The Idea of Israel (13 page)

Like Leibowitz, Avnery did not represent an anti-Zionist point of view, and saw the 1967 war as the source of evil in Israel. But his exposures of pre-1967 oppressive policies towards the Palestinians in Israel and the aggression towards the Arab world were an important source in the 1990s for academics who were prepared to embark on a more fundamental challenge of the Zionist narrative or the idea of Israel.

Other activists, such as Akiva Orr, Michel Warschawski, Ilan Halevi, and Uri Davis, stood outside, and clashed directly with, Zionism. Each of them had an epiphany, so to speak, triggered by an event that changed their perspective on the Zionist reality in Israel. In fact, there are so many others of whom the same can be said that I cannot mention them all in this chapter. Most seemed to follow a similar trajectory, in which a formative, sobering event exposed Zionism as colonialism, Israel as an apartheid state, and the United States as an imperialist nation.
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For the benefit of future historians, there is now a ‘dissident archive’, thanks to the psychotherapist Avigail Abarbanel, who recently induced a large number of Jews and Israelis to describe their experiences.
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The late Akiva Orr was born in Berlin in 1931 and emigrated with his family to Palestine as a toddler. As did many teenagers at the time, he joined the Hagana in 1945 and served in the Israeli navy in 1948 (as a youth, he was a local champion in competitive swimming). Later he served in the commercial national fleet, where he witnessed a sailors’ strike being brutally broken by the police, with the tacit support of the Labour-led trade union, the Histadrut. While completing his studies in the sciences, he became active in several political groups on the anti-Zionist left.
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In 1964 he left Israel and moved to London, where he became an important member of the Palestine solidarity movement and also participated in British socialist groups. He published extensively in the
Black Dwarf
, a newspaper edited in the 1960s by Tariq Ali, and joined the London-based organisation Solidarity, founded by the Greek philosopher Cornelius Castoriadis. In the 1990s he returned to Israel, where he stayed until his death in early 2013.

Although Orr published extensively on democracy, socialism and politics, one of his early publications –
Peace, Peace and There Is No Peace
, written with his colleague Moshe Machover and published in 1961 – reads as though it were written in the 1990s by a post-Zionist. Machover was born in Tel Aviv in 1936 and was a lecturer in mathematics when Akiva Orr arrived at the Hebrew University as a student.
Peace, Peace
is five hundred pages long and includes chapters on the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians in 1948 as well on the atrocities committed by Israel against the Palestinian citizens of Israel. It was the first structured analysis in Hebrew of Zionism as a colonialist movement, and the first to suggest that the struggle for peace in Israel and Palestine must be anti-colonialist.

Michel Warschawski, known as Mikado, was born in central Europe, as were so many of the other challengers mentioned so far (I discuss in a separate chapter the Arab Jews who challenged Zionism later in the state’s history). He was born in Strasbourg to an Orthodox Jewish family; his father was the chief rabbi of Strasbourg and a partisan in the Second World War. In 1961 Warschawski’s family sent him to a yeshiva in Jerusalem that was also attended by future leaders of Gush Emunim, the settlers’ movement in the occupied territories. Warschawski went in the opposite ideological direction, pushed there by his own formative event – the expulsion of the residents of three Palestinian villages near the monastery at Latrun (between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem) in 1967. The Israeli army had tried in vain to occupy these villages in 1948, losing many soldiers in the attempt, but the Arab Legion bravely defended them. Finally the Israeli army succeeded in capturing the villages in June 1967, expelling the residents with vengeance.

Mikado was an eyewitness to this expulsion. When he began to study at the Hebrew University in the late 1960s, he joined with like-minded students to organise a solidarity movement with the Palestinian struggle on both sides of the Green Line. For a while he also dreamed of importing the 1968 Prague Spring. In 1984 he put his energies into something far more permanent, the Alternative Information Center, which has continued ever since to track the abuses of the Israeli occupation in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip and the oppression of Palestinians inside Israel. Deep analyses, wide reportage and strategic discussion made its publications
an important source for activists inside and outside Israel before the Internet revolution provided even more accessible and immediate tools for apprehending and reacting to the reality on the ground. Again, like so many other activists, Warschawski paid a high price for his views and activity: sitting in jail for months while he was a young father of two.
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Two other trailblazers were willing to do even more than pay the high price of being jailed or being condemned as traitors by their own society. These two – Ilan Halevi and Uri Davis – actually went over to the ‘other’ side.

Halevi was born in Vichy France to an extraordinary family. His father had been born in Jerusalem and, after travelling the world, joined the International Brigades during the Spanish Civil War; his mother was a Resistance fighter in Paris. As a teenager, he was sent to the United States after the separation of his parents, and there joined the Black Panthers. He also came to know Malcolm X quite well. Years later, he would say that his darker complexion made him feel like, and be accepted as, an African American. Like his father, Halevi chose a cause and finally landed in the newly liberated Algeria as a guest of the FLN. In 1965 he arrived in Israel and joined a kibbutz, Gan Shmuel, near Hadera, but was eventually thrown out of the kibbutz because of his radical views.
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Halevi’s political career took a turn in 1976 when he left Israel for France and from there began frequent visits to Beirut and the PLO headquarters until he received an official appointment to the organisation in 1982. He represented the PLO in the Socialist International and in the 1991 Madrid peace conference. His highest position in the PLO was as deputy to the PLO’s foreign minister, Nabil Shaath. He was more of an activist and politician than a writer. But the interviews he left behind give us a glimpse of his worldview: he uncompromisingly rejected Zionism and declared himself to be ’100 per cent Jew and 100 per cent Arab’.

Uri Davis followed suit and joined the PLO in 1984. He was born in 1943 in Jerusalem and grew in Kfar Shmaryahu, a well-to-do suburb of Tel Aviv. He was already thinking out of the Zionist box when he succeeded in avoiding military service by substituting civil
service for it instead (a very rare move for a young Jewish man in the early 1960s). After completing his national service, he was drawn into the Palestinians’ struggle in northern Israel against the expropriation of their land. His focus was on the land taken from several villages for the construction of the new, Jewish-only town of Karmiel on the road between Acre and Safed. In 1964 he began demonstrating there, sometimes all by himself; at the height of his struggle, he undertook a hunger strike and moved to one of the villages as a resident. The expropriated areas were declared closed military zones, but he violated these orders and was arrested for doing so; all told, he was incarcerated for half a year, during which he again began a hunger strike. After several forays into local and municipal politics, he adopted a different mode of action and joined Fatah, of which he remains a member of the Revolutionary Council.
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Davis was one of the first to fuse his professional qualifications – a doctorate in anthropology – with his political commitments. As an anthropologist, he exposed the apartheid nature of the State of Israel.
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In many ways he set an example for the following generation of how to confront Zionism within Israeli academia and within one’s own discipline – the inevitable price for which was the loss of his job.
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It was possible in Israel to teach the sciences and hold anti-Zionist views, but it was not permissible for a dissident social scientist or humanities professor to teach Zionism in an Israeli university. Until Davis’s daring scholarly work, critiques of Zionism were dismissed as purely political and ideological tracts.

But even lone fighters need a home, and most of these activists – most of the time, in one way and another – were connected to Matzpen, the longest-standing anti-Zionist Jewish movement in Israel (apart from the Communist Party), or to one of its many offshoots.

The Anti-Zionist Movements: Matzpen and Its Offshoots

In 1962 Moshe Machover, Akiva Orr, Oded Pilavsky and Yirmiyahu Kaplan were expelled from the Israeli Communist Party. They were
among the younger cadres of the party, and their sin was their continued critique of party policies, specifically its blind obedience to the Soviet Union. On various occasions, they argued that the party had, since 1948, failed to advance the conditions and realities of its natural constituencies: the Palestinian minority of Israel and the socio-economically deprived classes of the Jewish state.
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Feeling that what was needed was a clearer discourse about a socialist revolution in Israel and the Middle East as a whole, they decided to found a new political organisation that would better reflect their views. They also proposed that the workers in Israel create councils that would make major decisions on the policies to be pursued and actions to be taken, rather than follow the practice of the Communist Party, in which the Politburo made all the decisions. Their early publications declare clearly their rejection of Zionism (for the Communist Party, this was never a clear issue) and fully endorse the demands of the Palestinian national movement (in 1962 these were not yet clear, since the Palestinian National Charter, which defined these demands, was not produced until 1964).

These ideas came out in the public manifesto of the new group, which called itself Matzpen (Compass). At their first meeting in 1962, the participants defined themselves as a voluntary organisation of Israelis committed to a social revolution within the territory of Israel and Palestine. In the next few years the group succeeded in recruiting dozens of Palestinian and Jewish Israelis. Consisting mostly of students, it had more Jewish members than Arabs; most of the Jews came from the kibbutz movement, while the Palestinians came from the cities. In 1965, Matzpen joined Uri Avnery in the founding of a parliamentary party that would compete in national elections, although none of the Matzpen members were willing to be in the actual list – they only lent their support.

Having started with twelve members, the movement grew significantly after the June 1967 war. On June 8 it burst into the international arena when it published a joint ad in the
Times
of London, together with the Palestinian guerilla organisation the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, calling for the abolition of the Zionist character of Israel and the creation of an ‘a-national’ federal-socialist
state. The ad further stated that in the desired new state, everyone would enjoy equal cultural and civil rights and that the state would be committed to the economic and political union of the Middle East. Soon after, leading members of Matzpen, such as Akiva Orr and Moshe Machover, joined exiled Palestinians in Europe to create a pro-Palestinian solidarity movement. Inside Israel, it became the most vociferous lobby against the occupation – an approach that frequently led to the arrest and detention of its members.

In the 1970s Matzpen underwent an ideological crisis, when some members found it to be too passive and departed to create a number of splinter groups. The first was the Workers’ Union (called also Avangard). This group criticised Matzpen for being insufficiently active within workers communities in Israel and for preferring the international stage. From this group sprang another one, the Revolutionary Communist Alliance – the RCA, whose publication was named
Ma’avak
, ‘Struggle’ – which proposed that the political strategy had to focus on the creation of a binational state over the entirety of historical Palestine. Some RCA members were still active in the 1990s, in a new organisation called Derech Ha-nizoz (Through a Spark) and were arrested for their connections to left-wing organisations within the PLO.
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Nowadays some of them are part of the parliamentary list, the Da’am Workers Party, which focuses on the rights of workers and has thus far not succeeded in entering the Knesset.

From those two basic groups emerged a third, the Red Front, which chose, among other things, to be associated directly with the armed Palestinian struggle. The best-known, outside of Israel, of their members was Udi Adiv, a young member of Kibbutz Gan Shmuel (Ilan Halevi’s kibbutz) who, after serving as a paratrooper in the Israeli army, joined others in creating an underground web of connections with the PLO. The members of the Red Front were arrested in December 1972 and charged with the creation of an Arab–Jewish sabotage and espionage network in Israel. It seems they had never gotten, nor did they intend to go, that far. In any case, they were sentenced and jailed for long periods but were released in 1985, when three Israeli soldiers captured in Lebanon were traded by
the Palestinian organisation Ahmad Jibril for more than a thousand Palestinian prisoners, including the arrested members of the Red Front.
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Finally, I should mention a fourth group, the Revolutionary Communist League (also called Matzpen Marxist). All of these groups, as well as their own splinters, shared a stronger affiliation with Maoist or Trotskyite variants of communism and were willing to participate in actual military struggle against the state.