Israel-Hamas War: The left and the Middle East – 10/14/2023 – Celso Rocha de Barros

Kibbutz Be’Eri, attacked by Hamas last week in a brutal and cowardly manner, was founded by young socialists. They were members of the HaNoar HaOved VeHaLomed movement, the “Student and Working Youth”. On the movement’s website, there is information that the organization is a “sister” of Habonin Dror, founded from the merger of two movements. One of them, Dror, with a socialist orientation, had among its Brazilian members Paul Singer, one of the main intellectuals in the history of the PT.

If the reader was surprised by the association between Israel and the left, they have not seen anything yet. Israel’s war of independence was won with weapons from communist Czechoslovakia, and the Soviet Union was the first country in the world to recognize Israel. And it wasn’t Gorbachev: it was Stalin.

There are people more qualified than me to explain the subsequent geopolitical upheavals, but by the end of the process, everyone had switched sides. The right, which had a long history of anti-Semitism, began to defend Israel and pretend that it had spent the 1930s in a coma.

Over time, Israel became a modern democracy, which provided its citizens with an important welfare state and broad individual freedoms (including LGBT marriage). And, at the same time, it subjected the Palestinians to a brutal colonial situation.

To complicate matters, Israel is not a typical colonizer. It is a country formed from the diaspora of a people who had recently escaped the risk of extinction. The Europeans gave the Jews every right in the world to believe that, without an Army of their own, their existence could be threatened again.

Therefore, most of the international left defends the two-state solution. This is the PT’s position. It is present, for example, in the “Basic Document” of the party’s core of Jewish activists, Caju (Jewish Affairs Commission), presented in São Paulo in May 1987 (“Iyar de 5747”).

In the 1990s, the Oslo Accords, concluded between Ytzak Rabin’s Labor government and Yasser Arafat’s PLO, gave the impression that the conflict in the Middle East could begin to be resolved.

In Oslo, the main representative of the Israeli left and the Palestinian movement closest to the global left, including the PT, met. Israeli labor and Palestinian Fatah (the strongest group within the PLO) even coexisted in the Socialist International for a brief period in the last decade. The Israelis left when IS joined the boycott against Israel.

But the anti-Oslo radicals won. Hamas managed to take Gaza from the Palestinian Authority, controlled by Fatah. Yigal Amir, an Israeli far-right militant, killed Ytzhak Rabin. A month before the assassination, a young extremist, Itamar Ben-Gvir, appeared on TV holding a prop from Rabin’s car and saying “we’ve already reached your car, we’ll reach you”. Today he is a minister in the Netanyahu government.

We do not know whether the new occupation of Gaza will descend into indiscriminate killing, or whether the conflict will become regionalized. If we can avoid these two risks, I hope that the Palestinian Authority will regain control of Gaza, and that Rabin’s spirit will still inspire someone in Israel. The two-state solution is difficult, but the rest is no solution.

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