Searching for the Universal in Israel/Palestine
An Interview with Oded Nir
Christian Thorne: You are on record as saying that you wished Marxists had more to say about Israel/Palestine. It is your sense, I think, that we would understand events better if we factored in the place of Israel in the world system; considered the requirements of capital in the region; and understood the configurations of class in the country, sometimes across the Israeli-Palestinian divide. Your writing sometimes gives the impression that most of the work on this front is still in front of us — that Marxist thinking about Israel/Palestine has mostly failed to appear. Can I ask you even so where you think we should start? What are Marxism’s most enduring insights into Israel/Palestine, going back to the 1940s or, if you prefer, to the 1880s? What, in particular, do Marxists have to add to the “settler colonial” paradigm, which is well represented in discussions of Israel, including in the Palestine solidarity movement in Europe and North America? The question, of course, will pop if I put it the other way round: What do we miss when we talk only about “settler colonialism”?
Oded Nir: Yes, I do think that Marxism can add much to the way we understand Israel/Palestine, not just in adding another dimension to it, but in fundamentally defining the horizon of a political commitment to Palestinian liberation in particular, and its relationship to global struggles for emancipation more generally. And I want to say right from the start that what I have to say won’t solve any problems, but just modify how we perceive these problems.
Let’s get straight to the heart of the disagreement between the settler colonialism paradigm and Marxism. One would think that the difference between a Marxist and a non-Marxist leftist position would be in the answer to this question: does capitalism drive horrible oppression and cruelty? Or is capitalist exploitation just a secondary dimension, one area among others where colonial oppression is expressed? Unfortunately, much of the writing on Palestine/Israel that touches on economic issues falls on one of these sides, or on a third option: not choosing at all, seeing a little bit of both at work.
But this way of posing the problem should be rejected, since it allows us to provide only bad solutions to it: if we say capitalism is the driver of Palestinian oppression, we are in danger of reducing colonial violence to a side effect of capitalist development; and if we think that (colonial) abuse of power is behind everything, we are in danger of falling into a flat moralism, into seeing ourselves as choosing what is righteous, while others choose evil. The problem here is that the wrong life cannot be lived rightly, as Adorno puts it: flat moralizing fails to take into account the way we are, materially, part of the bad world, and the way it exerts pressures on what we (and others) can and cannot do.
To head off one objection: I’m not preaching cynicism here–Adorno didn’t mean we should just shrug off suffering, because life is bad anyway. I think we must remain sensitive to suffering, and fight for it to end. But it does mean that, unfortunately, given the wrongness of the world, any act in it is tainted with this wrongness, necessarily depends on it, and can lead to its reproduction: existing social forces make this result highly likely. So the horizon of any action must always also contain its own negation–weirdly, this means that I should act now in a way that aims to eliminate the possibility of this very act in future generations.
So I have a weird and seemingly non-Marxist way to proceed from this: to say that Palestine/Israel today names not a scientific problem, not a problem to be solved by study and rigorous analysis, but a problem of narrative and of ideology. The debate between settler-colonialism and Marxism is a debate between two kinds of materialism, two ways of understanding material forces at work. In this debate, materialism is the only game in town. And the dominance of materialism is not limited to activists and “radical” thinkers: mainstream media today is full of analyses of material power relations. So, to my mind, the really excluded possibility is that of materialism’s opposite, which we used to call idealism. There is a great tradition–one that includes figures such as Mao, Mahdi Amel, and Fredric Jameson–that insists that Marxism is not a set of positive statements or a stable methodology; Marxism, rather, has to be reinvented in new historical situations–to do the same thing, you have to do something different. I think that today, when materialism is itself a dominant ideology, Marxism has to take up the opposite pole, to have an uncompromising idealist kernel. This way—and only this way—will it take on a position that is truly repressed almost everywhere.
And I would say that what idealism comes down to, in this case, is narrative. You mention previous Marxist positions on Palestine/Israel and their enduring insights. So I want to briefly say how some of these were transformative, not in their contributions to knowledge, which were undoubtedly significant, but in the way they completely reconfigured how one understood the condition and aims of emancipatory struggle. One example that I like, from Jewish-Israeli circles, took place in the 1970s and ‘80s, around the coming into being of Matzpen (a group that broke off from the Israeli communist party) and, say, Tamar Gozansky’s The Development of Capitalism in Palestine, which came out in the mid-1980s, right before the wave of what is known as Post-Zionism. The situation of socialist struggle in Israel at that point was not very good: it had been completely neutralized by state institutions that, at least until the late 1970s, promoted a calcified and toothless version of the discourse of class struggle. And so what the communist interventions of Matzpen and Gozansky did, was to discover class antagonism anew, precisely by mediating it through the analyses of the British-colonial, Zionist, and later Israeli oppression of Palestinians.
In its moment, this was a monumental shift, one that not only reinvented Israeli socialism, but later became a way to revitalize the entire Israeli left. So we saw the birth of the 1990s peace process, which was the name for an entire utopian program, of which what we know as Post Zionism was merely the intellectual wing. What is important for me is to emphasize that this was a shift in narrative and ideology–the coming into being of a new language through which to imagine a (contradictory or self-negating) path to liberation.
Thorne: Your framing the issue in terms of narrative raises all sorts of fresh considerations. Can you summarize us for that older story about class, the one that was dominant when the Labor Party enjoyed a near monopoly on power in Israel? And can you help us see how the story told by Matzpen and Tamar Gozansky was different?
Nir: To answer this question, I think it would be best to turn to literature. I’m thinking in particular about the genre called Zionist realism that flourished in the early 20th century, and that is today usually mocked by critics for being mere propaganda. There is one short story that narrates the experiences of a Jewish immigrant to Palestine, who joins a group of other Jews in working the land for a Jewish land owner. The worker, who isn’t accustomed to physical labor, is in a state of excitement throughout the story: he sees every physical chore he completes as part of a historical Act, a form of direct participation in the making of a new Jewish history. But as the story progresses, you hear that the Jewish workers are competing with much more skilled Palestinian labor: our character sees Palestinian workers being driven off the land in the beginning, and they emerge marginally throughout the story in his thoughts.
But the story ends when the job is complete, at which point the Jewish workers are themselves driven off the land, and the narrator is completely shocked: his sense of being inseparable from history-in-the-making, from working the land, completely crumbles. This of course recalls the Palestinian workers who had already been driven away. There’s no “moral” to the story–it ends with the workers’ separation from the product of their work.
What I like about this very simple allegory is that it is able to hold together what are radically incompatible meanings: on the one hand, the revolutionary kernel of early Zionism, the attempt to make history within given conditions; on the other, the betrayal, uncompromisingly rendered, of this very attempt: intentional history-making turns into unintentional history-making; existing conditions turn your emancipatory intention not only against the Palestinian other, whom you have left out, but also against your own liberation.
This is the tragedy of the Labor Party in a nutshell, one that was much better recorded and conceptualized in literature than in actual political discussions: the story I’ve mentioned captured this process as it’ was taking place. It is the turning of the code of class antagonism from holding a revolutionary truth, one that potentially leads to a radically different world, into a hegemonic ideology, one that is used to oppress both Palestinians and Jews. For us, it’s clear which side won. But in the moment, one completely loses the feeling of history-in-the-making if one doesn’t acknowledge the potential for social transformation, the possibility of making something new–the utopian impulse that these workers embody, the deep undecidability that makes that moment ripe for intervention. This is exactly why Israeli socialists in the 1970s found themselves without a language: class discourse had become a tool of oppression, a code through which Israelis gained entry to the dominant classes! This is what the Labor Party had devolved to, since 1948.
This was the background to the interventions of Matzpen and later Gozansky. It is as if someone–the state–stole the language through which you can express the fact of oppression. On the one hand, you have class antagonism in Israel without a symbolic code in which to express it. On the other hand, there are those completely excluded from the hegemonic code: Palestinians, and Mizrahi Jews, discriminated against by the Jewish-European hegemony. What Matzpen and Gozansky did may seem simple and obvious to us, but it was not so obvious at the time: to affirm symbolically the oppression of these excluded groups and the need to fight it. It’s important to mention that reversing this exclusion is not an easy thing to do in practice. This is where ideas about uneven development are important: when one considers that such exclusions are what makes capitalist social relations possible–that in the context of Israel in the 1970s, the oppression of Palestinians, Mizrahi Jews, women, and LGBTQ+ were not accidental, but a necessary part of the capitalist structure—then you see how radical such demands can be: they threaten to undo capitalism as a whole, and radically transform how society is structured.
This is what made the interventions by Matzpen and later Gozansky so important. Not only were the struggles they helped conceptualize important and righteous in their own right; they were the basis for a new universal struggle, a new way through which to come together to–potentially–transform the structure of the whole of society. At the end, of course, that didn’t happen. But that the potential for radical transformation was there should not be overlooked. One of the most important tasks is to see how and why these revolutionary efforts failed: this is a crucial part of re-narrating our present historically.
Thorne: I’m interested in the phrase “new universal struggle.” You’ve written elsewhere that the history of Zionist and Israeli Marxism can be tracked by its serially transformed understandings of the universal. So let’s say that socialism is a universalist politics, but that any such politics can’t help but pass through the particular. A universalism comes into the world only when it is demanded by particular groups and housed in particular institutions. And in that case, the question becomes: Which particularities do we think can demand the universal most plausibly and realize it most amply? And your sense is that Zionist and Israeli Marxism has proposed over time different candidates for this role, different particulars to serve as bearer of the universal: first, the Israeli nation broadly; then, the Israeli working class more specifically; finally, as of the 1980s, the Palestinians as the excluded term. Am I hearing you right? If I am, I’m wondering what you think the status of the universal is now? Are the Palestinians still the bearer of the universal in the region? Gozansky’s work, after all, dates back to the 1980s and would seem to belong to the moment of the peace process and post-Zionism. But if the peace process is itself now a historical artifact, its very failure decades in the past, then what has been the fate of that particular universalism?
Nir: Yes, I think that’s completely right: universal struggle is often mediated by what is a particular struggle, and that is something many current defenders of universality take up. The recent example of Black Lives Matter is a case in point: it mediated universality, while seeming particular; the “all lives matter” response to it from the Right was the truly particular, exclusionary, position, even if it seems universal at first sight.
But things get more complicated once you realize that a particularity can be at one moment the historical mediator of universal change, but lose that universality in the next moment. This was true of the 1848 moment in the European bourgeois revolution–when the universal values turned from revolutionary weapon to an apology for the bourgeoisie’s social dominance. And it was equally true of Zionism’s failed revolution: from a particularism that had a universal aspect, it turned into an exclusionary, oppressive ideology. And I think the only other moment in Israeli history when a new universal-particularity came to be was that of the late 1970s and early ‘80s that I have been describing, in which the excluded Palestinians became the particular bearer of a potential universal transformation.
But there are always false starts and wrong times that complicate the picture. In 1948, after the formal establishment of the state of Israel, one of the Zionist leaders surprisingly quit his post and joined a socialist party that insisted, against state leadership, that class struggle must still be waged in the newly established state, against its new authorities. That position unfortunately failed to become a significant political force. Efforts to create Zionist-Palestinian cooperation were almost nonexistent at that time: such efforts had become too fraught and were considered impossible. There is no point in criticizing such impossibility: for instance, socialism in the US was for many years an unthinkable option, even if there was no logical impossibility. In 1948, the sense that Zionism had ceased being an emancipatory ideology, that it was rapidly becoming a repressive ideology, had all kinds of similar effects: some prominent figures in the labor movement suddenly turned to the extreme Right, to Jewish ultra-nationalism. This was a response to the same historical dilemma, the same reification of Zionism into the opposite of liberation.
The problem of false starts is interesting in several respects. It is easy to see the 1970s and ‘80s in Israel as a moment of formation of a new universal struggle, because we immediately recognize the demand for Palestinian liberation as a just one. But being morally right is not a historical criterion. False starts demonstrate that the political success of universality-in-particularity is not evident in the moment that it is first asserted. It is only from a later perspective that we can narrate it as such. And one can go a step further, and argue that it is the future that causes it to be universal, in a strong sense: it’s not only that we don’t know in advance which position will be successful, it’s that the possibility of narrating its success or failure is determined by the future.
Such future causation is a result of how we think of the excluded particular. In any notion of universality that isn’t bloodless, the effort to include the excluded isn’t just a matter of busting down an arbitrary fence, of allowing someone, some group, to take part in a system that otherwise remains the same. No: what makes the inclusion of such particulars a universal demand is that including them would require a radical transformation of the social whole into which it is to be included, down to its basic structure.
So false starts are important because they help us see, I think, that voluntarism or contingency are not the opposites of historical determination or causality, but necessary parts of it. To remain uncompromisingly loyal to subjective agency, to our freedom to act and respond in a way not determined in advance by circumstances, we must acknowledge that such contingency is only authentic if it eventually disappears: the future dissolves it into necessity and determination, into the necessary condition for the moment in which we live; or, if it fails to produce change, into something completely extraneous to the current moment. This is for me what false starts demonstrate.
To come back to our moment: if you see, as I do, our moment as one of radical and unavoidable transition, then ethics, or belief, shimmer and come to the fore. No amount of fact checking or archival work or algorithmic position-play can take the place of the purely subjective intervention that we need–precisely because only the future can tell a false start from the successful universal struggle. Truth now is a matter of acting on one’s belief, in the strongest sense there is. This is also what makes this moment so anxiety-inducing, at least for me: no received wisdom–no matter how righteous–can save us from the need to decide and act. And, of course, I’m not saying that we shouldn’t take facts into consideration, that we shouldn’t learn from the past or that we should be purely impulsive. But I am saying that subjective intervention, one whose meaning is not decided in advance, is unavoidable. And that’s scary: are we wrong? Are we doing the right thing? Nothing can settle that question for now, even if it will eventually have an answer.
The same thing holds in the case of Palestine/Israel. There are multiple contexts here, each requiring a different intervention. I already posed the question of what narrative work the Palestinian struggle does for us, here in the US–that’s one important context for intervention. It is not for me to talk about the internal Palestinian context, but it plainly requires careful attention. In Israel, it is clear that the Palestinian cause does not function, in Israel, as it did in the 1980s, as a particularity mediating universal struggle. I think we need in this context to distinguish between two positions that used to be fused together: one has to do with Israeli-Palestinian peace, collaboration and reconciliation; the other has to do with uncompromising support for Palestinian liberation, at all costs. While the latter has become the banner of some on the left, the former has virtually disappeared: the very word “peace” projects powerlessness, naiveté, and incoherence; it seems irrevocably nostalgic, a fool’s errand. Palestinian/Israeli collaboration is very strained, becoming almost impossible (this is affecting academic collaborations, too). There is a strong impulse to separate activists and intellectuals into different groups according to their nationality and ethnicity, in a manner that unfortunately comes close to a leftist version of symbolic segregation.
If you see the situation this way, then, for me, the excluded particularity, what mediates universality, is the possibility of peace and collaboration. Yes, this is not an identity category, so it seems to violate the principle of particularity-mediating-universality. But one shouldn’t reify how particularity appears in the world. Sometimes, universality is mediated through … universality! Or at least through some more general term that becomes visible when you enlarge the field of vision. This is why I like to think about particularity in terms of items in a series, rather than only in terms of identity categories. Peace, or collaboration, can be such an excluded item. So, for me, this is the particular that right now mediates universality in Israel, and maybe in Palestine/Israel. Think about the initial gesture of the project of peacemaking in the 1980s-90s–it can be reduced to the statement: we are not pursuing Israeli-Palestinian peace effectively, we need to find a better way to pursue it. I think we need a similar gesture today: expressing support for the two-state solution has degenerated into ineffectual lip-service–it doesn’t promote any actual project of transformation. So how do we pursue peace more effectively? What are the institutions that we need to do it? What went wrong last time? All of these questions need to be answered, earnestly, with an eye to the reinvention of this project. One beginning of an answer, I think, is if we take peace to name a project that now mediates not only relations between two states, but within the state of Israel too: it has to be a class project, in addition to an ethnic-national project. It is closer to a one-state solution than to the two-state one. But I’m already getting here into details that belong elsewhere.
Oded Nir is the author of Signatures of Struggle, a 2018 book on “the figuration of collectivity in Israeli fiction.” He has edited volumes on Marxist approaches to Israel/Palestine and on the literatures of the capitalist periphery. He teaches courses on Israeli culture and literature at Queens College.
