Perspectives for the Israeli Left Jonathan Brandow May 1, 1972—Six hundred people had gathered in Jerusalem's David- ka Square to demonstrate against domestic repression and the war pol- icies of the government. That had been an hour before. Now the troops were moving in. Armored halftracks rumbled up the narrow avenue, pushing the suddenly silent mob into the corner offshoots of the plaza. Then there was only concrete slab, the escape routes spotted with heavily armed and willing riot police. A rock wafted from the crowd, ricocheting off the halftrack and landing less than five feet from the deputy police commissioner's mount. "Enough of these bastards . No mercy!" The cav- alry descended, whipping yard-long billy clubs in the windmill motion of polo players. For five hours, chaos and blood ensued. THE TRIP TO RAFIACH IS NEVER TOO PLEASANT. The area is inhumanly hot, the ground rock hard. Four hundred people showed up. Not a week before, the government had announced the final expulsion of 10,000 residents from the area to make way for a new industrial complex and, according to the Minister of Finance, Pinchas Sapir, a possible new "Jew" ish city in Gaza." Incredibly, the indigenous Bedouin farmers had left without a murmur. In a lightning response, the leftists from all over the country united to promote a day of protest highlighted by a march on the disputed village. At the last minute, 3,000 social democrats from sur- rounding kibbutzim, which had initiated the idea, knuckled under to a United Workers' Party (MAPAM) advisory prohibiting engagement in the vigil. The rest tried to maintain a complement of ardor in spite of the disappointment. After all, in a drastic departure from normal practices, the press was covering the affair. As the last speaker finished and a discussion concluded the worth- lessness of a deeper physical probe that day, we turned to make our way toward the buses. Mobile machine gun units stared us in the face. As we passed by, the gunnery crews continued bolting and releasing their heavy weapons. The motorcade back to Tel Aviv groaned and began. PERCEPTION OF A VIABLE LEFTIST FORCE IN ISRAEL has eluded most West- ern radicals for too long. Yet the Israeli left drifts along, often hobbling, sometimes strutting, isolated from political comrades throughout the world. The image of the daring Palestinian resistance fighter has so cap tivated the imagination of Western radicals that an assessment of the Israeli left is frequently dismissed as a minor addendum. That a radical force still exists in Israel today is miraculous. That it is in constant dan- ger of submergence is a reality. That it could ultimately decide the po- 37 LICENSED TO UNZ.ORG ELECTRONIC REPRODUCTION PROHIBITED litical future of the Middle East as no existing Palestinian force might is a truth that will become more and more difficult to escape. Sadly, it seems that a liberation front with a brandished Kalachnikov is much simpler for left-intellectualized self-identification than are the incessant, often violent and always evocative actions of the numerous factions of the progressive Israeli forces. The Israeli left is growing and becoming bolder. It is maturing. But, with neither allies nor uniting program, it is running scared. Israel is an ideologically-rooted country. The legends—now deemed trite—regarding the revolutionary aspirations of the mass of Jewish pio- neers in Palestine are grounded in fact. A healthy percentage of Israelis still consider themselves Marxists. (How they manipulate their inter- pretations of Marxism is an entirely different matter.) The parents of today's youthful radicals were faithful to the Comintern and Cominform in turn. Those same parents attempted to pass on their legacy of reform- ism and Stalinism. At the instant of rejection of that political transfu- sion from the older to the younger generation, the story of the real Is- raeli left begins, and that of the misguided idealism of its antecedents draws to an ineffectual close. Rebelling against the dogmatism preached throughout their party- oriented educations, kibbutz-born soldiers broke from MAPAM, Israel's traditional Marxist opposition, which differed from the Communist Party only on the abstract aspect of the Zionist ingathering. The radical dis- senters' immediate precipitant was MAPAM's decision to join the new Government of National Unity (Ma'arach) before the 1967 war. Tired of MAPAM's reactionary-patriotic policies and its internally omnipotent bureaucratic elite, the dissident kibbutznikim, grouped in Tel Aviv and the Negev (southern desert region) around the name SIACH an anagram for The New Israeli Left spelling the Hebrew word for "discussion." Simultaneously, a group of radical students in Jerusalem, emerging from predominantly CP backgrounds, realized the need for a national radical unit and joined forces with the kibbutz-based activists, despite the lat- ters' original outspoken advocacy of Zionism. This breakaway was not the first encountered by Israel's two CPs. (Pretense of unity among the major factions had cracked in 1965.) Six years before the formation of SIACH, a left-wing group calling itself the Israeli Socialist Organization (Matzpen) had virulently denounced Zionism and formalized a self-avowed revolutionary cadre. Despite its singular glorification in the Western radical press, Matzpen has never gained any measure of popular sympathy in Israel. Ideological conflicts tore at the fledgling revolutionaries, finally carving them into two major splinter groups (a Jerusalem Trotskyist and a Tel Aviv anarchist sector) and an uncounted number of minor fractions among Matzpenikim 38 LICENSED TO UNZ.ORG ELECTRONIC REPRODUCTION PROHIBITED around the world. This waste of revolutionary zeal manifests itself through a cumulative membership in all Matzpen segments of only 35- 50 persons. A third element in the radical socialist spectrum was yet another significant split from the traditional Israeli left, MAPAM, this time by older activists under the leadership of Ya'akov Riftin, that resulted in the creation of Brit Ha'Smol (The Left Union), a radically oriented Zionist Party which participates in most SIACH actions by virtue of the fact that a number of prominent individuals (including central commit- tee member Mordechai Cafri and former head of the radical, anti-Brit- ish terrorist LECHI, Natan Yellin-Mor) retain membership in both or- ganizations. Their presence in SIACH deters the group's criticisms of Zionism per se. Friendly but wary, the younger non-Zionists have—and probably will—not move to oust the Zionists for some time, an observa- tion which often surprises foreign ideologues but is logical from the Israeli viewpoint. EMERGING FROM HIGHLY BUREAUCRATIZED AND CORRUPT PARTIES, the Israeli version of the New Left, terrified at the prospect of producing yet an- other set of political functionaries, a clique regarded as the sinister force which arrested revolutionary development between Arabs and Jews in Palestine, harbors an abiding suspicion of almost any mode of organi- zation. For the first three years of its existence, SIACH refused to en- dorse the concept of a platform or even working committees which were not committees of the whole. Although this attitude has been somewhat modified by the dire political necessities of the past year and a half, the general atmosphere of preference for consensual work prevails, threat- ening extensive national cracks in the structure. The awkwardness pre- sented by consensual democracy in an organization of five hundred ac- tivists and numerous supporters is plain. Brit Ha'Smol and Matzpen have long since surpassed SIACH in political maturity. Two YEARS AGO, an organization new in conception and trend burst onto the Israeli political scene. The Israeli Panthers (IP) assumed their name in an outbreak of enthusiasm and naivete. If their political outlook was limited, their spirit was not. In the first few months of their existence, the Panthers aroused more furor among the Israeli Sephardic masses, comprising upward of 65% of the country's population, than any street- oriented organization in Israeli history. Their central demands for de- cent housing, jobs and education for Sephardic (especially North Afri- can) Jews resounded in shanty-towns and slum developments until the government felt constrained to repress systematically the Panthers and their closest political ally, SIACH. Originally, the Panthers were composed almost exclusively of Jews 39 LICENSED TO UNZ.ORG ELECTRONIC REPRODUCTION PROHIBITED of Moroccan extraction, and, in the tradition of many Oriental Jews in Israel, were among the most chauvinist elements in the country. The IP leadership studiously avoided contact with any leftist organizations and publicly proclaimed its solidarity with the "Arab policy" of the Israeli ruling elite. As their struggle broadened at an astonishing pace, the more sophisticated politicos in the IP recognized the inexorable swing to the left that the organization would need to maintain political consistency. The point was driven home to the rank and file Panther adherents by police surveillance, confiscation of leaflets, scores of arrests and beatings at demonstrations and periodic comments from the Prime Minister. The evolving Panthers were eagerly offered aid by sections of Matzpen which, after flat rejection, scorned the IP as politically immature and narrowly nationalistic. SIACH's diverse membership and less dogmatic approach appealed much more to the Panther complex in Jerusalem, and a close working relationship developed. Last summer, personal talks with Pan- ther leaders and co-founders Sa'adia Marciano and Charlie Biton con- firmed their ultimate desire to enter into a more permanent "roof or- ganization" coalition with certain other left movements, especially SIACH. Other individuals in the recognized but unofficial Panther hierarchy began to speak in terms of an overall Israeli and Middle Eastern revo- lution, laying aside restrictive preachings dealing only with Sephardim. In less than a year, the Israeli Panthers had transformed themselves from a "delinquent" life in corrugated hovels to a highly conscious, if non- doctrinaire, cadre of dedicated political workers.