History of Palestine-Israel: Nationalism hurts fight against Israeli Apartheid state

The aim of this history of Palestine-Israel is to show how nationalism has worsened conditions for Palestinian and Israeli workers. It has enabled  in both regions as well as ensured that imperialists retain power.

An overview of the present
The U.S. heavily relies on Israel.. As Biden said in 2013, “If there were not an Israel, we would have to invent one to make sure our interests were preserved.”

Some U.S. leaders would prefer that Israel were not so brutal toward Palestinians, which has created a growing international backlash. Over 6800 Palestinians have been killed and thousands injured or displaced by attacks on Gaza from 2008 -2023 compared to about 300 Israelis (excluding the recent conflict). Basic services such as electricity, potable water, and medical care are increasingly scarce in Gaza, making it unlivable by any standard, and are now completely cut off.

Before the current conflict, throughout the Occupied Territories(OT) of the West Bank(WB) and Gaza, Palestinians could be killed with impunity, were subject to military courts that allow torture and internment without charges -40% of Palestinian men have been or are in prison.

Unemployment is 27% in the WB and 49% in Gaza; poverty is 36% and 64% respectively, and travel is highly restricted even for work or medical care. The Covid vaccine, widely available in Israel, was mostly denied to the OT. The 20% of Israeli citizens who are Palestinian are subject to many limitations on where they can live or build, have fewer legal rights, lower wages and services.

Currently Israel is in the process of demolishing homes of Palestinians in East Jerusalem, homes they moved into after being displaced from West Jerusalem decades ago. The number of Israeli settlers in the West Bank has grown to over 500,000.

Under the new Netanyahu government, attacks on Palestinians by settlers have markedly increased under military protection, with an open plan to regain all the land for Israel.

Israel relies on a diet of racism to survive as a Jewish state. From early childhood, Jews are taught that all Arabs hate them and wish only to destroy them and are fed a false historical narrative about the formation of the Israeli state and all the subsequent conflicts. This racism is used to justify the militarization of society and Israel’s role as a Western nuclear outpost and its own great inequality and lack of sufficient resources for most Jewish workers.

The Palestinians are also led by nationalist parties, Fatah and Hamas, which care not for the welfare of their workers and enrich only the few at the top.

The birth of Zionism
From the late 1800s onward the Middle East became the target of European imperialists, primarily France and Britain, who hoped to capture it from the Turkish Ottoman Empire. As the source of oil, which became the major military and industrial fuel at the time of World War I, the region grew vastly in importance.

Jewish workers had begun emigrating from Europe to Palestine in the late 1800s. Zionism, in parallel with the growing European nationalisms of the late 19th century, called on Jewish workers to relinquish their group identity based solely on religion for an identity tied to a Jewish state.

Many Eastern European Jewish workers had been part of multi-ethnic working class communist movements and were called on instead to support a multi-class solely Jewish state in Palestine.
The reasoning was that this state was necessary to fight anti-Semitism, which was seen as an ineradicable, special form of racism. As the great majority of Zionists sought only to displace rather than live with the native population, Zionism became a settler-colonial movement in Palestine.

The Zionist aim of setting up a Jewish state populated by European pro-Westerners appealed to Britain, which saw Zionism’s potential for a military and cultural outpost in the area. At the same time as the British were promising a unified state to the Arabs, they promised a homeland in Palestine to the Zionists with the Balfour Declaration of 1917.

In addition, under the secret Sykes-Picot Agreement, they promised to divide all Arab lands amongst their WWI allies. Support for a pan-Arab country was quickly replaced by the creation of smaller colonies:  Palestine, Transjordan, Iraq, and Kuwait controlled by Britain, and Syria and Lebanon controlled by France.

From the 1930s onward, as more  oil was discovered in the Middle East, and in the post-war era, when the US became the major imperialist power, many developments  took place: US oil companies took control in Saudi Arabia, the US engineered coups in Iran and Iraq and made deals with nationalist leaders in Egypt and Syria.  
In all of these countries U.S. efforts were helped by local left-wing nationalists who abandoned class struggle in order to side with pro-US nationalists against the British.  In the 1950s, the U.S. also began supporting Islamic fundamentalism as an antidote to socialist, communist, and pan-Arabist movements.

In the decades after WWII, the Soviet Union and its allies (hoping to deter British imperialism), West Germany, and then the French became the major supporters of Israel, with the US becoming the major Israeli backer after 1967.

The Israeli state was created in 1948 following massive Jewish immigration after WWII, largely because the US and Britain would allow only a trickle of Jews to enter their own countries before, during and after the war. The Zionists were anxious to build their population and an army to defend the new country.  

During the war, the founders of Israel cut a deal with the Nazis to help get 400,000 Hungarian Jews into the gas chambers in exchange for a train load of Zionists being freed to form the heart of the Israeli ruling class.
When statehood was granted by the UN, Jews were given 55% of the land, although they owned only 6% at the time and comprised about 30% of the population.  

The founding Zionists, however, wanted all of the land, and began the Nakba,  a program of terrorization and forced displacement of 700,000-900,000 Palestinians, six out of seven Arabs who had lived in what is now Israel, and the destruction of over 500 villages. This process was facilitated by a secret deal with Jordan, the only well-armed Arab state, which was rewarded with Jordanian control of the WB.
Many refugees were forced into what are now the West Bank and Gaza, while others fled to neighboring countries.  

In 1967 Israel launched a war to defeat the pan-Arab movement being built by the Egyptian nationalist leader Nasser.  Jordan was driven out of the West Bank and Jerusalem, Egypt out of Gaza, Syria out of the Golan Heights, and the longest military occupation of modern history began in the Golan Heights, West Bank, and Gaza.

Multiracial unity of workers
Despite this history and many conflicts between Arab and Jewish workers, there are also instances of Arab-Jewish worker solidarity and trade union struggles from 1920-1947.

These struggles were systematically undermined by nationalists representing the capitalists on both sides. Communists who supported unified organizing were expelled from the main Jewish labor organization, the Histadrut, by 1930. A large primarily anti-British Arab revolt began in 1931, and both Jews and Arabs who stood for unity were killed by nationalists. Although some joint strikes in railway and civil service continued into the 1940s, the nationalist forces were victorious on both sides.

At the end of WWII, large communist parties and militant trade unions existed in Iran, Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Israel/Palestine and Iraq. Unfortunately, these parties were tied to the Soviet Union, whose two-stage theory of revolution prescribed fighting for national liberation from imperialists before establishing communism. Thus leftists united with bourgeois forces to oppose the British. Even the Palestine Communist Party separated into two national camps by 1943. As US interests grew in the 1950s, it supported nationalist movements while also attacking local communists. Meanwhile, the USSR was instructing the communists to support nationalists like Egypt’s Nasser even as he was jailing and executing them.

After Israeli statehood in 1948, the Arab and Jewish populations were increasingly segregated from each other, including in the workplace. Israel did allow Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza to commute daily to work in Israel from 1967 to 1992, but since then, Israel has completely sealed its borders.

Bosses now import workers from Africa, Asia, and Eastern Europe, to whom they pay the bare minimum.  This has not only increased Israeli capitalists’ profits, but has caused massive unemployment in Palestine and cut off nearly all contact between Israelis and Palestinians.

The scourge of nationalism
The WB and Gaza, despite being occupied and oppressed, are both capitalist, nationalist entities. The Palestinian Authority (PA), the branch of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) that is in power in the WB, is dominated by a small group of wealthy capitalists with ties to Israeli capitalists and wealthy Palestinian businessmen in the diaspora. The Palestinian Development Plan of 2007 encouraged privatization, foreign investment, and made service cuts of 21% in the public sector. 78% of the Palestine Stock Exchange is owned by a few rich families.

The Palestinian Authority spends over one quarter of its budget on security, the same amount as on health and education combined, mostly to suppress revolt against Israel. In fact, the PA is such a reliable partner for Israel, that they were warned before the Gaza invasions. So unpopular are the policies of Fatah that Hamas won an electoral victory in 2006, mostly a vote against Fatah.

Hamas, an oppressor
Hamas is a fundamentalist party also controlled by a small wealthy elite, whose growth Israel supported in the 1980s through today, to decrease the appeal of secular nationalism, much as the US had done with fundamentalists in Afghanistan to oppose the Soviets. Driven out of the WB but victorious in Gaza in 2007, Hamas has been in power there ever since. The impoverished people of Gaza are taxed at exorbitant rates of over 60%, and Hamas pays high salaries and sells land only to its own loyalists. They enact a reactionary theocracy (religious state), which is, of course, very sexist, and have forged relationships with the fundamentalist rulers of Qatar, Iran, Bahrain and Turkey.  They use international aid sent to Gaza to enrich themselves and build their military machine, all while workers in Gaza suffer.

The leaders live in capitalist excess and periodically engage in military shows that inevitably harm thousands of civilians.

Israel too is a disgustingly unequal society controlled by a small ruling elite.  Eighteen ruling families have incomes equal to 77% of the national budget and take in 32% of the profits from the 500 largest companies.
These differentials fall along racist lines. Immigrant workers, mostly from Africa and South Asia, are the worst paid, as are Palestinians. Dark skinned Israelis of Arab or African heritage are also low on the scale in wages and services. The GINI index, a measure of inequality within a society, shows the US and Israel to be right next to each other in 3rd and 4th or 4th and 5th place in the world depending on the year.

Nationalism equals death
Nationalism and capitalism have led to death and misery for the majority of Jewish and Palestinian workers, although as with black workers in the US, the Palestinians bear a far greater burden.
Only a multiracial communist struggle will be able to free all the workers in the Middle East from imperialist and racist oppression.