The British Left and Zionism

The changes and divisions on the British left over the Israel-Palestine conflict forms the central theme of this archive based study. How did the various currents of the British left respond to two competing nationalisms seeking to found a state in Palestine? The Labour Party from 1917 onwards helped to popularise the Zionist project as a social democratic experiment that would bring progress to the Middle East. The party’s colonial experts largely ignored the sectarian practices of the Labour Zionist movement, which through its trade union and kibbutzim, sought to build an exclusively Jewish economy. The British Communist party alone provided a critique of Labour Zionism but in 1947 in line with the Soviet Union’s Middle East policy it reversed its position. Over the following two decades the left was overwhelmingly supportive of the Israeli state considering its establishment as a recompense to the Jewish people for the Holocaust. The left-wing Zionist party, Poale Zion played an important role as intermediary between, on the one hand, the British labour movement and, on the other, Anglo-Jewry and the Israeli Labour Party. By contrast, there was no significant political force in Britain to represent the Arab nationalist viewpoint. The destruction of Palestinian society in the 1948 war and the refugee crisis resulting from it barely registered in Western public consciousness. It was not until the rise of the new left in the late 1960s, that Palestinian nationalist aspirations found a voice on the British left and began to command mainstream attention. After highlighting the major shifts in the left’s appraisal of Israel and Zionism, this study examines the argument that its pro-Palestinian sympathy stems from antisemitism. The changes and divisions on the left over the Israel-Palestine conflict forms the central theme of this archive based study. While the Labour Party supported establishing a Jewish state in Palestine, as a modernising force, the communist movement opposed it, on the grounds that it facilitated imperial influence in the Middle East. In 1947, however, the British Communist Party rallied to the Zionist cause, leaving the Palestinian cause with no effective protagonists in Britain. The left’s sympathy, at the time, was overwhelmingly with the Israeli state, considering its establishment a recompense to the Jewish people for the Holocaust. It was only after the 1967 Arab-Israeli War and Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, that the new left in Britain began to articulate a critical attitude to Israel and support for Palestinian nationalism. It is a perspective which has gradually gained ground in the political mainstream.