The Educator – #008

Last updated 19/07/24

THE EDUCATOR

The Lancet medical journal estimates that 186,000 deaths or more are “attributable” to Israel’s brutal war on Gaza. Meanwhile, the United Nations has warned that famine has spread throughout Gaza as more children die from malnutrition.  

But as Israel continues to commit countless war crimes, the UK remains complicit by providing arms. A YouGov poll shows a majority of voters back suspending arms sales to Israel – with 56% in favour. Keir Starmer may have called for an immediate ceasefire during discussions with Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu – but he has stayed largely silent on the issue of arms sales. 

We supported Labour MP Zarah Sultana’s amendment to the King’s Speech on Wednesday demanding the Government suspends arms sales to Israel. And you can sign our petition to help pile on the pressure. 

Over the years, Britain has played a significant role in the occupation of Palestine. Its influence in the founding of the state of Israel under the Balfour Declaration has led to a decades-long conflict and a worsening humanitarian crisis. Consecutive governments, both Tory and Labour, have labelled Israel a staunch ally. Not taking into account its ongoing military campaigns in the West Bank and Gaza, thereby turning a blind eye to the mounting war crimes and atrocities that define the brutal bombardment. Furthermore, a litany of multinational corporations and political parties have kept close ties with Israel. 

Today, this unwavering support for Israel is increasingly indefensible – the Emperor has no clothes, even as he continues down the same path. To help outline the history of Britain’s role in Palestine, we sat down with Leiden University lecturer Sai Englert, who teaches on settler colonialism, Zionism, labour movements and antisemitism. 

Note: Sai’s book Settler Colonialism: An Introduction (2022) is now available at 50% off for all Momentum members and Movement Builders. Simply use the code “ENGLERT50” at plutobooks.com when purchasing. The code is active until next month. 

⬤ Britain came to govern Palestine as part of a League of Nations ‘Mandate’ after the First World War. This was preceded by the Balfour Declaration, with the British state committing to help create a ‘national homeland’ for the Jewish people in Palestine. Can you tell us a bit about how these events came to pass, and the interests behind the colonial British state’s actions here, including the role of antisemitism?

There’s a number of things to say, first from the perspective of the Zionists and then of the British state. Up until the 1930s, Zionists were an extremely small minority amongst Europe’s Jewish population. They were often very bourgeois, highly assimilated Jews who, despite a comfortable socioeconomic position, saw their integration into the societies of Europe limited by anti-semitism. This was a period of colonial expansion and the emergence of the nation states in Europe, and their conclusion as European bourgeois thinkers was that anti-semitism was a European reality. And so because that nation state can’t be established in Europe, it can be established in the colonial world. 

Their thinking aligned with European bourgeois thinkers of the 19th century, who saw no problem with solving Europe’s internal social problems through colonial expansion and domination. And the idea therefore becomes, and this was hardly new, that the unwanted of Europe, whether economically, religiously or politically, could be expelled into the settler world and in the process, both relieve the metropole of their presence, and become the vanguard of colonial expansion. We can cite the expulsion of puritans who became pilgrims in North America, the crushing of the Paris Commune and the expulsion of many of its leaders to French-controlled Algeria. Or the famous Tolpuddle Martyrs, at the beginning of the labour movement in Britain, who were deported to Australia and of course the thousands upon thousands of urban poor, who were sent to the settler world to relieve social tensions at home. 

And so Zionism fits neatly into that European tradition, both as a response to anti-semitism, but a response that accepts it as an immutable reality, and imagines its solution as an expansion of European power abroad. And that’s very clear in the writings of Herzl, who writes ‘The Jewish State’, which became the founding document of the Zionist movement. Herzl’s main contribution practically will be the setting up of the Zionist organisation to go from theory to practice, but also to identify that the task of the Zionist movement will be to secure the support of a Great Power that will be able to turn colonisation into practice. It was clear that although the Zionist movement would start the process of colonisation independently, it needed an imperial sponsor to make that project a reality. 

The arguments were twofold. One was to say that the future state that our movement will build will be an important ally within the colonial world. And that’s obviously particularly attractive to European colonial powers in Palestine because Palestine is at the crossroads of three continents, it is next to the Suez Canal, and in the early 20th century Haifa became the point where British oil extraction could just go all the way from Kurdistan to Haifa in order to be exported to Europe. It’s a crucial strategic area and Zionism will be an important military ally. And the second argument was an appeal to the anti semitic powers in Europe, saying ‘you don’t want the Jews in Europe, we have a solution for you’. So it’s sort of a double solution. Herzl has this famous sentence, that “anti-semites will become our most dependable friends, and ant-semitic countries our allies”. And that really captures the deep pessimism, the idea that anti semitism is undefeatable in Europe, and so that the way to deal with it is to appeal to antisemitic policy makers.

Both of those tendencies are very visible in Britain’s decision to support Zionism. There’s two useful examples here. The first is the Balfour Declaration, which made clear that it would be Britain rather than Russia, Germany, or France who would be the central supporters of the Zionist movement. Arthur Balfour who gives his name to that declaration, was also a famous antisemite who penned the 1905 Aliens Act, which is the first official British policy trying to stop Jewish migration from Eastern Europe into Britain. This only reinforces the analysis that this was about dealing with a problem by sending it to Palestine. 

I’m not sure the British Empire is entirely convinced in the 1920s that it will actually create a separate state at some point for the Zionist movement (hence why the Balfour Declaration talks about a’ homeland’) but it’s useful to play different communities against each other and to repeatedly mobilise the Zionist movement against the Palestinian national movement, most visibly in the Arab revolt in the 1930s, in which Zionists trade unions were used to break a general strike, while Zionist militias were used to help break the more general military uprising

The second is that Britain is extremely clear about the fact that it needs as much strategic help as possible to control a key strategic area in the world economy, which it still is today. The Suez Canal is still the most important water thoroughfare in world trade, for example. Oil is still a central aspect of the world economy and so a military presence in the Middle East remains of central strategic importance for Western or any other powers that want to project power on a global stage. There’s a very famous sentence by Ronald Storrs, who was the first British governor of Palestine, who explained Britain’s support for the Zionist movement by saying that Zionism will be like a ‘little loyal Jewish Ulster in a sea of potentially hostile Arabism’. So he also makes the connection with another British settler colony in Ireland, and was very clear about the fact that it was about expanding British military power which was the role that Zionism will play for Britain up until the second half of the 1950s and for the United States from the 1960s onwards, and you get all these famous sentences by American politicians that go very much in the same direction. Secretary of Defence Hague said in the 70s, for example, that ‘Israel is the largest American aircraft carrier in the world that cannot be sunk, does not carry even one American soldier, and is located in a critical region for American national security’. People know the Biden quote “that if there was no Israel we’d have to invent it.” What all that points to is the recognition that Israel is supported not out of any sort of concern for its citizens or for Jewish people, but out of naked strategic self-interest in the region. In fact it is often mobilised or is often also dependent on a desire to externalise the European Jewish populations and not maintain them in Europe, which was an overwhelming concern of European ruling classes, certainly until the end of the Second World War. 

⬤ We’ve talked a bit about Britain’s role in the foundation of Israel. How has this evolved since Israel’s foundation around 1948 politically and diplomatically? 

The fundamental change is primarily one of the growing weaknesses of Britain and the fact that Britain increasingly is being forced into a second fiddle position towards the United States. The turning point for this was in 1956 when Britain and France convinced Israel to conquer the Sinai and take over the Suez Canal in response to Gamal Abdel Nasser’s nationalisation of the Suez Canal in 1956, with the very poorly masked response by Britain and France who stepped in and took over the Suez Canal as a security force that would serve to protect the canal from both Egyptian and Israeli confrontation… except they took that decision in a situation of majorly-weaning French and British power. And both the Soviet Union and the United States stepped in and demanded the immediate retreat of Israeli, British and French forces out of the region.

That moment really marks the fundamental shift away from Israel as European to Israel as an American military base in the region. And from that moment, Ben Gurion famously decided that no military operations would be carried out without the Americans’ agreement. So by the mid-1960s Israel was entirely integrated into the American sphere of influence and became the American expression of power against Arab nationalism, which it defeated militarily in a number of confrontations in 1967 and 1973. From that moment onwards, Britain’s strategy, in so far as it has one, is simply to follow and replicate the US strategy in relation to Israel, just as it was in Afghanistan, it’s the reality in Iraq, it’s the reality in the repression of the Arab Spring.  it’s now the reality in Britain’s support and participation in Israel’s genocide in Gaza, which is really primarily motivated by this strategic commitment to Atlanticism and US power around the world.

⬤ So moving on from the historic to the more current relationship between the UK and the British state and Israel today. There’s been a lot of pressure from pro-Palestinian campaigners, which we’ve been supporting at Momentum, around UK arms sales to Israel and the (bad faith) rejoinder from Israel’s defenders is that these amount to a tiny proportion of Israel’s arms imports. Not that that actually means we shouldn’t stop them. But it begs the question: what are the economic, political and military ties between the two states currently? And what in your opinion are the pressure points that we as activists and as an anti-imperialist socialist movement should be targeting?

Britain has allowed itself not only to be directly involved in weapons trade with Israel, which is by the way a relation in both directions, particularly in terms of the expansion of Israeli security and spying technology but also of allowing Israeli armaments companies to prosper on British soil and so the Elbit systems arms factories are obviously the most prominent of those examples and the work that people have been doing in Palestine Action and more recently now the Workers for Palestine pickets and actions I think are absolutely wonderful and important. 

There’s also other examples that I think are important to think about, not least the fact that there are people within the British trade union movement in industries that are either directly or peripherally connected to the arms trade that are talking about just transitions. You get these campaigns in aerospace, for example, of Unite members that are talking about transitioning out of the arms industry and the fact that there’s lots of other much more socially useful and important things that workers in those industries could be doing, rather than building weapons used in Israel’s F35s that are being used to bomb Gaza.

More generally, this is the sort of the central call that the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement has made to the solidarity movements around the world since 2005, which is to say ‘your state is making you complicit. Your institutions, your companies are making you complicit in the ongoing dispossession and colonial subjugation of the Palestinian people’, and Palestinian civil society is calling on the civil societies of the world to end it and so, in a sense, I think the argument about whether or not it’s a big part of Israel’s military arsenal is utterly irrelevant. It’s of course true that BDS movements in the United States will have a greater impact in terms of their victories. 

But there are lots of campaigns in which the BDS model in Britain has been really central. So, for example, Veolia is in charge of a lot of bin collection for local governments in Britain and it was targeted by BDS campaigners because it was involved in building the tram line that connects West Jerusalem to the settlements in the East and so participates in the illegal transfer of the occupier population into the settlement. Veolia, under pressure from those campaigns, in which the solidarity movement in Britain played a central role, pulled out of that project. That’s a major victory. 

The fact that G4S, the security company which participated in the security for settlements and checkpoints was targeted on that basis. Again, solidarity groups in Britain played a key role in pressuring it and it announced that it would end that relationship. Not only is that economically important but I think those campaigns are hugely important as well because they raise both the cost of Western companies’ participation in Palestinian subjugation, but also it limits the political space of the Israeli state by increasing the costs on our own states for their support of it. And so I think it’s absolutely central for that to continue whether it’s in universities, local governments, companies or targeted at the British state. The fact that we are seeing other European states, as well as the Japanese state recently breaking military contracts with the Israeli state or with Elbit systems for the first time, that is a really striking sign of the fact that these campaigns are bearing fruit and that the logic of the BDS movement is starting slowly to break into the world of policy-makers and this trend is one to be to be encouraged, continued, intensified etc. 

I would also say that one of the strengths of the BDS movement is the lesson that real solidarity is always about how you connect your own liberation to the liberation of the people that you are expressing solidarity with, and I think BDS is such an extraordinary tool because it’s also a tool for the democratisation of our own society. It’s a tool to say we have a right in our workplaces. in our local governments, in our communities, in our universities and colleges and schools to be involved in the collective decision-making process of who we want to have contact with and who not, who we want to give money to and who not etc.

And it’s also one of the reasons why the BDS movement has made such effective links with people who campaign against climate change, people campaigning against arms sales. It’s about asserting where we are investing, who we are trading with, what we are supporting and should we. So it’s a movement that is also fighting for the democratisation of our own society in ways that raises the political stakes alongside the economic pressure that it puts on Israel. I would also just say that for all the bluster of Israel supporters saying its [arms sales] represents so little in terms of Israel’s military arsenal, or trade in terms of its economic interest, the absolute, strategic centrality that the Israeli government is giving to fighting the BDS movement, together with the focus of its allies on trying to criminalise the BDS movement across the world, points to the fact that it’s of absolute strategic interest. And that efforts should be redoubled. Every attack against the BDS movement is further evidence of how effective and how important it is.

⬤ You’ve laid out Britain’s complicity, but it’s important as well as socialists to be aware of the limits and failings of our movement. You write in your book about the active role of the labour Zionist movement in driving the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, especially in the Nakba around 1948. Could you expand on that? And how should we be wary of and factor in this kind of structural complicity in our understanding as socialists today? 

Yes, so actually I think what’s striking is that in Israeli history, first of all the state and its institutions are built by the labour movement. And the labour movement is the most rabid defender in Israel of the exclusion, the so-called ‘transfer’ i.e. the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. And so until the current genocide, the largest massacres and displacements of Palestinians are carried out by the so-called ‘Israeli Left’. You know, the Nakba is organised by the labour Zionist leadership, it’s largely carried out by its militias and the military rule that Palestinian citizens are put under after 1948 is organised by the labour leadership. The Histadrut, the Israeli Trade Union Federation which was established in order to fight for the so-called conquest of labour or the campaign for Hebrew labour, so the exclusion of Palestinian workers from the Israeli economy, sat on the committee that maintained military rule over Palestinian citizens. The conquest of the whole of historic Palestine, of the Sinai and of the Golan Heights, in 1967 was carried out by a Labour Zionist government. The beginning of the settlement, the Alon plan, which is the beginning of the segmentation of the West Bank and the settlement strategy in the West Bank, is carried out by labour Zionists and so on. 

So this idea that there is an Israeli Left that is somehow a progressive alternative in terms of the treatment of Palestinians to the Netanyahu government has absolutely no basis in history or in contemporary realities, which is to say that all these organisations continue to support the Israeli state and its military campaigns against Palestinians and at most have strategic disagreements on how to organise the state or how to organise its domination over the Palestinians.

The Histadrut, which is still the largest trade union in Israel, is today open to Palestinian citizens to be members which they were until the mid-1960s. But its structures remain very much, in a whole number of ways, based on the continued political exclusion of Palestinians from both sides of the green line.

The Histadrut has supported all of Israel’s military attacks on Palestinians. Recently the head of the Histradut was in an arms factory supporting the contribution that workers in the arms industry in Israel were making to the war effort where he signed a bomb that was to be dropped on Gaza in the name of the Histadrut and all the workers in Israel. There’s a total ideological and political commitment to Israeli power and Israeli rule. So one of the things that’s important for us to think about in the labour movement is that the BDS movement is also demanding the cutting of ties with the Histadrut, to not normalise ties with an organisation that actively participates [in Israeli occupation], even though it is no longer in the driver seat as it was in the early years of the state.

⬤ The point on the writing on the bomb – Isaac Herzog, Israel’s President, did a similar thing recently and he was cited at the ICJ on some of his comments, in relation to the finding of plausible genocide and he is of the Israeli Labor Party…

It’s absolutely unsurprising for anybody that knows the history of the Israeli Labor Party. This is absolutely in step with the entire political tradition that they represent. And there’s this real sigh of relief among European liberals every time there are demonstrations or strikes or whatever in Israel, as if they represented a fundamental break with the overall structure of Israeli domination of the Palestinians and they absolutely never do.

They don’t raise the question of Israeli domination and colonisation – because they don’t fundamentally disagree. They’re sometimes more tactical. So for example you know in recent years on what exactly the role of the high court should be but you know almost nobody was raising a sort of a fundamental critique of Israeli domination over Palestinians.

And so I think it’s really important for us to strategically understand that our focus needs to be on the Palestinian national movement and the wider liberatory movements across the region, in a way that was already being theorised by the Palestinian Left and its allies in the 1960s and 70s. Liberation will not come from the much-vaunted and fantasised-about Israeli working class. It will come from a regional transformation in the balance of power that will make Zionism a problem rather than an asset for its Western sponsors.

⬤ We’ve talked about some of the horrors of the genocide being unleashed on Gaza by Israel. And we’ve talked a lot about, as we should, the history of Zionism, settlers. But it’s important we don’t fall into the trap of viewing Palestinians only as victims: they have always resisted this oppression since the early stages, as you’ve talked about, and that they do have a vibrant history of labour struggles. So can you talk to us a bit about the activities of the past Palestinian labour movement in recent years, and what concrete forms of solidarity they’re demanding from us in Britain?

Yeah, well I think there are two things to say. One is that the Palestinian labour movement operates in close-to-impossible situations, whether it’s under the absolute blockade of the Gaza Strip, whether it’s under military rule, which also comes with the vast differences of legal and political rights that different groups of Palestinians have, whether they work inside the occupied territories, whether they work in the settlements, whether they work inside of the green line itself. 

And so the political fragmentation of the Palestinian population also has real consequences in terms of the possibility of organising Palestinian workers. That has led, alongside the Oslo Agreements, to a real bureaucratization (as everywhere) of the official Palestinian trade union movement, which has gone hand in hand with quite a high level of normalisation of relations both with Israel and with the Histadrut. 

In response to this there’s been a growing number of independent Palestinian trade unions, as well, for example amongst teachers but also the development of an independent Palestinian trade union federation which has a goal, and again you know in an extremely difficult situation, to organise Palestinians across all of these different divides. This is something that the official Palestinian trade union movement has refused, for example, to organise Palestinian workers in the settlement, using the argument that they shouldn’t accept to work there. Obviously, this fails to capture the question of economic power that Palestinians working in Israeli companies, wherever they might be, would be able to mobilise for the national liberation movement if they were organised.

And I think it’s really important to highlight that, I think people should invite representatives of the independent unions. Individual unions are doing really great work. The union of journalists has been doing really important work highlighting the targeting of journalists by Israel. People should invite their representatives and have them speak. 

There’s also the campaign of Workers in Palestine that organized that really important call almost immediately after the beginning of the genocide that had trade unions across historic Palestine signing up and calling on workers across the world to focus particularly on armament industries and the transport of arms to Israel and so across the world different trade unions respond to the call. Perhaps most importantly, we’ve seen port workers in Spain, in South Africa, in the United States, in India, Italy, Turkey and elsewhere, refusing to participate in the continued transportation of weapons for the genocide.

And so I think that initiative has been extremely important. People should invite representatives of Workers in Palestine to speak in their unions. Think about what concrete steps they can take. And make those connections as much as possible.

On the one hand there’s the question of inviting people, having them talk, supporting them, including financially, making donations, etc. But it’s also important to make the connection in a really organic way in the way that those unions have asked, which is not only about extending solidarity. It’s also about taking direct action. Or directly taking action in terms of the labour movement.  And that goes back to what I was saying before about the kind of demand made by Palestinians, whether it’s through the BDS movement, whether it’s through the trade union call. We need to raise the political stakes, within our own workplaces, and make the kind of necessary militancy to cut relations with Israel possible. This is a call for solidarity and a call for the revitalisation of the labour movement more generally.

Further reading:

• From the River to the Sea: Essays on a Free Palestine (2023) edited by Sai Englert, Michal Shatz and Rosie Warren. Link here.
• Hil Aked, Friends of Israel: The Backlash Against Palestine Solidarity (2023). Link here.
• You can also listen to Sai on the Politics Theory Other podcast here.