In a comment on Part 2 of ‘The Jewish Tragedy Finds in Israel a Dismal Sequel’ – 1967 interview with Marxist scholar Isaac Deutscher, Bruce Levine wrote:
“But Deutscher’s ‘parable’ is unbalanced and politically misleading. It suggests that Palestinian and Israeli Jews are equally responsible for the conflict there. It leaves out the role that the Zionist leaders played in deliberately directing the desperate European refugees toward Palestine and using them there to bolster colonization and expulsion of the Palestinians. It does not, thus, point the way toward supporting the struggle of the Palestinians against Israel. And, if I’m not mistaken, Deutscher himself did not support that struggle.”
Levine is referring to a parable Deutscher offered to an Israeli audience that begins: “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.”
DISCUSSION WITH OUR READERS
Readers can find Deutscher’s entire argument in the link above.
We do not read Deutscher’s words in the same way Levine does. The parable he refers to is one aspect of a much broader political explanation Deutscher develops in the interview.
Western ‘civilization’ responsible for tragedy of Jews
Levine appears to ignore the many related points Deutscher makes, including this one that immediately follows the parable to which Levine objects. Deutscher said:
“The responsibility for the tragedy of European Jews, for Auschwitz, Majdanek, 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’.”
He continued:
“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.”
We would also highlight other points Deutscher made that Levine apparently ignored:
“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,” said Deutscher.
“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.”
“Irreconcilable hostility to Arab aspirations for emancipation from the West thus became the axiom of Israeli policy,” he explained.
“The ‘friends of Israel’ have in fact abetted Israel in a ruinous course,” Deutscher added.
“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.”
Nationalism of oppressors and oppressed
Nor does Deutscher regard the nationalism of the oppressed and that of the oppressor as somehow equal. To the contrary, Deutscher said:
“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.”
We would add that Deutscher’s views on the political limitations of nationalism, even on the part of the oppressed, are well taken:
“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,” he said.
We believe Deutscher’s views are in keeping with those of V.I. Lenin, central leader of both the Russian Revolution and the Communist International (Comintern), including this point Lenin made in a report he gave to the second congress of the Comintern:
“We, as Communists, should and will support bourgeois-liberation movements in the colonies only when they are genuinely revolutionary, and when their exponents do not hinder our work of educating and organising in a revolutionary spirit the peasantry and the masses of the exploited.”
Lenin’s full report on The Commission on the National and Colonial Questions can be found here.
Marxist scholar George Novack, in his pamphlet How Can the Jews Survive? A Socialist Answer to Zionism, said this about Deutscher’s views:
“Indeed, because of their massacre during the Second World War, European Jews had a special claim upon the generosity of the civilized world.”
Deutscher, Novack said, “was fully aware of the predicament of the Jews — in which he was so intimately implicated — and he was sensitive to the aspirations behind the Zionist dream. Yet he rose above his individual sympathies and antipathies to take a broad view of the complex and excruciating problem from the vantage point of historical materialism, as a Marxist was obliged to do.”
Novack then introduced the very parable that Levine objects to. The editors of World-Outlook share Novack’s assessment.
Finally, Levine argues that Deutscher’s parable does not “point the way toward supporting the struggle of the Palestinians against Israel,” but then adds, “And, if I’m not mistaken, Deutscher himself did not support that struggle.”
Deutscher died in August 1967, within months of giving the interview. Thus, these were his last words on Israel and its oppression of the Palestinians. We don’t know how anyone can read the interview and come to Levine’s conclusion. If Levine has evidence that Deutscher “did not support that struggle,” we think he should provide it.
— World-Outlook editors
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Categories: Discussion with Readers, Palestine/Israel
Deutscher says ‘Israel should have done this,’ ‘Israel should have done that…’. ‘… should not have done the other thing.’ This is a far cry from saying (as the SWP correctly did in the 1960s) that there should *not be* an Israel, there should *not be* a Jewish state that was carved out of a majority-Arab country and was based on the dispossession of so many tens of thousands of Arabs. Calling retrospectively for attempts to compensate the oppressed nation for its oppression is not the same thing as supporting the struggle to remove the oppression.
I hadn’t expected World Outlook to use my very short comment as the occasion for such a lengthy rebuttal. But since it has, I feel obliged to correct its misunderstandings.
Isaac Deutscher was an anti-Zionist before the second world war. But the Jewish “holocaust” changed his mind. Thereafter, he became de facto a critical but definite partisan of the Israeli state. He made that painfully six years after Israel’s founding: Writing of the millions of Jews slaughtered by the Nazis, Deutscher wrote that Israel, “is their great, tragic posthumous offspring fighting for survival with breath-taking vitality.” If that wasn’t clear enough, he added this: “I have, of course, long since abandoned my anti-Zionism, which was based on a confidence in the European labour movement, or, more broadly, a confidence in European society and civilisation which that society and civilisation have not justified. For the remnants of European Jewry (is it only for them?) the Jewish state has become an historic necessity.” (Deutscher, “Israel’s Spiritual Climate,” The Reporter, 27 April and 11 May 1954)
In that essay, like the 1967 one , he compared the creation of Israel to jumping in order to escape death: “From a burning or sinking ship people jump no matter where – onto a lifeboat, a raft or a float. The jumping is for them an ‘historic necessity’, and the raft is in a sense the basis of their whole existence.” And he immediately adds, “I hope that Israelis or Zionists who happen to read this will not misunderstand the expression ‘raft state’. It describes the precariousness of Israel, but is not meant to belittle its constructive achievement.” (emphasis added)
He then noted how Zionists respond to a critic: “‘Ah, but show us the nation that has abandoned its statehood’, say my Israeli friends.” Deutscher’s response? “None has done so, of course, and it has not occurred to me to urge Israelis to do so.”
Four years later he was again arguing that the Jewish embrace of Israel was the unavoidable result of the Holocaust, even if he thought Zionism could not bear healthy fruit: “The world has compelled the Jew to embrace the nation-state and to make of it his pride and hope just at a time when there is little or no hope left in it [the nation-state]. You cannot blame the Jews for this; you must blame the world.” (Isaac Deutscher, “Message of the Non-Jewish Jew,” based on an essay originally in Universities and Left Review, September 1958)
Yes, it is true that Deutscher was quite capable of expressing regret at the way that Israel treated the Palestinians, even repeating Lenin’s observation that the nationalism of the oppressed was progressive while that of the oppressor was not. And he clearly did not consider himself a Zionist. None of that, however, prevented him from positioning himself not as an opponent of Israel but rather as a critical-minded left-wing counselor of Israel, chastising it for its misguided ideology and bad policies – policies which, he said, undermined its own position.
The 1967 interview that World Outlook has uncritically reprinted hewed to the same basic line. “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.” Compensate him for taking his land, not give the land back. In 1956, he said, the Israelis acted as the “spearhead” for western imperialists in seizing the Suez Canal. “The Israelis did not have to align themselves with the shareholders of the Suez Canal Company.” They should have done something different, he retrospectively counsels. But this counsel takes the existence of Israel for granted and wishes only that it had pursued a different course.
World Outlook evidently admires Deutscher’s comparing post-1967 Israel to Prussia after its 19th-century defeats of other European powers. “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.” But note carefully what Deutscher says about his comparison: “And as a result of the Israeli victory in the 1967 war, I fear that a similar degeneration — for degeneration it is — may be taking place in the political character of Israel.” Again, this is the stance of someone highly critical of Israel and its policy but not an enemy of it.
Yes, Deutscher did at one point even go so far as to regret that “None of the Israeli parties is prepared even to contemplate a bi-national Arab-Israeli state.” But he also then says that Arabs “cannot go on denying Israel’s right to exist ….” (emphasis added) And he calls upon “the Arabs” to give “clear assurances and pledges that Israel’s legitimate interests are respected.” He condemns those who cheer on Israel’s multiple wars against Arab states. But he does so from the standpoint of a well-wishing advisor: “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.” (emphasis added)
Closing with a warning against Israel’s continuing role as an agent of western imperialism, Deutscher said, “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.” (emphasis added) Isn’t it clear that he regarded himself as one of “Israel’s real friends,” seeking to talk it out of its regrettable, even reprehensible policies, but also refusing to deny its basic legitimacy? It seems so to me, at least.
Very interesting with all the counterdictions but the garbage that the militant is publishing should be answered.