Rethinking Israel and Palestine

Marxist Perspectives

Oded Nir, Joel Wainwright, Oded Nir, Joel Wainwright

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000517453
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Jura
• Subtopic: Kollisionsrecht

The Middle East seems to be in perpetual crisis. One might expect a plethora of Marxist analyses of Israel and Palestine. Yet in the literature on Israel and Palestine there are hardly any studies of class, relations of production, or the relationship between the political and economic balance of forces over time. This edited volume brings a diverse array of Marxist-influenced interpretations of the present conjuncture in Israel and Palestine. The collection includes works by luminaries of social theory, such as Noam Chomsky and Fred Jameson, as well as leading scholars of Palestine (Raja Khalidi, Sherene Seikaly, and Orayb Aref Najjar) and Israel (Jonathan Nitzan, Nitzan Lebovic and Amir Locker-Biletzki). It comprises the first-ever collection of Marxist-influenced writings on Palestine and Israel, and the relationship between them.

This book was originally published as a special issue of the journal Rethinking Marxism.

Editors’ Preface

 

Oded Nir and Joel Wainwright

 

 

                                                        This special issue went into production in May 2018, during Israeli massacres in Gaza. That such massacres seem almost routine—periodic, like stormy weather—testifies to our dreadful sense of being stuck, unable to move from the present horror toward some other future. These recurring violent events present us with an inversion of the notion of the end of history as the realization of reason and freedom: in each Gaza bloodbath, history seems to have ended but has left us only with the negation of freedom and reason as we face scenes of degradation and madness. This inversion should be understood in a strict dialectical sense; the project of realizing freedom within a capitalist system inevitably leads to unfreedom—just as in Marx’s critique of the Proudhonists, which applies to all liberal projects today. To grasp how bleeding in Gaza relates to capitalist prosperity, one has to move beyond the immediate shock of the events themselves and toward a totalizing perspective that can grasp the violence as an expression of the capitalist world. Such an analysis, made today, is not necessarily reductive, and it has the potential to open new avenues of thought and action rather than keeping us locked within paradigms that (for all their sensitivity to injustice) may block critical thought.

This collection of essays was born out of a deep dissatisfaction with the impasse of the present, an impasse reflected by waves of violence on the ground but also a political Left whose liberal-reconciliatory agenda has long ago produced its opposite (“pacification”) and has since lost all political effectiveness. This inability to invent a new collective project—in Palestine-Israel but also globally by the international Left—prompted us to assemble this special issue. It seeks to unsettle the positions on Palestine-Israel to which we on the left are accustomed. It aims to show that a return to Marxist theorizing of Palestine-Israel has the potential to produce insights that cut against the grain of what exists. It tells us, in other words, that to remain faithful to a Leftist project in Palestine-Israel, we should consider abandoning those older positions that were once at the core of this project, for the course of history inevitably transforms any vanguardism into conservatism. And so to restart history in Palestine-Israel would mean taking a different relation to reality than the one we know.

This special issue is precisely an attempt to revitalize our thinking about Palestine-Israel. Each essay offers one such new interpretation. Hence, the pieces are eclectic, in terms of both their disciplinary fields and their theoretical commitments. This is intentional. The reader will find no fully elaborated political agenda or conceptual system. Are the essays entirely Marxist? To that we answer with Fredric Jameson’s (1996, 19) assertion that “Marxism is not … a philosophy at all,” in the customary sense. Rather,

It may be clearest to say that it can best be thought of as a problematic: that is to say, it can be identified, not by specific positions (whether of a political, economic or philosophical type), but rather by the allegiance to a specific complex of problems, whose formulations are always in movement and in historic rearrangement and restructuration, along with their object of study (capitalism itself).

* * *

We end this brief introduction by expressing our gratitude to all those whose help was essential to the process of publishing this special issue. First and foremost, we would like to wholeheartedly thank the coeditors of Rethinking Marxism, Serap Kayatekin and Marcus Green, for their endless encouragement, guidance, and very active promotion of this special issue. We would also like to thank the many scholars—who shall remain nameless—who attentively reviewed these essays on a very tight schedule, and thanks to the Rethinking Marxism collective for providing us with the opportunity to put together this special issue.

Reference

Jameson, F. 1996. Actually existing Marxism. In Marxism beyond Marxism, ed. S. Makdisi, C. Casarino, and R. Karl, 14–55. New York: Routledge.

Israel-Palestine as Capitalism’s Laboratory

 

Fredric Jameson

 

The declaration of an intent to “rethink” something is often, particularly for the Left, an ominous sign. When the social-democratic parties openly declared such an “intent” and dropped Marx from their program, their decline quickly emptied their positions of content, leaving them just one more center-left or “liberal” party (in the American sense) among others, with little more than human rights, anticorruption, and identity politics to show for themselves.

But surely there are good reasons to rethink the Palestinian-Israeli struggle: in particular an experience of defeat become a way of life, an Israeli power so long identified with that of the United States that its “defeat” has come to seem unthinkable, and the famous “two-state solution” an old-fashioned pipe dream, yesterday’s fantasy. We are then tempted to “rethink” this struggle into a wish fulfillment that might at least be up to date: what about a single nonconfessional democratic state in which the two sides fight it out in free elections and by parliamentary majorities? Is this not, after all, the Washington Consensus: free elections as the outward and visible sign of the inner free market? But perhaps it was this Consensus, along with the category of the nation-state in which it is articulated, that was the problem in the first place?

The present collection has a dramatic proposal for us, one which identifies two separate streams of faulty thinking and leaves us with the even more shocking implication that they might somehow be deeply interrelated with each other: on the one hand is the inconsistency of the older nation-state categories in a situation of globalization (that is to say, the world coordination of late capitalism); on the other is the assumption that leftist politics is to be reduced to the classic bourgeois concepts of civil rights and human rights, of equality before the law and voting rights, of multiculturalism and the end of ethnic, racial, and gender intolerance. “Rethinking” does not mean abandoning these programs (which liberals like to call “values”) but rather presupposing them, just as the socialist tradition has always presupposed the achievement of bourgeois freedoms as the foundation on which a new and distinctive, radically different form of economic freedom might be built. However, if all politics are local, the traditional objections to such “rethinking” assume that the larger perspective inevitably saps the energies of local, everyday struggles against injustice, struggles which are difficult enough to launch in the first place. On the other hand, the Palestinian struggle is uniquely one in which the everyday and the ultimate end are inextricable and have to be solved together or not at all.

Unfortunately, not-at-all seems to have come out the winner, with the result that Palestine fatigue joins Israel fatigue, and the individual sufferings that have horrified and energized generations on the left now pale into seeming insignificance before the virtual Völkerwanderung of refugees and exiles, asylum seekers and boat people, from the Middle East in general. That unique struggle which was once considered to be the single festering open sore that poisoned Middle Eastern politics has now become a minor, well-nigh forgotten exception in the midst of a regional upheaval of “world-war” proportions. Why even bother to rethink it?

My own position on twenty-first century politics in this area has always been that the Americans were so successful in their overt or covert efforts to stamp out Middle Eastern Communist parties and left-wing movements (beginning, for example, with the massacres of Communists in an older Iraq—the forerunner of their virtual genocide in Indonesia) that they created a situation in which only religion remained as a terrain of opposition and revolt. To be sure, the Americans did not feel that there was anything to revolt against (inasmuch as they were the target), and they failed to understand that there were whole populations who thought otherwise and who had only religion to fall back to as an oppositional ideology. But disposing of a religious opponent (save, perhaps, in Iran) does not automatically restore the coordinates of an earlier secular situation.

Indeed, even though the Palestinian struggle was and remains the most secular form of opposition in the Middle Eastern world (a term I continue to use inasmuch as Palestinians are not exclusively Muslim and Muslims not exclusively Arab), its nationalism might well be seen as a misleading ideological masking of deeper contradictions that only Marxism is capable of “rethinking” with any precision and comprehensiveness.

This is, at any rate, the proposal argued from a variety of directions by the present issue. It sees Fatah as a form of liberal or social-democratic alliance politics with all the weaknesses and vices of the Western versions, defects too visible now that Fatah has in effect come to power in the Palestinian Authority. And it seeks to rectify the misunderstanding of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a settler-colony struggle between colonists and the “native” or indigenous population by insisting on the development of capital in the Palestinian world and on the shared interests of Israeli and Palestinian workers who in fact—if not in political fiction—may not even constitute two distinct national proletariats but versions of that new globalized workforce coming into being in this third stage of capital. We may well remember American history here and Werner Sombart’s famous answer to the perennial question of why no viable socialism emerged in the United States: namely, race! The most significant radical movement in U.S. history, indeed, that of late nineteenth-century populism, foundered on its opponents’ strategic ability to set white farmers against black (see Larry Goodwin’s pathbreaking work on American populism). Race is indeed a fictive concept with only too real consequences, and its analogous role in Israeli politics, articulated according to successive waves of immigrants from different class situations, has clearly played a decisive role in the staging of the so-called Israeli-Palestinian struggle, a role to be attributed not only to the rhetoric of an increasingly nonsocialist Israeli power structure but also to the “nationalist” appeal of a centrist Fatah, in which Marxists and socialists have played an ever more insignificant part. Here is then a momentous “revision” of the history of this period as it has been seen by the propaganda for both sides for generations. Indeed, since decolonization the international Left of whatever persuasion has considered “national liberation” to be a more urgent cause than class struggle and has given priority to the former under various political agendas. The essays collected in the present issue may indeed serve to shake the hold of this conviction.

But this changed conviction goes hand in hand with another one: namely, the development of capitalism in both Israel and Palestine alike. This is the “great transformation” some of us have called postmodernity, or late or finance capital, and others the neoliberal or neoconservative turn, or the end of history, the end of ideology, and so on. It is the local form of this transformation—situated in the early 80s with the Reagan-Thatcher moment and the liquidation of Keynesianism—which bears the name “post-Zionism,” a term that suffers the ambiguous fate of all such formulations, depending on whether you grasp it as an ideological affirmation or simply as a marker for a fundamental structural break and transition.

In our context, the post-Zionist situation signifies the emergence of a full-fledged capitalist economy from the heroic (or ideologically heroic) period of Israeli state formation and the concomitant transformation of its political reality along with the residual survival of its older political rhetoric. Few will doubt the historical reality of this evolution, but many are likely to be astonished by the affirmation, in the present collection, of a similar development in Palestine, where the existence of an analogous Palestinian capitalism seems to have been either a well-kept secret or an unmentionable fact of life.

With this revision of Israeli-Palestinian history from a Marxist perspective, we are suddenly confronted with the astonishing conclusion that, far from being a glaring exception in contemporary world politics, this seemingly eternal “open wound” of the global situation is in fact exemplary and offers something like a pure laboratory experiment in which theoretically to observe the dynamics of the latest stage in world capitalism. As to practice, however much it complicates the thinking of anticapitalist forces today, the rethinking of this experiment may well have strategic lessons for the forms that resistance can take today and the shape of some global Marxism to come.

Where Is the Marxist Critique of Israel/Palestine?

Oded Nir and Joel Wainwright

This essay argues for the urgent necessity of developing a new Marxist analysis and political horizon for Palestine/Israel. Two factors coalesce to affirm this conclusion: the near absence from contemporary academic writing of any discernibly Marxist analyses of Palestine/Israel and the deep crisis of the 1990s leftist project of peace, whose decline has not spurred a leftist alternative to it. The authors suggest several explanations for this state of affairs, from academic trends to the universalization of an older Marxist universalism to the near absence within existing leftist commentary of any attempt to present a materialist totalizing perspective on Palestine/Israel that relates the conflict causally to the contradictions of capitalism. Finally, the authors suggest that the essays included in the Rethinking Marxism symposium on Palestine/Israel (described briefly in this essay) can be used as so many potential starting points for narrating Palestine/Israel anew and reasserting forcefully this narrative’s commitment to the Left’s traditional political goals in Palestine/Israel.

1.

Noam Chomsky jokes that when he needs to provide a title for a public lecture more than a year in advance, he can always reuse “The Present Crisis in the Middle East.”¹ That the Middle East will be in crisis, year in and year out, is a cruel constant. Yet the nature and qualities of the crisis are constantly shifting, and we must stay on the track of the forces shaping the political conjuncture. Doing so reveals that the present crisis—though undoubtedly extreme—is by no means an exceptional condition but rather an intensification of the norm. Any attempts to make sense of the recent wars in Syria and Iraq, the conflict between Iran and Saudi Arabia, the intensification of Shia-Sunni tensions, or the pretensions of the United States as a broker of “peace” and “stability” all require patient dissection (however much those of us on the Left desire immediate action). The fact is that the Left has been defeated across the entire region. U.S. hegemony is clearly in decline, but resulting political openings have not been seized by the Left. The Arab Spring played out with no substantive gains. The crowds in Tahrir Square have gone; Egypt is firmly gripped by Sisi and the military (with ample backing from the United States). Wars, covert and open, continue unabated.

And at the h...