The Ideological History of Israel and Palestine

In the past couple of months, Israel’s war in Gaza reached new heights, with 28,000 Palestinians dead at present including 85 journalists, and over 100 United Nations aid workers. More than 40 per cent of houses in Gaza have been destroyed. Throughout the decades, Israel has clashed against various militant groups fighting for Palestinian self-determination, with both sides undertaking actions that may be contrary to international law, with the International Court of Justice now stating that there is a plausible case of Israel conducting a genocide in Gaza. 

In the midst of multiple human rights organisations alleging the crime of apartheid being committed by Israel, and complementary accusations of war crimes against Hamas, one may find themselves utterly confused and bewildered about this situation. 

Why is the Israeli government willing to go to lengths as far as what is being accused as ethnic cleansing? Why do Palestinian militants launch attacks that seem to come at the expense of their people? 

It doesn’t help that both sides comprise of absolutist partisans who take their affiliations to unhelpful extremes, as well as potentially compelling cases for their particular cause. By  highlighting the ideologies of the various parties involved, we may come to better understand the interplay of the various factions and the historical events we are witnessing unfold. 

The Inception of Zionism

Our story actually begins in the early to mid 1800s, with the secularisation of Jewish society in the Haskalah, the slow collapse of the Ottoman Empire, at that point dubbed the ‘Sick Man of Europe’ and a blossoming of an Arab renaissance culture under the Nahda, we see the origins of the formation of modern national identity among both the Jewish and Palestinian people. 

It is under these circumstances that  the first Proto-Zionist work was published in 1862: ‘Rome and Jerusalem’, by Moses Hess, the father of Social Democracy, and author of the ‘Holy History of Mankind’, the first piece of Socialist literature ever published in Europe. Although not very popular at first, this book would inspire other thinkers and lead to the publication of more popular books such as ‘Auto-Emancipation’ by Leon Pinsker, which argued that Jews needed a separate state to achieve equality and the full benefits of emancipation, and ‘Der Judenstaat’ by Theodor Herzl – which argued in the light of then recent Dreyfus Affair and the massive history of antisemitism in Europe that Jews need to migrate to their own state. He would become the face of the movement and organise the first Zionist Congress in August 1897. 

By the early 1900s, most of the factions that exist in Israeli politics today would come into being, such as Labour Zionism, which conceived of the Jewish State as a Socialist project, General Zionism, which lacked concrete plans beyond the establishment of a Jewish state, and Religious Zionism, which sought to combat the then popular notion in Orthodox Judaism that establishing a Jewish State was blasphemous. Finally, Revisionist Zionism was a later programme formed in opposition to the partition of the British Mandate of Palestine to create a separate state on the eastern bank of the Jordan River to appease the Hashemite dynasty, and desired a Jewish State throughout the whole of historical Palestine. 

While there were Jewish political movements outside of Zionism (notably Bundism), and a pre-existing Jewish community in Palestine known as the ‘Old Yishuv’ that was ambivalent towards the Zionist political project, the inter-war years saw massive Jewish immigration, primarily Zionist, that changed the demographics in favour of Zionism among the Palestinian Jewish community. 

Notably, the pattern of settlement in agricultural communities run according a socialist principles, as well as much of the remainder joining the urban working class, meant much of the newly arrived population supported Labor Zionism.

The contrast with the Arab population couldn’t be more stark. Traditional Palestinian groups by and large continued to operate politically through traditional Ottoman institutions, as well as clan based networks around prominent families, particularly the al-Husayni family, which controlled the religiously important position of the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem during the British Mandate in Palestine. 

The raising of the Israeli flag in Eilat, marking the end of the First Arab-Israeli War [Image Source IDF Spokesperson’s Unit]

Then, in 1948 came a massive sea change. The First Arab-Israeli War meant the creation of an independent Israeli state, and the mass displacement of Palestinian Arabs. However, one thing remained certain regardless of which side you were on, this was an age of socialism — following the waves of the Soviet Union’s massive strides in industrialisation, its credible role in the Nazi defeat of the Second World War, and the outsized dominance Socialists played overall, in national liberation movements. The latter would be due to Vladimir Lenin’s role as one of the earliest European thinkers to provide a sustained ideological critique of it; one which was backed up by ideological material support provided by the comintern. Importantly, both Zionists and Palestinian Nationalists saw their movements as ones of national liberation.

The dominance of the Kibbutz, the pre-existing ideological heft of socialism and social democracy in the European countries many Israelis came from, and the status of Labor Zionist leader David Ben-Gurion as effectively the father of the country that came about in the course of the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, led to Labor Zionist parties winning every election in Israeli history until 1977. 

On the Palestinian side, this was the age of decolonisation. Two major ideologies captured the hearts of Palestinians during this era: Nasserism and Ba’athism. The success of Egypt following the Egyptian Revolution of 1952, and its victory against western colonial powers and Israel in the Suez Crisis of 1956, led to Egyptian President Gemal Abdel Nasser being seen as the natural leader of the Arab World. More to the point, after 1948, the Gaza Strip was under Egyptian military occupation, though under the administration of a nominally independent All-Palestine Government. As a result, Nasser’s combination of Arab Nationalist ideology and socialist economics had wide cachet over the Arab World. Moreover, the more organised and well-defined political movement and ideology of Ba’athism, a form of socialism that also focused heavily on Arab identity and called for a united Paan-Arab state, also gained in popularity at around this time. 

Israel and Palestine conflicted over a resolution to the refugee situation that arose from the mass displacement of Arabs during the first Arab-Israeli War, and the desire on the part of the Arab world for a single Palestinian State from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. To achieve this aim, Palestinians started forming their own political groups, with varying degrees of cooperation with the Arab occupying powers of Egypt and Jordan, culminating in the formation of Fatah, a group of militants that formed in the Palestinian diaspora with the aim of creating a united Palestinian state in 1959, and the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), an organisation that aimed to represent the Palestinian people to the world and bring together the various armed groups fighting for Palestinian liberation in 1964. 

Map of Israeli Settlements in the West Bank [Image Source OCHA]

After the Six Day War that saw Israel militarily occupy the Palestinian territories previously under the rule of Egypt and Jordan in 1967, and the Intifadas of the 1990s and 2000s, right-wing political movements began gaining more prominence in both Israeli and Palestinian politics. In Israel, a combination of economic factors and the increasing prominence of the settler movement to populate the occupied Palestinian territories with Jewish settlers, saw something of a proliferation of the Revisionist Zionists movement. Moreover, the 1970s saw the emergence and rise of Kahanism, an ideology created by American Rabbi Meir Kahane, which argued for the transformation of Israel into a Jewish Theocracy and the genocide of the Arab population in all areas under Israeli control.

The First Intifada also saw the rise of Hamas, a faction completely unrelated to the PLO but instead originating in the Muslim Brotherhood (an organisation dedicated to the establishment of an Islamic State through political, cultural, and charitable work). The Brotherhood emerged in Egypt as one of  several responses to British colonialism, focusing on a return to traditional Islamic values and a sense of cultural pride, eventually gaining traction throughout the Islamic world and a tense relationship with the Egyptian government.

When the Gaza Strip was taken by Israel, it allowed the Brotherhood to become more active due to hopes by Israeli politicians that it’d neutralise Palestinian resistance through an increased focus on religion. However, with the Intifadas, which initially took the PLO by surprise, and especially after Fatah leadership began to focus on non-violence and a two-state solution, the demand for an uncompromising Palestinian resistance was filled by a faction of the Brotherhood that broke away to found Hamas.

Israel and Palestine Today

With that, welcome to the situation today. 

The Zionist lens through which all of historic Palestine belongs to the Jewish people has seen the construction of settlements since 1967, in territory considered to be Palestinian under International Law,  and continues unabated in spite of the Palestinian Authority’s (PA) de jure claim over those lands. Moreover, the right wing of the Zionist movement has generally seen the very existence of a Palestinian State as inherently threatening Israel’s security. This led to the Oslo Accords, which resulted in a Palestinian administration that lacks the basic functions of a state. 

In particular, in the majority of Palestinian land, it has to give up some or all of its powers to Israel, and lacks control over its own water supply and external security, a state of affairs former Israeli Prime Minister Yitzak Rabin called ‘less than a state’.

Among the Palestinians,  the rightward shift in Arab politics as a whole has led to the PLO, with its original socialist roots, being largely isolated diplomatically from its neighbours, aside from Syria, which under the Asads provided some amount of succour due to their own Ba’athist ideology and very limited support from Jordan, mostly in the form of government statements. Meanwhile, Hamas has embedded itself in the larger space of Islamist groups, effectively acting as a Vassal of Hezbollah in Lebanon, and of Iran’s Islamic Republic. This difference in leverage has also led to Hamas taking a more confrontational stance with the Israeli State, while the PLO has made ever more concessions, first by accepting the ‘two-state’ solution, then taking the reigns of governance of the PA, largely seen as an Israeli puppet, and being seen as incapable of responding to the continued Israeli military presence on Palestinian land, and of the continuation of Israeli illegal settlement activities. 

Palestinian territories are under a divided political mandate as a result of a Civil War following elections in 2006, with the West Bank under a PLO controlled government recognised internationally as the legitimate voice of the Palestinian people (though with diminished popularity among the Palestinians), and Hamas, which effectively runs the Gaza Strip , and claims legitimacy as the winners of the 2006 elections (though many in Palestine today were unable to vote in those elections). 

Meanwhile, the current government in Israel is a coalition consisting of the Likud, a merger of General and Revisionist Zionists (albeit now dominated by its right-wing), various Religious Zionist parties, and Otzma Yehudit, a rebranded version of the extremist ideology of Kahanism. 

All in all, the present situation, exacerbated by the worst violence in over 40 years, looks bleak.

In spite of that, I believe there is reason for hope. 

A group of  academics, the New Historians, have challenged the traditional Israeli narrative in the 1990s, and have helped foster a more critical and nuanced understanding of the events leading up to 1948. Their research has the possibility of helping Israelis understand why Palestinians feel as they do about the conflict, with its focus on using archival evidence to showcase the less than noble actions the government took in establishing the state, as well as the use of oral testimony from those displaced by the conflict, to understand how the other side views the conflict.

Meanwhile, there has been something of a cooling of opinions, with Hamas accepting the borders established by what is known as the green line, and the emergence of a new generation focusing more on Israel’s violations of international law, and the day to day struggles of regular Palestinians, rather than grand narratives around religion. Especially notable is the rise of the Boycotts Divestments and Sanctions (BDS) movement, arisen from civil society, which limits its critique of Israel primarily to questions of international law and apartheid, and whose simple and understandable strategy of targeted boycotts has granted it much more international support than Palestinian groups have historically received. Moreover, where the conflict has previously been solely the interest of Israel, the US, and the Arab states, it has now gained the attention of the international community, which has largely condemned its most extreme happenings, such as Israel’s strategic bombing of UNWRA schools or blocking aid, , with activists pushing to finish the process started with the Oslo Accords, and establishing a just peace. Not to forget of course, South Africa’s case against Israel, in the ICJ. 

Although it will be many years yet until a ruling is delivered, perhaps the decisive force of international law can finally convince governments to act on humanitarian atrocities such as those that have unfolded in the Gaza Strip.