1967 interview with Marxist scholar Isaac Deutscher (Part 4)

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 last of which follows.

(This is the last of a four-part series. The previous can be found in Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3.)

ON THE ISRAELI-ARAB WAR (IV)

What solutions do you see to this situation? Can the Arab-Israeli conflict still be resolved in any rational manner?

I do not believe that it can be so resolved by military means. To be sure, no one can deny the Arab states the right to reconstitute their armed forces to some extent. But what they need far more urgently is a social and political strategy and new methods in their struggle for emancipation. This cannot be a purely negative strategy dominated by the anti-Israeli obsession. They may refuse to parley with Israel as long as Israel has not given up its conquests. They will necessarily resist the occupation régime on the Jordan and in the Gaza strip. But this need not mean a renewal of war.

The strategy that can yield the Arabs far greater gain than those that can be obtained in any Holy War or through a pre-emptive blow, a strategy that would bring them real victory, a civilized victory, must be centered on the imperative and urgent need for an intensive modernization of the structure of the Arab economy and of Arab politics and on the need for a genuine integration of Arab national life, which is still broken up by the old, inherited and imperialist-sponsored frontiers and divisions. These aims can be promoted only if the revolutionary and socialist tendencies in Arab politics are strengthened and developed.

Nationalism and internationalism

Finally, Arab nationalism will be incomparably more effective as a liberating force if it is disciplined and rationalized by an element of internationalism that will enable the Arabs to approach the problem of Israel more realistically than hitherto. They cannot go on denying Israel’s right to exist and indulging in bloodthirsty rhetoric.

Economic growth, industrialization, education, more efficient organization and more sober policies are bound to give the Arabs what sheer numbers and anti-Israeli fury have not been able to give them, namely an actual preponderance which should almost automatically reduce Israel to its modest proportions and its proper role in the Middle East.

This is, of course, not a short-term programme. Yet its realization need not take too much time; and there is no shorter way to emancipation. The short cuts of demagogy, revenge, and war have proved disastrous enough.

Meanwhile, Arab policy should be based on a direct appeal to the Israeli people over the heads of the Israeli government, on an appeal to the workers and the kibbutzim. The latter should be freed from their fears by clear assurances and pledges that Israel’s legitimate interests are respected and that Israel may even be welcome as member of a future Middle Eastern Federation. This would cause the orgy of Israeli chauvinism to subside and would stimulate opposition to Eshkol’s and Dayan’s policy of conquest and domination. The capacity of Israeli workers to respond to such an appeal should not be underrated.

More independence from the Great Power game is also necessary. That game has distorted the social-political development of the Middle East. I have shown how much American influence has done to give Israel’s policy its present repulsive and reactionary character.

But Russian influence has also done something to warp Arab minds by feeding them with arid slogans, and encouraging demagogy, while Moscow’s egoism and opportunism have fostered disillusionment and cynicism. If Middle East policy continues to be merely a plaything of the Great Powers, the prospect will be bleak indeed. Neither Jews nor Arabs will be able to break out of their vicious spirals. This is what we, of the Left, should be telling both the Arabs and the Jews as clearly and bluntly as we can.

The crisis clearly caught the Left by surprise and found it disoriented and divided, both here and in France, and, it seems, in the United States as well. In the States fears have been expressed that the division over Israel might even split the movement against the war in Vietnam.

Yes, the confusion has been undeniable and widespread. I shall not speak here of such ‘friends of Israel’ as Messrs Mollet and his company, who like Lord Avon^[1] and Selwyn Lloyd,^[2] saw in this war a continuation of the Suez campaign and their revenge for their discomfiture in 1956. Nor shall I waste words on the right-wing Zionist lobby in the Labour Party. But even on the ‘extreme Left’ of that party men like Sidney Silverman behaved in a way as if designed to illustrate someone’s saying: ‘Scratch a Jewish left-winger and you find only a Zionist.’

But the confusion showed itself even further on the Left and affected people with an otherwise unimpeachable record of struggle against imperialism. A French writer known for his courageous stand against the wars in Algeria and Vietnam this time called for solidarity with Israel, declaring that if Israel’s survival demanded American intervention, he would favour it and even raise the cry ‘Vive le President Johnson’. Didn’t it occur to him how incongruous it was to cry ‘A bas Johnson!’ in Vietnam and ‘Vive!’ in Israel?

Jean-Paul Sartre also called, though with reservations, for solidarity with Israel, but then spoke frankly of the confusion in his own mind and its reasons. During the Second World War, he said, as a member of the Resistance he learned to look upon the Jew as upon a brother to be defended in all circumstances. During the Algerian war the Arabs were his brothers, and he stood by them. The present conflict was therefore for him a fratricidal struggle in which he was unable to exercise cool judgment and was overwhelmed by conflicting emotions.

‘I am speaking as a Marxist of Jewish origin’

Still, we must exercise our judgment and must not allow it to be clouded by emotions and memories, however deep or haunting. We should not allow even invocations of Auschwitz to blackmail us into supporting the wrong cause. I am speaking as a Marxist of Jewish origin, whose next-of-kin perished in Auschwitz and whose relatives live in Israel. To justify or condone Israel’s wars against the Arabs is to render Israel a very bad service indeed and to harm its own long-term interest. Israel’s security, let me repeat, was not enhanced by the wars of 1956 and 1967; it was undermined and compromised.

The ‘friends of Israel’ have in fact abetted Israel in a ruinous course.

They have also, willy-nilly, abetted the reactionary mood that took hold of Israel during the crisis. It was only with disgust that I could watch on television the scenes from Israel in those days; the displays of the conquerors’ pride and brutality; the outbursts of chauvinism; and the wild celebrations of the inglorious triumph, all contrasting sharply with the pictures of Arab suffering and desolation, the treks of Jordanian refugees and the bodies of Egyptian soldiers killed by thirst in the desert.

I looked at the medieval figures of the rabbis and Khassidim^[3] jumping with joy at the Wailing Wall; and I felt how the ghosts of Talmudic obscurantism — and I know these only too well — crowded in on the country, and how the reactionary atmosphere had grown dense and stifling.

Then came the many interviews with General Dayan, the hero and saviour, with the political mind of a regimental sergeant-major, ranting about annexations and venting a raucous callousness about the fate of the Arabs in the conquered areas. (‘What do they matter to me?’ ‘As far as I am concerned, they may stay or they may go.’)

Already wrapped in a phoney military legend — the legend is phoney for Dayan neither planned nor conducted the six days’ campaign — he cut a rather sinister figure, suggesting the candidate to the dictator’s post: the hint was conveyed that if the civilian parties get too ‘soft’ on the Arabs this new Joshua, this mini-de Gaulle,^[4] will teach them a lesson, himself take power, and raise Israel’s ‘glory’ even higher.

And behind Dayan there was Begin,^[5] Minister and leader of the extreme right-wing Zionists, who had long claimed even Trans-Jordania^[6] as part of ‘historic’ Israel. A reactionary war inevitably breeds the heroes, the moods, and the consequences in which its character and aims are faithfully mirrored.

The Jewish tragedy finds a dismal sequel

On a deeper historical level, the Jewish tragedy finds in Israel a dismal sequel. Israel’s leaders exploit in self-justification, and over-exploit Auschwitz and Treblinka;^[7] but their actions mock the real meaning of the Jewish tragedy.

European Jews paid a horrible price for the role they had played in past ages, and not of their own choosing, as representatives of a market economy, of ‘money’, among peoples living in a natural, money-less, agricultural economy.

They were the conspicuous carriers of early capitalism, traders and money lenders, in pre-capitalist society. As modern capitalism developed, their role in it, though still conspicuous, became less than secondary.

In Eastern Europe the bulk of the Jewish people consisted of poverty-stricken artisans, small traders, proletarians, semi-proletarians, and outright paupers. But the image of the rich Jewish merchant and usurer (the descendent also of Christ’s crucifiers) lived on in Gentile folklore and remained engraved on the popular mind, stirring distrust and fear. The Nazis seized this image, magnified it to colossal dimensions, and constantly held it before the eyes of the masses.

‘Socialism of Fools’

August Bebel^[8] once said that anti-semitism is the ‘socialism of the fools’. There was plenty of that kind of ‘socialism’ about, and all too little of the genuine socialism, in the era of the Great Slump, and of the mass unemployment and mass despair of the 1930’s.

The European working classes were unable to overthrow the bourgeois order; but the hatred of capitalism was intense and widespread enough to force an outlet for itself and focus on a scapegoat. Among the lower middle classes, the lumpenbourgeoisie, and the lumpenproletariat a frustrated anticapitalism merged with fear of communism and neurotic xenophobia.

These moods fed on crumbs of a mouldering historic reality which Nazism used to the utmost. The impact of Nazi Jew-baiting was so powerful in part because the image of the Jew as the alien and vicious ‘blood-sucker’ was to all too many people still an actuality. This accounted also for the relative indifference and the passivity with which so many non-Germans viewed the slaughter of the Jews. The socialism of the fools gleefully watched Shylock led to the gas chamber.

Israel promised not merely to give the survivors of the European Jewish communities a ‘National Home’’ but also to free them from the fatal stigma. This was the message of the kibbutzim, the Histadrut, and even of Zionism at large. The Jews were to cease to be unproductive elements, shopkeepers, economic and cultural interlopers, carriers of capitalism. They were to settle in ‘their own land’ as ‘productive workers’.

Yet they now appear in the Middle East once again in the invidious role of agents not so much of their own, relatively feeble, capitalism, but of powerful western vested interests and as protégés of neo-colonialism. This is how the Arab world sees them, not without reason.

Once again, they arouse bitter emotions and hatreds in their neighbours, in all those who have ever been or still are victims of imperialism. What a fate it is for the Jewish people to be made to appear in this role!

As agents of early capitalism, they were still pioneers of progress in feudal society; as agents of the late, over-ripe, imperialist capitalism of our days, their role is altogether lamentable; and they are placed once again in the position of potential scapegoats. Is Jewish history to come full circle in such a way? This may well be the outcome of Israel’s ‘victories’; and of this Israel’s real friends must warn it.

The Arabs, on the other hand, need to be put on guard against the socialism or the anti-imperialism of the fools. We trust that they will not succumb to it; and that they will learn from their defeat and recover to lay the foundations of a truly progressive, a socialist Middle East.

London, 20 June 1967.

(This was the last of a four-part series. The previous can be found in Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3.)

NOTES

[1] Lord Avon is a reference to Anthony Eden, the United Kingdom’s prime minister of at the time of the Suez War. Eden also held the title Earl of Avon.

[2] Selwyn Lloyd was British foreign minister in the government led by Eden during the Suez War.

[3] Khassidim (or Chassidim) refers to a religious group within Judaism that has its roots in eastern Europe of the 18^th century.

[4] Charles de Gaulle served as prime minister and then president of France. He is widely seen as the embodiment of the powerful executive figure in the “strong state.”

[5] Menachem Begin was a political figure on the right wing of Israeli politics for many years. He was Israel’s prime minister from 1977 to 1983. He and Egyptian leader Anwar Sadat signed the 1979 treaty between Israel and Egypt. He led the Israeli government when it invaded Lebanon in 1982. He was a founder of the Likud party, the party of current Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

[6] Prior to its independence from Britain in 1946, Jordan was known as the Emirate of Trans-Jordan.

[7] Treblinka, established in 1941, was another of the “death camps” that formed part of the Nazi system of concentration camps.

[8] August Bebel (1840 – 1913) was a central leader of German and international Marxism.

If you appreciate this article, subscribe to World-Outlook (for free) by clicking on the link below.

Type your email in the box below and click on “SUBSCRIBE.” You will receive a notification in your in-box on which you will have to click to confirm your subscription.