Palestine: A Socialist Introduction

Summary

An edited collection of nine essays, edited by Sumaya Awad and brian bean, arguing that Palestinian liberation is bound to an international socialist movement from below against capitalism and imperialism, and that “to be a socialist you must be a principled champion for Palestine” (Palestine: A Socialist Introduction, line 193). Part 1, read here, comprises the praise and front matter, the editors’ Introduction defining socialism as workers’ collective democratic control and imperialism as a system of competing capitalist classes rather than a policy, the unsigned Timeline from 1517 to 2020, all of Chapter 1 by Awad and Annie Levin on the Nakba as Zionist settler colonialism — four hundred villages destroyed in 1947–48, Tantoura, Plan Dalet, and Zionism’s alliances with imperial powers from Herzl to the present far right — all of Chapter 2 by Shireen Akram-Boshar on how Israel became the United States’ watchdog state in the Middle East after 1967, all of Chapter 3 by Mostafa Omar, a 2002 essay updated for the volume, analysing the PLO’s class character, the failures of the Palestinian left and the rise of Hamas, and arguing for a secular democratic state built by the Arab working class, all of Chapter 4 by Daphna Thier arguing the Israeli working class is a settler-colonial, colonizing class and not an ally of liberation, and the opening of Chapter 5 by Toufic Haddad on Oslo, ending at the two concessions of the Oslo back channel (lines 1046-1104). The remaining chapters are read in parts 2-5.

What the file is

• The book: Palestine: A Socialist Introduction, edited by Sumaya Awad and brian bean (brian bean’s name is printed in lower case throughout). The copyright page in this range gives ”© 2020 Sumaya Awad & brian bean”, “Published in 2020 by Haymarket Books”, P.O. Box 180165, Chicago, IL 60618, ISBN 978-1-64259-531-4, with the generous support of Lannan Foundation and Wallace Action Fund; cover design by Izzaddine Mustafa (lines 35-65).
• Contents (lines 71-141): Introduction “About This Book”; Timeline; Part 1 “Circumstances Given and Transmitted from the Past” (Chapters 1-3); Part 2 “The Road to Jerusalem Goes through Cairo” (Chapters 4-6); Part 3 “Workers of the World, Unite” (Chapters 7-9); Conclusion “Revolution Until Victory”; Afterword by Remi Kanazi; Acknowledgments; Notes; Index; About the Editors; Contributors.
• The eBook is licensed, with the licence line repeated through the file: “This eBook is licensed to Joshua Dunlap, joshuaphilipdunlap@gmail.com on 10/20/2023” (lines 29 and passim).
• The text copy has no page markers; it is divided by === EPUB item N === markers (31 items in the whole file). Locators in this part are line numbers in the text copy. Chapters carry numbered notes whose texts are printed at the back of the book under Notes; those note texts fall outside this part’s range, so this part records each note marker and what the running text attributes to it.
• EPUB items 1-2 (cover and ex libris, lines 1-6) are blank in the text copy.
• The dedication (lines 66-70) is “For the martyrs”.

Section by section

• Praise (lines 7-31): Noura Erakat — the editors “introduce both the question of Palestine as well as socialist principles” with an internationalist framework “defined as a commitment to anti-imperialism”; Ahmed Abu Artema — Israel’s settler-colonial project is “not merely a historical event that we can move past, but an ongoing reality backed by successive Western administrations”; Tithi Bhattacharya — “Palestine is the Vietnam of our times”; Ilan Pappé — a collection on the past and possible future role of the left, on organizational matters, gender and secularism; Hadas Thier — “Nine powerful essays, meticulously woven together by Sumaya Awad and brian bean”; Mariam Barghouti — diaspora, belonging and “a roadmap for return”; Moshé Machover — for socialists the fight for Palestinian rights “must be approached within the context of the international struggle against imperialism and for socialism”; Danny Katch — “A Palestine primer for the growing socialist movement, and an argument for socialism for the growing Palestine solidarity movement”; Dave Zirin and Eric Blanc close the praise.
• Introduction, “About This Book”, by Sumaya Awad & brian bean (lines 142-206): epigraph from Ghassan Kanafani, “The Palestinian cause is not a cause for Palestinians only, but a cause for every revolutionary, wherever he is, as a cause of the exploited and oppressed masses in our era.” The moment is polarized: a blossoming BDS solidarity movement and fierce state repression; settlement expansion, possible annexation and the “open-air prison of Gaza”; a movement trapped in “peace talks” since the 1993 Oslo Accords; Donald Trump’s “so-called Deal of the Century, which amounts to official adoption of apartheid” (line 157). Radicalization is traced to 2008 — the global economic crisis, the Iraq and Afghanistan wars and Operation Cast Lead — and through Occupy, Black Lives Matter, the teachers’ strike wave, wildcat strikes during COVID-19 and the rebellion against anti-Black racism. Socialism is defined: “a society where workers collectively own and democratically control their labor and the value they produce”, a classless society; it is distinguished from Scandinavian social democracy, from the former USSR and North Korea and from the current Chinese state, all forms of “socialism from above”. Stalinism is defined by the false notion that socialism can be established in a single country and by “stagism”; Khaled Bakdash, “dean of Arab Communism”, boasted in 1944 that the Syrian Communist Party’s charter was “devoid of any mention of socialism” (lines 173-175). Hal Draper’s “socialism from below” is quoted: socialism “can be realized only through the self-emancipation of activated masses in motion, reaching out for freedom with their own hands” (lines 177-179). Imperialism is defined as “the unrelenting process of competition and conflict between the world’s capitalist classes of different states, who are vying for domination and exploitation of the globe’s people, wealth, and resources”, rooted in Marx, Lenin and Bukharin — not a policy but a system rooted in economics; its economic tools include the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank; “As long as capitalism exists, so will imperialism.” (lines 183-189). The framing closes: “an international socialist movement, from the bottom up, rooted in the workers and oppressed of this world, is the only path toward liberation for Palestine” (lines 193-203). Signed Spring 2020.
• Timeline, unsigned (lines 207-293): 1517–1917 Palestine part of the Ottoman Empire; 1670 Mufti Khayr al-Din al-Ramli refers to “our country” of Filastin; 1917 Balfour Declaration; 1920–48 Mandate Palestine; 1923 founding of the Palestine Communist Party; 1936–39 “The Great Revolt”; 1943 the party splits into the National Liberation League and the Zionist MAKEI; 1947 UN Partition Plan, accepted by the Jewish Agency and rejected by Arab leaders; May 15, 1948 “Beginning of the Nakba”, the Declaration of Independence the day before; May 1948–January 1949 war, Israel annexing territory beyond the proposed Jewish state, Gaza occupied by Egypt and the West Bank by Transjordan until 1967; 1950 Law of Return and Absentee Property Law; 1956 Nasser becomes president of Egypt and nationalizes the Suez Canal; 1964 founding of the PLO; 1967 Six Day War, the Naksa, Israel taking Gaza and Sinai, the West Bank and Jerusalem, and the Golan Heights, founding of the PFLP and Fateh joining the PLO; 1969 Arafat chairman; 1970 Black September; 1973 October War; 1974 Ten Point Program, Rejectionist Front, UN recognition of the PLO as the “sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people”; 1976 Land Day; 1978 Camp David Accords; 1982 First Lebanon War and the Sabra and Shatilla massacre, “carried out by Lebanese fascists with support from IDF and Ariel Sharon”; 1987–93 First Intifada; 1987 founding of Hamas; 1988 PLO declaration within 1967 borders; 1993 Oslo; 1994 a disciple of Meir Kahane massacres twenty-nine and injures 125 at the Ibrahimi mosque in Hebron, after which Hamas initiates its suicide-bombing campaign; 2000 targeted assassinations and the Second Intifada; 2002 construction of the “472-mile-long Apartheid Wall” begins; 2004 Arafat’s death; 2005 disengagement, Israel dismantling “all its twenty-five Jewish settlements” in Gaza and then beginning a blockade; 2006 Hamas wins the legislative elections, the Second Lebanon War kills 1,191 Lebanese and injures 4,409, Hamas officially abandons suicide attacks; 2007 Fateh–Hamas division; December 2008–January 2009 Operation Cast Lead kills 1,291 Palestinians; December 2010 Arab Spring begins; November 2012 Operation Pillar of Cloud kills 158 Palestinians (105 civilians) and the UN upgrades Palestine to “non-member observer state status”; July–August 2014 Operation Protective Edge kills 2,191 Palestinians; 2017 Trump recognizes Jerusalem and moves the embassy; 2018 Great March of Return begins, the Knesset adopts the “Nation-State” law, and the Trump administration closes PLO offices in Washington; 2019 Trump recognizes Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights and the US convenes the Bahrain Conference; 2020 Trump releases the “Deal of the Century”, green-lighting annexation of the West Bank.
• Part 1 title page (lines 294-302): “Circumstances Given and Transmitted from the Past”.
• Chapter 1, “Roots of the Nakba: Zionist Settler Colonialism”, by Sumaya Awad & Annie Levin (lines 303-545): a portrait of pre-1948 Palestine — groves, cinemas, cafes, tatreez, railways and Haifa’s port — insists “Palestinians existed; they thrived politically, culturally, and socially”. The Nakba is “the ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1948, when, over a period of several months, Jewish militia groups known as the Irgun and Haganah conducted raids, massacres, and depopulation campaigns across Palestine—all under orders from Zionist leadership”; in 1947–48 “four hundred Palestinian villages were completely destroyed”. Plan Dalet is presented as the Haganah’s initiative to take the UN-allocated areas and any areas the Yishuv deemed critical, brigades each assigned villages whose occupation “most often entailed complete destruction”. Tantoura, assigned to the Alexandroni Brigade among sixty-four villages, was occupied on May 22, 1948; Teddy Katz’s 1998 thesis finding is quoted — men taken to the cemetery, ordered to dig in lines, “every line that finished digging just was shot and fell down to the holes” — and Katz was punished, sued, his research removed and archives sealed. Deir Yassin is named; Elad Peled is quoted on planting “a bomb next to every house”; Golda Meir’s horror entering Haifa homes, as detailed by Ilan Pappé, and Yigal Allon’s “harm them without mercy, women and children included” are quoted; Avigdor Lieberman’s April 2018 “There are no innocent people in Gaza” follows. Erasure — textbook censorship, criminalization of commemoration, the 2011 Nakba Law withholding funding from institutions that commemorate the Nakba — and the refusal of return are treated as one project; against the “war” between equals, “there were not two warring sides. There was an occupying foreign power and an indigenous population defending itself”, the Zionist militias better armed and British-trained. Moshe Dayan’s 1969 admission is quoted: “We came here to a country that was populated by Arabs, and we are building here a Hebrew, Jewish state.” The Nakba is presented as ongoing, likened to the dispossession of indigenous Americans. “What is Zionism?” takes the July 19, 2018 Basic Law: Israel as the Nation State of the Jewish People — self-determination “unique to the Jewish people”, Hebrew as state language with Arabic downgraded to “special status”, and Jewish settlement as a national value — with Moshe Machover quoted that the law legitimises the state “not as the political expression of its own citizens” but as the nation-state of a worldwide Jewish “nation”; Vladimir Jabotinsky in 1923: “Zionism is a colonizing adventure and therefore it stands or falls by the question of armed force.” The roots section traces emancipation after the French Revolution, the Pale of Settlement and pogroms, the 1880s antisemitism revival, the Dreyfus Affair and Theodor Herzl’s 1896 The State of the Jews; Herzl considered Argentina, Uganda, Cyprus and US Midwest states, chose Palestine for its symbolic power, and wrote “We should there form a part of a wall of defense for Europe in Asia, an outpost of civilization against barbarism.” Herzl and Max Nordau are quoted describing Jews as a “race of accursed beggars” and arguing Jewish immigration itself provokes antisemitism, which would cease once the plan was executed. Herzl’s 1896 offer to the Ottoman Sultan — softening condemnation of the Armenian genocide in exchange for Palestine — is quoted through Lenni Brenner: “there were no criteria of ordinary humanism that the World Zionist Organization considered itself bound to respect”; his 1903 meeting with Count von Plehve, his appeal “Help me reach land sooner and the revolt will end”, Chaim Zhitlovsky’s rejection, and Chaim Weizmann on East European Jewish youth being anti-Zionist follow. The three pioneer slogans are “conquest of land”, “conquest of labor” and “produce of the land”. Under the Mandate, in 1917 there were 56,000 Jews and 644,000 Palestinians, Britain gave 90 percent of concessions to Jewish capitalists, and by 1935 Zionists owned 872 of 1,212 industrial firms; Winston Churchill’s “Zionism versus Bolshevism” is quoted at length. The 1936–39 Great Arab Revolt was defeated by British repression drawing in at some points half the British military; in 1945 the Zionists declared war on the British; the 1947 partition “granted the majority of the land to the minority of Jewish settlers”. Ber Borochov’s proletarian Zionism, the Histadrut and kibbutzim follow, with David Hacohen’s 1969 recollection: “I had to fight my friends on the issue of Jewish socialism, to defend the fact that I would not accept Arabs in my trade union, the Histadrut”. Jabotinsky’s Revisionism is quoted: colonization “can, therefore, continue and develop only under the protection of a force independent of the local population—an iron wall which the native population cannot break through”, and “One prefers an Iron Wall of Jewish bayonets; the other an Iron Wall of English bayonets.” Betar’s admiration of Mussolini and the Revisionist press’s fascist columns are recorded. In 1945 the Revisionists and the Labor Zionists united to form the Resistance Movement to wage war against the British and then the Palestinians. “Zionism and the Holocaust” presents the Jewish Agency’s selectivity — Menahem Ussishkin, Moshe Beilinson in 1934 (“The streets are paved with more money than we have ever dreamed of in the history of our Zionist enterprise”), Tom Segev on preferring “healthy young Zionists”, the German Immigrants Association’s complaint that “the human material coming from Germany is getting worse and worse”, and the Rescue Committee’s 1943 memorandum on saving 10,000 who could build the country “as against saving a million Jews who will be a burden” — then the Kastner case, Rabbi Dov Michael Weissmandel’s unanswered pleas (“Twelve thousand Jews—men, women, and children, old men, infants, healthy and sick ones, are to be suffocated daily”), the Bund’s 1905 condemnation, Karl Kautsky in 1910 (“today Palestine does not belong to the Jews of Vienna, London, or New York, who claim it for Judaism, but to the Arabs of the same country”), and Lenin and the Bolsheviks abolishing racist laws against Jews. “Today” closes the chapter: alliances with Bolsonaro’s Brazil, Modi’s India, Salvini and Orbán, arms to neo-Nazi militias in Ukraine, Christians United for Israel with more than five million members, the August 14, 2019 ICE truck attack on Never Again protesters, Israeli training of ICE and Israeli surveillance technology on the US–Mexico border, and Richard Spencer lauding Israel as “the most important ethno-state, the one I turn to for guidance”; the socialist movement’s principled opposition to antisemitism is counterposed to Zionism’s record.
• Chapter 2, “How Israel Became the Watchdog State: US Imperialism and the Middle East”, by Shireen Akram-Boshar (lines 546-620): epigraph from Benjamin Netanyahu, July 3, 2017, “There is another mighty aircraft carrier of our common civilization—it’s called the State of Israel.” The thesis: the Israel lobby is powerful but not the tail that wags the dog; support for Israel is bipartisan and in the interests of US capital as a whole in the oil-rich Middle East; Israel, “expelling more than 750,000 of the indigenous Palestinian population”, required imperialist backers from its inception, first Britain and France under Sykes-Picot. The US emerged from the Second World War seeking oil and Soviet containment; a 1945 State Department memo called Saudi Arabia “a stupendous source of strategic power”; the Dhahran base and the 1947 Truman Doctrine followed. The 1953 CIA coup against Mohammed Mossadegh transferred 40 percent of Iranian oil to American hands. Haaretz is quoted proposing that “strengthening Israel helps the Western powers maintain equilibrium and stability in the Middle East. Israel is to become the watchdog.” France armed Israel in the 1950s over Algeria; Shimon Peres in 1955: “Every Frenchman killed in Algeria, like every Egyptian killed in the Gaza Strip, is a step toward strengthening the ties between France and Israel.” The Lavon-style bombings plot against US- and British-owned institutions, the September 1955 Soviet arms deal, the July 1956 Suez nationalization and the October–November 1956 attack, from which the US forced withdrawal, follow. The January 1957 Eisenhower Doctrine, the 1958 United Arab Republic and Iraqi revolution, and the crushing of communists by nationalist regimes are recorded; Arab nationalism’s “Arab socialism” is described as top-down state economies without workers’ control. US military aid began in 1959 at $400,000ayear;KennedytoldGoldaMeirin1962"incaseofaninvasiontheUnitedStateswouldcometothesupportofIsrael";aidreached$12.9 million by 1965 and $90 million in 1966. The June 1967 war, expelling an estimated three hundred thousand Palestinians, cemented the alliance; Naseer Aruri is quoted that the victory “spared the US the trouble of direct intervention to contain Nasserism”, and Reagan called Israel a “strategic asset”. In September 1970 Kissinger asked Israel to prepare to intercede in Jordan; Nixon’s message was that “the president will never forget Israel’s role in preventing the deterioration in Jordan”, and aid multiplied tenfold. Israel’s 1973 performance, the 1978 and 1982 Lebanon invasions, and its global watchdog role — arms to El Salvador’s death squads, Guatemala, Somoza’s Nicaragua at more than 90 percent of its arms, Ecuador, Chile, Paraguay and Argentina, to Rhodesia, Malawi and apartheid South Africa circumventing the embargo, to Thailand, Indonesia, Singapore and Taiwan, and to Iran during the hostage crisis — are catalogued. After 1979 Reagan called Israel “perhaps the only strategic asset in the area that the United States can really rely on”. After 1991 the US pushed a settlement “based on US designs”; Oslo accelerated settlements and divided the territories into “fragmented Bantustans”, turned the Palestinian leadership into a subcontractor repressing resistance, and was followed by the War on Terror, Israel’s 2002 invasions, “a 470-mile wall through the occupied West Bank”, police training for hundreds of US forces including ICE, and Elbit Systems’ 2014 and 2017 Department of Homeland Security contracts to militarize the US–Mexico border: “The Israeli state serves as the research, development, and training division of the US state and other authoritarian regimes worldwide.” The 2008 crisis, China’s rise, the 2011 revolutions and the counterrevolutions — Saudi Arabia in Bahrain and Yemen, Iran propping up Syria — close the survey; the conclusion is that AIPAC impacts politics but is not the driving force, Obama “vastly increased funding for Israel even as it carried out three major assaults on Gaza under his watch”, and “any serious challenge to Israel’s apartheid regime, then, must also challenge US imperialism and its backing of the Israeli state”.
• Chapter 3, “The National Liberation Struggle: A Socialist Analysis”, by Mostafa Omar (lines 621-837): an Editors’ Note states the chapter is “an updated reprint of the original written in 2002”, amid the Second Intifada and preparations for the invasion of Iraq, with Arafat alive and Fateh dominant. Since Oslo, negotiations failed on occupation, statehood and “the right of return for five million Palestinian refugees”; Edward Said is quoted that Arafat “no longer represents the majority of Palestinians, and now survives without dignity by virtue of US, Israeli, and Arab support”. The pre-1948 movement: the 1929 Buraq Rebellion, Izz al-Din al-Qassam’s militias, the April 1936 Jaffa dockworkers’ strike and six-month general strike under Mufti Hajj Amin al-Husseini demanding an end to Jewish immigration and land sales, and the three-year Great Arab Revolt, defeated by British-Zionist military superiority and by a Palestinian elite of landowners and merchants — the al-Nashashibis and al-Husseinis — whose rivalries and ties to pro-British Arab rulers outweighed opposition to colonialism. The Palestine Communist Party, founded in 1924, followed Moscow under Stalin, remained almost wholly Jewish, adopted “revolution in stages” in 1935, split in 1943, and followed the USSR in backing partition in 1947, its Jewish members joining the Haganah. Fateh, formed in 1958, took over the PLO in 1969 after the 1968 Battle of Karameh; the revised 1968 charter is quoted, “armed struggle is the only way to liberate Palestine”. Fateh’s refusal of “Whose Palestine?” and its “principle of nonintervention” in Arab countries — billions in aid, no support for Palestinian oil workers against ARAMCO — are presented as serving the Palestinian bourgeoisie, and their cost in Jordan in September 1970, where Arafat refused appeals to depose King Hussein although refugees were 70 percent of Jordan’s population. After the 1973 war the US launched the “peace process”, aiming to win Arab recognition of Israel in exchange for Israel’s return of land occupied in 1967 and 1973, and Arab regimes pressured the PLO to abandon its radical goals. Salah Khalaf’s “our own state, even on a square inch of Palestine” and Phil Marshall on Fateh dropping “its principal aim—the liberation of the whole of Palestine—in favor of the prospect of the mini-state” mark the turn; Arafat’s 1974 call for a two-state solution, offered at the UN as a “historic compromise”, is described as effectively recognition of Israel and a prelude to Oslo; in 1988 the PNC recognized Israel, proposed a state on “only 23 percent of pre-1947 Palestine”, and renounced armed struggle. The PFLP, founded by George Habash after 1967 as a “Marxist-Leninist” organization with the slogan “The road to Jerusalem begins in Cairo, Damascus, and Amman”, is faulted for distinguishing progressive from reactionary regimes and allying with Ba’athist Iraq and Assad’s Syria, for its Soviet alliance, and for airline hijackings in 1968–72 substituting for mass struggle; by the mid-1980s it adopted the mini-state. The DFLP, a 1969 split, pioneered the “secular, democratic state” but shifted right after Black September, Nayef Hawatmeh calling in 1974 for a “national authority”. The Islamic opposition: the Muslim Brotherhood’s nonpolitical social work from 1967 to 1987, the breakaway Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and Hamas’s formation in 1988, its charter quoted — “There is no solution to the Palestinian problem except by Jihad (Holy Struggle)” — with polls by early 2002 showing Islamist support drawing even with Fateh; Hamas is faulted for market economics, IMF and World Bank ideas, noninterference, middle-class leadership, and Sheikh Ahmed Yassin’s 1993 openness to a cease-fire of “10, perhaps 20 years if a Palestinian state is established”, and for deferring to the PLO, quoted as “a father, a brother, a relative, a friend”. Oslo and the crisis of perspectives: the PA cooperates with Shinbet (as printed) and the CIA, with security forces “more than fifty thousand strong”, and after September 2001 declared itself a “partner of the US in its war against terrorism”; the PLO’s capitulation is explained by the Palestinian bourgeoisie’s desire for a mini-state, not by “selling out”; the left’s failure is quoted from Challenge: “The illusion of national unity among all classes served bourgeois interests and prevented the Left from fulfilling its strategic task: to create a political alternative”, and from Graham Usher declaring the left “nowhere. They are history.” The socialist alternative closes the chapter: liberation requires “a democratic, secular state in all of historic Palestine where Jews and Arabs can live as equals” built by the region’s working class; Egypt’s and Jordan’s solidarity demonstrations in 2000-2002, turning against Mubarak and austerity, are offered as evidence of the connection between Palestine and Arab workers’ struggle.
• Part 2 title page (lines 838-846): “The Road to Jerusalem Goes through Cairo”.
• Chapter 4, “Not an Ally: The Israeli Working Class”, by Daphna Thier (lines 847-1045): from Hal Draper’s exposition of Marx, the working class alone can overthrow capitalism; the Israeli working class is posed as a possible exception that “have embraced racist ideas, nationalist sentiment, consistent opposition to democracy, and support for counterrevolutionary regimes”. The Committee for a Workers International’s conclusion that a single secular democratic state is a “bourgeois national utopia” and the International Marxist Tendency’s view of BDS as “counter-productive, and a campaign that strengthens bourgeois Zionism” are rejected. Moshe Machover and Akiva Orr of Matzpen, writing in 1969, are presented as the seminal analysis: material benefits bond Israeli workers to the settler-colonial state, and “the experience of fifty years does not contain a single example of Israeli workers being mobilized on material or trade-union issues to challenge the Israeli regime itself”; American aid of “steadily three billion dollars annually” is now proportionately less and mostly military. Gershon Shafir’s five settler forms and Patrick Wolfe’s “logic of elimination” frame the pure settlement, which requires a committed labouring class given a stake through Labor Party and kibbutz institutions; the Palestinian diaspora is given as “roughly 10 million people”. Ethnic cleansing’s perpetrators “came from the left wing of the labor movement, particularly from members of the United Workers Party (MAPAM)”; Joel Benin is quoted, “Most of the officers of the Palmah, Haganah and subsequently the IDF were MAPAM members” [Palmah as printed]; by 1954 over 30 percent of the Jewish population lived in Arab property, more than 1.1 million acres were confiscated, increasing Jewish farming land by 250 percent, and the UN Refugee Office estimated stolen wealth at more than five billion dollars in today’s currency. MAPAI’s corporatist tripartite arrangement, the Histadrut and state employing fully 40 percent of Israelis, the 1951 seamen’s strike as the singular exception, Mizrachi Jews at about half the Jewish population and a majority of its working class, Abba Eban’s “occidental spirit” and Ben-Gurion on the Moroccan Jew, and the 1966 government recession precede the 1967 occupation’s cheap labour — by the mid-1980s Palestinian workers were 7 percent of the Israeli labour force — quoted through David Hall-Cathala and Michael Shalev. Nitzan and Bichler’s “state as a cocoon” for differential accumulation, eight families controlling the majority of the economy, Netanyahu’s four cases, census shifts from 44 percent managerial/professional in 1996 to 57 percent in 2016, Andy Clarno’s Israel–South Africa comparison and his “neoliberal apartheid”, state spending 35 percent more on Jewish citizens, and the arms economy — seven billion dollars of annual exports, 10.25 percent of the economy directly in arms, $98percapitaagainstRussi{a}^{\prime }s$58 and Sweden’s $53,72percentofPalestinianimportsfromIsrael—supporttheconclusionthatworkersarenowintegratedthroughwarandoccupation,"asaprisonguardtiedtotheprisonforlivelihood".PercapitaGDPisgivenasaround$4,300 in the West Bank and Gaza against roughly $35,000 in Israel; the Mizrachi Black Panthers and the 2011 Tent Movement and December 2017 Tel Aviv protests are presented as movements that rejected democratic change on Palestine. The conclusion lists four findings and quotes Machover and Orr that a revolutionary Arab working-class movement would make Israel’s role obsolete and the regime “open to mass challenge from within Israel itself”.
• Chapter 5, “The Price of “Peace” on Their Terms”, by Toufic Haddad (lines 1046-1104, opening only): epigraph from Salah Khalaf, “So we came to be seen less as revolutionaries than as politicians.” Post-2007 global, regional and local crises create an opportunity for a more effective Palestinian movement; more than a quarter century after Oslo the four Palestinian communities — West Bank, Gaza Strip, Jerusalem and 1948 communities — are in a “holding pattern”, their leadership rooted in historical Palestine and not conceding self-determination, refugee return or the end of occupation, against ambitions “to liquidate the Palestinian cause”. “The run-up to Oslo”: the Declaration of Principles “does not even mention the word “occupation,” let alone indicate that a Palestinian state is to be its end game”; Edward Said was the accords’ most eloquent critic; the PLO was cornered after the Eastern bloc’s collapse and the 1990–91 Gulf War, Abu Alaa (Ahmed Qurei) recounting it had less than two months’ funding and had cut 70 percent of its budget; through Norwegian diplomacy the US opened a backdoor Oslo channel away from public scrutiny. “The Oslo calculus” begins: the PLO accepted self-rule without an end to occupation or a guarantee of statehood, and an agreement with no solid guarantees that settlement construction would end. The chapter continues in part 2.

Key passages

• “The liberation of Palestine is bound to the struggle against the global capitalist system: its local governments, states, and imperialist forces.” (line 157)
• “What we mean when we say socialism is, simply put, a society where workers collectively own and democratically control their labor and the value they produce.” (line 169)
• “Anti-imperialism is the cornerstone that upholds the principle of internationalism.” (line 189)
• “The Nakba refers to the ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1948” (line 318)
• “Zionism is a colonizing adventure and therefore it stands or falls by the question of armed force.” — Vladimir Jabotinsky, 1923, as quoted in Chapter 1 (line 384)
• “Israel is to become the watchdog.” — Haaretz proposal to the West, as quoted in Chapter 2 (line 573)
• “The road to Jerusalem begins in Cairo, Damascus, and Amman.” — PFLP slogan, as quoted in Chapter 3 (line 734)
• “The Israeli state serves as the research, development, and training division of the US state and other authoritarian regimes worldwide.” (line 609)

Evidence the work relies on

• Front matter and praise statements by the named endorsers (lines 7-31), and the unsigned Timeline’s dated entries (lines 207-293).
• Chapter 1 relies on quotations and accounts it attributes to Teddy Katz’s 1998 Haifa University thesis on Tantoura, Ilan Pappé’s The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine for Golda Meir in Haifa, Elad Peled as recounted to Boaz Lev Tov, Moshe Dayan’s 1969 speech, Moshe Machover on the 2018 Nation-State law, Vladimir Jabotinsky (1923), Theodor Herzl’s The State of the Jews and diaries, Max Nordau, Lenni Brenner, Chaim Weizmann, Winston Churchill’s “Zionism versus Bolshevism”, David Hacohen (1969), Tom Segev, the Jewish Agency Rescue Committee’s 1943 memorandum, the Kastner trial record, Karl Kautsky (1910) and Hal Draper (for the Introduction), each credited in the running text with a numbered note whose text is printed at the back of the book, outside this part’s range.
• Chapter 2 relies on a 1945 US State Department memo on Gulf hydrocarbons, a Haaretz proposal to the West, Shimon Peres (1955), Naseer Aruri on 1967 and on the post-1991 settlement, Yitzhak Rabin’s recollection of Kissinger’s message from Nixon, and dated figures for US military aid ($400,000ayearin1959;$12.9 million by 1965; $90 million in 1966; a tenfold multiplication after 1970), each with a numbered note printed at the back.
• Chapter 3 relies on Edward Said on Arafat, the revised 1968 and 1974 Palestine National Charter texts, Salah Khalaf, Phil Marshall, Hamas’s charter, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin (1993), the Jerusalem magazine Challenge, Abu Ali Mustafa and Graham Usher, each with a numbered note printed at the back.
• Chapter 4 relies on Moshe Machover and Akiva Orr’s 1969 “The Class Character of Israel”, Gershon Shafir’s settler-society typology, Patrick Wolfe’s “logic of elimination”, Joel Benin on MAPAM, Michael Shalev, Jonathan Nitzan and Shimshon Bichler on the “state as cocoon”, Adam Hanieh, David Hall-Cathala, Andy Clarno, Israeli census figures for 1996 and 2016, and Tikva Honig-Parnass on the 2011 Tent Movement, each with a numbered note printed at the back.
• Chapter 5’s opening relies on Edward Said’s critique of Oslo and Abu Alaa’s (Ahmed Qurei’s) biography for the PLO’s finances, each with a numbered note printed at the back.

Analysis

Provisional, for the part read here. The book is a programmatic edited collection, not a single-author history: each chapter has its own author and its evidence is carried largely by quotation from named earlier writers, officials and participants, with the numbered note texts deferred to the back of the book. Its method is class analysis applied in sequence — the editors define socialism from below and imperialism as a system, Chapter 1 treats Zionism as a settler-colonial ideology allied in every period with an imperial patron, Chapter 2 treats US support for Israel as a ruling-class interest rather than a lobby effect, Chapter 3 explains the PLO, its left and Hamas by the class interests they are said to serve, and Chapter 4 tests the Israeli working class against the Marxist expectation of a revolutionary proletariat and finds a colonizing exception. Its limits in this part are those of the form: figures are given in the running text with their notes elsewhere, several of them as single-source estimates, and Chapter 3 is a 2002 essay whose present tense belongs to the Second Intifada, updated only by its Editors’ Note.

People, organizations, places and events

Sumaya Awad, brian bean, Annie Levin, Shireen Akram-Boshar, Mostafa Omar, Daphna Thier, Toufic Haddad, Matzpen, Akiva Orr, Hal Draper, Elbit Systems, Nation-State Law, Great March of Return, Moshe Machover, Theodor Herzl, Vladimir Jabotinsky, Ghassan Kanafani, Ilan Pappe, Moshe Dayan, Yigal Allon, Golda Meir, David Ben-Gurion, Chaim Weizmann, Moses Hess, Tom Segev, Jewish Agency, Histadrut, Haganah, Irgun, Stern Group, Dalet Plan, Tantura, Deir Yassin, Balfour Declaration, Palestine Communist Party, National Liberation League, Maki, 1936-39 Revolt in Palestine, Izz al-Din al-Qassam, Amin al-Hussaini, Raghib al-Nashashibi, Palestine Liberation Organization, Fateh, Yasir Arafat, George Habash, Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, Popular Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, Karameh, Palestinian National Council, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Muslim Brotherhood, Edward Said, Oslo Accords, Palestinian Authority, First Intifada, Second Intifada, Benjamin Netanyahu, Barack Obama, Yitzhak Rabin, Operation Cast Lead, Gaza, Haifa, Jaffa

Concepts

Socialism, Watchdog state, Imperialism, Zionism, Settler Colonialism, Nakba, Ethnic Cleansing, BDS movement, Apartheid, Right of Return, Self-determination, Secular Democratic State, Two-state solution, Orientalism, Bantustans, Separation wall

How it relates to other sources

• With Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions: The Global Struggle for Palestinian Rights: both are Haymarket Books volumes centred on BDS; this book’s Chapter 7 is an interview with Omar Barghouti (outside this part), and its Introduction and Chapter 4 treat BDS as part of an international socialist strategy where Barghouti treats it as a rights-based movement prescribing no state formula — Chapter 4 records the Israeli working class and the Zionist left rejecting BDS’s equal-citizenship and return demands.
• With The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine: Chapter 1 follows Pappe on the Nakba, Plan Dalet and Tantura — including Teddy Katz’s thesis and its suppression — and quotes Pappe for Golda Meir’s reaction in Haifa; Pappe also endorses this book in its praise. The village count differs in form: this book says “four hundred Palestinian villages were completely destroyed” in 1947–48 (line 320), where Pappe’s account is of a larger set of depopulated localities; both figures are kept as printed on their own pages.
• With The 1936-39 Revolt in Palestine: the Introduction’s epigraph is Kanafani, and Chapter 3’s account of the 1936–39 revolt shares Kanafani’s class reading of the Palestinian elite, while attributing the defeat jointly to British-Zionist military superiority and elite compromise.
• With Palestine: The Legitimacy of Hope: both treat BDS and global solidarity as the decisive arena and Oslo as a US-designed process that subordinates Palestinians; this book adds an explicit class analysis of the PLO and of the Israeli working class that Falk’s posts do not attempt.
• With Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation: both describe Gaza as an open-air prison and the West Bank as fragmented into bantustans, and both end in a one-state, secular democratic horizon; this book reaches it through a regional working-class strategy rather than through the everyday machinery of occupation.

Open questions

• The Timeline gives the separation wall as “472-mile-long” (line 266) while Chapter 2 gives “a 470-mile wall through the occupied West Bank” (line 609); both figures stand as printed.
• The Timeline dates Israel dismantling “all its twenty-five Jewish settlements” in Gaza in 2005 (line 270); no other source ingested gives a settlement count for the disengagement in that form, and the figure is kept as printed here.
• Chapter 1 says Tantoura was occupied on May 22, 1948 and that about four hundred villages shared its fate (lines 326-332); The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine dates the Alexandroni capture to 21 May in one passage and the attack to 22 May in another, and The Palestinian Nakba 1948 — The Register of Depopulated Localities in Palestine lists a depopulation date of 20-05-48; all are kept as printed on their own pages.
• Chapter 1 quotes Yigal Allon with “If we accurse a family” [as printed, lines 346-348]; whether the word is the book’s own error or a text-copy artefact is not determined, the text copy being the copy read for spelling in this part and the original being an EPUB of the same text.
• Chapter 4 names “the founding Zionist philosopher, Abba Eban” (line 930); the description is kept as printed, and no other ingested source describes Eban in those terms.
• Chapter 4 quotes Joel Benin with “Palmah” for the Palmach (line 904) and Chapter 3 prints “Shinbet” for the Shin Bet (line 788); both spellings stand as printed.
• Chapter 3’s figure of “five million Palestinian refugees” whose return Oslo failed to secure (line 632) and Chapter 4’s diaspora figure of “roughly 10 million people” (line 900) are different measures given in different chapters by different authors; neither chapter reconciles them, and both stand as printed.
• The numbered notes for the Introduction and Chapters 1-5 are printed at the back of the book, outside this part’s range; what each note cites can only be checked when the Notes are read in a later part.
• Chapter 2 gives Israel’s expulsion at its founding as “more than 750,000” Palestinians (line 563) and its 1967 expulsion as “an estimated three hundred thousand Palestinians” (line 589); both are kept as the chapter’s own figures.
• Chapter 3 says Arafat “officially called for a two-state solution” in 1974 (line 716), and also that Hawatmeh’s 1974 call for a Palestinian “national authority” came “four long years before Arafat himself dared to utter it” (line 752); if Arafat called for a two-state solution in 1974, Hawatmeh’s 1974 call cannot have preceded his by four years, and both statements stand as printed.

Coverage

lines 1-1104 of 5516, read in part 1 of 5. Remaining: part 2, lines 1105-2208; part 3, lines 2209-3312; part 4, lines 3313-4416; part 5, lines 4417-5516.