[Originally published under the pseudonym M. Lubetsky in Vol. 10 of Autonomie. Materialien gegen die Fabrikgesellschaft. Frankfurt 1977/78. Translated from the reprint in Moishe Postone: Deutschland, die Linke und der Holocaust. Politische Interventionen. ça ira-Verlag, Freiburg 2005. The title image depicts Wilfried Böse (1949-1976), one of two members of the German group Revolutionäre Zellen (RZ) who participated in the hijacking of Air France Flight 139, which ended with him being killed by Israeli commandos at Entebbe International Airport, Uganda.]
Stammheim and Tel Zataar
An experiment on morality and politics
I.
In recent years I have always had problems with the way the issue of violence was publicly discussed on the left. On the one hand, there are those who, starting from a position of radical humanism, reject the Jesuit or Stalinist justification of all means by the end goal and thus come to a categorical rejection of all use of violence. They emphasize that the goal of creating a better world must be clearly identified in every step that leads there. Although I am fundamentally close to this position, I have problems with the way it is often advocated. To me, it remains too abstract. I do not criticize this attitude as too moral – to the contrary, it is astonishing that some people who come from a movement whose driving force has always been morality – the moral horror of the Nazis, of Vietnam, of the situation in the Third World, would today reject a position as too moral and thereby in a certain way displace a part of themselves. No, my problem is that in this discussion the question of violence is torn away from all political and historical context. The impression arises that violence should be rejected by all movements and groups regardless of their concrete historical situation. But not only that. I do not think that this position alone is sufficient to adequately criticize the politics of the urban guerrilla.
I reject the politics of the guerrilla not only for moral, but also for political reasons, because if you follow the guerrillas onto the field that they have set, it is a political argument that has to be conducted with them. The guerrillas consider themselves “realistic”, an “effective factor of resistance”, and they accuse the rest of the left of naivety and liberalism. I would like to problematize this self-assessment because, in my opinion, it is itself deeply apolitical. I would like to explain this in the following.
Most of the arguments of the defenders of the metropolitan guerrilla are also abstract and moral. But the character of their arguments is very different from those of the proponents of the “radical humanist” position. While the latter problematize the relationship between the goal and the means of social change, the guerrillas derive the moral justification of their violence exclusively from existing societal violence, but not from the changes that are to be achieved through their politics. It only explains the causes of the violence, but not its effects and aims.
I don’t criticize their anger – it is mine as well. I also know the desire to express this anger directly through violence. But although anger is the driving force behind many political actions, in order for an action to become political it must be emotionally understandable to more than just a small group; the question of whether to undertake it or not must be discussed not only in terms of its moral justification, but also of its effects.
(The first protest in the United States against the war in Southeast Asia that I participated in was in 1963. We were ten people. Passers-by spat at us. We knew of the horrors that were happening there, we wanted to put an end to them, but we found ourselves isolated in an ocean of reactionary American patriots. What would have happened if, out of our anger and isolation, we had resorted to acts of sabotage? It would have been morally justified, but we would also have destroyed the possibility of widespread opposition to the war. We, and with us all anti-war positions, would have been condemned by the general public as traitors and enemies of the American people. We would have been used to mobilize even more support for the war. This was no longer possible as easily when, in 1967, 300,000 people marched on the Pentagon after long agitation, when a million people were protesting in Washington in 1970, and when also in 1970, in a national student strike against the invasion of Cambodia and for the release of Bobby Seale, more than 1,000 universities were brought to a standstill at the same time. A broad movement had emerged that was more effective in obstructing the US government than any form of sabotage. The real question is: Do we want to shout out our anger immediately and remain morally pure, or do we want to change or destroy what generates our anger? These are not the same.)
The language of the advocates of the guerrilla position is the language of lawyers who justify, make understandable, explain the actions of their clients, but it is not the language of political actors who see violence as a means for achieving political ends.
But how could it be otherwise? What reasonably “realistic” argument would speak for a possible success of the guerrillas in this country? It is not about the justification of anger, it is not about the brutality of state and society, it is not about whether the guerrillas are to blame for the repression or not – the question is: What has been achieved? Or what could be achieved in a metropolis this way? – Nothing.
For some years now, the comrades of the RAF [Red Army Faction] have been telling us that we live in a fascist country and that military resistance is therefore the only course of action. OK. I don’t want to go into that any longer, just, if fascism reigned here, then this article, this newspaper and all these teach-ins would no longer exist. But what should be done if fascism was at the door? One would have to try with all means to prevent it, in my opinion this would only be possible with the largest anti-fascist movement possible.
(The German workers’ movement was not defeated in 1933, it gave up without a fight. The KPD’s tactics of going underground before Hitler came to power and of adhering to the social fascism thesis mark the steps of this surrender without a fight. The underground was then more or less quickly smashed. What the underground work of one of the largest communist parties in the world did not succeed at at that time should now be possible for a small group? The people who recall the successful Yugoslav or French resistance must not forget the national element of the fight against a foreign occupying power. Germany is not occupied by a foreign military machine. Problems of legitimation still exist in the BRD [Federal Republic of Germany, this abbreviation carried a polemic connotation when it still meant the West German state alone, which would be lost in translation], they are not simply replaced by questions of fear and anxiety.)
The foundational idea of an anti-fascist front is the common opponent – beyond all differences regarding the positive determination of the goals of the struggle. The comrades who claim to be fighting against fascism here and now are obviously not interested in such a broad movement.
Another look at the USA at the time of the great political trials at the end of the 1960s, especially the trial of Bobby Seale. The Panthers of the Black Panther Movement did not demand identification with their politics, they demanded support against the attacks of the state. On this basis a broad front was created, a joint movement whose aim, beyond the release of Bobby Seale, was the indictment of the brutal and terrorist methods of the state against the Panthers and against the ghetto.
The point of agitation was the rupture between the liberal claims of a state supposedly acting according to clearly defined laws, and the practised reality. Obviously, such an approach is “liberal” – but it was seen as the first step in the direction of a steadily radicalizing broad movement, at the very least the creation of this liberal protective shield was a necessary line of defense for the left. Every left needs this shield, needs space to live. In the Third World it is the support of the peasants, in the metropolises a strong labor movement or a liberal public that guarantees the left this space. This leeway is political, it is not simply there, it has to be built up. (The ‘space’ that urban anonymity affords the urban guerrilla is not a substitute for this, it is merely the reified translation of a political constellation into the technical, analogous to the reification of the concept of political power as the gun.)
How did it play out for us? In my impression, the RAF refused support against the Stammheim Landrecht and the conditions of detention if this support was not prepared to go as far as identifying with the politics of the RAF. There were and are many who wanted to protest against the treatment of the prisoners, against the attempt to legitimize repression with the RAF, but many wanted to do so without automatically identifying themselves with the RAF. Not out of fear, not out of weakness – but because they simply found these politics wrong. This type of support was not allowed by the RAF. What the state did to them was used as moral leverage. Moral pressure as a recruitment tool – this attitude is so avant-garde that it even makes the pre-revolutionary Bolsheviks look like council socialists. For me, this is one of the reasons for the paralyzing effect of many RAF discussions in recent years – a contribution to paralyzing an already paralyzed left.
Of course, one wonders what reasoning is behind the rejection of this support. A protest that was stirring for the first time in a long time during of the wiretapping affair ended with the Buback assassination. One wonders why the RAF didn’t care about a broader public. I suspect that the RAF, recognizing the brutality of imperialism and “democratic capitalism”, equated these forms of rule with fascist brutality. This moral valuation, which sweeps away all differentiations, is not only analytically wrong, but also politically fatal. It negates all political leeway, rejects it as moral compromise.
It is then only a matter of ‘exposing’ the state as fascist. Apparently they believed that if the population recognized this, they would be morally outraged about it. Their own moral evaluations were posited as the norm and projected onto society as if outrage was something that was simply there and not something that had to be created. Or they represented the same worldview as the Weather Underground in the USA, i.e. the thesis that the USA / BRD are absolutely evil and the movements in the Third World are absolutely good, that the metropolitan guerrilla can see itself as one small unit of a global liberation movement, operating behind enemy lines.
This Manichean worldview, together with the absolute simplification and glorification of the Third World, was already a mistake at the end of the 1960s, today it is just sad.
I have two associations regarding the RAF. One is the fascination that the idea of armed resistance – especially against the Nazis – had on me a few years ago. Today I would say that part of this fascination (which is by no means over) was the idea of not having to live an everyday life any longer. Every minute of my life would have a meaning if it were given by the struggle that is morally necessary and right, and which, since the question of life and death is always present, does not know everyday life. At this thought I noticed that any other idea of everyday life than that of the slow gray death of life under capitalism had become foreign to me, that I had a contemptuous attitude towards everyday struggles. There were no other ideas about life than that of a life within slow death. I say this because I realized that my idea of a life without the mundane was a flirtation with death. I wanted to replace the gray death with a different one. But struggle can also be determined by a different life.
The second association is about coming to terms with the past. I felt emotionally close to the anti-fascism of the RAF. But sometimes it occurs to me that in their disgust at the general repression of the Nazi past of this nation, they came to want to experience the 30s and 40s in a new edition in order to prove to themselves that they morally did better than their wretched parents. I sometimes have similar fantasies, fantasies that I have to deal with, since the reaction to the general suppression of the past must not be a desire to relive it.
But despite my associations, and although I can emotionally identify with such an attitude to a certain extent, that doesn’t mean that I think the RAF’s politics are good. Above all, I wanted to make it clear that a political stance is determined by the will for social change and by a discussion of the means to be used to achieve this goal. Most of us want the end to be expressed in the means; many of us strive to combine political and private life. There is a great deal of existentialism in our politics. But the existentialism of the urban guerrilla seems to me to be of a different kind. Its goal is not social change, but this existential attitude itself becomes its goal.
I emphasize this because I am angry. I have nothing against a non-political existentialist stance. Nobody can be commanded to be “political” and declare this to be the highest of all values in life. But I’m angry at what has happened in the past few years. Angry at the RAF people who declared themselves to be the most political of all, and so exerted tremendous moral pressure on many of us who were already suffering from powerlessness and isolation, pressure that went so far as to defame all those who did not agree with the RAF as naive, apolitical. My goal is to question the RAF’s self-assessment as a political group.
I see in the attitude described above not only the reasons for the rejection of all alliances, but also the basis of those constructions that explain one’s own violence only by way of the eisting one, but never from one’s own goals. One cannot criticize this attitude only morally, since it is itself profoundly moral.
Morally, the radical humanists’ rejection of murder stands against the necessity to fight evil by all means. The latter morality can lead to an attitude that plays numbers games with the dead, declaring four deaths and the possibility of 86 more as unimportant compared to the much higher number of victims of the state. At this point, when adding up the dead, the guerrillas’ attitude begins to mirror their opponent, at least qualitatively, the quantitative differences are clear.
I want to say more than that the RAF is a group whose politics I reject. Since their basic attitude is a specific existentialism, all questions about goals etc. become blurred and unclear. The attitude is far from what it wants to be, namely effective politics and resistance.
II.
For further clarification, let me now present some actions by certain political groups from the Middle East. This concerns organizations to which the RAF was connected in an unfortunate way, but whose actions, in contrast to those of the RAF, pursued a clear strategic goal. The planners of the plane hijacking to Mogadishu did calculate the effects – but these effects had little to do with the RAF. I emphasize this not only to show the extent to which other groups have a relationship of means and ends (albeit one that I reject in this case), but also because I believe that they are using the RAF for their own ends . They were able to do the latter because of the RAF’s attitude towards violence, as well as because of a certain kind of anti-imperialism widespread on the left that is closely linked to this attitude.
First of all, briefly about the background: Israel is – for reasons that I will go into later – only willing to make “peace” with the existing Arab states, but not with the Palestinians. Israel is permanently undermining the possibility of peace with the Palestinians. All Palestinian groups, of course, oppose any kind of peace negotiations which exclude them and which would not lead to any kind of Palestinian national unity. Within the Palestinian movement, however, there are groups such as the PFLP (Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine) and various splinter groups that have formed out of and alongside it, which reject any kind of peace settlement with Israel whatsoever. At this level, their position on Israel is complementary to that of Israel on the Palestinians. Regardless of how one wants to judge this position (I think little of it, which I try to explain below), certain actions of the PFLP, especially aircraft hijackings, can only be understood as attempts to enforce this position, or at least to torpedo other attempts at resolution. This means that the ultimate strategic purpose of each hijacking, while always demanding the release of political prisoners, was a different one.
Examples
1) September 1970: Israel and Egypt have just signed an armistice that ended the war of attrition at the Suez Canal. The American Secretary of State Rogers introduced a ‘peace’ plan for the Middle East. At this point, the Palestinian groups in Jordan had become extremely strong, almost a state within a state. The Jordanian army was becoming increasingly restless, looking for an opportunity to attack. In this situation, the PFLP hijacked three planes – ostensibly to obtain the release of Palestinian prisoners. The effect, of course, was that war broke out in Jordan. And that was the real and immediate purpose of the hijackings. The PFLP likely assumed that the Palestinian movement could defeat King Hussein’s army. And if they were in power in Jordan, the Palestinians would not need to care about peace negotiations. The Rogers plan would be undermined this way. In actuality, the war resulted in a great massacre of Palestinians; the political and military power of the Palestinians in Jordan was broken. Whether the PFLP took this into account or not, the same “ultimate” goal was achieved, namely that all talks about peace plans were off the table. This was the strategic intent of the kidnappings – the demands for the release of political prisoners served only as a pretext. (One more thing I have to make clear: when I speak of attempts by certain Palestinian movements to sabotage possible peace plans, it should be clear that Israel is pursuing the same goal by other, more brutal means: forcible expropriation of Palestinian land, settlement of occupied territories, military attacks on Palestinian camps, raids on neighboring territories. The Israeli policy of brutal assault and the creation of facts is a permanent provocation of the Palestinians and the neighboring Arab countries, and it is intended as such. Historically as well as currently, the actions of the Israelis are the greatest obstacles to peace. The reason that I focus on the Palestinians is their strong influence on today’s left, the question I want to raise here is that of a political learning process within the left.)
2) Summer 1976: War and civil war in Lebanon. The long and murderous siege of Tel Zataar – the Palestinian refugee camp in Beirut, considered a stronghold of the PFLP – was nearing its climax. The siege was made possible not only by Israeli support of the Christian Falangists, but also by the entry of the Syrian troops into Lebanon – as a ‘regulating factor’. In this sense, they replaced the PLO, which had previously fulfilled this role, but could no longer do so politically or militarily. The PFLP saw the imminent threat of destruction of the camp and, on a political level, the de facto rapprochement between Israel and Syria. Until then, Syria had been the one among the so-called front-line states that had given the Palestinian cause the greatest support.
This was the background of the aircraft hijacking to Entebbe. This time, too, the demand for the release of political prisoners obscured another goal: to try to prevent Israeli-Syrian rapprochement and, if possible, to reduce pressure on Tel Zataar. How? The planners of the hijacking knew that the Israelis had never exchanged prisoners for hostages before. However, they could hardly have expected an Israeli commando unit to storm an airport this remote. So what reaction did they expect from the Israelis? I believe that they were speculating on a massive Israeli assault on Lebanon, an assault that would not have been limited to the areas of southern Lebanon implicitly ceded by Syria as Israeli sphere of influence. If such an assault had taken place, Syria could not possibly have stood by passively, and even less could have maintained a de facto understanding with Israel. Even if there had been no war between Israel and Syria, at least their rapprochement would have been undone. Syrians, PLO and PFLP would have been on the same side of the barricades, the siege of Tel Zataar would have ended (the price, however, would have been even greater destruction in Lebanon).
I believe that this goal explains the specific form of action. Two days after the Air France plane reached Entebbe, the approximately 150 non-Jewish passengers were released. The approximately 100 Jewish passengers were held as the actual hostages. And among those who performed the selection of passengers into Jewish and non-Jewish (not Israeli and non-Israeli, which would have been bad enough) were young Germans. I don’t think that this was a coincidence, it was a deliberate staging (whether the hijackers directly involved realized this or not). The intention was a provocation so extreme that an extremely violent Israeli response would be triggered. The world was shown, once again, how Germans select Jews and non-Jews from one another. And that’s how it was perceived (except perhaps in parts of the left, I’ll come to that later). A tremendous wave of traumatic memories surged everywhere. Any small successes that progressive anti-Zionists had achieved in their attempt to break the close connection between Jewish self-image and Zionism – a connection that only became this generalised after World War II – had been swept away. The intention was to create a united front of all Palestinian groups and Arabs against all Israelis and Jews, to plaster over all conflicts within the respective “camps” such that each side saw the “real Nazis” in the other – an intention that had nothing to do with a progressive liberation movement.
3) October 1977: Airplane hijacking to Mogadishu: Again the release of political prisoners was demanded – although this time those were mainly Germans. I do not believe, however, that this was the real goal, nor that the kidnapping was initiated by the RAF. Even from an RAF standpoint, it made little sense. Firstly, the massive attack on the German citizens involved was in contradiction to previous RAF policy. Secondly, from a tactical perspective, the kidnapping diminished the importance of Schleyer as a hostage, who was now only one of 87. I believe that the RAF was only used as a pretext and that the real strategic reason must again be sought in the Middle East.
On the same day as the GSG 9 struck in Mogadishu, an attempt on Arafat’s life was carried out in Lebanon. He had pressured the PFLP to withdraw its fedayeen from southern Lebanon. The likely reason for Arafat’s pressure was that, given the American and Soviet efforts to have the Geneva Conference reassemble this autumn, and the Israeli attempts to undermine these efforts by legalizing new settlements on the West Bank, etc. – he wanted to avoid a situation that the Israelis could have used as a pretext for further action to prevent the conference. (Meanwhile, on November 8th, in alleged retaliation for a rocket attack on the northern Israeli city of Nahariya that had killed 3 people, strikes by the Israeli air force and artillery on several villages and camps in southern Lebanon completely destroyed these and killed well over 100 people.)
Another aspect of the constellation in which the action took place is the pressure recently exerted on Israel by the Western powers, especially the Europeans, to accept the Palestinians as negotiating partners in Geneva. Israel has stubbornly refused: it does not intend to negotiate with “terrorists”.
In this context, a Palestinian group is carrying out an action directed against the most powerful state in Europe. The result is an outcry across the western world against ‘international terrorism’, which is being closely identified with the Palestinians. Israel’s position seems more understandable. This is hardly a coincidence.
It is too early to see if this goal has been achieved. That would be the case if Arab front-line states – out of the feeling that the Palestinians represent an unacceptable ballast – enter into negotiations with Israel without significant Palestinian participation. This would of course force all Palestinian groups to torpedo these peace negotiations. (The question of how intra-Arab rivalries – Libya versus Egypt, Iraq versus Syria – are represented in mediated fashion in conflicting Palestinian groups is too complicated to be presented here.)
It is possible, however, that the PFLP’s calculation will not work out and that the Americans and Europeans will continue to press for a Palestinian presence in Geneva. That would only indicate that the European powers and the US are very well aware of their own interests and that, although Israel needs imperialism, the reverse is not necessarily the case. Imperialism and its strategy has changed significantly in the Middle East since 1967.
The point with all of these examples is that whatever you might think of them, these actions do have tactical and strategic goals. These goals are not just expressions of anger, nor are they just intended to free prisoners. In this respect they are very different from the RAF actions in the BRD, revealing the latter as – despite their “harshness” – quite naive. Because the RAF unfortunately did not have a concept of politics that would have been appropriate to its moral outrage, they probably believed the slogans that were offered to them and could therefore be used by other groups for their own purposes.
But this requires further explanation. How could young German leftists allow themselves to be instrumentalized in this way, e.g. in Entebbe, where their primary function was precisely to be German? I think they probably did not realize this – but the reason cannot be sought in individual naivety. As I said, I think it has a lot to do with the RAF’s stance to justify violence by reference to existing violence – but also with a related form of anti-imperialism that is by no means limited to the RAF.
III.
I would like to say something about the widespread form of anti-imperialism, as it was also represented by the RAF, using the Middle East as an example. Here I would also like to discuss the question of political learning processes in general.
For many of us, in retrospect, the experience of most communists of the 1930s and 1940s seems hard to understand. We have difficulty subjectively positioning ourselves to it. How could people – even in the face of the world historical threat posed by fascism – be so blind in one eye? How could they suspend their critical faculties to such an extent that, despite the horrors of forced collectivization, mass deportations, show trials, Spain, the Hitler-Stalin Pact, labor camps – they were able to ignore the reality of the Soviet Union?
We ask ourselves whether, even in the struggle against fascism, it was necessary to “see” the Soviet Union as the paradise of the working class – instead of accepting it as the lesser of two evils.
We say this – but are we all that different, even without directives from a headquarter in Moscow and without a hierarchical organization? When we say that in order to be against fascism it was not necessary to throw all critical faculties overboard and totally accept and glorify the Soviet Union, then perhaps we should examine more closely our own attitudes towards various political movements: must we, in order to maintain the anti-imperialist stance most of us have adopted over the past decade, embrace so uncritically all movements that declare themselves to be anti-imperialist?
What struck me, for example, was that since Entebbe I have never heard any public talk on the German left about what happened there before the Israeli raid. What kind of blindness, what kind of repression did this require from leftists here whose political socialization began with disgust for Nazism, for them not to recognize today an action in which Germans again selected Jews from others? (There were even people here so politically, historically, and morally unaware that they celebrated the action.) Did they fear that if they questioned the action, their anti-Zionism would be put to question?
However, these two things have nothing to do with each other. Awareness of crimes committed against a people or any group of people, and the desire to try to put an end to those crimes, should not necessarily imply uncritical solidarity with any political rebellion against such oppression – especially the nationalist kind. It is simply not enough to point out this oppression to legitimize all politics that fight against it. Such an attitude is, not coincidentally, similar to that which I have described above as that of the defenders of the urban guerrilla, who justify the violence by pointing at its causes rather than taking its effects into account.
I would like to share an example from my own experience. When I went to school I was in the Zionist movement. It took many years of “seeing” – both morally and politically – and questioning myself before I could reject this position and develop an anti-Zionist criticism. But why had I been a Zionist, what did (and does) this movement mean to most Jews since World War II? (Before that, only a minority of Jews supported Zionism.)
Most Jews have never analyzed Zionism. For them, as it was the case for me, it simply means national self-determination. To understand why national self-determination seemed so obvious to most Jews as a necessary solution, one must understand that we knew that it was not only the German fascists who were responsible for the extermination of 6 million Jews and the destruction of the traditional centers of European-Jewish culture in Eastern Europe. If it were ‘only’ for them, nationalism would not be such a natural reaction. But I learned early on that the German fascists – although they initiated and directed the Final Solution – received massive support from non-Germans. For example from French fascists and Romanian fascists, but also from Flemish, Croat, Slovak, Ukrainian, Lithuanian and Latvian fascists.
(All movements of the second group came from peoples who saw themselves ruled over by a central power, who were themselves dominated by another people: the Flemings by the Walloons, the Croats by the Serbs, the Slovaks by the Czechs, the Ukrainians, Lithuanians and Latvians by the Russians. The question of regional autonomy and independence is indeed more complicated than it is usually presented in the current discussion. Such movements are not always progressive.)
In Poland, Jews who had survived the ghetto uprisings and concentration camps were often killed by Polish nationalist partisans because they were Jews; Zionists were often shot by communists. To the active support of the Nazis came the passive one of the USA, Canada, Great Britain, which refused to change their immigration quotas. When anti-Semitism began to stir in the communist countries after the war and after 1948 – the Slansky trial in the CSSR, the “Doctors’ Plot” in Moscow – things had come full circle for most Jews. Zionism, which most saw simply as national self-determination, was now widely supported.
We did not “see” what was happening to the Palestinians. This “not seeing” was further promoted by a few incidents: that the Mufti of Jerusalem spent the war years in Berlin, that the anti-British revolt of Rashid Ali in Iraq was supported by the German fascists, that swastika flags appeared on the streets of Cairo when Rommel’s army approached Egypt. These stories, along with the speeches of reactionary Palestinian nationalists such as Shukeiry, made the Palestinians appear in our perception as yet another enemy out to destroy us. But this time we would fight back. We did not “see” the Palestinians for what they were: peasants and craftsmen, petty merchants and workers who were being dispossessed and terrorized, driven out even, and – in cases like Deir Yassin – massacred by the Zionists, and who were trying to fight back.
I cite Zionism here as an extreme example of a movement that is completely understandable in terms of its causes, that is, in terms of a people’s history of suffering, but which cannot be justified at all in terms of its effects. Now when people say, “Okay, but it’s a reactionary movement!”, you are right, but it did not always appear that way – and it is the question of appearance that I want to address. In the late 1940s, Zionism had a different image. It was hailed as progressive by many left and liberal movements. The main supply of arms deliveries came from Czechoslovakia, not the West. The USSR was the first country to formally recognize Israel. Sections of the Zionist movement presented themselves as anti-imperialist in their struggles with the British. The army of right-wing Zionists led by Menachem Begin (currently the Prime Minister of Israel) had good relations with the IRA (the common enemy were the British). The kibbutzim were hailed as examples of utopian socialism.
It is of course not decisive that Zionism was once progressive and is no longer progressive. Rather, a movement, no matter how understandable it is with regard to its cause, must be understood within a particular social and historical context with regard to the effects it has and could have, regardless of its image and the self-image of its members. Many of the active Zionists actually saw themselves as progressive, as socialists. But the wish of left-wing Zionists to build a progressive country, supported by Jewish workers in industry and agriculture, became the best means of creating a social infrastructure which would, in the context of a country that was already inhabited, exclude the original Palestinian inhabitants. Regardless of their subjective intentions, the left-wing Zionists created a structure that would ensure the success of the Jewish colonization of Palestine. Based on Arab labor, it could never have survived. It is not necessary to attribute this knowledge to most Zionists. Suffice it to say, in this context, progressive notions of not living off the work of others had a factual effect that was different from the original intention. This movement had no capacity whatsoever to be progressive within the actual Middle Eastern context.
Through my confrontation with Zionism, I have learned to see cause and effect of a movement as separate – that it is not enough to justify a movement with reference to the oppression of the people it represents. I also came to understand the importance of analyzing a social and political context in order to understand how subjective intent and actual effect can diverge. Including “objective” factors is absolutely necessary, and this is not necessarily objectivism. After going through a long and emotionally difficult learning process in relation to Zionism, I have no desire to repeat the same mistake in relation to other movements. I want to hold on to what I’ve learned and not particularize it to one movement and then forget it.
This explains what I want to say about most of the Palestinian movements below. It is now commonplace to claim that the suffering of the Jews in Europe does not justify the suffering of the Palestinians. However, the other side of this coin is problematic. The Palestinians were not responsible for the suffering of the Jews, but the Palestinians were driven out by the Jews. The Palestinians therefore have a right to repossess their homeland. The problem with this position, however, is that – although it is understandable and, in a sense, morally correct – its effects become much more ambiguous when one considers its social and political context.
After all, the difficult thing about the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is that models like Algeria or, even less, Vietnam, cannot work here because the situation is completely different. Israeli Jews are not a minority compared to a large Palestinian majority. There are about 3 million Jews in Israel and about 3 million Palestinians in the Middle East. The peculiarity of the Zionist economy in contrast to most imperialist economies is that it does not depend primarily on Palestinian labor. This does not mean that the Palestinians have suffered any less than, for example, the Algerians. But it does mean that within such a context (of which I have only described two particularly salient features) a classic national liberation movement – based on guerrilla warfare and/or strike movements – and aiming at the “liberation” of all of Palestine has no chance of success. Only in areas where the Palestinians are a majority (i.e. mainly areas that the Israelis occupied after 1967), along with other factors, could a Palestinian movement become strong enough to force the Israelis to withdraw. But in most areas within the pre-1967 borders, any “liberation” would entail the conquest of another people – no matter how that people got there – rather than the overthrow of a relatively small ruling group resting upon the labor of Arab peasants, workers and craftsmen. And that is highly unlikely, both politically and militarily. Contrary to all Palestinian and Israeli propaganda, the fedayeen have never posed a threat to the existence of Israel.
Within such a context, the creation of a ‘democratic secular state’, which the Palestinians are calling for programmatically, could only be the result of a multinational struggle, not the result of a purely national struggle. But it is precisely such a struggle that the Palestinian guerrilla organizations have waged so far. I do not mean, of course, that the Palestinians should have given up their struggle and waited until large parts of the Israeli population joined them in the fight against Zionism. Nevertheless, any movement that sets its goal of a “democratic secular state” in which Jews, Muslims and Christians should live together must differentiate – even in guerrilla warfare – between those among the Israelis who can be possible allies and those who will never be allies. I do not want to go into the fact that – tellingly – the program of the PLO determines the groups according to religious and not national distinctions, and that by Jews who will be allowed to live in a future Palestine it only means those who – depending on the version – lived there before 1917 or 1948. This is not meant to be an abstract argument in the sense that multinational struggles are better than national ones. A purely national Palestinian movement could at most liberate those areas in which the Palestinians constitute a majority of the population; a nationalist attempt to “liberate” the rest of Palestine would no longer be a national war of liberation, but a war between two nations. If a struggle was actually anti-Zionist, and not simply directed against Jews living in Palestine, then this program would have to manifest itself in the actions themselves.
And that is not the case. The guerrilla actions made no distinction. This applies even to the Popular Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PDFLP), which has always emphasized the need for contact with progressive elements within Israel and which has hoped for a possible class alliance with the “oriental” Jews in Israel. (Oriental Jews are those who emigrated from Arab countries after 1948 and who today make up the majority of the Israeli working class, about 60% of the Israeli population.) In 1974 the PDFLP attacked a school in the northern Israeli city of Maalot and took students hostage. The population in this city is made up almost entirely of oriental working class Jews. The action fell short of the program. It is important to see the actions of the political groups, not just read their program. The guerrilla actions revealed the nationalism which the program of the fedayeen denies. Such actions help to legitimize Zionism in the eyes of most Israelis and to make the struggle appear to the masses of the Palestinians as purely national, without social content. This has had devastating political effects also with regard to the struggles in Jordan and Lebanon.
In contrast to many other struggles, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is characterized by the fact that the war does not exacerbate the social contradictions on both sides, but rather conceals them. Therefore I question the possible effects of groups like the PFLP, which refuse to negotiate with the Israelis and which aim at the “military” liberation of all of Palestine. (Regardless of how different Arab regimes use different Palestinian movements to carry out their own rivalries.) The effect of such politics is not to ignite, but to freeze social conflicts in the Middle East, or to translate them into national categories.
This is the reason why Israeli politics is so complementary to it. For the Zionists, the permanent national struggle or its threat is necessary, both for their raison d’être and for internal stability.
In the Arab states it has in the past fulfilled the function of equating the “Arab revolution” with the “Palestinian revolution”, and the latter with the reconquest of Palestine. In this way, all social conflicts are suspended in national ones.
Anyone who rejects a peace solution that includes a Palestinian “partial state” is too myopic. Obviously, such a peace solution is in the immediate interests of imperialism. Obviously, such a state would be nothing more than a mini-state ruled by a national bourgeoisie and PLO bureaucrats, kept alive with Saudi money. Obviously, such a state would leave the structure of Zionism untouched – initially. But by defusing the national conflict, such a peace settlement could contribute much more effectively to undermining Zionism than decades of ineffective guerrilla warfare. Only then would there be an opportunity for social disputes that cross national borders – disputes that may eventually lead to the establishment of “democratic secular” states – not only in Palestine, but in the entire Middle East.
This is why Israel is ready to make peace with the existing Arab countries, but not – at least not without extremely strong foreign pressure – with the Palestinians. Peace with them is absolutely necessary in order to defuse the nationalist character of the conflicts in the Middle East, and that is exactly what Israel does not want, since this would attack the political legitimacy of Zionism. And that’s why I claim that groups like the PFLP, which dress their nationalist maximalism in the guise of Marxist-Leninist anti-imperialist slogans, are playing exactly the same game as the Israelis.
Anti-imperialism can’t just mean resistance against the immediate oppressor and the powers that support them. It must also reveal the intention to build a society whose structure is anti-imperialist. In this sense the anti-imperialism of the PFLP, for example, has much less in common with that of the Viet Cong than with that of the right-wing Zionists of the 1940s, who waged a more militant underground struggle against the British than the other Zionists did. The degree of military militancy in a national struggle is not a necessary indicator of social radicalism.
None of this is meant as an accusation against the Palestinians. Their nationalism is totally understandable, not only morally but also materially. What other attitude would be possible for people who have been displaced and have since lived outside of any real social structure: for more than a generation in refugee camps, who were permanently the target of brutal Israeli attacks and were used as pawns by the Arab states in their conflicts among themselves? Of course they want their country back. All of it. (There are however important latent differences between Palestinians who live in refugee camps and those living in the occupied territories.)
I don’t want to make accusations here, but to try to make an assessment, to be able to determine the degree to which I, as an anti-Zionist, am willing to actively show solidarity with various Palestinian groups. Nonetheless, there remains an accusation on some level, but it is not directed against the Palestinians. It is directed against the local left, which has difficulties in making anti-imperialist politics through an analysis and assessment of a situation and thus could come to critical support of anti-imperialist movements – an attitude that would require an ongoing process of political learning. Instead, there is often only uncritical identification with such movements. But if we don’t see these movements with open eyes, we run the risk of becoming disappointed or disillusioned later – without having learned anything. Instead, the next object of identification is selected. This anti-imperialism is like the RAF’s attitude towards violence: movements are justified in terms of their cause, not in terms of their political effects.
Is it the secret of so many on the left that we are inverted nationalists? Nationalists whose homeland is somewhere else? If not obviously and dogmatically in Moscow or Beijing, then alternately in Algeria, Vietnam, Cuba, Palestine, Portugal? Is it necessary that we compensate for the feeling of helplessness and powerlessness at home by uncritically identifying with movements and regimes elsewhere? (Those western communist parties that have remained the most loyal to Moscow are the weakest: the DKP and CP-USA.) Is it a coincidence that it is precisely those parts of the left who have weaned themselves off the breast of Moscow or Beijing, who showed themselves in their feeling of powerlessness to be the most susceptible to the glorification of armed struggle abroad? Can’t we stand on our own two feet?
When we fall into this pattern of identification, we give up something that originally made us leftists: our critical reflections on our own experiences and their mediation to the society in which we live. We became leftists by refusing to let this society dumb us down any longer. Our powerlessness made us all too susceptible to new forms of dumbing down.
1977
Determinate Negation 