Holidays of the Revolution

Communist Identity in Israel, 1919-1965

Amir Locker-Biletzki

• Editorial: SUNY Press
• Año: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781438480879
• Categoría: Historia
• Categoría: Historia de Oriente Medio

Holidays of the Revolution explores a little-known chapter in the history of Mandatory Palestine and the State of Israel: the Israeli Communist Party and its youth movement, which posed a radical challenge to Zionism. Amir Locker-Biletzki examines the development of this movement from 1919 to 1965, concentrating on how Communists built a distinctive identity through myth and ritual. He addresses three key themes: identity construction through Jewish holidays (Hanukkah and Passover), through civic holidays (Holocaust Remembrance Day and Israeli Independence Day), and through Soviet and working-class myths and ceremonies (May Day and the October Revolution). He also shows how Jewish Communists viewed, interacted, and celebrated with their Palestinian comrades. Using extensive archival and newspaper sources, Locker-Biletzki argues that Jewish-Israeli Communists created a unique, dissident subculture. Simultaneously negating and absorbing the culture of Socialist-Zionism and Israeli Republicanism—as well as Soviet and left-wing–European traditions—Jewish Communists forged an Israeli identity beyond the bounds of Zionism.

Chapter 1

Basic Concepts and Political Ritual

Basic Concepts

At the heart of this research stand four concepts. The first is the human collective that is the subject of this research, the Jewish Communists; the second is their organizational edifice, MAKI and Banki; the third is Communist anti-Zionism; and the fourth Israeli nationalism.

From 1919 to 1965, the Jewish Communists practiced a defined subculture, made up of Soviet and European as well as Israeli and Jewish elements, which were reflected in their rites, symbols, and myths. In the Israeli historiography and sociological historiography there are few references to the existence of a Communist subculture. Baruch Kimmerling argues that the only autonomous spheres in 1950s Israel were the marginalized Orthodox community in Jerusalem and the “subculture created by the Arab-Jewish Communist Party.”1

Yet if one gazes into its inner workings, a more complex picture emerges. Beyond the unique and important place that Arab-Jewish fraternity held in it, the Communist subculture existed in constant relation to other cultures. The two major cultural influences on it were the Soviet and Socialist-Zionist. From the time of the revolution in October 1917, the Bolsheviks created symbols, rituals, and myths that became the universal language of World Communism. This system of symbols, codified by the Soviet state, was adopted by the Jewish Communists in Palestine/Israel. Thus their subculture came to include cultural practices such as May Day parades, the myth of the October Revolution, and such symbols as the Hammer and Sickle, among others.

The collective that is the subject of this research is comprised of the Jewish Communists. MAKI and Banki of the 1950s and early 1960s were multicultural organizations. In them emigrant cultures from Bulgaria, Poland, Germany, and Russia mingled with the Palestinian and local Israeli ones. The multiethnic character of the party is supported by the statistics on MAKI. In a 1961 census 54.6 percent of the membership came from Europe, 11.4 percent from Asia, 3.1 percent from Africa, and 1.1 percent from America. That contrasted sharply with the only 29.8 percent of Israel- or Palestine-born Communists, most of them Palestinians.2 So while they were not the politically dominant group in an organization that self-consciously promoted Palestinian-Jewish equality, they were definitely the largest. Moreover, despite their different cultural tastes, the Jewish members of MAKI and Banki were bound together by party ideology. As will be shown, the Jewish Communists conveyed the same ideological messages about core issues such as Arab-Jewish fraternity, the USSR, and class politics. When analyzing subjects like the Jewish holidays, Zionism, or Israel, they used the ideological terms of Marxism-Leninism. Therefore, despite their cultural differences, the Jewish members of MAKI and Banki shared a common Marxist-Leninist worldview that made them one group.

The Jewish Communists, the subjects of this research, organized in two institutional frameworks from the early 1920s to the mid-1960s, MAKI and its youth movement Banki. One of the points arising from the history of MAKI and Banki is that the Communist mother party had little organizational control over its youth movement. I argue here that notwithstanding the organizational relations between MAKI and Banki, they should be treated as one political, ideological, and above all cultural entity. There was a cultural affinity between them, bonding the elder and younger Communists.

This study deals at great length with the Jewish Communists’ relations with Zionist political culture, both during and after the pre-state era. In the pre-state era, one could argue that the Communist Party and its youth movement were both anti-Zionist. When one looks at the Jewish Communist subculture, however, it is hard to avoid the Israeli and Jewish elements that constituted it, especially as regards the way the Jewish European Communists dealt with the 1948 War and the Holocaust. Did the Jewish Communists actually become Zionists in a gradual process from the early 1920s to the mid-1960s? In contrast to such scholars as Johan Franzén and Lea Miron,3 who have argued that the Communists in Palestine/Israel became increasingly Zionist in all but name, here I claim that the Communists were anti-Zionist for most of their history. While the content and degree of their anti-Zionism changed, they remained steadfast until the mid-1960s. When nationalism overshadowed their Socialist anti-Zionism, the organizational integrity of the party collapsed.

The Communist Party defined Zionism from the 1920s as a manifestation of the Jewish bourgeoisie and financial capital. In a 1930 letter from the Comintern political secretariat to the PKP, Zionism’s link to British imperialism is clearly defined. “The Jewish bourgeoisie is the main agent of British imperialism in Palestine … Zionism revealed its true nature as an expression of the Jewish bourgeoisie’s desire for exploitation, expansionist nationalism and oppression.”4

The same basic definition of Zionism was reasserted in 1961 by Samuel Mikunis. In a report to the Fourteenth Party Congress, he stated that “Zionism is the ideological tool of the Jewish bourgeoisie in the era of imperialism and the link between it and imperialist reaction.”5 The same condemnation was extended to Zionist Socialism in all its forms. The party viewed it as no more than a ploy by the Jewish middle class to deceive Jewish workers. As for Marxist Zionism, it had no ideological validity for them. On the whole, they pointed out that the Zionist content of the movement always outweighed any Socialist content.

Zionist Socialism was the hegemonic political faction of the Yishuv era and of the state of Israel until 1977. The Socialist-Zionist movement that had been developing since the early twentieth century in Palestine encompassed the kibbutzim, the workers parties, and youth movements, and it wielded enormous economic power in the hands of the Cooperative Workers’ Company that was controlled by the all-inclusive union, the Histadrut. By the early 1930s, Zionist Socialism had become the hegemonic political, cultural, and economic power in Jewish Palestine and the World Zionist movement. In the first decades after 1948, Zionist Socialism preserved its hegemonic position and was the politically dominant power in Israel.

Ideologically, Zionist Socialism was supposed to be a harmonization of Jewish nationalism and Socialism; in fact, however, the two ideological political forces of Labour-Zionism—the one emanating from the unification of the right-wing Ahdut HaAvoda6 with Hapo’el Hatza’ir (Young Worker), and the other originating in Hashomer Hatza’ir (Youth Guard)—both relegated Socialism to a subordinate role in the aims of political Zionism. In offering this statement, I accept the historical account of Zeev Sternhell7 regarding the preeminence Zionist Socialism gave to nationalism over Socialism. He argues that from their origins in the second Aliyah, Labour-Zionists promoted a form of organic nationalism. This type of nationalism, prevalent in nineteenth-century Central and Eastern Europe, perceived the nation in terms of ethnicity and territory. This same organic nationalism was promoted over the Marxist ideology some Zionist Socialists brought with them from Europe. Sternhell’s arguments cannot be easily dismissed.8

In origin, Hashomer Hatza’ir was heavily influenced by the anarchism of philosopher Martin Buber and Pyotr Kropotkin and the Socialism of Gustav Landauer. However, from 1924 onward it developed a Marxist-Zionist ideology that was formulated by 1927 in the Two Stage Theory. Zionism was defined as “the complete rehabilitation (of the Hebrew People) by the establishment of a Socialist society in Eretz-Israel, which will be realized in two stages: 1) establishment of the Hebrew national home in Eretz-Israel on an independent economic basis; and 2) the Socialist Revolution.” The Socialist stage was defined in Marxist terms: “The new Socialist society will be built upon the training and education of the working class toward the seizure of power and the management of the economy and production on the one hand, and the destruction of the existing order on the other hand.”9 Despite the Marxist rhetoric it invoked, the Two Stage Theory was able in reality to indefinitely postpone the realization of the Socialist revolutionary stage. Hashomer Hatza’ir and its settlement movement and successive political parties concentrated on achieving nationalist aims in the 1930s and 1940s, subordinating their Marxism to their Zionism.

MAPAI (Workers of Eretz-Israel Party), which first appeared as a unified party in 1930, went even further in its subordination of Socialism to Zionism. Over the course of the 1930s and 1940s and into the first decades of statehood, MAPAI was the focal point of political and economic power. It was the dominant party in the Histadrut, in the Jewish Agency, and in the world Zionist movement. It was the center of governmental power, heading every Israeli government until 1977. Ideologically, MAPAI developed a form of nationalized Socialism that combined non-Marxist Socialism and Zionism. MAPAI preached the building of workers organizations that would be financed by national funds controlled by the Zionist middle class in Europe. Thus, Zionist Socialism—or, in the ideological jargon of the party, Constructive Socialism—was regarded not as a Socialist vanguard in the class war, but as a national elite meant to rejuvenate the Jewish people. The rejection of Marxist Socialism and the preference for Zionism are evident in the words of MAPAI’s historian, Meir Avizohar:

From the approach of Constructive Socialism, it was concluded that the problem of the Jewish workers in Eretz-Israel was in essence different: capitalism was not the reality they wished to change, but the galut. The change was to be accomplished not by revolution and correction, but in exiting. Whoever left the galut and came to Eretz-Israel would not find an existing society and economy, which had to be seized, but a largely uninhabited country. Talking about an Eretz-Israeli revolution against the Jewish capitalist class, or against British imperialism, between the wars is preposterous empty talk.10

These ideological tenets resulted in interclass peace between the labor movement and the bourgeoisie, cooperation with the British, and the exclusion of Palestinians. They constituted the ideological divide that separated Communism from Zionist Socialism from the 1920s to the mid-1960s.

Already in the early twentieth century the contradiction between Zionism and Socialism emerged when the first members of Po’aley Zion arrived in Palestine with their Borochovist ideology. The right wing of the party struggled to shape the politics of its Palestine branch in 1907 in accordance with the tenets that would later form the core of Constructive Socialism. However, not all members of the party agreed with the preference for the nationalist over the Socialist: “How are we to more tightly combine the idea of international proletarian solidarity with the national competition against the Arabs … one of the two: if we are ‘real’ internationalist Socialists, we must not push out foreign workers because we are all brothers and comrades against capital and its rule.”11 When those Po’aley Zion members that opposed the right-wing Ahdut HaAvoda formed the MPS in 1919 to 1920, their preference for internationalist Socialism was declared in a programmatic article:

Socialist Palestine will be built on a sound economic alliance with the mass of Arab toilers. Our Socialism means one Socialist economy for the whole country and its populace. We do not believe in “Socialism” only for one part of the population. Our demands and slogans must concern all the workers of Palestine. The wall that was erected between Arab and Jewish workers by the bourgeoisie and social-traitor elements must be replaced by a Socialist alliance.12

The formation of the PKP and its acceptance as the section of the Comintern in Palestine marked the formulation of its anti-Zionist ideology. Zionist Socialism was defined not only as preferring the nation over the class, but also as a tool in the hands of the bourgeoisie. Thus, Jewish Communist anti-Zionism, which originated from the doubts concerning the compatibility of Zionism with Socialism, became part of a wider Marxist analysis. According to a pamphlet:

Zionism is a movement that expresses the aspirations of the Jewish bourgeoisie that wants to create its own market, for which purpose it exploits nationalist romanticism. Zionism is linked to British imperialism, and economically to the Zionist colonization project that is based on acute exploitation. All the actions of the Zionist organizations are preparing the ground for capitalist settlement at the expense of the exploited masses. All those parties (like Ahdut HaAvoda and Hapoel Hatzair) that talk about Socialist settlement are making it easy for the Zionist bourgeoisie to achieve its aims.13

The 1930s were characterized by the persistence of the basic anti-Zionist tenets that were formulated in the 1920s. The resolutions of the Seventh Party Congress, which accelerated the Arabization of the PKP in the aftermath of the 1929 Riots, give clear expression to the anti-Zionist line of the party. Zionism, according to the Communists, was being used by the Zionist bourgeoisie to transform Palestine’s Jews “into a tool for the oppression and control of the Arab workers.”14

The early 1930s and the first years of the Arab Revolt saw a continuation and radicalization of the strong anti-Zionist ideology formulated since 1924. However, by 1937 the Jewish section of the PKP began a reassessment of the anti-Zionist policy. Driven by what they saw as a growing Palestinian nationalist movement, which was destroying its progressive nature when parts of its leadership sought support in Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy from the late 1930s, the Jewish section argued for a more sophisticated approach to the Yishuv and to Zionism, all the while agreeing to the basic policy of the PKP regarding Zionism. A 1940 document of the Emmet faction, which emerged from the Jewish section and splintered from the party, formulates the Jewish Communists’ understanding of Zionism in the latter part of the 1930s. The document deals with Communist activity within various organizations of left-wing and liberal Zionists aimed at Arab-Jewish understanding. In accordance with the PKP line, the Jewish Communists describe Zionism as a tool in the hands of British imperialism used to separate Arabs and Jews and to blur the class war and the liberation struggle of Palestinians and Jews alike. However, on the ques...

Índice

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 Basic Concepts and Political Ritual
• Chapter 2 The Creation of a Jewish Progressive Tradition
• Chapter 3 Holocaust, Independence, and Remembrance in Israeli Communist Commemoration
• Chapter 4 Workers’ Utopia and Reality in Israeli Communism
• Chapter 5 Revolution and the Soviet Union among Israeli Communists
• Chapter 6 Jewish-Arab Fraternity: Language, Perception, Symbol, and Ritual
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Back Cover