The Progressive International and Israel

Israel’s diplomatic isolation is not unrelated to the rupture that has come about between the Jewish State and a left increasingly receptive to the rhetoric of the anti-globalization movement. The massive support for unilateral recognition of a Palestinian State owes much to this mobilization of the Progressive International.

Unlike the Conservative International¹, the Progressive International has long been organized². But the power of transnational political organizations should not be overestimated. The Communist International has vanished³, and the Socialist International⁴, like what remains of the Trotskyist Fourth International⁵, never wielded the influence ascribed to them. Their mode of operation more closely resembles that of a confederation, a venue for the exchange of information that scarcely attracts the attention of the media, or even that of activists. There exists, nonetheless, an informal Progressive International gathered around an ideological foundation common to the parties of the left. Beyond the cleavages that divide them internally between the partisans of the market economy and those more favorable to a massive presence of the State, all come out in favor of intervention by public authority to regulate the economy, a tax system that corrects inequalities, the promotion of equal opportunity, a conception of democracy that calls upon forms of popular intervention such as trade unionism. At the international level, the progressive parties campaign for a rebalancing of power in favor of the countries of the South, for a global society less dependent on the great powers and more reliant on international organizations endowed with real means of intervention. The right to self-determination, derived from the right of peoples to govern themselves—an inheritance from the philosophy of the Enlightenment—holds a place of choice in the thought and action of the progressive parties. In the Near East, this conception had led these parties to support the creation of the State of Israel. Things have changed a great deal since then, which often places the Israeli Labour Party in an uncomfortable position.

The Labour Party and the Socialist International

In 1948, the creation of the State of Israel enjoyed broad support among the parties of the left, communists included. Despite an initial critique of Zionism, Stalin supported the creation of Israel, expecting to gain in the young Jewish State an ally against the British colonial power. As Arab nationalism proved far more useful, the Soviet Union was not slow to distance itself from Israel, before durably aligning itself with the camp of its enemies. For the socialists, support for Israel was elevated to the rank of a matter of principle, and was expressed chiefly on two levels. On the ideological level, the non-communist left showed keen interest in the rich socialist experiment carried out by the Israeli Labourites with the Histadrut, the kibbutz, a mixed economy largely controlled by the workers’ movement. On the diplomatic and military level, the French socialists were in the vanguard of support for Israel and its army, playing a decisive role in enabling the young State to attain nuclear power. This unconditional support for Israel was widely shared within the ranks of European social democracy. Within what was not yet the European Parliament, the socialist representatives thus played a key role in the unanimous support given to Israel during the Six-Day War. From that date on, the occupation of the Territories would bring about the unraveling of relations between the left and Israel. The turning point came with the Lebanon War (1982), which radically transformed the image of the State of Israel, shifting it from the status of the attacked to that of the aggressor. The first Intifada (1987), then the second (2000), the second Lebanon War (2006), and Operation Plomb Durci (Cast Lead) (2008) completed the degradation of the Jewish State’s image in the eyes of progressives the world over, even if this is not always clearly expressed.

Officially, the Socialist International (SI) expresses balanced positions on the conflict in the Near East: support for the existence of Israel, for its security, as well as for the creation of a Palestinian State. This balance is duly respected in the organization of the debates on the conflict. Thus, on June 9 and 10, 2011, at a meeting of the SI’s Middle East Committee, representatives of the Israeli Labour Party, of Meretz, and of Fatah were able to speak. The value of such gatherings is not to be underestimated: in times of tension, the SI is one of the rare venues where moderate elements from both camps can still hold a dialogue. One may indeed note broad convergences among the representatives of the protagonists: the urgent need to resume negotiations, to support the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination in a State, the call to put an end to the colonization of the territories. But when it comes to arriving at operational conclusions, the positions expressed are far less consensual. Thus, at the close of the meeting just mentioned, the final communiqué took up virtually all the Palestinian demands⁶, referring to the Arab Peace Initiative⁷. It is true that the Labour Party has never responded very clearly to this initiative, dating from 2002, which has been reactivated on several occasions. More generally, the Israeli Labourites have never expressed a unanimous position on the ways of resolving the conflict. This is the tragedy of the Israeli left. The most pacifist among them wish to arrive swiftly at an agreement on the bases laid down as early as 2000 with the “Clinton parameters” and renewed on May 19, 2011, by President Barack Obama: the creation of a demilitarized Palestinian State “on the 1967 lines with mutually agreed swaps.” But the “realist” wing of the Labour Party, anxious not to cut itself off from a portion of the left-wing electorate, or what remains of it, is more reticent, and expresses in particular the greatest reservations about an Israeli disengagement from the eastern part of Jerusalem. All in all, a certain ideological vagueness undermines the credibility of the Israeli Labour Party on the international stage. But these internal difficulties do not explain everything. Within the Socialist International, the legitimacy of Israel is at times surreptitiously called into question. Alfonso Guerra, former number two of the PSOE and of the Spanish government, recounts in this regard a telling incident⁸: in 1975, on the occasion of the SPD congress held in Heidelberg, the microphone was deliberately cut off to prevent the representative of the Labour Party, Itzhak Rabin, from taking the floor to protest the adoption of the UN resolution of November 10, 1975, equating Zionism with racism. Very tellingly, the author continues his account by explaining that he admires the ideas of George Steiner, a Jew hostile to Zionism⁹. Suffice it to say that the position of the European socialists concerning Israel is often murky, resembling a phenomenon of mental dissociation: a veritable political schizophrenia.

Socialist Schizophrenia

This behavior is general throughout Europe, but to varying degrees. In the category of the parties most moderate toward Israel, there is scarcely any left but the German SPD, for obvious historical reasons. The weight of the past continues to bear upon the choices of the German left: even Die Linke, formed to the left of the SPD, adopted in June 2011 a resolution forbidding its members from taking part in the second flotilla to Gaza. But at the grassroots, in certain of Die Linke’s sections (in Bremen, in Duisburg…) as among certain SPD local officials, hostility to Israeli policy is openly expressed. More generally, the desire of the new generations to put an end to German guilt should not remain without consequence for the relations between Israel and that country’s left.

In the category of the social-democratic parties increasingly hostile to Israel, the French-speaking Socialist Party of Belgium occupies a place of choice. Whereas it once counted in its ranks numerous pro-Israeli figures, the PSB now stands on the side of the State of Israel’s most virulent critics, in Parliament as in the street. Some of its elected officials, such as the former minister André Flahaut, openly align themselves with the most anti-Zionist elements of Belgian society¹⁰. Others, such as the Member of the European Parliament Véronique de Keyser, have specialized in the criticism of Israel within the European Parliament. The Spanish PSOE, too, has gone from a great closeness with Israel to an increasingly systematic hostility. Gone are the days when the head of government, Felipe Gonzalez, declared that Spain’s recognition of Israel (1986) was one of the major acts of his foreign policy. The Spanish left is at the forefront of denouncing the Jewish State, and socialist activists are numerous in taking to the street to express it. On a more official level, the leaders of Spanish diplomacy, such as Miguel Angel Moratinos, press at the level of the European Union for it to condemn Israeli policy more firmly. The Israeli ambassador, on leaving his post in 2011, summed up his four years in Madrid with marked bitterness:

“What has changed in the relations between Spain and Israel? There is no doubt that the Embassy lived through painful periods during these years.”

In most of the other parties of European social democracy, the situation is more nuanced, at times confused, but the evolution is clear: criticism of Israel is increasingly frequent, and at times issues into public actions. The Italian Democratic Party, which now federates the whole of the non-communist left, expresses this evolution very well, hesitating to take clear-cut positions on account of the variety of its components. But the great closeness of the Berlusconi government with Israel arouses opposite movements within the ranks of the main opposition party. Within the British Labour Party, the condemnation of Israel does not always command unanimity, but has powerful relays. Ken Livingstone, during his two terms as mayor of London (2000–2008), was a virulent critic who did not hesitate to accuse Israel of practicing ethnic cleansing, and to brand Ariel Sharon, prime minister at the time (2005), a war criminal. The British Labour Party is also strongly subject to the pressure of the trade unions to which it is close, such as the University and College Union, representing higher-education teachers, which regularly has its congresses adopt a resolution to boycott Israeli universities¹¹. In Norway, the boycott movement, driven by the Socialist Left Party¹² and its leader, Kristin Halvorsen, is officially contested by its partners on the moderate left. But within the Labour Party, and still more in the ranks of its youth movement, radical actions directed against the Jewish State gather an ever-growing number of activists.

In France too, the Socialist Party endures no end of torment. Contrary to an opinion complacently spread within the Jewish community, it often shows great political prudence when it must speak on the Near East. But many of its activists, elected officials, and leaders, and the Socialist Youth Movement, blithely free themselves from the moderate orientations advocated by the national leadership. Thus, during Operation Plomb Durci (Cast Lead) in Gaza (December 2008–January 2009), the Socialist Party condemned the Israeli intervention in very measured terms, wishing that “the Israeli and Palestinian leaders find again the path of negotiation, necessary for a lasting peace in the region”¹³. But as this moderation did not command unanimity¹⁴, the PS left its federations and activists free to join or not the demonstrations organized by the far left and the pro-Palestinian organizations. On the occasion of the fifth anniversary of the abduction of Gilad Shalit, the City of Paris was one of the rare socialist municipalities to display the portrait of the young Franco-Israeli for a few days on the front of the City Hall. One will note also that in June 2011, Martine Aubry, first secretary, received Noam Shalit, Gilad’s father. As for the boycott, at a CRIF dinner held in Lille on November 8, 2010, this same Martine Aubry had clearly condemned the practice:

“those who advocate the boycott are mistaken in their fight: instead of bringing peace, they bring intolerance, they bring hatred. And when one wants a path to peace, one does not begin by bringing that.”

But in the communist town halls, at the forefront of the boycott of Israeli products, the socialist officials were scarcely heard to raise any protest. A like silence prevails in the face of the mobilization of the PCF and its municipalities in favor of Salah Hamouri, a young Franco-Palestinian convicted in Israel on the charge of preparing an attack against Chief Rabbi Ovadia Yossef, mentor of the Shas¹⁵. In similar fashion, after clearly condemning the assault carried out on the first flotilla to Gaza in May 2010 by the Israeli navy¹⁶, the Socialist Party scarcely made its voice heard regarding the second flotilla. But in the Party’s most left-leaning currents, support for this initiative was clearly expressed¹⁷, and many socialist elected officials, including several parliamentarians¹⁸, backed the appeal Un bateau français pour Gaza (A French Boat for Gaza), denouncing in particular an illegal policy of confinement and military actions. The Socialist Youth Movement is often at the forefront on these questions. Thus, at the time of the interception of the first flotilla to Gaza, it proclaimed its will not to let the extremists lay down the law, only to conclude at once:

The Young Socialists call upon the governments, the Quai d’Orsay first and foremost, to take firm and binding sanctions against Israel in order to make it aware of the real balance of power¹⁹.

At the extreme end of the spectrum, one finds a socialist senator, Monique Cerisier-Ben Guiga, who, on June 28, 2011, during a meeting with Israeli parliamentarians, accused Israel of colonialism, described Gilad Shalit as a prisoner of war, and refused to answer the question of whether she recognized Israel as a State governed by the rule of law.

Beyond the diversity of the opinions expressed within the European social-democratic parties, one observes, then, a growing gap between political discourse and political practice. The discourse of the leadership conveys a will to balance, to diplomatic prudence, that one finds in all officials of a certain rank, whether they are in power or aspire to it. At the grassroots, where these precautions are no longer in order, criticisms of Israel are expressed in abundance, and one increasingly observes a political practice that owes much to anti-globalism.

The Influence of Anti-Globalism

This influence is very clear among community activists, trade unionists, local elected officials, and the representatives of the youth movements, who work day to day with communist, ecologist, or Trotskyist partners. The process is complex but logical. As the social-democratic parties hesitate to take clear positions, their activists and their audiences are permeable to stances more critical of Israel. The porosity is all the greater in that the anti-globalist discourse on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has the merit of being clear, if not nuanced: Zionism, figurehead of colonialism and imperialism, opposes by force the birth of a Palestine, symbol of the national liberation movement of oppressed peoples. This theme has gradually imposed itself on the left, where, after the decolonization of Black Africa, the independences in North Africa, and the end of apartheid in South Africa, it has become the great international cause to be defended.

But anti-Zionist discourse in its anti-globalist version is not limited to the question of the conflict with the Palestinians. Thus, José Bové, an emblematic figure of the movement in France, did not hesitate to describe Israel as an advanced sentinel of savage liberalism. Among the other grievances leveled against the Jewish State, one finds, jumbled together: the growing place of religion, the discriminations suffered by minorities, the growth of inequalities between social strata… as if these ills did not afflict all the Western democracies. In fact, these thematic accusations constitute so many pieces of the general indictment introducing a trial of the Jewish State’s legitimacy. Thus, the success met with by the work of the Israeli academic Shlomo Sand, Comment le peuple juif fut inventé (The Invention of the Jewish People)²⁰, among the Parisian intelligentsia²¹ is not innocent. One will note that these accusations are not the monopoly of anti-globalism, and that the discrediting of the State of Israel has invaded the political space well beyond the left. But among the most committed of the Progressive International, this way of thinking, speaking, and writing about Israel goes further and raises questions in which, despite the things left unsaid, it is indeed the legitimacy of a Jewish State that is at stake:

Is there an Israeli people? Might it not be a pure invention of the military-industrial complex, of the Jewish lobby? And for that matter, does the Jewish people really exist? And even on that hypothesis, does it have the right to self-determination on this land in the name of an old history?

Would not cohabitation in a single binational State be the best formula, settling at one and the same time the question of borders and that of refugees?

The influence of anti-globalism is not only ideological. It has major diplomatic consequences. It is in Latin America, where this current is solidly anchored, that the movement of support for the unilateral recognition of the Palestinian State at the UN was launched. Countries as influential as the Venezuela of Hugo Chavez, a notorious anti-Zionist, the Brazil of Lula and Dilma Rousseff, the Argentina of Cristina Kirchner—important figures of the Progressive International—played a key role in this movement, drawing along most of the countries of the region. The movement for unilateral recognition was swiftly relayed in the rest of the world, particularly on the Old Continent, where the left rapidly seized upon this demand. Thus, the French Socialist Party, after recalling its traditional position of balance, added to it the proposals of Barack Obama: “On the basis of the 1967 borders, it will fall to the Israelis and the Palestinians to proceed to equal exchanges of territory with a view to establishing the definitive borders of the Palestinian State, to settle the question of the status of Jerusalem, which has the vocation of being the capital of the two States, and the question of the refugees.” But the political conclusion of this stance was far less nuanced, since the PS called on France “to recognize the Palestinian State and to make every possible effort so that the European Union defends this recognition”²².

At this level, this appeal had every chance of being heeded, since the Group of former European leaders, whose stances carry authority, was even less nuanced, declaring:

“Europe cannot oppose this legitimate demand of the Palestinians. To refuse to recognize their independence after having supported their efforts, after having acknowledged that they have come closer to this objective by building a coherent system of governance, and after having acknowledged that they have cooperated with Israel on security questions, would directly and unacceptably contradict our own positions and our own policies”²³.

Here too, one will note that the left is not alone in defending these ideas. This text was signed by figures of the right such as the Frenchman Jean-François Poncet, and Alain Juppé was a member of the Group until his appointment as Minister of State in November 2010. But the representatives of European social democracy, and not the least among them, played a decisive role in having this group speak out in this sense. Among the signatories of the aforementioned text, one finds the French socialists Lionel Jospin, Michel Rocard, and Hubert Védrine, the Belgian socialist Louis Michel, the Spanish socialist Felipe Gonzalez, the former Italian leader of the Olive Tree party, Giuliano Amato… One will take care here not to think that, in defending the right of the Palestinians to a State, the European left adopts the entirety of the anti-globalist discourse. The social-democratic parties still know how to make distinctions. But it must be acknowledged that this balancing act is increasingly difficult to express, and that when it comes to taking a position on alternatives, the Progressive International knows how to make up its mind, and always does so in the same direction.

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All in all, the conclusion is unavoidable: the party of unilateralism and of the boycott is in the process of winning the game within all the lefts. In other words, between the Progressive International and Israel, the stage of incomprehension was long ago passed, giving way to a great mistrust, which nothing shows could be overcome. On the contrary, between an Israeli government that persists in a policy of deadlock and an Arab world in the grip of revolutions of uncertain outcome, everything gives cause to fear that the adversaries of the Jewish State will see their positions reinforced. This phenomenon entails significant collateral damage. First, within the Progressive International, where the voices that advocate solutions to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict based on moderation and reason are increasingly marginalized. Next, within the Jewish communities of Europe, where the left has become almost inaudible²⁴. In Israel, finally, where the positions hostile to Israel taken by the Progressive International ease the task of Likud and the other right-wing parties, which thus have an additional argument with which to discredit a left already much weakened and that really did not need this.

Notes