The Israel–Palestine Question

The second chapter, ‘The Israel–Palestine Question’, discusses Matzpen’s independent engagement with, and analysis of, the Palestine problem. It elaborates on how they came to interpret it as a colonial-type conflict between nationalities: a clash between a European population aiming to establish a state and a native population, residing there since before the foundation of Israel. This is analysed, first, in view of the Trotskyist traditions of dissidence that already existed in Palestine before the establishment of the State of Israel. Second, it is situated in the context of Algerian decolonisation, as the dramatic fate of the French Algerians gave the Israeli Left a new conception of their own circumstances in the Israel–Palestine conflict. Applying Albert Memmi’s writings on the coloniser and the colonised and comparing them to Albert Camus’s stance on the Algerian question, the chapter discusses in detail Matzpen’s programme for Israel’s de-Zionisation: A plea to cut ties with the legacy of Zionism which equally entailed the demand towards the Arab world to recognise Israeli Jews’ transformation into a new Hebrew nation who belongs to the region.