1967 interview with Marxist scholar Isaac Deutscher (Part 2)

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 second of which follows.

(This is the second of a four-part series. The remainder can be found in Part 1, Part 3, and Part 4.)

ON THE ISRAELI-ARAB WAR (II)

Could we now turn to the Arab side of the picture, and their behaviour on the eve of the crisis?

The Arab behaviour, especially Nasser’s divided mind and hesitation on the eve of hostilities, present indeed a striking contrast to Israel’s determination and uninhibited aggressiveness. Having, with Soviet encouragement, moved his troops to the Sinai frontier, and even put his Russian-made missiles in position, Nasser then, without consulting Moscow, proclaimed the blockade of the Straits of Tiran.^[1]

This was a provocative move, though practically of very limited significance. The western powers did not consider it important enough to try and ‘test’ the blockade. It provided Nasser with a prestige gain and enabled him to claim that he had wrested from Israel the last fruit of their 1956 victory. (Before the Suez war Israeli ships could not pass these Straits.) The Israelis played up the blockade as a mortal danger to their economy, which it was not; and they replied by mobilizing their forces and moving them to the frontiers.

Soviet propaganda still continued to encourage the Arabs in public. However, a conference of Middle Eastern Communist Parties held in May (its resolutions were summarized in Pravda^[2]) was strangely reticent about the crisis and allusively critical of Nasser. What was more important were curious diplomatic manoeuvres behind the scenes.

On May 26th, in the dead of night (at 2.30 a.m.) the Soviet Ambassador woke up Nasser to give him a grave warning that the Egyptian army must not be the first to open fire. Nasser complied. The compliance was so thorough that he not only refrained from starting hostilities but took no precautions whatsoever against the possibility of an Israeli attack: he left his airfields undefended and his planes grounded and uncamouflaged. He did not even bother to mine the Tiran Straits or to place a few guns on their shores (as the Israelis found out to their surprise when they came there).

Moscow’s bungling

All this suggests hopeless bungling on Nasser’s part and on the part of the Egyptian Command. But the real bunglers sat in the Kremlin. Brezhnev’s and Kosygin’s^[3] behaviour during these events was reminiscent of Khrushchev’s^[4] during the Cuban crisis,^[5] though it was even more muddle-headed. The pattern was the same. In the first phase there was needless provocation of the other side and a reckless move towards the ‘brink’; in the next sudden panic and a hasty retreat; and then followed frantic attempts to save face and cover up the traces.

Having excited Arab fears, encouraged them to risky moves, promised to stand by them, and having brought out their own naval units into the Mediterranean, to counter the moves of the American Sixth Fleet, the Russians then tied Nasser hand and foot.

Why did they do it? As the tension was mounting, the ‘hot line’ between the Kremlin and the White House went into action. The two super-powers agreed to avoid direct intervention and to curb the parties to the conflict. If the Americans went through the motions of curbing the Israelis, they must have done it so perfunctorily, or with so many winks that the Israelis felt, in fact, encouraged to go ahead with their plan for the preemptive blow. (We have, at any rate, not heard of the American Ambassador waking up the Israeli Prime Minister to warn him that the Israelis must not be the first to open fire.)

The Soviet curb on Nasser was heavy, rude, and effective. Even so, Nasser’s failure to take elementary military precautions remains something of a puzzle. Did the Soviet Ambassador in the course of his nocturnal visit tell Nasser that Moscow was sure that the Israelis would not strike first? Had Washington given Moscow such an assurance? And was Moscow so gullible as to take it at face value and act on it? It seems almost incredible that this should have been so. But only some such version of the events can account for Nasser’s inactivity and for Moscow’s stunned surprise at the outbreak of hostilities.

Behind all this bungling there loomed the central contradiction of Soviet policy. On the one hand the Soviet leaders see in the preservation of the international status quo, including the social status quo, the essential condition of their national security and of ‘peaceful coexistence’. They are therefore anxious to keep at a ‘safe distance’ from storm centres of class conflict in the world and to avoid dangerous foreign entanglements.

On the other hand, they cannot, for ideological and power-political reasons, avoid altogether dangerous entanglements. They cannot quite keep at a safe distance when American neo-colonialism clashes directly or indirectly with its Afro-Asian and Latin-American enemies, who look to Moscow as their friend and protector.

In normal times this contradiction is only latent, Moscow works for détente and rapprochement with the USA; and it cautiously aids and arms its Afro-Asian or Cuban friends. But sooner or later the moment of crisis comes, and the contradiction explodes in Moscow’s face. Soviet policy must then choose between its allies and protégés working against the status quo, and its own commitment to the status quo. When the choice is pressing and ineluctable, it opts for the status quo.

The dilemma is real and in the nuclear age dangerous enough. But it confronts the USA as well, for the USA is just as much interested as is the USSR in avoiding world war and nuclear conflict. This, however, limits its freedom of action and of political-ideological offensive far less than it restricts Soviet freedom. Washington is far less afraid of the possibility that some move by one of its protégés, or its own military intervention might lead to a direct confrontation of the superpowers. After the Cuban crisis and the war in Vietnam, the Arab-Israeli war has once again sharply illuminated the difference.

One critical problem is obviously whether the Israelis have ever had any chance of establishing normal or merely tolerable relations with the Arabs? Did they ever have any option at all? To what extent was the last war the outcome of a long chain of irreversible events?

A parable about Israeli-Arab relations

Yes, to some extent the present situation has been determined by the whole course of Arab-Israeli relations since the Second World War and even since the First. Yet I believe that some options were open to the Israelis. Allow me to quote to you a parable with the help of which I once tried to present this problem to an Israeli audience:

A man once jumped from the top floor of a burning house in which many members of his family had already perished. He managed to save his life; but as he was falling to the ground, he hit a person standing down below and broke that person’s legs and arms. The jumping man had no choice; yet to the man with the broken limbs he was the cause of his misfortune.

If both behaved rationally, they would not become enemies. The man who escaped from the blazing house, having recovered, would have tried to help and console the other sufferer; and the latter who might have realized that he was the victim of circumstances over which neither of them had control.

But look what happens when these people behave irrationally. The injured man blames the other for his misery and swears to make him pay for it. The other one, afraid of the crippled man’s revenge, insults him, kicks him and beats him up whenever they meet. The kicked man again swears revenge and is again punched and punished. The bitter enmity, so whimsical at first, hardens and comes to overshadow the whole existence of both men and to poison their minds.

You will, I am sure, recognize yourselves (I said to my Israeli audience), the Israeli remnants of European Jewry, in the man who jumped from the blazing house. The other character represents, of course, the Palestine Arabs, more than a million of them, who have lost their lands and their homes. They are resentful; they gaze from across the frontiers on their old native places; they raid you stealthily and swear revenge. You punch and kick them mercilessly; you have shown that you know how to do it. But what is the sense of it? And what is the prospect?

Responsibility for the tragedy of European Jews

The responsibility for the tragedy of European Jews, for Auschwitz, Majdanek,^[6] and the slaughters in the ghetto, rests entirely on our western bourgeois ‘civilization’, of which Nazism was the legitimate, even though degenerate, offspring. Yet it was the Arabs who were made to pay the price for the crimes the West committed towards the Jews. They are still made to pay it, for the ‘guilty conscience’ of the West is, of course, pro-Israeli and anti-Arab. And how easily Israel has allowed itself to be bribed and fooled by the false ‘conscience money’.

A rational relationship between Israelis and Arabs might have been possible if Israel had at least attempted to establish it, if the man who jumped from the burning house had tried to make friends with the innocent victim of his descent and compensate him. This did not happen. Israel never even recognized the Arab grievance.

From the outset Zionism worked towards the creation of a purely Jewish state and was glad to rid the country of its Arab inhabitants. No Israeli government has ever seriously looked for any opportunity to remove or assuage the grievance. They refused even to consider the fate of the huge mass of refugees unless the Arab states first recognized Israel, unless, that is, the Arabs surrendered politically before starting negotiations.

Perhaps this might still be excused as bargaining tactics. The disastrous aggravation of Arab-Israeli relations was brought about by the Suez war, when Israel unashamedly acted as the spearhead of the old bankrupt European imperialisms in their last common stand in the Middle East, in their last attempt to maintain their grip on Egypt. The Israelis did not have to align themselves with the shareholders of the Suez Canal Company. The pros and cons were clear; there was no question of any mixture of rights and wrongs on either side. The Israelis put themselves totally in the wrong, morally and politically.

Nationalism of oppressed and oppressors

On the face of it, the Arab-Israeli conflict is only a clash of two rival nationalisms, each moving within the vicious circle of its self-righteous and inflated ambitions. From the viewpoint of an abstract internationalism nothing would be easier than to dismiss both as equally worthless and reactionary. However, such a view would ignore the social and political realities of the situation.

The nationalism of the people in semi-colonial or colonial countries, fighting for their independence must not be put on the same moral-political level as the nationalism of conquerors and oppressors. The former has its historic justification and progressive aspect which the latter has not. Clearly, Arab nationalism, unlike the Israeli, still belongs to the former category.

Yet even the nationalism of the exploited and oppressed should not be viewed uncritically, for there are various phases in its development. In one phase the progressive aspirations prevail; in another reactionary tendencies come to the surface.

From the moment when independence is won or nearly won, nationalism tends to shed its revolutionary aspect altogether and turns into a retrograde ideology. We have seen this happening in India, Indonesia, Israel, and to some extent even in China. And even in the revolutionary phase each nationalism has its streak of irrationality, an inclination to exclusiveness, national egoism and racism. Arab nationalism despite all its historic merits and progressive functions, also contains such ingredients.

The June crisis has revealed some of the basic weaknesses of Arab political thought and action: the lack of political strategy; a proneness to emotional self-intoxication; and an excessive reliance on nationalist demagogy. These weaknesses were among the decisive causes of the Arab defeat.

By indulging in threats of the destruction of Israel and even of ‘extermination’ — and how empty these threats were has been amply demonstrated by the Arabs’ utter military unpreparedness — some of Egypt’s and Jordan’s propagandists provided plenty of grist to Israeli chauvinism, and enabled Israel’s government to work up the mass of its people into the paroxysm of fear and ferocious aggressiveness which then burst upon Arab heads.

It is a truism that war is a continuation of policy.

The Arab regimes

The six days’ war has shown up the relative immaturity of the present Arab régimes. The Israelis owe their triumph not merely to the pre-emptive blow, but also to a more modern economic, political, and military organization. To some extent the war drew a balance on the decade of Arab development since the Suez war and has revealed its grave inadequacies. The modernization of the socio-economic structures of Egypt and the other Arab states and of Arab political thinking has proceeded far more slowly than people inclined to idealize the present Arab régimes have assumed.

The persisting backwardness is, of course, rooted in socio-economic conditions. But ideology and methods of organization are in themselves factors of weakness. I have in mind the single party system, the cult of Nasserism, and the absence of free discussion. All this has greatly hampered the political education of the masses and the work of socialist enlightenment.

The negative results have made themselves felt on various levels. When major decisions of policy depend on a more or less autocratic Leader, there is in normal times no genuine popular participation in the political processes, no vigilant and active consciousness, no initiative from below. This has had many consequences, even military ones.

The Israeli pre-emptive blow, delivered with conventional weapons, would not have had such devastating impact if Egypt’s armed forces had been accustomed to relying on the initiative of individual officers and soldiers. Local commanders would then have taken the elementary defensive precautions without waiting for orders from above. Military inefficiency reflected here a wider and deeper, social-political weakness.

The military-bureaucratic methods of Nasserism hamper also the political integration of the Arab movement of liberation. Nationalist demagogy flourishes only all too easily; but it is no substitute for a real impulse to national unity and for a real mobilization of popular forces against the divisive, feudal and reactionary elements. We have seen how, during the emergency, excessive reliance on a single Leader made the fate of the Arab states dependent in fact on great Power intervention and accidents of diplomatic manoeuvre.

(This was the second of a four-part series. The remainder can be found in Part 1, Part 3, and Part 4.)

NOTES

[1] The Straits of Tiran are an important shipping passage between the Sinai and Arabian peninsulas that connect the Gulf of Aqaba and the Red Sea.

[2] Pravda was, at the time of this interview, the leading government newspaper of the Soviet Union.

[3] Leonid Breznev was at that time general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU). Alexei Kosygin was then Premier of the USSR.

[4] Nikita Kruschchev was both general secretary of the CPSU and premier of the USSR until he was removed and replaced by Breznev and Kosygin in 1964.

[5] Widely known as the “Cuban Missile Crisis,” this refers to events that included a U.S. naval blockade of Cuba and threats of a U.S. invasion of the island. The best source of information is October 1962 – The Missile Crisis As Seen from Cuba.

[6] Auschwitz (established 1940) and Majdanek (established 1941), both located in modern-day Poland, were part of the concentration camp system established by Nazi Germany to detain Jews and other political prisoners beginning in 1933. Both are considered to be among the “death camps” focused on extermination of Jews and others (including Roma, or Gypsies, communists, and homosexuals).

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