1967 interview with Marxist scholar Isaac Deutscher (Part 3)

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 again 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 third of which follows.

(This is the third of a four-part series. The remainder can be found in Part 1, Part 2 and Part 4.)

ON THE ISRAELI-ARAB WAR (III)

To return to Israel, what use is it going to make of victory? How do the Israelis visualize their further role in that part of the world?

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.

Yet as the Prussia of the Middle East, Israel can be only a feeble parody of the original. The Prussians were at least able to use their victories for uniting in their Reich all German-speaking peoples living outside the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Germany’s neighbours were divided among themselves by interest, history, religion, and language. Bismarck, Wilhelm II, and Hitler could play them off against one another.

The Israelis are surrounded by Arabs only. Attempts to play the Arab states against one another are bound to fail in the end. The Arabs were at loggerheads with one another in 1948, when Israel waged its first war; they were far less divided in 1956, during Israel’s second war; and they formed a common front in 1967. They may prove far more firmly united in any future confrontation with Israel.

‘Rush yourself to the grave’

The Germans have summed up their own experience in the bitter phrase: ‘Man kann sich totsiegen!’ ‘You can rush yourself victoriously into your grave.’  This is what the Israelis have been doing. They have bitten off much more than they can swallow. In the conquered territories and in Israel there are now nearly a million and five hundred thousand Arabs, well over 40 per cent of the total population.

Will the Israelis expel this mass of Arabs in order to hold ‘securely’ the conquered lands? This would create a new refugee problem, more dangerous and larger than the old one. Will they give up the conquered territories? No, say most of their leaders. Ben Gurion,^[1] the evil spirit of Israeli chauvinism, urges the creation of an ‘Arab Palestinian State’ on the Jordan, that would be an Israeli Protectorate.

Can Israel expect that the Arabs will accept such a Protectorate? That they will not fight it tooth and nail? None of the Israeli parties is prepared even to contemplate a bi-national Arab-Israeli state. Meanwhile great numbers of Arabs have been ‘induced’ to leave their homes on the Jordan, and the treatment of those who have stayed behind is far worse than that of the Arab minority in Israel that was kept under martial law for 19 years.

Yes, this victory is worse for Israel than a defeat. Far from giving Israel a higher degree of security, it has rendered it much more insecure. If Arab revenge and extermination is what the Israelis feared, they have behaved as if they were bent on turning a bogey into an actual menace.

Did Israel’s victory bring any real gain to the United States? Has it furthered the American ideological offensive in Afro-Asia?

There was a moment, at the cease-fire, when it looked as if Egypt’s defeat led to Nasser’s downfall and to the undoing of the policy associated with his name. If that had happened, the Middle East would have almost certainly been brought back into the Western sphere of influence. Egypt might have become another Ghana or Indonesia. This did not happen, however.

The Arab masses who came out in the streets and squares of Cairo, Damascus and Beirut to demand that Nasser should stay in office, prevented it happening. This was one of those rare historic popular impulses that redress or upset a political balance within a few moments. This time, in the hour of defeat, the initiative from below worked with immediate impact.

There are only very few cases in history when a people stood in this way by a defeated leader. The situation is, of course, still fluid. Reactionary influences will go on working within the Arab states to achieve something like a Ghanaian or Indonesian coup. But for the time being neo-colonialism has been denied the fruit of Israel’s ‘victory’.

Moscow’s influence and prestige have, as a result of these events, suffered a grave reverse. Is this a permanent loss or a temporary one? And is it likely to have an effect on political alignments in Moscow?

‘The Russians have let us down!’ was the bitter cry that came from Cairo, Damascus, and Beirut in June. And when the Arabs saw the Soviet delegate at the United Nations voting, in unison with the Americans, for a cease-fire to which no condition for a withdrawal of the Israeli troops was attached, they felt utterly betrayed. ‘The Soviet Union will now sink to the rank of a second or fourth-rate power,’ Nasser was reported to have told the Soviet Ambassador. The events appeared to justify the Chinese accusation of Soviet collusion with the United States.

The debacle aroused an alarm in Eastern Europe as well. ‘If the Soviet Union could let down Egypt like this, may it not also let us down when we are once again confronted by German aggression?’ the Poles and the Czechs wondered. The Yugoslavs, too, were outraged. Tito,^[2] Gomulka,^[3] and other leaders rushed to Moscow to demand an explanation and a rescue operation for the Arabs. This was all the more remarkable as the demand came from the ‘moderates’ and the ‘revisionists’ who normally stand for ‘peaceful coexistence’ and rapprochement with the USA. It was they who now spoke of Soviet ‘collusion with American imperialism’.

The Soviet leaders had to do something. The fact that the intervention of the Arab masses had saved the Nasser régime unexpectedly provided Moscow with fresh scope for manoeuvre. After the great let down, the Soviet leaders again came to the fore as the friends and protectors of the Arab states. A few spectacular gestures, breaking off diplomatic relations with Israel, and speeches at the United Nations cost them little. Even the White House showed ‘understanding’ for their ‘predicament’ and for the ‘tactical necessity’ which presently brought Kosygin to the United Nations Assembly.

Arab regimes sought Soviet military aid

However, something more than gestures was required to restore the Soviet position. The Arabs demanded that the Soviet Union should at once help them to re-build their military strength, the strength they had lost through compliance with Soviet advice. They asked for new planes, new tanks, new guns, new stocks of munitions.

But apart from the cost this involved — the value of the military equipment lost by Egypt alone is put at a billion pounds — the reconstitution of the Arab armed forces carries, from Moscow’s viewpoint, major political risks. The Arabs refuse to negotiate with Israel; they may well afford to leave Israel to choke on its victory. Rearmament is Cairo’s top priority. Israel has taught the Egyptians a lesson: next time the Egyptian air force may strike the pre-emptive blow. And Moscow has had to decide whether it will supply the weapons for the blow.

Moscow cannot favour the idea of such an Arab retaliation, but neither can it refuse to rearm Egypt. Yet Arab rearmament will almost certainly tempt Israel to interrupt the process and strike another pre-emptive blow, in which case the Soviet Union would once again be faced with the dilemma which has worsted it in May and June.

If Egypt were to strike first, the United States would almost certainly intervene. Its Sixth Fleet would not look on from the Mediterranean if the Israeli air force were knocked out and the Arabs were about to march into Jerusalem or Tel Aviv. If the USSR again kept out of the conflict, it would irretrievably destroy its international power position.^[4]

A week after the cease-fire the Soviet Chief of Staff was in Cairo; and Soviet advisers and experts crowded the hotels there, beginning to work on the reconstitution of Egypt’s armed forces. Yet Moscow cannot face with equanimity the prospect of an Arab-Israeli competition in pre-emptive blows and its wider implications. Probably the Soviet experts in Cairo were making haste slowly, while Soviet diplomacy tried to ‘win the peace’ for the Arabs after it had lost them the war. But even the most clever [person] playing for time cannot solve the central issue of Soviet policy.

How much longer can the Soviet Union adapt itself to the American forward push? How far can it retreat before the American economic-political and military offensives across the Afro-Asian area? Not for nothing did Krasnaya Zvezda^[5] already in June suggest that the current Soviet conception of peaceful coexistence might be in need of some revision.

The military, and not they alone, fear that Soviet retreats are increasing the dynamic of the American forward push; and that if this goes on a direct Soviet-American clash may become inevitable. If Brezhnev and Kosygin do not manage to cope with this issue, changes in leadership are quite possible. The Cuban and Vietnamese crises contributed to Khrushchev’s downfall. The full consequences of the Middle Eastern crisis have yet to unfold.

(This was the third of a four-part series. The remainder can be found in Part 1, Part 2 and Part 4.)

NOTES

[1] David Ben-Gurion was Israel’s first prime minister.

[2] Josip Broz Tito served as both prime minister and president of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, following World War II until his death in 1980.

[3] Wladyslaw Gomulka was First Secretary of the Polish United Workers Party (Communist Party) at the time of the Six-Day War.

[4] In fact, Egypt and Syria led an assault on Israel six years later in what is known as the “Yom Kippur War,” because the attack began on that Jewish holiday — October 6, 1973. Despite early military success, the Arab regimes did not win the war. As Deutscher predicted, the war sharply heightened tensions between Washington and Moscow. Under pressure from both, a ceasefire was agreed to on October 25. In the “Camp David Accords” of 1978 Israel returned the Sinai Peninsula to Egypt. The next year Egypt and Israel signed a peace treaty. Egypt became the first Arab country to officially recognize the state of Israel.

[5] Kranaya Zveda was the official newspaper of the Soviet Defense Ministry.

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