Maxime Rodinson, Israel: Settler-colonial State?, Pathfinder Press, 75p.
In 1967, when the whole of Europe was engulfed in a wave of pro-Israeli hysteria, when practically without exception the 'left intelligentsia' rallied to the defence of 'socialist' Israel against the 'feudal, fascist' forces of the Arab world, Maxime Rodinson's lucid analysis, published in a special issue of Sartre's Les Temps Modernes devoted to the Arab-Israeli conflict, threw much-needed light on a subject which is still buried in mythology and sentimentality.
Rodinson, himself a Jew, and until 1958 a member of the French Communist Party, coolly and without polemical excess undermines the traditional Israelophilia of the European 'socialist' intelligentsia, exposing the double standards of the self-styled anti-imperialists whose critical thinking stops just short of Tel Aviv.
The publication for the first time in English of Rodinson's essay is thus a welcome event, even if Israel by its own actions has helped dissipate some of the unqualified pro-Zionism of the sixties.
The vindication of Rodinson's basic analysis by the aftermath of the Six-Day War and the protracted Israeli occupation is aptly underlined in Peter Buch's otherwise disappointing introduction, which is characterized by an unbelievably facile optimism about the Palestinian guerilla movement and its perspectives. His idealization of a movement which has never escaped the politics of Arab nationalism is combined with a defiance — purely symbolic — of reality which leads Buch actually to deny that the Palestinians have suffered a terrible defeat from which they show few signs of recovering.
It is to Rodinson and, of course, to that venerable teacher Isaac Deutscher, that the revolutionary Left owes its break from the guilt-ridden schema which has hitherto guided its sympathies on the Middle East conflict. At the same time there is no trace in Rodinson's book of Maoist-Third Worldist demonology (e.g. Free Palestine). Israel and the Zionist movement are seen, not as artificial creations of a monolithic imperialist monster, but as developments rooted in the tragedy of European Jewry which was forced, because of its exclusivist aspirations, into alignment with first British, then American imperialism against the national struggle of the masses.
The book contains a wealth of material on the early years of the relationship between Zionism and Great Britain, especially on the Balfour Declaration. It also attempts to reconstruct a picture of the real 1948 war, demolishing the over-simplified accounts of Zionists and nationalists alike. Rarely has the case for consideration of the Zionist State as a colonial fact, the culmination of a colonializing enterprise which involved the subjugation and dispossession of the indigenous Palestinian Arab population, been put with greater cogency or subtlety.
Rodinson is correctly at pains to underline the specific characteristics of Zionism which set it apart from other colonial movements — notably the eviction, rather (at least until 1967) than exploitation, of the native inhabitants, to make room for a completely new Jewish society with its own working class. The author takes issue with the left-Zionist dismissal of Herzel as a peripheral bogey-man, demonstrating how what is known as the 'Arab-Israeli Conflict' was inscribed in the very logic of the programme for a Jewish State in Palestine. It is here perhaps that the economic and political mechanisms of the colonial process could have been outlined at greater length, as could the reaction of the Palestinians to the 'homecoming' of the settlers, a chapter of Middle-Eastern history about which too little is known despite the 'rediscovery' of the Palestinians after 1967 as a result of the dramatic rise of their resistance.
An indispensible guide-book, therefore, to the often confusing tableau of a region in perpetual effervescence, even if its political conclusions are themselves contestable. Certainly a book about the world and Israel written in a more rigourously Marxist framework is needed —a book, moreover, which updates Rodinson's analysis in the light of Israel's gradual slide into apartheid-type policy. But such a book will have to assimilate and transcend this unique contribution towards an understanding of the problems of the troubled Palestinian arena.
Alan Adler