Zionist Left: The ‘Pacifist’ Arm of the Nakba
Hashomer Hatzair had distanced itself from the Zionist labor federation known as the Histadrut because its policies excluded Arab workers.
The Zionist Left and the Making of the Palestinian Nakba. Book cover.
C
olonizing Palestine: The Zionist Left and the Making of the Palestinian Nakba by Areej Sabbagh-Khoury, a senior lecturer at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, is in many ways a groundbreaking study of the formation of Israel through the lens of settler colonial studies. By examining a component of the Zionist movement that ostensibly sought to break with the movement’s overtly colonialist leadership, Sabbagh-Khoury uncovers the unavoidably racist core of Zionism as an ideology and practice.
The author specifically examines the Marxist socialist formation known as Hashomer Hatzair (Hebrew for “Young Guard”), which refused to endorse the notorious 1942 Biltmore Program, in which the Zionist movement publicly proclaimed that its goal was the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine. As an early Socialist-Zionist settler group in Palestine, Hashomer Hatzair had also distanced itself from the Zionist labor federation known as the Histadrut because its policies excluded Arab workers.
The Illusion of Marxist Zionism
Settler colonial studies typically earmark two distinguishing features of settler colonialism: the “conquest of labor” and the “conquest of land.” But whereas Hashomer Hatzair repudiated the idea of creating a dominant Jewish labor force in Palestine, it actively pursued Jewish settlement of the land in the form of the kibbutz (Hebrew for “communal farm”). In its early years this left-wing component of the Zionist movement appeared to be open to the idea of sharing the land with the indigenous Palestinians known as fellahin, but as Sabbagh-Khoury shows, all that changed seemingly overnight with the 1948 Nakba (Arabic for “The Catastrophe”). The author’s unique contribution is exploring how and why that changed.
Other studies have probed the core beliefs of Socialist or Labor Zionism, as proclaimed by founding figures such David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister. Most notably, the Israeli historian and political scientist Zeev Sternhell in The Founding Myths of Israel (1999) exposed the fact that these Zionists were more nationalist than socialist. Sternhell depicted Socialist Zionism as a form of National Socialism, much like the extreme right-wing ethnonationalists of the European fascist movements; National Socialism is a better descriptor of their ideology than Marxism.
In choosing to focus on Hashomer Hatzair, however, the author of Colonizing Palestine (2023) explicitly probes the self-proclaimed Marxist variation of Socialist Zionism. This relatively small wing of the Zionist movement never embraced Marxism-Leninism and, therefore, never became identified with Communism; nevertheless, it strove to hew to the ideas of Karl Marx as it understood them. And it is this contradiction that intrigued the author who wondered how its ideology and practice came to diverge.
As a historian, Sabbagh-Khoury studied the archives of three kibbutzes belonging to the Hashomer Hatzair movement in Palestine’s Jezreel Valley: Mishmar HaEmek, HaZore’a, and Ein HaShofet. However, she cautions that her analysis was not centered on examining their “experiences and ideologies,” but rather “their interactions with the indigenous Palestinians,” mainly farmers in nearby villages. Building on archive records that were contemporaneous or nearly so with the events described, she then probes more deeply into the “selective memory” or the “double reconstruction” revealed by later memoirs and accounts written by the kibbutz settlers decades after the 1948 Nakba.
Read: Ten Myths about Israel
Transformation of Kibbutz Relations with Palestinian Farmers in the Shadow of the Nakba
Early entries in the kibbutz archives describe relatively collegial and friendly relations with the nearby Arab villages. However, as the departure of British soldiers from Mandate Palestine neared, some of the kibbutzniks admit to going on scouting missions for the Haganah, the Israeli paramilitary force that took part in the crushing of the Arab Revolt against the British in the mid-1930s and eventually became the Israel Defense (Occupation) Force. One archive entry notes that their Palestinian neighbors were not fooled by their “long walks” and signaled their awareness of the real purpose of their mission.
Nevertheless, none of the Palestinian villages initiated hostilities. One archive entry exposes a “false flag operation” in which Zionists pretended to open fire on one of the kibbutzes in the hope that the Arab villagers would recognize the significance and flee to avoid retaliation.
Once the Nakba begins, the atrocities carried out by the Haganah become apparent to the settlers. They know, for example, that the village elders of Abu Shusha were executed. One settler admits that the village “did not fight us.” “Its elders were executed,” the settler continues. “Still, it was a necessity.”
Likewise, the villagers of Abu Zureiq did not attack the nearby HaZore’a kibbutz or the Haganah forces, yet all the villagers were expelled and prisoners were executed, including those found hiding during the fighting that began when the Haganah attacked the village.
A few settlers expressed remorse: “I had very mixed feelings all day long,” one wrote. “I was glad that we were being rid of the village, but, on the other hand I am wholeheartedly against murder and warfare.” Sabbagh-Khoury notes a rare sentiment expressed about Palestinians belonging to the land: “I am not at peace with the idea of war against Arab villagers who have been on this land longer than us and are fighting for their home with the same feeling we are.”
Many of the accounts of the Nakba that appear in the original, contemporary archives simply disappear in subsequent memoirs and other recollections written decades later. Except for one account by, Arnon Tamir, who wrote in a journal published in 1972 about his continuing difficulty in coming to grips with the expulsion of more than 750,000 Palestinians from their homes and land.
Noting in particular the fate of two nearby towns in 1948, Tamir lamented, “I am not at peace with myself neither about Qira nor about Abu Zureiq.” He remained particularly troubled about the looting of the villages that followed their destruction and the way the kibbutz settlers left their former neighbors “lying under the rubble of their homes, unburied.” Yet even he added, “I cannot say today whether this was wrong or not. It did relieve things for us considerably for a while and enabled us to establish the state, but whether it brought us closer to a solution, that I doubt.”
For others, however, in subsequent accounts, the atrocities committed during the events of 1948 simply disappear in what Sabbagh-Khoury labels “selective memory.” If the events no longer fit in the dominant narrative of justifying the expulsion, the memory ceases to exist in subsequent memoirs.
The author attributes the phenomenon to the process described by the French-Tunisian chronicler of settler colonialism, Albert Memmi, who writes in The Colonizer and the Colonized (1957) about the process of “double reconstruction” in which the colonizers imagine themselves becoming the native and erasing entirely the existence of the indigenous.
Class reductionist paradox of the Zionist Left
How was Marxism or simply a belief in the “brotherhood of peoples” so easily discarded in this process? Sabbagh-Khoury offers several explanations. One is simply the fact that the very material existence of kibbutzim depended on the successful colonization of the land. Marxist principles stood in direct contradiction with the practical activity of surviving as settler farmers, particularly because the communal effort in the kibbutz involved Jews alone, not the “brotherhood of peoples.” Workers may have had nothing to lose but their chains, but settler and Jewish-only farmers actually had much to lose if their enterprise failed.
Another reason was a kind of class reductionist position adopted by the Hashomer settlers, a position that some would describe as a betrayal of Marxism. Hashomer Hatzair never acknowledged that the Palestinians had national aspirations as a people. They depicted the situation as one in which the fellahin were exploited by the effendis, the rich absentee landlords who actually owned the land on which Palestinian farmers mostly worked as tenants. In their eyes, the fellahin had no attachment to the land. The settlers’ usurpation was therefore justified.
Furthermore, Hashomer Hatzair settlers depicted socialism as progress, an unleashing of productive forces otherwise constrained and held back by capitalist greed. In this vein they depicted the Palestinian farmers as backward and undeveloped. According to their view, the rightful progression of history depended on the advanced European settlers who were improving the land, never mind that the Palestinian farmers were actually quite successful in their work.
“Backwardness,” as the author notes, allegedly “justified the erasure of the Palestinians from their land.” This is a common refrain still heard today among Zionists who claim their settler enterprise made the “desert bloom,” whereas in fact the land was historically well cultivated and more ecologically balanced than the non-native pine forests planted over destroyed Palestinian villages.
Because many Palestinians were tenants on the land, the Hashomer settlers also depicted them as rootless and easily transferable. This alleged rootlessness, in contrast to the newly arrived European settlers who were in fact the ones uprooting 800 years of indigenous habitation, supposedly justified the Nakba expulsion. Sabbagh-Khoury quotes the settler Eliezer Be’eri: he “drew on a common representation of indigenous people to justify expulsion: they were rootless, he argued. There was no chance for them to resume their life here. He invoked the inherent logic of settler colonialism: ‘it’s either them or us.’”
Those chilling words today play out in the ongoing Nakba and genocide visible for the whole world to see in Gaza.
