When one speaks of the French left (Hasmol Hatsarfati) to Israeli students of political science, one must take great care to explain to them beforehand what it is about. And it is not simple! I generally explain to them that the concepts of right and left date from the French Revolution; that these concepts developed in the first place in relation to the powers left to the King, and that the deputies of the revolutionary assembly sat on the right or on the left according to their opinions on this subject; that in the course of the nineteenth century, following the industrial revolution, these notions began to take on a socio-economic connotation, and began to revolve around the opposition socialism-capitalism, and so on. I insist above all on the fact that, in contemporary France, these concepts have largely changed. On the one hand, I think that what was the capitalist right has largely integrated the notion of the welfare State and of social solidarity: in contemporary democracies the right-wing parties no longer call for the dismantling of social security and the abolition of all aid to the most disadvantaged strata of society. On the other hand, the left has largely renounced a socialist transformation of society; it no longer demands the nationalization of the economy, but simply a certain measure of State intervention in the market economy. I therefore try to explain to my Israeli students, who at this stage open wide round eyes, that the right-left divide in today’s France is situated on four planes, or more exactly on four continua:
A — On the economic plane, the French left is for more intervention by the public authority in the functioning of the economy, whereas the right wishes to restrict this intervention to a minimum.
B — On the social plane, the left is for more social solidarity and the extension of social-security services to very broad peripheral categories, whereas the right-wing parties wish to restrict the dimensions of the welfare State and to reduce its benefits; the one accepts the deficit of social security, the other wants a rigorous management.
C — On the axis traditional-values-versus-modernity, the right seeks to preserve the maximum of traditional values, and in particular religious and family ones (aid to the birth rate, struggle against abortion, pornography, homosexuality…), while the left favors tolerance, change, and modernity.
D — Finally, on the axis nationalism-versus-cosmopolitanism, the right is rather nationalist, it tends to insist on national preference, whereas, broadly, the left-wing parties are more in favor of internationalism and of the opening of national identity to others and to foreigners.
Obviously, all these notions, so well known and lived by the French and European public, are totally foreign to the universe of Israeli students of political science. For them, the concepts of right and left have an entirely different meaning. In today’s Israel, these terms are commonly employed to designate one single thing: the basic divide over the solutions to be brought to the Israeli-Arab conflict.
Let us explain ourselves. There have always been, from the beginnings of the Zionist movement until today, two entirely different conceptions of the Israeli-Arab conflict and of Israel’s insertion into its Arab environment. On one side, many Zionists understood that Israel could survive in the long term only if the Jewish State integrated itself harmoniously into its environment. This meant that the Zionist movement should confine itself to this basic requirement, the creation of a Jewish State, without demanding that it extend over the totality of the biblical Erets Israel. It also meant that Israel should be ready to compromise with its Arab neighbors and with the native population living in Turkish, then British, Palestine, in order to arrive at a modus vivendi and a peaceful coexistence. It is known that certain Zionist thinkers, such as Martin Buber, Judah Magnes, Akiva Ernst Simon, and the people of Brith Shalom, went much further, since they thought that a binational State would be the only solution that would allow the Jews to live in peace with the Arabs. This attitude was extremely much in the minority, and the majority of “left-wing” Zionists wished for a Jewish State, but one neither expansionist nor annexationist, ready for compromise and conciliation. The Israeli socialist labor movement, later represented by Mapai and Mapam, constituted the partisan backbone of this current of opinion. Conversely, there have always been Zionist militants who thought that the Arab world would never accept a Jewish State in the land of Islam, whether large or small, whether it extended over all of Eretz Israel or over a restricted part of this territory, and that, consequently, Israel would always have to struggle to impose its existence. In this perspective, which is qualified as “right” in Israel, it is only the power of our army and of our weapons that can constrain the Arab enemy to yield and to compromise. For this right, peace can be founded only on the force and the physical, material, technological superiority of the Israelis. The moment the Arabs sense the least weakness in the Jews, they will make a single mouthful of the State of Israel and throw its inhabitants into the sea (or worse). The partisan backbone of this current of ideas was the revisionist movement of Vladimir Zeev Jabotinsky. Subsequently the Herut of Menachem Begin took over, and this current is embodied today in the Likud of Ariel Sharon and in the hawkish parties situated to its right and its far right.
It is entirely true that in the past there existed bridges between the French or European definition of right and left and the Israeli conception. Indeed, originally, it was the same current that was a partisan of the cooperative socialism of the kibbutzim and of the Histadrut, and that also defended the “minimalist” thesis of the partition of Palestine between Jews and Arabs. The communist party, first called PKP (Communist Party of Palestine), then MAKI (Communist Party of Israel), before becoming the Rakah and then the present-day Hadash, represented the far left, both as regards the attitude toward the Arabs and on the social and economic plane. Conversely, the revisionist party laid claim at once to expansionist solutions (the two banks of the Jordan) and to a capitalist market economy at the antipodes of socialism. Consequently, there were bridges between the notions of the one and the other, and the two definitions largely overlapped in former times.
However, even at the origin, there were dissonances. In particular, within the Israeli socialist movement, alongside clearly conciliatory tendencies as regards the Israeli-Arab conflict (for example the Hachomer Hatzair current, which gave birth to the kibbutzim of the Artzi movement), there were much harder currents, much more security-minded, for whom Israel should oppose any partition and lay claim to all of Eretz Israel. This was above all the case of the Ahdout Haavoda current, which gave birth to the kibbutzim of the Hamehouhad movement, and which was inspired by the great socialist-Zionist ideologue Tabenkin. It is the current to which belonged, among others, Israel Galili, Yigal Allon, Yitzhak Rabin at one time, and a good number of leaders of the Palmach. This perhaps explains why this current, which was for a time part of Mapam along with the Hachomer Hatzair, quickly broke with it, and why a number of its cadres found themselves, after 1967 and the Six-Day War, among the partisans of “Greater Israel.” Let us recall that it was Yigal Allon himself who gave the green light to the settlers of Rabbi Levinger to install themselves in the Park Hotel of Hebron, an installation that was the prelude to the Jewish colonization of Kyriath Arba and of Hebron. A curious movement, which was intransigently Marxist and dogmatically socialist, but with a socialism that was for purely internal use and did not take into account the national claims of the Palestinians. Likewise, there developed around David Ben Gurion and later Moshe Dayan a “security” current which, at bottom, never ceased to put forward Israel’s defense needs, and was not “tender” with the Palestinian claims. It is this tendency that split from the Mapai party after the Lavon Affair, and constituted in the 1960s the ephemeral Rafi party. A few years later, while some, such as Dayan, Shimon Peres, or Teddy Kollek, reintegrated the ranks of the Labor Party, others continued their headlong race toward the positions of the nationalist right and found themselves, such as Yigal Hurwitz or Zalman Shoval, in the ranks of the Likud…
Others made the inverse journey, but they are not legion. There were notably members of the Stern Group (Lohamei Herout Israel), a particularly extremist and nationalist guerrilla group, who found themselves, such as Amos Kenan or Nathan Yellin-Mor, in the ranks of the Israeli peace camp.
But in a very general way, the right-left divide of the Israelis kept, until 1967, links with the European divide. It is the Six-Day War and the conquest of the territories that really muddled the cards. First of all, as I specified above, the victory of the Six Days literally made the earth turn for many socialist Zionists. These began to support with enthusiasm the annexationist theses and the process of creating Jewish settlements in the occupied territories. The list of “left-wing” intellectuals, from the great poet Nathan Alterman to the Palmach poet Haïm Gouri, who signed the manifesto of the Movement for the Whole of Eretz Israel, is eloquent! For many of these socialist Zionists of the Palmach and of the war of independence, the reconquest of these territories of Eretz Israel represented the very incarnation of the pioneering spirit of former times. Some even, such as the writer Moshe Shamir, engaged in a very militant political action for the annexation of all the territories.
But above all, one witnessed a “desocialization” of the Israeli economy and society. Cooperative socialism saw its end announce itself. The collective values and references of Israeli society, as I described and explained in my book La Nouvelle histoire d’Israël (The New History of Israel), vanished. Today, there are no longer really any proponents of a socialist economy in Israel. All the political parties, without exception, have rallied to the capitalist market economy, and there is no longer any difference on this subject between the various parties. It would be difficult to find more vehement advocates of integral capitalism and absolute privatization than the members of the kibbutzim who have engaged in a race toward the private sector and toward differential incomes! In short, there remain no authentic socialists in Israel, apart from a few dinosaurs in certain kibbutzim who cut the figure of an anachronism, like the Baram kibbutz of Ely Ben-Gal, but… careful, these are precisely the richest kibbutzim, those that have best succeeded on the economic plane and that can “afford” to remain collectivist. The others, the kibbutzim that have declined and sunk into unheard-of debt, those dream only of capitalism, of freedom, and of total privatization.
Better still, the public of the Israeli peace camp (Labor Party and Meretz) corresponds to the richest and most favored strata of society, those that are the least “proletarian” and that have the highest incomes. It is in the Israeli “left” that one finds all the captains of industry, all the owners of large enterprises, the doctors, the professors — in short, the richest. There are almost no workers or “common folk” who think for a second of voting for the parties of the Israeli left. On the contrary, the Likud, which today represents the nationalist positions, has an electorate of a very disadvantaged socio-economic level, and it is by far the party that represents the most proletarians in the country.
From then on, the use of the terms right-left in Israel found itself totally disconnected from its usage in Europe, and I believe there are no longer any Israelis who think for a second of the socio-economic reference when they employ these terms. The “smolani” (a very common insult in Israel…) is the man of the left, that is to say the one who thinks in terms of conciliation with the Arabs: in other words, for the man in the street, the smolani is a partisan of the Oslo accords, of negotiation, of the evacuation of the territories, and of the creation of a Palestinian State alongside the State of Israel. A “yemani” (many take pleasure in defining themselves thus) is someone who says he is of the right, and who is for resisting the Arabs by force and by the power of arms, and who refuses to evacuate the territories. The “smolani kitsoni” (far left) is either a partisan of the anti-Zionist Arab parties, or a member of one of those Jewish groupuscules such as Matzpen, Derech Hanitsots, or the Alternative Information Center of Michel Warschawski, who call for a binational State… The “yemani kitsoni,” whether a supporter of Avigdor Lieberman’s National Union party, or worse a partisan of the racists of Kach or of Baruch Marzel, are those who want to annex everything, strike the Arabs the hardest, and possibly transfer them out of Israel.
If the right-left divide in Israel is thus today without relation to the European socio-economic divides, there remains a link, however, at the level of the divide traditionalism versus modernity and of the divide nationalism versus cosmopolitanism. Indeed, it is certain that, in a general way, the Israeli right represents, broadly, a public more attached to traditional values, to religion, and to family values. The “religious” almost all situate themselves very much on the right of the Israeli political chessboard. Like the French left (which voted in the PACS), the Israeli left is more commonly identified with the values of secularism, of humanism, of feminism, of sexual freedom, and of modernity. This… must however be said with caution and nuance, since the Labor Party includes within it the moderate religious party Meimad, and since most of the heavyweights of the right are perfect non-religious, even if they punctuate, like Sharon, their speeches with expressions such as Beezrat Hachem or Baruch Hachem1…
Furthermore, it is certain that the divide, very pertinent in France, that concerns “the borders of national identity” — and that distinguishes a right very closed upon this identity (with a hyper-restrictive and anti-foreigner far right) from a left more open and ready for a certain dose of multiculturalism — exists also in Israel. For example, the Israeli right is more favorable to a “hard” policy toward immigrant workers, and would wish, like the French right, to send them back to their countries as quickly as possible, while the Israeli left, despite the rising unemployment, supports more flexible and more humane positions. Likewise, as regards Jews whose Jewishness is partial or uncertain in light of the halakhic definition, notably the Jews originating from the former Soviet Union, the left is very favorable to liberal and open solutions, whereas the right, inspired by the religious and allied with the ultra-religious parties, remains favorable to a “closed” and Orthodox definition of Jewish identity.
Thus, the collapse of the Israeli left in the elections of January 2003 represents a stance taken by the public with respect to the “Palestinian” policy options of the parties of the left, the Labor Party and Meretz. It was a vote of distrust toward the peace camp (not necessarily toward the solutions advocated by this camp). It is a vote that had strictly no kind of social or economic connotation. On the contrary, the Israeli left is unfortunately identified by public opinion as the “rich” population, as the elites who exploit the common folk. On the contrary, the Likud and the Israeli right, with a particularly anti-social finance minister,… are identified as the best representatives of the popular strata.
Notes
“With the help of God” and “Blessed be God.”↩︎