What’s Left?
LA’s Exposition Park, the northeastern meadows across from USC, were jammed with anti-Vietnam war protestors. The police estimated our numbers at between eight and ten thousand. The rally organizers said we had over twenty-five thousand in attendance.
It was October 15, 1969, the nationwide Moratorium to End the War in Vietnam. I’d never seen so many people in one place for one purpose. I was elated. I’d declared myself an anarchist pacifist in 1968 under threat of eventually being drafted. That day I was a revolutionary anarchist who’d traveled with friends from Ventura to participate in the protest.
I couldn’t hear the speeches in the huge crowd. Instead, I perused the two-score-plus literature tables that bordered the rally, noting the alphabet soup of Leftist organizations present. There were political parties (SP, SLP, CP, SWP, SL, PLP), front groups (WPC, ASFC, FPCC), New Left (SDS), civil rights (SCLC, SNCC, CORE), Black Power (BPP), feminist (NOW), labor (IWW, UE, UFW), religious (AFSC, CW, UUA), countercultural (YIPpie!, HAFC) and many others. I couldn’t get along with two-thirds of them personally and disagreed politically with nine-tenths of what they stood for, but on that day I embraced them all. They were my people. They were the Left.
I participated in anti-war vigils, pickets, sit-ins, marches, rallies, demonstrations, and riots for the next five years. I was also into labor activism; solidarity with the United Farm Worker’s grape and lettuce boycotts, support for UCSC graduate student unionizing efforts, and getting my IWW red membership card while working in a coop print shop in Santa Cruz. I wasn’t a Marxist, but I wholeheartedly espoused the sentiment “workers of the world, unite!” and believed the way forward was through international workers revolution.
I had a girlfriend as an undergraduate at UCSC, Leah, who was two years younger and Jewish. I was a recovering Catholic. She’d planned to spend six months on a kibbutz in Israel, so I joined her after graduating in 1974. It was my opportunity not only to fight for some hypothetical, pie-in-the-sky socialism but to experience real existing socialism by living in a real commune.
Living on Kibbutz Mizra, midway between Nazareth and Afula in the Jezreel Valley, was exciting. Established under the slogan “from commune to communism,” Mizra was part of the Hashomer Hatzair youth movement and affiliated with the Israeli political party MAPAM, the two comprising the far left of socialist Zionism and the Labor Zionist movement which advocated for a binational Arab/Jewish state in Palestine/Israel. (MAPAM eventually merged with the much larger MAPAI party to form the Labor Party.) The kibbutz belonged to the larger Artzi kibbutzim federation, which was part of the Histadrut, the centralized syndicalist organization that was a combination labor union and business proprietor, and which owned over seventy percent of the Jewish Yishuv’s economy before the establishment of the Israeli state. Mizra existed on land formerly owned by the Jewish National Fund, a communal land trust that held over eighty percent of the Yishuv’s land until it was nationalized by the Israeli state. And Mizra was headquarters for the Palmach, the elite ultraleft fighting force of the Hagana, the Yishuv’s underground army in British Mandatory Palestine before independence.
Leah and I were volunteer kibbutz workers and were provided free housing, food, clothing and entertainment, even a monthly stipend to purchase luxuries at the common store. Mizra was a communal farm with over a thousand members and a mixed economy of agriculture (crops, eggs, chickens) and industry (meat processing plant, hydraulics machinery factory). I worked first in the Lul (chicken coop) and then the Ta’amal (hydraulics factory) where I met and befriended several of the Christian Arabs who worked on the kibbutz. The number of Arab workers was strictly limited. They were not members of the Histadrut nor were they allowed to organize. At UCSC I’d studied the history of socialist Zionism and the role Labor Zionism played in the founding of Israel. I knew about the Labor Zionist insistence on “Hebrew land,” “Hebrew labor,” “Hebrew products,” and “Hebrew self-defense” in the Zionist immigration to and colonization of Palestine under the auspices of the Jewish Agency. All of this looked to me like “socialism for one people,” a settler colonial socialism for the Jewish people that put ethnic identity over class identity.
That suspicion was confirmed when I attended the kibbutz’s ulpan to study Hebrew, the dead Biblical tongue consciously revived as Israel’s national language. Leah was expected to learn Hebrew because our hosts wanted her to make aliyah—immigrate to “Eretz Israel.” But me? My Hebrew instructor was a septuagenarian chalutz, a wizened third aliyah pioneer settler who barely kept his eyes open during our lessons. When I startled him awake one afternoon with a question about grammar, he said gruffly: “Why are you doing this, studying Hebrew? You’re not Jewish.”
The 1789 French Revolution marks the birth of the first modern nation-state, with France the template for modern secular, multiethnic nationalism. This is Enlightenment nationalism, and the international socialism that derived from it also defined itself as secular and multiethnic, even when it degenerated into “socialism in one country.” With England and the US, Enlightenment nationalism and socialism are the core of what the Right likes to call Western civilization.
The semi-periphery of Western civilization however involves a nationalism and socialism based on Romantic notions of organic unity around race, ethnicity, language, culture, customs, or religion. The 1848 revolutionary wave across Europe witnessed numerous nationalistic revolutions involving Romantic, organic, identitarian themes. The unification of Germany and Italy used Romantic nationalisms, as did Theodore Herzl’s Zionist conception of a colonial Jewish state under Western imperialist auspices. Labor and socialist Zionists, in turn, skewed their socialism toward an ethnic solidarity that often became nationalist unity, placing the national struggle over the class struggle. I called Labor Zionism leftist ethnic nationalism in my dissection of explicit Third Positionism—movements and regimes that claim to “go beyond left and right.” Both straight ahead Fascism and explicit Third Positionism are ultranationalist which makes their “socialism,” if it exists at all, a socialism of idiots. This is Western civilization’s gutter periphery, where ethnic nationalism becomes fascism.
The socialism I witnessed living on a kibbutz in Israel for six months—limited, stunted, truncated—was still exciting, inspiring and viable. Ultimately, it was also a “socialism for one people,” a Zionist settler-colonial socialism that destroyed the national aspirations of another people and imperialized the region. It was a socialism that I could never truly grasp because I wasn’t Jewish. By contrast, the 60s Left I lived through was all struggle and no unity for a socialism with great potential but excruciating failures. However it was a Left that at its best sought an inclusive socialism, one that attempted to encompass workers, women, gays, Jews, people of color—the downtrodden, downcast, and dispossessed. It was my Left for a socialism I wanted to achieve.
I left Israel at the end of 1974 after the Yom Kippur War, a war that Israel nearly lost. Labor Zionism aided the British to suppress the 1936-39 Arab Revolt, then carved out a “minimum” national territory in 1948 and became an occupying imperial power in 1968. But demographics and world events precipitated the decline of Labor Zionism and Israel’s Labor Party with a corresponding rise of right-wing Zionism.
Likud was founded by Menachem Begin in 1973, who was the leader of the Irgun Zvei Leumi, an ultraright paramilitary organization that was rival to the Hagana, before becoming Prime Minister of Israel. Known for the bombing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem in 1946, the Irgun contended that Palestine’s hostile Arab population was the primary enemy of the Zionist project and the Jewish people. It conducted terrorist operations against Palestinian Arabs, and most infamously perpetrated the massacre of the Arab village of Deir Yassin in 1948. The Irgun emerged from the Revisionist Zionist Movement founded by Ze’ev Jabotinsky, which had friendly relations and a naval training base in Mussolini’s Italy. Revisionism proclaimed: “In blood and fire Judea fell; in blood and fire Judea shall rise again.”
A second, smaller paramilitary group helped with the Deir Yassin massacre, the Lehi or Stern Gang, from which Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir arose. Lehi was Third Positionist in its endorsement of first left Fascism, then National Bolshevism. Seeking a Jewish state “from the Nile to the Euphrates,” Lehi was putatively anti-imperialist, a reactionary anti-imperialism that considered Britain the primary enemy of the Zionist project and the Jewish people. Besides cooperating with Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany and making overtures to the Soviet Union, Lehi assassinated the British Minister Resident Lord Moyne in Cairo, Egypt, in 1944 and UN mediator Folke Bernadotte in Jerusalem in 1948.
With Israeli General and Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, who permitted the massacre of Palestinian Arabs in the Lebanese Sabra and Shatila refugee camps by Christian Phalange militias during the 1982 Lebanon War, Likud arguably led Israel from leftist ethnic nationalism into straight ahead Fascism. Zionist Fascism. Hebrew Fascism.