1967 interview with Marxist scholar Isaac Deutscher (Part 1)

In June 1967, following the “Six-Day War” with several Arab countries, Israel emerged victorious. It captured large areas, including Gaza, the West Bank, and two-thirds of the Golan Heights — territories it continues to occupy decades later.

At the time, New Left Review — a political journal based in London — conducted an interview with Marxist scholar Isaac Deutscher. Originally titled “On the Israeli-Arab War,” the interview is being republished today by World Outlook with the kind permission of New Left Review.

Deutscher (1907-1967) was born near what is now Krakow, Poland. He joined the outlawed Polish Communist Party in 1926, in which he was active until his expulsion in 1932. In 1939, just before the outbreak of World War II, Deutscher moved to London, where he worked as a journalist, historian, academic, author, and political activist. His books include the well-known biographic trilogy of Russian revolutionary leader Leon Trotsky — The Prophet Armed, The Prophet Unarmed, and The Prophet Outcast — as well as Stalin: A Political Biography.

Deutscher was born into an observant Jewish family. He was considered a prodigy in the study of the Jewish Torah and lived through three pogroms in 1918. But he became an atheist as a teenager. He is also the author of The Non-Jewish Jew and Other Essays. Marxist scholar George Novack reviewed it in a 1969 article in the Militant newspaper. Novack’s article was later published as a pamphlet, How Can the Jews Survive? A Socialist Answer to Zionism.

The following interview took place more than 50 years ago, and some of the references may be unfamiliar to readers today. However, many of Deutscher’s insights remain timely and of striking political value in light of the ongoing murderous Israeli assault on Gaza in response to the gruesome October 7 attack by Hamas.

One example deserves attention in light of the recent revelation that Israeli intelligence agencies knew of the plans by Hamas more than a year before the attack occurred. Deutscher explained:

Paradoxically and grotesquely, the Israelis appear now in the role of the Prussians of the Middle East. They have now won three wars against their Arab neighbours. Just so did the Prussians a century ago defeat all their neighbours within a few years, the Danes, the Austrians, and the French. The succession of victories bred in them an absolute confidence in their own efficiency, a blind reliance on the force of their arms, chauvinistic arrogance, and contempt for other peoples. I fear that a similar degeneration — for degeneration it is — may be taking place in the political character of Israel.

Readers will find many more astute and perceptive ideas throughout the interview. Among them is Deutscher’s clear explanation of the roots of Jew hatred and why opposition to Israeli aggression is not antisemitic.

This is why World-Outlook is making this interview available to a new audience that includes many who have come to political awareness long since its original publication.

The introduction, additional subheadings, footnotes, and graphics are by World-Outlook. No substantive changes have been made to the text. The British spelling and capitalization of some words has been retained; some paragraphs have been broken up to facilitate online reading. The original interview can be found here. Due to its length, we are publishing the interview in four parts, the first of which follows.

(This is the first of a four-part series. The remainder can be found in Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4.)

ON THE ISRAELI-ARAB WAR (I)

As an introduction, could you sum up your general view of the Israeli-Arab war?

The war and the ‘miracle’ of Israel’s victory have, in my view, solved none of the problems that confront Israel and the Arab states. They have, on the contrary, aggravated all the old issues and created new, more dangerous ones. They have not increased Israel’s security, but rendered it more vulnerable than it had been. I am convinced that the latest, all-too-easy triumph of Israeli arms will be seen one day, in a not very remote future, to have been a disaster in the first instance for Israel itself.

Let us consider the international background of the events. We have to relate this war to the world-wide power struggle and ideological conflicts which form its context. In these last years American imperialism, and the forces associated with it and supported by it, have been engaged in a tremendous political, ideological, economic, and military offensive over a vast area of Asia and Africa; while the forces opposed to them, the Soviet Union^[1] in the first instance, have barely held their ground or have been in retreat.

This trend emerges from a long series of occurrences: the Ghanaian upheaval, in which Nkrumah’s^[2] government was overthrown; the growth of reaction in various Afro-Asian countries; the bloody triumph of anti-Communism in Indonesia,^[3] which was a huge victory for counter-revolution in Asia; the escalation of the American war in Vietnam; and the ‘marginal’ right-wing military coup in Greece.^[4]

The Arab-Israeli war was not an isolated affair; it belongs to this category of events. The counter-trend has manifested itself in revolutionary ferment in various parts of India, the radicalization of the political mood in Arab countries, the effective struggle of the National Front of Liberation in Vietnam; and the world-wide growth of opposition to American intervention. The advance of American imperialism and of Afro-Asian counter-revolution has not gone unopposed, but its success everywhere outside Vietnam has been evident.

In the Middle East the American forward push has been of relatively recent date. During the Suez war,^[5] the United States still adopted an ‘anti-colonialist’ stance. It acted, in seeming accord with the Soviet Union, to bring about the British and French withdrawal. The logic of American policy was still the same as in the late 1940’s, when the State of Israel was in the making. As long as the American ruling class was interested primarily in squeezing out the old colonial Powers from Africa and Asia, the White House was a mainstay of ‘anti-colonialism’.

But having contributed to the debacle of the old Empires, the United States took fright at the ‘power vacuum’ that might be filled by native revolutionary forces or the Soviet Union or a combination of both. Yankee anti-colonialism faded out, and America ‘stepped in’. In the Middle East this happened during the period between the Suez crisis and the last Israeli war.

The American landings in Lebanon in 1958 were designed to stem a high tide of revolution in that area, especially in Iraq. Since then, the United States, no doubt relying to some extent on Soviet ‘moderation’, has avoided open and direct military involvement in the Middle East and maintained a posture of detachment. This does not make the American presence any less real.

How would you situate Israel’s policy in this perspective?

The Israelis have, of course, acted on their own motives, and not merely to suit the convenience of American policy. That the great mass of Israelis believe themselves to be menaced by Arab hostility need not be doubted. That some ‘bloodthirsty’ Arab declarations about ‘wiping Israel off the map’ made Israeli flesh creep is evident. Haunted by the memories of the Jewish tragedy in Europe, the Israelis feel isolated and encircled by the ‘teeming’ millions of a hostile Arab world.

Nothing was easier for their own propagandists, aided by Arab verbal threats, than to play up the fear of another ‘final solution’ threatening the Jews, this time in Asia. Conjuring up Biblical myths and all the ancient religious-national symbols of Jewish history, the propagandists whipped up that frenzy of belligerence, arrogance, and fanaticism, of which the Israelis gave such startling displays as they rushed to Sinai and the Wailing Wall and to Jordan and the walls of Jericho.

Behind the frenzy and arrogance there lay Israel’s suppressed sense of guilt towards the Arabs, the feeling that the Arabs would never forget or forgive the blows Israel had inflicted on them: the seizure of their land, the fate of a million or more refugees, and repeated military defeats and humiliations. Driven half-mad by fear of Arab revenge, the Israelis have, in their overwhelming majority, accepted the ‘doctrine’ behind their government’s policy, the ‘doctrine’ that holds that Israel’s security lies in periodic warfare which every few years must reduce the Arab states to impotence.

Western outpost in the Middle East

Yet whatever their own motives and fears, the Israelis are not independent agents. The factors of Israel’s dependence were to some extent ‘built in’ in its history over two decades. All Israeli governments have staked Israel’s existence on the ‘Western orientation’. This alone would have sufficed to turn Israel into a Western outpost in the Middle East, and so to involve it in the great conflict between imperialism (or neo-colonialism) and the Arab peoples struggling for their emancipation.

Other factors have been at play as well. Israel’s economy has depended for its tenuous balance and growth on foreign Zionist financial aid, especially on American donations. These donations have been a curse in disguise for the new state. They have enabled the government to manage its balance of payments in a way in which no country in the world can do without engaging in any trade with its neighbours. It has distorted Israel’s economic structure by encouraging the growth of a large, unproductive sector and a standard of living which is not related to the country’s own productivity and earnings.

Israel has in effect lived well above its means. Over many years nearly half of Israel’s food was imported from the West. As the American Administration exempts from taxation the earnings and profits earmarked as donations for Israel, Washington has held its hand on the purses on which Israel’s economy depends. Washington could at any time hit Israel by refusing the tax exemption (even though this would lose it the Jewish vote in elections). The threat of such a sanction, never uttered but always present, and occasionally hinted at, has been enough to align Israeli policy firmly with the United States.

Years ago, when I visited Israel, a high Israeli official listed to me the factories that they could not build because of American objections — among them steel mills and plants producing agricultural machinery. On the other hand, there was a list of virtually useless factories turning out fantastic amounts of plastic kitchen utensils, toys, etc. Nor could any Israeli administration ever feel free to consider seriously Israel’s vital, long-term need for trade and close economic ties with its Arab neighbours or for improving economic relations with the USSR and Eastern Europe.

Spirit of racial exclusiveness and superiority

Economic dependence has affected Israel’s domestic policy and ‘cultural atmosphere’ in other ways as well. The American donor is the most important foreign investor operating in the Holy Land. A wealthy American Jew, a ‘worldly businessman’ among his gentile associates and friends in New York, Philadelphia, or Detroit, he is at heart proud to be a member of the Chosen People, and in Israel exercises his influence in favour of religious obscurantism and reaction.

A fervent believer in free enterprise, he views with a hostile eye even the mild ‘socialism’ of the Histadrut^[6] and the Kibbutzim,^[7] and has done his bit in taming it. Above all, he has helped the rabbis to maintain their stranglehold on legislation and much of the education; and so to keep alive the spirit of racial-talmudic exclusiveness and superiority. All this has fed and inflamed the antagonism towards the Arabs.

The cold war^[8] imparted great momentum to the reactionary trends and exacerbated the Arab-Jewish conflict. Israel was firmly committed to anti-communism. True, Stalin’s policy in his last years, outbreaks of anti-semitism in the USSR, anti-Jewish motifs in the trials of Slansky, Rajk and Kostov,^[9] and Soviet encouragement of even the most irrational forms of Arab nationalism, all bore their share of responsibility for Israel’s attitude.

Yet it should not be forgotten that Stalin had been Israel’s godfather; that it was with Czechoslovak munitions, supplied on Stalin’s orders, that the Jews had fought the British occupation army — and the Arabs — in 1947–48; and that the Soviet envoy was the first to vote for the recognition of the State of Israel by the United Nations. It may be argued that Stalin’s change of attitude towards Israel was itself a reaction to Israel’s alignment with the West. And in the post-Stalin era the Israeli governments have persisted in this alignment.

Irreconcilable hostility to Arab aspirations for emancipation from the West thus became the axiom of Israeli policy. Hence Israel’s role in 1956, in the Suez war. Israel’s Social Democratic ministers, no less than Western colonialists, have embraced a raison d’état which sees its highest wisdom in keeping the Arabs backward and divided and playing their reactionary Hashemite^[10] and other feudal elements against the Republican, national-revolutionary forces.

Israel prepared to invade Arab neighbors

Early this year, when it seemed that a republican uprising or coup might overthrow King Hussein, Mr. Eshkol’s^[11] government made no bones about it that in case of a ‘Nasserite coup’ in Amman, Israeli troops would march into Jordan. And the prelude to the events of last June was provided by Israel’s adoption of a menacing attitude towards Syria’s new régime which it denounced as ‘Nasserite’ or even ‘ultra-Nasserite’, (for Syria’s government appeared to be a shade more anti-imperialist and radical than Egypt’s).

Did Israel, in fact, plan to attack Syria some time in May, as Soviet Intelligence Services believed and as Moscow warned Nasser? We do not know. It was as a result of this warning, and with Soviet encouragement, that Nasser ordered mobilization and concentration of troops on the Sinai frontier. If Israel had such a plan, Nasser’s move may have delayed the attack on Syria by a few weeks. If Israel had no such plan, its behaviour gave to its anti-Syrian threats the kind of plausibility that Arab threats had in Israeli eyes.

In any case, Israel’s rulers were quite confident that their aggressiveness vis-à-vis either Syria or Egypt would meet with Western sympathy and bring them reward. This calculation underlay their decision to strike the pre-emptive blow on June 5th.^[12]

They were absolutely sure of American, and to some extent British, moral, political, and economic support. They knew that no matter how far they went in attacking the Arabs, they could count on American diplomatic protection or, at the very least, on American official indulgence. And they were not mistaken.

The White House and the Pentagon could not fail to appreciate men who for their own reasons, were out to put down the Arab enemies of American neo-colonialism. General Dayan^[13] acted as a kind of Marshal Ky^[14] for the Middle East and appeared to be doing his job with startling speed, efficiency and ruthlessness. He was, and is, a much cheaper and far less embarrassing ally than Ky.

(This was the first of a four-part series. The remainder can be found in Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4.)

NOTES

[1] The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR, often shortened to Soviet Union) was created in the years following the Russian revolution of 1917, the first successful socialist revolution. The revolution subsequently degenerated, and a bureaucratic caste led by Joseph Stalin came to rule the USSR. (The reasons for this degeneration are explained by Leon Trotsky, one of the revolution’s central leaders, in The Revolution Betrayed.) The Soviet Union was dissolved in December 1991, and capitalism was subsequently re-established in the former USSR.

[2] Kwame Nkrumah was Ghana’s first prime minister after the country declared its independence from British colonialism in 1957. He was deposed in a coup in 1966.

[3] In a 1965 military coup, General Suharto overthrew the Indonesian government led by President Sukarno. The brutal anti-communist repression that followed led to at least 500,000 deaths (some estimates are as high as 1.2 million). Suharto remained in power more than 30 years. Prior to the coup, the Indonesian Communist Party was the third largest in the world with several million members. In 2017 the Associated Press reported on the release of previously classified U.S. documents that confirm Washington supported the coup, the subsequent massacre, and the new repressive government.

[4] On April 21, 1967, a group of colonels in Greece overthrew a caretaker government, a month before national elections that George Papandreou’s Center Union party was favored to win. The decade leading up to the coup had been marked by a labor upsurge and youth radicalization. The military junta stayed in power for seven years. The U.S.-backed dictatorship was characterized by extreme anti-communism, curtailment of democratic rights, and widespread imprisonment, torture, killings, and exile of political opponents.

[5] The Suez war of 1956 refers to the Israeli invasion of Egypt and the Gaza Strip, quickly joined by the United Kingdom and France, following Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser’s nationalization of the Suez Canal. The invaders subsequently withdrew, and Egypt retained ownership of the canal.

[6] The Histadrut is Israel’s national trade union federation.

[7] Kibbutzim are small Israeli towns historically centered around collective farms.

[8] The “cold war” refers to the period following the end of WWII, when the U.S. and other imperialist powers felt unable to pursue open military aggression against the USSR and its allies in Eastern Europe in order to overthrow the workers’ states in those countries and reestablish capitalism there. This period, however, was marked by a number of hot wars such as the Korean war and the U.S. war on Vietnam.

[9] Rudolf Slánský, László Rajk and Traicho Kostov were victims of frame-up trials conducted by Stalinist regimes in Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Bulgaria in the late 1940s and early 1950s.

[10] The House of Hashim refers to the ruling royal family of Jordan, led from 1952 to 1999 by King Hussein.

[11] Levi Eshkol was Israel’s prime minister from 1963 to 1969.

[12] The Six-Day War began with the Israeli invasion of Egypt on June 5, 1967.

[13] Moshe Dayan, a prominent military leader in the country’s nascent military, was Israel’s defense minister during the Six-Day War.

[14] Nguyễn Cao Kỳ was chief of the South Vietnamese air force and then led a military junta from 1965 to 1967.

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