics, which applies to Marxist economics the concepts of statistical mechanics (originally developed by James Clerk Maxwell to understand the physics of gases).
Moshe Machover is a living legend and what he writes deserves careful consideration. Moshe has not just been a writer and thinker but an activist. He was President of Labour Against the Witchhunt and until the advent of Starmer was the one that got away in that he was expelled because of a false allegation that he was a member of the CPGB before Sam Matthews was forced to retract the expulsion.
I am also grateful for Moshe agreeing to write the Foreword to my new book ‘Zionism During the Holocaust’.
As Moshe says the split in Matzpen, over Kronstadt was an absurd issue but this is the way of the USFI and Trotskyists. To split and split again.
I agree with Moshe that the oppression of the Palestinians and the deZionisation of the Israeli state won’t happen within the confines of Palestine for the reasons he outlines. However I also disagree with the analysis that says there is a separate Hebrew people in Israel and that they will have the right of self-determination and the tendency to write off everything except a socialist revolution in the Middle East.
Moshe says that ‘There is no reason why the Hebrew working class would want to exchange the Zionist regime for a democratic state that is capitalist, because it would entail a loss of privilege.’ However it is also unlikely that a right-wing racist settler working class would desire socialism either.
We don’t know what will happen. It is possible at some point that the United States will withdraw its support for Israel. What is clear to me is that a national liberation struggle throughout the Arab East which removes the present dictatorships is an essential precursor to the overthrow of Zionism.