For centuries, the world’s imperialist powers have intervened in the Middle East for their own political, strategic, and economic interests. During the feudal era, the caliphates encompassing Palestine and other Arab territories were conquered by the Turkish Ottoman empire and remained under its control until the empire collapsed after WWI. The British empire then ruled Palestine after WWI until the creation of Israel in 1948. The way had been paved for an Israeli state by the 1917 ‘Balfour declaration’, named after Britain’s then foreign minister Arthur Balfour, which declared Palestine to be “national home for the Jewish people”. This was a great gift to the Zionist movement but a massive blow to Palestine’s Arabs, who at that time comprised around 90% of the population.
Balfour made clear the racism and imperialism behind his statement when he wrote in 1922 that “Zionism, be it right or wrong, good or bad, is of far profounder import than the desires and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land”. Jewish immigration to the region significantly increased following the declaration, causing growing alarm to the Arabs. Zionism itself dates back to the late 19th century and was essentially a reaction to the widespread anti-Jewish racism of that time. The goal of Zionists wasn’t to fight Judaeophobia but to escape from it. However in the early 20th century most of the politically active Jews were not looking towards Zionism but rather to workers’ organisations and struggles.
Unsurprisingly, support for Zionism increased following the Nazis’ rise to power in 1933, leading to a strengthening of the Zionist movement. Following the end of WWII, British forces reached a crisis in their ‘divide and rule’ strategy in Palestine, and in 1947 the UN voted to partition Palestine into two states, one Arab (referred to, slightly confusingly, as Palestine) and the other Jewish (referred to as Israel). The Zionists settlers were not satisfied with this however and in 1949 unleashed a monstrous campaign known by Palestinians as the ‘naqba’ (Arabic for catastrophe). This resulted in Palestine effectively being wiped off the map, with around 750,000 Palestinians displaced from their homes and becoming refugees.
It goes without saying that the mass killing of Jews during WWII could in no way be used as justification for the naqba. But rather than becoming a pariah state, in 1949 Israel was able to obtain armistice agreements with its four Arab neighbours: Egypt, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon. Jewish immigrants began pouring into Israel, with 1.6 million arriving during the three decades following WWII. Many of the earliest Zionist immigrants lived in Kibbutzim agricultural communities, which distorted socialist ideas into a form of camouflage for the project of colonizing Palestine. In reality, Israel was an imperialist capitalist state from the outset. One of the key projects of the new nation was building up the Israeli Defence Force armed with hi-tech weaponry and an unpublicised nuclear capacity.
US imperialism came to have increasing political interest in aiding Israel as part of its strategy in the cold war. The US and other Western nations wanted to counter the influence of the left-wing secular Nasser regime in Egypt, which they perceived as a threat to their interests. The so-called ‘Jewish lobby’ in the US was also a factor in US-Israel relations and still is today. For its part, Israel’s ruling class feared the arming by the USSR of hostile Arab regimes, and wanted US protection. In 1956 Israel initiated the Suez war by invading Egypt’s Sinai peninsula, following a secret pact with Britain and France. This was not welcomed by the US however, which was desperate to prevent disruption to oil supplies and other trade, and forced Israel to pull out of Sinai.
In 1967, Israel launched military attacks on Egypt, Syria and Jordan, in what became known as the ‘six-day war’. Israeli forces had dramatic and unexpected success, gaining control of the West Bank, east Jerusalem, Gaza, the Golan Heights and Sinai from Jordan, Egypt and Syria. In November 1967 the UN Security Council passed its well-known resolution 242, calling for Israeli withdrawal from the areas taken. But with the exception of Sinai these areas remain occupied by Israel to this day. The war created around 400,000 Palestinian refugees, some for the second time. Within months of the end of the six-day war Israel started building Jewish settlements in the occupied territories, along with developing a regime of brutal repression against the Palestinians living there.
A group of Palestinians formed Fatah, a reverse acronym for ‘Palestinian National Liberation Movement’ in the late 1950s, led by Yasser Arafat. By 1969 Fatah was the dominant party in the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), an umbrella for numerous Palestinian organisations. However the PLO did not attempt to build mass mobilisations of the Palestinian working class and poor against Israeli oppression, but instead carried out armed attacks against Israel’s military and infrastructure. In later periods, mass movements such as the Palestinian intifada in 1987-92 or the ‘Arab Spring’ uprisings of 2011 demonstrated the potential power of mass mobilizations, which arguably proved to be more effective than the guerrilla campaigns that had been conducted by the PLO.
Today, Israel is a capitalist, class-based society with the second highest level of inequality in the industrially developed world. Ordinary Israelis are certainly not happy with the state of their country and the number emigrating is high. There have also been a great many workers’ strikes in Israel. Clearly, though, Palestinians cannot simply sit around and wait for Israeli workers to bring down Israeli capitalism, as each conflict initiated by Israel draws more Israelis into supporting the use of military might. In my view, we need to undertake a process of de-Zionisation in Israel and across the Western world. This may be compared to the process of de-Nazification that took place in Germany and elsewhere after WWII. Then, and only then, might we finally see peace in Palestine.
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