Wednesday, January 24, 2024
Promised Land (1982)
The “promised land” of Biblical myth is so-called because, for all the
impoverished Jewish and Arab workers who are trained to kill over it.
“promised” is all it will ever be. Investors, capitalist employers of one side
or another will continue to dominate, or come to dominate, the lucrative
industry and markets there as long as world capitalism remains.
Class division among Jews was typified towards the end of the last century
by the reaction of the “Cousinhood” of established Anglo-Jewry to
the wave of poorer Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. For example
Benjamin Cohen, the Conservative MP for Islington at the time,
supported the 1905 Aliens Act to limit further immigration. The historical
tendency towards international integration and class polarisation makes
Jewish nationalism, like its Palestinian counterpart, a pointless and
reactionary response to the exploitation and oppression of the past and present.
There is no Jewish “race": Israeli and British workers share the same interest
in i breaking down national boundaries and forming a democratic, socialist society.
In the nineteenth century, Zionism developed as a nationalist movement
similar to many others involving the setting up of capitalist states. Because of
the banning of Jews from many fields of work in the Middle Ages, and
the Christian ruling against taking part in money-lending, many Jews ended up
as moneylenders. This was used as part of the vicious campaign of persecution
directed against Jews over centuries, as they were used as a scapegoat
for the problems of poverty and conflict which were endemic to the rise of
capitalism. In the twentieth century, the idea of giving the Jews a country
where they might be safe from the painful discrimination and attacks they
had suffered was harnessed to the need for Western capitalism to have
an outpost in an area of great strategic importance, the Middle East.
As early as 1840 Lord Shaftesbury, anxious to ensure an overland
route to India, proposed a scheme of Jewish colonisation to use “the wealth
and industry of the Jewish people for the economic development of a backward
area”. In the nineteenth century Rothschild invested £2 million in Palestine,
and the French government showed an interest in colonisation. The first
Zionist conference was held in 1897 at Basle, at a time of violent
Palestine, because of its religious significance. For thousands of years,
it had been a crucially situated trade centre. The pogroms in Russia
since the 1880s had sent thousands of Jews fleeing across Europe, and
the prospect of a Jewish state seemed welcome to them.
During the First World War, as pact of its contradictory war-bribes,
Britain promised the Jews a “national home” and the Arabs independence
throughout the Middle East. In 1940 Joseph Weitz, then heading the Jewish
Agency Colonisation Programme, wrote in his diary:
Between ourselves it must be clear that there is no room for both
peoples together in this country . . . the only solution is Palestine
without Arabs (Quoted in Socialist Charter, February 1979).
Indeed, the attempt to solve the problem of anti-semitism within a
nationalist framework demanded that Jews should remain in a majority
in the newly created state, with all of the immigration restrictions that implies,
if the exercise was not to lose its point.
The state of Israel was founded in 1948, and by 1968 the annual influx of
capital invested in the area was equivalent to about one tenth of the total
world “aid” bill. Most of this capital was owned by British, French and
American investors who did not live in the Middle East and for whom
the religious ideals of Zionism meant nothing, other than a pool of
labour inspired by those ideals to work hard to produce a substantial return for
such investors.
Did the formation of Israel solve the problem of anti-semitism? Clearly not,
and for three reasons in particular. First, the only real binding factor between
people calling themselves Jewish is the acceptance of Judaism. Like other
religions, Judaism is a reactionary dogma with its own implicit racism,
in its reference to the “chosen people”. Second, capitalism generates racism
and divisiveness because of its class divisions, and the competition
between nations over world markets and between workers over jobs.
The problems of poverty, unemployment, state violence and war are as evident
in Israel as anywhere else. Israel is allied to the segregated state of
South Africa. At least three Israeli trade unions bar Palestinian Arabs.
The elements of Jewish culture which have attracted some to Zionism are all
but wiped out by the demands of the capitalist state. Shops are opened on
Saturdays, despite the religious ruling against it, to compete more aggressively
for the market. Yiddish has been all but suppressed.
Thirdly, there is the creation of a new, Palestinian "diaspora” around Israel,
and a Palestinian minority within Israel. The search for a scapegoat for the
problems of the area, in the form of “Arab terrorists”, or the official anti-Jewish
policies of some of the surrounding Arab states, are yet another way in which
Zionism has generated racism, rather than ending it.
The persecution of Jews over many centuries, culminating in the Nazi
genocide of the ’thirties, led many Jews sincerely to hope for a better future
in the creation of a “humane” Jewish homeland in the Middle East. Such hopes
are dangerously idealistic, and have themselves proved divisive and
reactionary. The Zionists and Palestinian nationalists who argue over the
borders in the area hardly own between them a single acre of that territory.
As workers, owning no substantial property, they are arguing about where
and by whom they will be exploited. The solution to the oppression which
Jews have suffered is not to build “Jewish” prisons, tanks and bombs.
The truncheons in the hands of Israeli police feel no different to those wielded
in Germany, Russia or Ireland. In this respect, Israeli nationalism is
basically no different from dozens of other nationalist movements with their
roots in the nineteenth century expansion of capitalism. Each has its own
myths, its own religious sanction, irrational loyalties, violence and senseless
support for capitalism.
One final way in which racism is still being generated is in the reaction towards
Israel’s recent military policies. Liberal newspapers like the Guardian,
for example, have tried to interpret events by unsubstantiated racist myths:
Most opponents of the government are Ashkenazi, and most supporters
of the government are oriental. "And those people don't understand
peace or compromise.” said the journalist, "they understand dominance.
And that's what Begin promises them.” For much of this constituency, the
arguments about Palestinian purposes don't matter. (Martin Woollacott,
2 September 1982)
Like every other state, Israel is a political unit for the accumulation of
capital. From 1948 to 1968, productivity increased nine-fold. Lacking natural
resources, Israel imports more than 67 per cent of its raw material requirements,
uses its pool of labour to work these up into finished products, and then exports
nearly half of the resulting industrial production to earn foreign currency. In 1981,
about 5 billion dollars was received from industrial exports, and 7.5 billion dollars
spent by Israel on the world market. Since the early ’seventies there has been
a high technology boom, which has largely replaced textiles and other
industries of the ‘fifties. The general way in which the profit system functions
across the world has been very clearly summed up in the ease of Israel as
follows:
That magic ingredient (“added value”) is the difference between the cost of
raw materials, plus transport and related costs, and the same price after the
raw materials have been turned into highly sophisticated equipment . . .
the higher the added value, the more foreign currency Israel earns. With
diamonds, for example, the added value is between 20 and 25 per cent;
in many electronic and other highly sophisticated products, it can reach
between 45 and 70 per cent.
British Israel Trade, journal of British-Israel Chamber of Commerce, May/June 1982.
The wages and salaries on which the majority of Israelis depend in order to live are simply one of the "related costs" which this process seeks to minimise.
Seventy per cent of capital in Israel is owned by private investors, ten per
cent is controlled by the state and about twenty per cent is owned by
Hevrat Ovdim, the industrial holding company of the Histadrut, the main trade
union, which is otherwise known as the General Confederation of Labour.
In any of these cases, the same extraction of "added value” from the
subordinate class of wage- and salary-workers is carried on in the interests
of capital; 35 per cent of the budget goes on arms. When the Sinai Peninsula
was evacuated it still had over 17 billion dollars' worth of military bases
and armaments invested in it. It was Israeli and American shareholders
who lost out as a result, not wage-earners or peasants.
Earlier this year, the President of the Israeli Bonds Drive attended a London
lunch given by Bank Leumi for “business people and financiers”. He reported
that Israel’s stock exchange, currently valued at over 11 billion dollars,
is growing "by leaps and bounds" and is second in profitability only to
Singapore, with an average rate of profit of 18 per cent. Israel Bonds are now
the third most widely held security in the USA, after US government bonds
and shares in AT and T. The President of the Bonds Drive stressed that
Israel Bonds were “making an important contribution to peace". They are in
fact doing so no more than Israeli bombs.
Some of the more idealistic of the early Zionists thought that it would be
possible to establish a separate country which would be insulated from the
conflicts and crises of world capitalism. This hope has also been shown as
ill-founded by the course of history. Ernest Japhet, Chairman of Bank Leumi,
said at the Industrial Club in Israel in January 1982, that “the Israeli
economy, more than many other national economies, is dependent on
developments in the world economy” and he went on to list problems such
as fluctuations in markets and prices, and the uncertainties of market demand
for Israeli exports.
The only practical way in which the majority of Israelis. Palestinians and others
in the Middle East are going to come together in harmony and solidarity is
through the recognition of their common class interest against their
border-drawing rulers. How many Arab workers and peasants sat at the
Arab summit conference of oil-sheiks and princes, which proclaimed
the PLO the “sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people”?
How many Israeli workers, their wages and salaries trailing desperately
behind the spiralling cost of living in Israel, are among the millionaire
shareholders in high- technology industries, or American and French arms
and firms?
Hundreds of thousands of Israeli workers have recently been involved in the
Peace Now movement against the war in the Lebanon. If they are to
make their dream of peace into a practical reality, they must be prepared
to throw off their ideological chains of religion, nationalism and support for the
profit system in any of its many forms. They could do worse than to follow
the advice given nearly a hundred years ago. in the Yiddish socialist
paper Arbeiter Freund (“Workers' Friend"). January 15, 1886:
We say again that no colonisation, no land of one's own and
no independent government will help the Jewish nation. Jewish happiness
will come with the happiness of all unhappy workers, and Jewish
emancipation must come with the general emancipation of humanity.
Clifford Slapper
Blogger's Note:
A correction to an item in this article appeared in the January 1983 issue of
the Socialist Standard
.
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