Thats what it shows when term of neglience by arbitrary the partnership roomage of Palestinians with Nazi-Europe and the Mufti of Jerusalem adhere Hitler in Berlin - the term Zionism has to convene not settlement - it casual pursue a radical approach for democracy out of fundamental burden,...and likewise my antifaschist militancy supports the state building of Israel as radical democracy.

Salaam !

I can't understand a word of your post I will be at Trafalgar square to protest against 60 years of shame.

RiotQueer, while I'm sure your comment was trying to highlight the finer points of the difficulty of the radical left approaching the national question especially with regard to the present nation state of Israel, that was truly incomprehensible.

I don't like the media shortbus on Palestinians - younger thena hell - with guns and detecting rude sighted opportunity to all then owned family bias:

Why speak of this then? Or how did we get here? It seems to me that any discussion of Cultural Marxism in Britain demands to speak of Cultural Studies (despite Cultural Studies' distancing from and then eventual repudiation of Marxism). It is precisely the sceptical critique of the yoking together of these three terms - British, Cultural and Marxism - that provides the thematic of the last three decades of Cultural Studies, particularly as seen through the set of theoretical interests expressed in Stuart Hall's influential line, a detourned version of which gives this paper its name: 'within shouting distance'. 'Within shouting distance' meant that yes, there were useful aspects of Marxism - issues of capital's power and global reach, class, the general theory - and that these could not fall away from any aspirantly critical political theory meant "working within shouting distance of Marxism, working on Marxism, working against Marxism, working with it, working to try to develop Marxism." But the gap which had to be shouted across was apparently too wide - and Marx - or Marxism - according to Hall, "did not talk about or seem to understand […] our privileged object of study: culture, ideology, language, the symbolic." So for Hall the encounter with Marxism was with a problem, not a theory, and Marxism, apart from its so-called 'Euro-Centrism'; is always characterised as a reductive, economistic entity, hidebound to a base-superstructure model of economic and socio-cultural forms. Into this failure flooded waves of cultural and semiotic analysis, and a determined project to counter determinism. The message was doubled - Marxism could not speak of culture - Marxism spoke of culture only in deterministic ways. Doctrinal, reductionist, parading an immutable law of history - Hall's version of Marxism was, in many respects, a parody and crude, and the sort of thing necessary for launching a new brand. But perhaps that redress, that tipping the scales back in favour of 'culture' and in particular in favour of ('favour of' in all its senses) popular culture was a response to a characteristic of the British left - in particular in its academic variant, as well as British intellectual life across the political spectrum.

Eagerly my neighbor is a famous Neo-Nazi (www.1mai.net) and pursue the hall distance with the 'Autonomous Nationalist' who looks defined like left-radicals and punks.

B'in'aith B'rith!

Don't forget an issue of critical whiteness:

 http://www.workersliberty.org/node/6705

is not English? I really can't make out either of his posts.

Lets state a resistance of common radical approaches!

Peace riotqueer!

Although, Israel is near the Middle Eastern oil fields, it has no oil fields of its own, which has added to its strategic vulnerability in relation to its neighbours. However, its image, as 'a bastion of Western culture in a sea of backwardness ruled by petty despots'[7], has been used by the USA to maintain control over the oil fields.

From the late 1950s onwards, dramatically rising amounts of financial and military aid made it plain that the US saw Israel as a strategic asset which counterbalanced, and indeed was capable of overwhelming the Soviet client states of Egypt and Syria. The wars of 1967 and 1973 demonstrated to the Arab world exactly how powerful Israel had become. It was now the region's superpower. The Israeli airforce, especially, could completely subjugate the eastern Mediterranean area.

Israel also had a second use for US policymakers. Stung by its Vietnam experience, and often prevented from intervening in the political hotspots of the world as it would like by domestic opinion or concerns over its international standing, the US frequently used Israel, particularly in the 1970s and 1980s as a conduit through which it could supply, or could entice Israel to supply, money and arms to various counterinsurgency movements. The ruling classes of Zaire, South Africa, Angola, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Indonesia were some of those who benefited from timely Israeli aid in their attempts to remain safe from challenge.

While the US bourgeoisie has tended to be pro-Zionist, Israel has 'never been enough' to guarantee the security of their interests. They have had to engage directly with the Arab states, and this has sometimes proved to be a high risk strategy, which has not always gone the United States' way. While the Gulf states and Turkey have been consistently unquestioning about their role as clients, Arab nationalism, 'socialism', and Islamism have each caused various Arab nations to take an intransigent position in their relations with the US. Egypt under Nasser, Syria under Hafez al-Asad, and Iran under the mullahs are some of the examples.

Currently two areas are still giving US policymakers sleepless nights. The first is the rise of Islamism, which was initially promoted by the USA as a counterweight to the USSR, but has become almost impossible - or at least very difficult - for the US and its client states to recuperate. From Syria to Jordan to Egypt, the jails of the Middle East are stuffed with radical, anti-American Islamists.

The second problem is the recurring question of the Palestinians. Israel's creation of a large Palestinian diaspora throughout the Middle Eastern oil-producing proletariat led sections of the Arab bourgeoisie to take a radical anti-US stance. As the 'guard-dog' of US imperialism, Israel provided the external threat, which unified the emergent Arab bourgeoisies and mobilized Arab workers. Whenever the Arab bourgeoisie has faced the threat of proletarian antagonism, it has been able to deflect the anger of the proletariat against 'the real enemy', Israel. After 1967, the PLO became the main political expression of Pan-Arabism.

In the face of Pan-Arab hostility, the Israeli bourgeoisie has sought military alliances with non-Arab Islamic countries. However, Israel's association with Iran was cut short by the overthrow of the Palavi dynasty in 1979. The new Shi-ite regime was, if anything, more vehemently anti-western than the Arab nationalists.[8] More recently Israel has found in Turkey a new non-Arab ally in the region.

So the form of Pan-Arab nationalism, which was the ideological basis for Palestinian nationalism, has been bound up with and maintained by Zionism.[9] Like its nemesis, Zionism was also a nationalist political movement based on the idealized 'natural community', in this case of Jews.[10] It is impossible to understand the present uprising, and the nationalist ideology which pervades it, without understanding the nationalism it sought to has oppose: Zionism. Until relatively recently its dominant form could be called Labour Zionism, to which we now turn.

A tale of two national liberation movements: Labour Zionism and the Palestinian National Movement
Labour Zionism and the militancy of the European Jewish working class

Labour Zionism has traditionally been based around various big institutional structures, mainly the Histadrut and the Jewish National Fund (JNF). The Histadrut is a state run 'trade union', which has always also been a major employer. Even before the creation of Israel it was an embryonic department of labour that also fulfilled the functions of a trade union for some sectors of Jewish workers. The Jewish National Fund (JNF) was established in 1903 as a fund for collecting donations from Zionists. Its main function has been as the national land administrating body. It bought large amounts of land in the name of 'all Jews' and controlled much of the land gained in the '48 land grab. JNF land could only be let to Jews and worked on by Jews and became state owned in '48. Eighty per cent of Israelis live on land that was initially JNF owned, much of which is still controlled by the JNF.

The early Zionists were a bourgeois pressure group, who spent their time lobbying various European leaders (including Mussolini). Unlike most European Jews, these Zionists identified themselves as anti communists. They saw their allies in 'honest anti semites' who would give them land to rid themselves of the Jewish 'revolutionary menace'. They also courted western European Jewish capitalists who wanted to avoid the continued immigration of militant Eastern European Jews into their countries (which they saw as compromising assimilation and encouraging anti semitism) and colonial states who could give or sell them land (which didn't necessarily have to be Palestine at this point). However, Zionism always needed to be a mass movement and the early Zionists were happy to be flexible with their political allegiances to facilitate this.

In its early days, Zionism was irrelevant to most working class European Jews, whose allegiance tended to be to the revolutionary workers' movement sweeping the continent.[11] As well as the militant Jewish proletariat many middle class Eastern European Jews found that, when faced with right wing anti-semitism, the only place for them was the left.

In order to appeal to this constituency, Zionists groups were forced to emphasize their more 'socialist' aspects.[12] These aspects converged with the desire, expressed in Zionism, to return to the pre-capitalist communal ties, which formed the very basis of 'Jewish identity'. The more 'social democratic' elements of Zionist thought became prominent and prevailed as the dominant form of Zionism, and this is what allowed Zionist groups to gain a foothold in the Jewish workers' movement.

Advent of Labour Zionism in Palestine

The early Jewish settlements were more or less commercial ventures, which tended to end up employing Arab workers (often newly proletarianized due to Zionist land purchases).[13] New Jewish immigrants looking for work sometimes even found themselves looking for casual work on the same basis as the Arabs.[14]

The institutions of Labour Zionism began to become ascendant in the Palestinian Jewish community around the 1920's. There had been an ongoing struggle since around 1905 when, after the failure of the 1905 revolution, many leftist Russian Jews turned to Zionism. The second wave of Zionist immigration consisted mainly of young, educated, middle class, leftist Jews who wanted to return to the land and work as pioneers. They became disillusioned with Zionist colonization, which they saw as too capitalist to live up to their hopes. In opposition to the Jewish capitalists, who were happy to employ Arab labour power in so far as it was cheaper, they introduced the idea that Jewish land and business should be worked exclusively by Jewish labour. If a part of modern anti-semitism is a pseudo-anti-capitalism, in which the Jew is equated with the abstract side of the commodity form - abstract labour not concrete labour, 'rootless and cosmopolitan' finance and circulation, rather than grounded, nationally based production[15] - at one level Zionism, with emphasis on productive labour and going back to the land, is a response. It was thought that, in an exclusively Jewish state, Jews would not be concentrated in certain trades and professions, but play a full part in the capitalist division of labour. Hence their slogans were: 'the conquest of land' and 'the conquest of labour'.

This led to a conflict between the older settlers and the new immigrants.[16] Jewish bosses who carried on employing Arab labour were picketed by the Zionist trade unions.[17] The conflict was muted by the Zionist organisation, which used the large part of its funds to subsidize Jewish wages so that employers could use Jews as cheaply as Arabs. However there were still strikes. In response to this, the right wing opposition organised scab labour into a 'national trade union' with the help of Polish petit bourgeois immigrants, rich farmers and factory owners. They also carried out attacks on working class organisations.[18] However, the left wing 'conquest of labour' Zionists got a big boost from the Palestinian general strikes of 1936, when Jewish workers scabbed on striking Palestinians.

By the 1920s the Histadrut organised more than three quarters of Jewish workers and was the main employer after the British government. It also ran the labour exchanges, and was very closely linked to the sales and production co-operatives. With all this structure the Histadrut was a vital basis of the Zionist organisations 'quasi government' which organised education, immigration, economic and cultural affairs. So, even before 1948, the Zionist state was becoming rooted in corporatist social democratic forms.[19]

Zionist ethnic stratification

After the massive land grab in 1948, the perennial problem of a Jewish labour shortage emerged for the first time. European bourgeois Jews presented Zionism to their funders and supporters as the solution to the militancy of Jewish workers. However, most Jews, it turned out, didn't want to go to Israel, and were more tempted by America or Western Europe. European Jews were put off by the tiny state's territorial disadvantage in relation to its hostile Arab neighbours, which in turn fed the imperative to expand: unlike Egypt to the West and Syria to the North East, Israel could not afford to lose a single acre of land. The consequent militarization of Israeli society was a further disincentive to potential immigrants.

This problem was partially solved by the immigration of Middle Eastern and North African Jews. However, many oriental Jews had no desire to move to Israel, and were even opposed to Zionism, because it made their situation more precarious, especially in Arab countries. Much of the Arab bourgeoisie was attempting to promote pan Arabism as an opposition to Zionism, although the oriental Jews were not subjected to anything like systematic genocide on the level of the holocaust, there were pogroms in some Middle Eastern countries. The establishment of Israel, the 1948 war and the subsequent increase in Arab nationalism further destabilized the position of the oriental Jews, and many of them emigrated to Israel.[20]

The oriental Jews were often proletarianized in the process of their dislocation. Those who had professional qualifications found that these were not recognized in Israel and assets were often taken on arrival. In stark contrast, the occidental Jews received preferential treatment in housing and employment, and some were able to use individual war reparations from Germany as money capital. Frequently oriental Jews were also placed in the transit camps and development towns which were closest to the borders, and which were overcrowded as well as dangerous. In the case of the mainly North African Jews dumped in border towns like Musrara, the state turned a blind eye when they squatted in the houses of Arabs displaced by the expropriatory war of 1948. So in practice the oriental Jews ended up guarding the borders against the Arabs. So the application of labour Zionism in Israel was based on ethnic stratification of the working class, not just between Jews and Arabs, but also between occidental and oriental Jews. It was the labour of the oriental Jews, as well as the few Palestinians who remained, that became the driving force to 'make the desert bloom' into a modern capitalist state.

However Israel has never had a 'normal' capitalist economy, due to the disproportionate role played by overseas financial support. From the 1950s, about a billion marks was contributed annually by West Germany as collective reparations for the Nazi holocaust. More significant has been the contribution from the USA. 'In 1983, Israel with only 3 million inhabitants received 20% of all-American aid. In other words, each Israeli family received the equivalent of 2,400 dollars from the US government. However as the most developed capitalist state in the region, the Israeli bourgeoisie had accumulated its own potential gravediggers, in the form of a combative working class.

Jewish working class resistance and the imperative to expand

Unlike many other countries in the Middle East, Israel has always had a relatively large working class concentrated in a small area. Ethnic stratification has safeguarded against the emergence of a homogenous proletariat confronting Israeli capital. However, in spite of this, the Israeli working class showed itself to be combative. The major feature of class struggle in this period was oriental Jews contesting their subordinate position in Israeli society. Throughout the 1950s there were riots in the overwhelmingly oriental transit camps about 'bread and work', which frequently turned against the police. In 1959 the 'Wadi Salib Riots' started in a slum of Haifa and immediately spread to other places with a large Moroccan Jewish population.

As in Western European states, class conflicts in Israel were mediated through social democratic institutions. However many of the militant oriental Jews saw the Histadrut and the Labour Party as the enemy, and so these institutions were often under attack. On one occasion, in 1953 the Histadrut office in Haifa was subject to an arson attack by oriental Jewish demonstrators, who saw its naked corporatism as one of the embodiments of their subordination to the occidental Jews.

In the early 1960s, the Israeli economy was in a slump, partly due to the drying up of the German war reparations, which had provided Israeli capital with its initial kick-start. Many of the immigrants, who had moved to Israel expecting a better life, now faced growing unemployment. Jewish workers continued to make life difficult for the Israeli bourgeoisie, with 277 strikes in 1966 alone.[21] With the burning of the red flag (which symbolized the hegemony of the Labour Party) becoming a routine feature at dockers' demonstrations, it was clear that the social democratic forms of Labour Zionism were failing to recuperate the struggles of Jewish workers.