[For 100 years, Maki has been the leading force for
Jewish-Palestinian equality in Israeli politics, yet it has failed to
unite Arab and Jewish workers into a viable movement. Was it doomed
from the start?]
[[link removed]]

A CENTURY AFTER ITS FOUNDING, THE ISRAELI COMMUNIST PARTY IS AT A
CROSSROADS  
[[link removed]]


 

Joel Beinin
July 28, 2023
972 Magazine
[[link removed]]

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

_ For 100 years, Maki has been the leading force for
Jewish-Palestinian equality in Israeli politics, yet it has failed to
unite Arab and Jewish workers into a viable movement. Was it doomed
from the start? _

A Convention of the Israeli Communist Party (Rakah), Tel Aviv,
December 15, 1976, National Library of Israel/Dan Hadani Archive/The
Pritzker Family National Photography Collection

 

One-hundred years after it set down roots between the Jordan River and
the Mediterranean Sea, the Communist movement in Israel, once the
leading current of the Palestinian political struggle for equality, is
at a potential crossroads.

Establishing the Arab-Jewish Democratic Front for Peace and Equality
(Hadash/Al-Jabha) in 1976 was a historic accomplishment for the
Communist Party of Israel, commonly known by its Hebrew acronym, Maki.
Hadash signified the party’s prominence among Palestinian citizens,
affirmed its commitment to joint Arab-Jewish political action, and
became its most visible public face.

In May 2023, Hadash chair Ayman Odeh, arguably the most statesman-like
national political figure from any party, announced he would not run
in the next Knesset election. Hadash regulations require anyone who
has served eight years in the Knesset to be endorsed by ¾ of the
Council members before seeking another Knesset term, and Odeh did not
appear to have the votes.

Odeh was the leading architect of the now-defunct Joint List,
comprised of entirely and predominantly Arab parties, whose strength
peaked at 15 Knesset seats in 2020. The Joint List won’t be
resurrected. Odeh’s departure from the Knesset therefore offers an
opportunity to affirm the value of democratic governance, assert that
the Knesset may not be the most important arena for organizing for
political change, and open up a vital discussion about the future of
Maki and Palestinian politics in Israel.

Throughout its history, Maki has been more thoroughly committed to
Palestinian-Jewish equality and joint Palestinian-Jewish political
action than any other political force in the country. That is an
achievement to celebrate in a political environment defined by the
severe constraints on left-wing political action imposed by the
Zionist project and its alliance with its imperial patrons:
successively, Britain, France, and the United States.

Ayman Odeh speaks during a debate in the Knesset plenum, Jerusalem,
June 13, 2022. (Yonatan Sindel/Flash90)

Nonetheless, despite years of mass support from the Palestinian public
in Israel, over the course of its 100-year existence, Maki has
manifestly failed to unite Arab and Jewish workers in Palestine-Israel
into a viable socialist movement. It committed serious political
errors and misunderstood the circumstances in which it acted.

Like all communist parties, it apologized for the crimes of Stalinism
and adopted an undemocratic organizational structure. After the
establishment of the State of Israel, following the lead of the Soviet
Union, Maki minimized its critique of Zionism as a settler-colonial
project. It did not adopt the Palestinian view of Israel as an
apartheid regime. Like most Israeli parties, it has rarely
acknowledged the full significance of the issues of gender equality
and the structural subordination of Mizrahim. 

Communist theory anticipated that the Jewish working class in
Palestine would participate in a struggle for socialism and be a major
force in the anti-imperialist struggle against British rule. But
recently implanted settler-colonial working classes who perceive
themselves as politically more “advanced” than indigenous
populations have never constituted a stable social base for
internationalist socialist politics. The working class of
the _yishuv_ (the pre-state Zionist settlement in Palestine) was
overwhelmingly loyal to Zionism and, for the most part, its alliance
with British imperialism. 

The leaders of the Mandate-era Palestinian national movement were
primarily socially conservative urban notables and large landholders
who dominated the peasant majority. By the time of the Great Arab
Revolt of 1936-39, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Hajj Amin al-Husayni,
who initially owed his prominence to a British appointment, emerged as
the titular head of the Palestinian national movement.

The incompatibility of the Zionist loyalties of the great majority of
the Jewish working class, and the social character of the leadership
of the Palestinian national movement made any alliance between them
improbable. This has been the defining problematic of communism —
indeed all progressive political action — in Palestine-Israel ever
since.

Inherent contradictions

Maki’s historical trajectory was shaped by reciprocal and
asymmetrical
[[link removed]] relationships
between worldwide political developments, local and regional labor
movements, and anti-imperialist struggles.

Communism emerged in Palestine as a movement of a small group of
radicalized Ashkenazi Jews who had recently arrived as Zionist
settlers. Inspired by the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, they sought to
align themselves with the Communist International (Comintern)
established in 1919 under the leadership of the Communist Party of the
Soviet Union. Following four years of ideological debates and a
tortuous series of splits from the socialist-Zionist Left Po‘alei
Tziyon (Workers of Zion) Party, these pro-Comintern Jewish immigrants
gradually renounced their Zionist and quasi-Zionist positions. 

The Mayor of Tel Aviv showing the city to Lord Arthur Balfour, April
1925. (Library of Congress)

The new communists easily agreed on opposing British imperial rule and
its alliance with Zionism enshrined in the 1917 Balfour Declaration.
However, they were ideologically divided on three main issues: how
should communists relate to working-class Jewish settlers? Would
Jewish immigration and Zionist construction create conditions
conducive to the growth of socialism? And how should communists relate
to the emergent Palestinian Arab nationalist movement and its
conservative leaders? 

By July 1923, sufficient unity on these questions was achieved to
convene the founding Congress of the Palestine Communist Party (PCP).
Its commonly used Yiddish name, Palestinishe Komunistishe Partei,
reflected the party’s social base and marginal status in the
country. The PCP resolved
[[link removed]] that
Zionism was “a movement which contains the aspirations of the Jewish
bourgeoisie” allied to British imperialism. This flawed analysis
could not explain why the great majority of Jewish workers in
Palestine supported Zionism. It was nonetheless sufficient for the
Comintern to accept the PCP’s application for membership in March
1924. 

Four months later, Karl Radek, head of the Comintern’s Eastern
Section, wrote [[link removed]] with concern
to the Third Congress of the PCP: “Until now, the party was composed
of immigrant Jews. In the future, it must become a party of Arab
workers to which Jews can belong who have acclimated and rooted
themselves in the Palestinian conditions, people who know Arabic.”

This would have been a formidable task even if the worldwide upsurge
of socialist and anti-imperialist revolutionary movements anticipated
by the Comintern had succeeded. However, in light of their defeat in
places such as Germany, Italy, Iran, China, and elsewhere, doing so
was certainly beyond the reach of a small, new political formation
comprised overwhelmingly of Russian and Yiddish speaking Jews, some of
whom were not yet fluent in Hebrew, let alone Arabic. Yet
internationalist discipline required the PCP to accept the Comintern
line, and, after its dissolution in 1943, the less formal version of
pro-Soviet loyalism embodied by the Cominform. 

Still, the PCP’s political action remained initially concentrated
within the Jewish working class, which was largely organized under the
General Federation of Hebrew Labor in Eretz Israel — commonly known
as the Histadrut — on the exclusionary Zionist principle of Hebrew
labor _(“avodah ivrit”_). As internationalists, the communists
opposed this principle, leading  Histadrut leaders to ban them from
participating in the organization in 1924. The British Mandate
authorities had already banned the PCP altogether in 1921.

Throughout the 1920s and 30s, there were very few Arabs among
the party’s roughly 300
[[link removed]] members,
while the Palestinian Arab working class was still in its formative
stages. A dozen Arabs were sent to Moscow
[[link removed]] for
political education between 1925 and 1930, but only four returned to
become party leaders; one died fighting for the Republic in the
Spanish Civil War.

Palestinian farmers and their Jewish neighbors in the Lake Hula area,
northern Palestine, 1946. (Zoltan Kluger/GPO)

The potential for Arab-Jewish unity and broadening the PCP’s Arab
constituency was continually undermined by a complex of factors,
including the structure of a settler-colonial society that awarded
privileges to Jewish workers over Arabs; Jewish communists’
inability to extricate themselves from their social location in
the _yishuv_; the alliance of Zionism with British imperialism that
lasted until the 1939 White Paper; and the reactionary leadership of
the Palestinian national movement, which disastrously misread the
post-World War II global political map. 

Moreover, from the mid-1930s on, a substantial proportion of Jewish
workers and kibbutz members embraced the Zionist leadership’s
aggressive security doctrine, which helped the British crack down on
the Arab Revolt and would later shape the policy of the State of
Israel. These impediments were exacerbated by the international
communist movement’s Stalinist personality cult which made it
impossible to distinguish between European and local political
dynamics and the state interests of the Soviet Union.

The PCP’s inherently contradictory condition was manifested during
the Arab Revolt, when some Arab party members interpreted the
anti-fascist united front policy adopted by the Comintern’s Seventh
Congress as authorization to join the guerilla bands that attacked
both British forces and Jewish settlers. Jewish members rejected this
approach. Some even believed that the Comintern’s line authorized
collaboration with left-Zionists.

Ethno-national split

The onset of World War II transformed Palestine into a British
logistical and military-industrial base. The Arab working class grew
rapidly, reaching approximately 100,000. Communists emerged as an
important force in the Arab trade union movement. 

The Histadrut vied with two other major workers’ organizations —
the Palestine Arab Workers Society (PAWS) and the communist-led
Federation of Arab Trade Unions and Labor Societies (FATULS) — to
organize Jewish and Arab workers employed in the British military
camps and manufacturing and logistical facilities. In May 1943,
without consulting with either of the Arab unions, the Histadrut
called a strike to demand that a cost-of-living-alliance previously
granted to other government workers be applied to the camp workers.
Rejecting the Histadrut’s claim to speak for Arab workers, both Arab
union federations opposed participating in the strike; only a small
number of Arab workers joined in. 

The PCP’s Arab leaders likely also opposed the strike because they
saw it as an impediment to the war effort, a position common to
communist parties in Allied countries during World War II. Some Jewish
PCP leaders who advocated that the party should moderate its critique
of Zionism and cooperate with left-Zionist forces, at least on trade
union and labor issues, thought that Arab workers ought to have
participated in the strike. That difference brought the tensions in
the party, which had been escalating since the Arab Revolt, to the
breaking point. 

The Scots Guard regiment of the British army marches along Bethlehem
Road outside the Old City of Jerusalem, 1936. (Library of Congress)

In response, a group of younger Arab intellectual PCP members issued
an Arabic-language leaflet in the name of the party’s Central
Committee, which had not approved it. They asserted that the party had
purged the “Zionist deviationists” from its ranks and defined the
PCP as “an Arab national party in whose ranks there are Jews who
accept its national program.” The leaflet welcomed the recent
dissolution of the Comintern, which would allow broader Arab national
elements to join the party. 

A series of mutual expulsions ensued, and the PCP disintegrated. The
social motor of the split was the consolidation of a sizable Arab
working class alongside a young, urban Arab intelligentsia,
disproportionately composed of Christians from families lacking high
social status. They formed left-leaning associations like the League
of Arab Intellectuals, the People’s Club, and the Rays of Hope
Society. Ironically, Palestinian communists most successfully
participated in the political life of the Arab and Jewish communities
only after this split in the PCP.

Communists led the fusion of the left wing of the PAWS and FATULS to
form the Arab Workers Congress (AWC — known also as Ittihad al-Ummal
al-Arab in Arabic), which by 1945 claimed 20,000 members. The AWC was
the leading Arab trade union federation in Jaffa, Gaza, Jerusalem, and
Nazareth and had a presence in the leading industrial center of Haifa
as well, providing a social base for the new left-wing Arab political
formation that emerged after the demise of the PCP.

In September 1943, leftist intellectuals and trade unionists, former
PCP members, and others met in Haifa. At first, they sought to
establish an all-Arab communist party. By early 1944, they established
the anti-imperialist National Liberation League (NLL — Usbat
al-Taharrur al-Watani), appealing to broad nationalist sentiment, as
communists were then doing in several Asian and European countries. 

A major achievement of the NLL was the establishment of an Arabic
weekly, “Al-Ittihad” (The Federation or Union), in May 1944,
formally as the organ of the left in the Arab trade union movement.
Former PCP members Emile Tuma, Emile Habibi, and Fu’ad Nassar, a
leader of the AWC, served as the paper’s editors and prominent
contributors. 

The NLL program prioritized evacuation of British troops and the
independence of Palestine, calling for “a democratic government
guaranteeing the rights of all inhabitants without distinction.” It
differentiated between Zionism and the Jewish inhabitants of
Palestine, and it criticized the other Arab parties — the largest
were the Palestine Arab Party led by the Husayni family and the rival
National Defense Party led by the Nashashibi family — for
“ignoring the existence of the Jewish inhabitants” and refusing to
grant them equal democratic rights as full citizens. While the NLL was
an Arab national party, these positions bore the marks of its
leaders’ communist training.  

Members of the Arab Higher Committee. Front row from left to right:
Raghib al-Nashashibi, Amin al-Husayni, Ahmed Hilmi Pasha, Abdul Latif
Bey Es-Salah, and Alfred Roke, January 1, 1936. (Matson G. Eric and
Edith Photograph collection/Library of Congress)

Meanwhile, in 1944, Shmuel Mikunis, Esther Vilenska, and Meir Vilner
reestablished the PCP under their leadership, effectively as an
all-Jewish party. As reported in “Kol ha-Am” (Voice of the
Nation), the party’s Hebrew organ, in September 1945, the PCP’s
Ninth Congress resolved that Palestine was a “country with a
binational character” and called for establishing a “democratic
and independent Arab-Jewish state.” This formulation signaled the
first communist recognition of the _yishuv_ as a national community,
meaning Jewish settlers in Palestine had the right to
self-determination, including the right to form a separate state,
although the party continued to oppose this. 

The question of partition

The principal difference between the PCP and the NLL, then, was their
position on the question of whether or not settlers could acquire
rights, and if so, what those rights would be.

The line of the re-established PCP did not recognize the national
rights of a worldwide Jewish people or promote _aliyah_, so it was
not fully Zionist. But it did seek to cooperate with Zionist parties
that had a strongly pro-Soviet left wing, and with which it had
programmatic agreement on labor and foreign policy issues. The
popularity of the Soviet Union, due to its role in the defeat of
Nazism and its legalization by the British, broadened the PCP’s
opportunities for political action. Yet the party remained a minor
player in the politics of the _yishuv_.

The NLL distinguished between the Zionist movement, which it opposed
completely, and the population of the _yishuv_. The latter_,_ it
argued, deserved full and equal rights of citizenship, but not
national rights, in an independent Palestine (recall that Arabs
constituted two-thirds of the population in post-World War II British
Mandate Palestine and Jews only one-third). 

With the end of World War II, the demand for a Jewish state became far
more acceptable to international opinion. Even among non-Zionists,
establishing a Jewish state in Palestine was widely considered a form
of reparations for the mass murder of European Jewry, an insurance
policy against a recrudescence of fascist antisemitism, a foil to
British imperialism in the Middle East, and a home for the roughly
225,000 Jews languishing in European displaced persons camps. Weighed
against these considerations, Palestinian Arab national claims were
considered less legitimate, and even politically dangerous because of
Amin al-Husayni’s wartime collaboration with the Nazis. 

Until the formation of the UN Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP)
in May 1947, the Soviet Union and the international communist camp
upheld the line of Lenin and the Comintern: Zionism was an ally of
imperialism; there was no worldwide Jewish nation; and British
imperialism had imposed the _yishuv_ as a settler colony on the
indigenous Palestinian Arabs. But on May 14, 1947, Foreign Minister
Andrei Gromyko hinted at the Soviet Union’s willingness to abandon
that position.

Jewish Jerusalemites celebrating the UN decision on the partition of
Palestine, riding on top of an armored police car, Jerusalem, 1947,
November 30, 1947. (Hans Pinn/GPO)

Addressing the UN General Assembly, he acknowledged
[[link removed]] the
“exceptional sorrow and suffering” of the Jewish people during the
war, and correctly argued that the Western European states failed
“to ensure the defense of the elementary rights of the Jewish people
and to safeguard it against the violence of the fascist
executioners.” This, he said, “explains the aspirations of the
Jews to establish their own state. It would be unjust not to take this
into consideration and to deny the right of the Jewish people to
realize this aspiration.” 

Should a single state with equal rights for both peoples prove
infeasible, Gromyko said, the Soviet Union would consider partitioning
Palestine into an Arab and a Jewish state. And indeed, on October 3,
1947, it announced its support for the UNSCOP majority proposal
recommending partition with an international _corpus separatum_ in
the Jerusalem-Bethlehem area. 

This shift prompted the PCP to abruptly reverse course and rename
itself the Communist Party of the Land of Israel (ha-Miflagah
ha-Komunistit ha-Eretz Yisra’elit), adopting for the first time the
Hebrew name for the country. The rival NLL initially rejected
partition and asserted its right to maintain a position independent of
the Soviet Union. But after the UN General Assembly adopted Resolution
181 favoring the partition of Palestine on November 29, 1947, a slim
majority of the NLL Central Committee accepted the UN resolution
[[link removed]].
Opponents of partition, led by Emile Tuma, were expelled from the
party; Tuma was permitted to rejoin Maki only in 1951.

Reunification and reorientation

The reunification of Jewish and Arab communists under the Maki banner
in October 1948, just months after the State of Israel was declared,
was made possible by a political reassessment recognizing the rights
of both the Arab and Jewish communities in Palestine-Israel to
national self-determination, and consequently the legitimacy of
partition
[[link removed]]. 

The NLL signaled its ideological acquiescence to this line by signing
on to a statement
[[link removed]] of
the Iraqi, Syrian, and Lebanese communist parties that formally
endorsed the partition of Palestine, in line with the policy of the
USSR. These parties reasoned that the 1948 war was instigated by
imperialism and reactionary Arab leaders. By extension, Arab
resistance to the creation of Israel was illegitimate, and communist
diplomacy to secure arms for Israel as well as service in the IDF were
considered heroic. These dubious assertions consolidated a Jewish
national tilt in Maki and fortified its claims to be a legitimate
Israeli political party. 

The decision of members of the NLL who remained inside Israel’s
borders to join Maki was taken in the middle of a war during which
Zionist forces were dismantling Palestinian Arab society, especially
its urban and intellectual elements. The NLL and other progressive
Palestinian forces were defeated, scattered, and persecuted. The Arab
side, however one describes its configuration, had decisively lost the
war by October 1948. Under those circumstances, NLL members concluded
that becoming part of a legally recognized Israeli party was the best
way to defend their people. 

Members of the Communist Party on election day in Nazareth, January
25, 1949. (Hugo Mendelson/GPO)

In June 1951, acknowledging that the Palestinian Arab state envisioned
in the 1947 Partition Plan was not being established, Fu’ad Nassar
led NLL members who became refugees in the West Bank in forming the
Communist Party of Jordan. The Jordanian party was illegal until 1993.
Communists in the Gaza Strip regrouped as the Palestinian Communist
Party of the Gaza Strip in 1953. Communism having been illegal in
Egypt since the 1920s, the Egyptian authorities who ruled Gaza from
1948 to 1967 subjected its communists to constant harassment and a
mass arrest campaign in 1959. 

In October 1948, Maki held a “unity meeting,” which declared the
“Restoration of a United Internationalist Communist Party in Each of
the Two States.” In principle, the communists accepted the
legitimacy of the State of Israel on the assumption that a Palestinian
Arab state would also be established. In practice, that was unlikely
to occur since the leaders in both Israel and its neighboring Arab
states opposed such a state. 

Shmuel Mikunis’s speech to the assembly sharply criticized the
Israeli interim government’s expulsions of Palestinians,
expropriations of their property, and opposition to establishing an
independent Palestinian state, warning: “If matters continue in this
way, then the war of liberation of the State of Israel may turn into
an antidemocratic war of conquest.” As we now know, matters did
continue in this way, but the communists were too weak to prevent it,
while left-Zionists like Hashomer Hatzair rhetorically criticized the
government’s ethnic cleansing policies even as their kibbutzim
seized Palestinian lands. 

Maki recognized the State of Israel within the borders of the UN
Partition Plan. But gradually and reluctantly, the party participated
in erasing Palestine from the map and the political horizon. Maki and
its then overwhelmingly Jewish membership needed to adapt to the new
Israeli political context, and therefore to reorient from a struggle
against Zionism writ large to one for democracy, social justice, and
equal rights for Palestinian Arab citizens, as well as the rights of
Jewish and Arab workers within the parameters tolerated by the Israeli
state.

Within these severe constraints, Maki was more thoroughly committed to
equality and joint Arab-Jewish political action than any other Israeli
political force. The party consistently opposed the military
government [[link removed]] imposed on
Palestinian citizens of Israel from 1949 to 1966. Maki Knesset members
Tawfiq Tubi and Meir Vilner battled heavy censorship to expose
the Kufr Qasem massacre
[[link removed]], which took place
October 29, 1956. Furthermore, Maki was the only party to oppose the
1956 Suez War by Israel, France, and Britain as an imperialist war of
aggression against Egypt. 

These achievements established the basis for Maki’s future
trajectory and primary political identity as the champion of the
rights of the Palestinian citizens of Israel. Emphasizing its Arab
program, however, ultimately undermined Maki’s aspirations to
represent the entire Israeli working class — both Jewish and
Palestinian.

Tawfik Toubi, the Deputy-Secretary of the Hadash party, delivers a
speech during a rally marking Land Day in the city of Sakhnin, March
30, 1988.

Meanwhile, the mass migration of Mizrahim (Jews who came from Muslim
and/or Arab countries) to Israel lifted many veteran Ashkenazi workers
familiar with the class-based discourse of communism out of the
working class and into the middle classes. Nonetheless, Maki did win
support among some Iraqi immigrants: literary luminaries such as
Shimon Ballas, Sami Michael, David Semach, and Sasson Somekh, who had
been members of or close to the Communist Party of Iraq, joined Maki
after they arrived in Israel and wrote for Al-Ittihad.

Under pressure from Arab nationalism

In response to Nikita Khruschev’s denunciation of Stalin’s crimes
in 1956, Palmiro Togliatti, the leader of Italy’s Communist Party,
developed a theory of polycentrism and national roads to socialism.
Jewish Maki leaders influenced by Togliatti began to imagine an
Israeli road to socialism by drawing closer to Jewish national culture
and seeking to ally with the left-Zionist MAPAM party, despite its
support for the Suez War and its embrace of the Israeli national
security consensus. 

Nearly all of Maki’s Arab members resisted this approach, which
would have diminished their standing in their own communities.
Palestinians were also keenly aware that France, Israel’s
co-conspirator in the Suez War and its principal ally and arms
supplier from 1954 to 1967, was engaged in a cruel counterinsurgency
war to thwart Algeria’s independence. 

In 1947-49, the Soviet Union had determined that establishing a Jewish
state was the strongest counter to British imperial ambitions in the
Middle East. But after the 1956 war, the Arab nationalist movement —
led by Egypt’s charismatic President Gamal Abdel Nasser — became
the leading anti-imperialist force in the region, and consequently
enjoyed increasing Soviet support. Maki’s standing in the
Palestinian community in Israel was therefore under constant pressure
from the mass appeal of Arab nationalism. Leaning toward Arab
nationalism weakened the force of Maki’s Arab critics while any
identification with Jewish national culture strengthened them.

These shifts naturally affected the party’s electoral success.
Maki’s best result in its first 30 years was during the July 1955
election, when it won 4.5 percent of the total vote and six Knesset
seats (at the time, the majority of the party’s voters were still
Jews). In 1959, Nasser clashed with the Egyptian communists, who he
subjected to mass incarceration and torture. Because of Nasser’s
popularity among Palestinian citizens, Maki’s fortunes plummeted in
the November 1959 election to 2.8 percent and three seats.

A militant campaign against the continuing efforts of Israeli
authorities to expropriate Palestinian land restored the party’s
popularity in the Arab community. The Israel Lands Authority,
established in 1960, effectively prohibited Arab citizens from leasing
92 percent of all the land in the State of Israel. As part of the
drive of the Israeli government to fortify its control, that same year
Minister of Agriculture Moshe Dayan proposed an apartheid-style
Consolidation of Lands Law. Maki led a successful mass struggle that
defeated the draft legislation. In the August 1961 election, Maki won
4.2 percent of the total vote and five Knesset seats. 

Israeli Communist Party MK Moshe Sneh addresses a crowd at an election
campaign event in Ramat Gan, October 30, 1959. (Fritz Cohen/GPO)

This relative success temporarily moderated the party’s internal
tensions over whether to adopt a Jewish or Arab national tilt.
However, that outcome was almost entirely due to the doubling of the
number of Maki’s Palestinian voters, most of whom were neither party
members nor readers of Al-Ittihad.

Even as _fellahin_ were becoming proletarianized, Arab support for
Maki was most commonly due to its struggle for the rights of
Palestinian Arab citizens of Israel, rather than identification with
Marxism. At the same time, the party also built a base among aspiring
Arab professionals by offering scholarships to promising students for
university study in Moscow and other Soviet bloc capitals.

The final split

But those tensions could not be contained indefinitely. In 1965, the
party split into two factions on largely ethnic lines: the all-Jewish
Maki led by Shmuel Mikunis and Moshe Sneh, and the mostly Arab Rakah
(New Communist List) led by Tawfiq Tubi and Meir Vilner. The Maki
faction retained the party name after a court battle, but the Soviet
Union recognized Rakah as the official communist party.

The June 1967 War and the ensuing occupation only broadened the gaps
between the two factions. After the war, Maki collapsed into
ineffectual left-Zionism. In 1975 it disappeared entirely. Meanwhile,
by adopting the Soviet line on the war, Rakah lost nearly all support
among Israeli Jews who were overwhelmingly in thrall to triumphalist
nationalism. 

The 1975 municipal election in Nazareth signaled Rakah’s surging
power in the Arab community. The party, which had been strong in the
city for two decades, won an absolute majority, and Tawfiq Ziad became
the first communist mayor in Israel (and in the Middle East). Rakah
built on this gain to initiate the National Committee to Defend the
Land, which organized the Land Day general strike
[[link removed]] of
March 30, 1976. Israeli forces killed six Arab demonstrators that day,
which has since become a Palestinian national day of commemoration and
protest. 

Rakah’s prominent role in the Palestinian land struggle laid the
foundation for the party to establish the Democratic Front for Peace
and Equality (Hadash/al-Jabha) in 1976. This was a coalition of
leftist groups, in which Rakah was the dominant force and maintained
its autonomy. In some respects, the creation of Hadash reprised the
strategy of the National Liberation League — to create a broad,
left-leaning but not ideologically communist, patriotic front. The
essential difference this time around was the presence of a Jewish
component.

Tawfiq Ziad speaks during a meeting of the Communist Party in
Nazareth, 1979. (Dan Hadani Collection/The Pritzker Family National
Photography Collection/ The National Library of Israel/CC BY 4.0)

In the 1977 Knesset election, Hadash won a majority of the Arab vote
and 4.6 percent of the total votes for the Knesset, better than any
electoral result of pre-1965 united Maki. By putting Charlie Biton, a
leader of the Israeli Black Panthers — which had led a militant
struggle by Mizrahim for social equality in the early 1970s — high
enough on its electoral list to win a Knesset seat, Hadash
demonstrated its commitment to joint Jewish-Arab political action and
more concern for the rights of Mizrahim than Maki ever had. These were
major strategic achievements despite the fact that most Mizrahim
continued to support parties of the right.

Hadash’s victory in the Palestinian community, which in Israel’s
first decades voted mainly for parties of the Zionist left or their
Arab satellite parties, opened the door for other independent Arab
parties to compete for the Arab vote. 

The Arab Democratic Party (al-Hizb al-Arabi al-Dimuqrati, known also
by its Hebrew acronym Mada) was established in 1988 — when MK
Muhammad Darawshe split from the Labor Party over then-Defense
Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s “break their arms and legs” tactics to
suppress the First Intifada — and was the first legal all-Arab party
in Israel. It was followed by the National Democratic Alliance
(Al-Tajammu‘ al-‘Arabi al-Dimuqrati, or Balad), the Arab Movement
for Renewal (Al-Haraka al-‘Arabiyya lil-Taghyir, or Ta‘al), and
the United Arab List (Al-Qa’ima al-‘Arabiyya al-Muwahhada, or
Ra‘am) in the mid-1990s. 

Rakah reclaimed the Maki name in 1989, on the eve of the extinction of
its historic lodestar, the Soviet Union. Since then, the party has
struggled to overcome the legacy of its uncritical pro-Sovietism and
the undemocratic elements in its political culture. 

Old-new legacies

Perhaps the most significant legacy of its past is a tendency to
understand the world in Cold War terms: an imperialist camp led by the
United States, and an opposing camp that includes many authoritarian
regimes. This led prominent Maki and Hadash leaders to make ambiguous
and contradictory statements
[[link removed]] suggesting support for
the Assad regime’s ruthless suppression of the 2011 popular uprising
in Syria. A decade later, Maki refused to oppose Russia’s 2022
invasion of Ukraine and support the Ukrainian people’s right to
self-determination.

Ahead of the 2015 election, the Israeli right succeeded in raising the
electoral threshold to enter the Knesset in an attempt to wipe out the
Arab parties. The Joint List was formed in response to this
anti-democratic maneuver. In the 2015, September 2019, and 2020
elections, the Joint List was attractive enough to draw, at its peak,
some 20,000 Jewish voters. 

Members of the Joint List arrive for a meeting with Israeli President
Reuven Rivlin at the President’s Residence in Jerusalem, as Rivlin
begins consulting political leaders to decide who to task with trying
to form a new government, September 22, 2019. (Yonatan Sindel/Flash90)

But the fracturing of the Joint List in 2021 and 2022 disenchanted
those who saw that as a cause for optimism. Since the November 2022
election, and in light of Ra‘am’s willingness to collaborate with
right-wing parties and Balad’s failure to pass the threshold to
enter the Knesset, Hadash-Ta’al has become the only reliable
opposition to the Zionist consensus in the Knesset.

Why is all of this history relevant today? Because those who seek the
decolonization of Israel/Palestine and the dismantling of Jewish
supremacy between the river and the sea will only succeed if they
convincingly uphold democratic and national rights for all. In this
crucial political moment, then, Maki’s history can offer a potential
starting point for rethinking the requisites of the kind of democratic
Jewish-Arab unity that might counter the fascist wind coursing through
the Israeli-Jewish body politic. 

In addition to articulating a goal of decolonization and supporting a
regime based on full civic equality and national rights for both
Palestinian Arabs and Israeli Jews, such a formulation would also need
to advocate enhancing the power and the rights of all working people
between the river and the sea while understanding that class,
ethnicity, and gender are mutually constitutive and inextricably
intertwined. And like historic Maki, it would need to be rooted in the
political realities of Palestine-Israel while maintaining solidarity
with global progressive forces.

*Thanks to Zachary Lockman for comments on an earlier draft of this
article.

_JOEL BEININ is the Donald J. McLachlan Professor of History and
Professor of Middle East History, Emeritus at Stanford University. His
research and writing focus on the social and cultural history and
political economy of modern Egypt, Palestine, and Israel, and the
Palestinian-Israeli Conflict._

_Support journalism against apartheid. Become a member of +972
MAGAZINE. [[link removed]] We rely on YOUR
contribution to expose and resist injustice in Israel-Palestine._

* Israeli Communist Party
[[link removed]]
* Communism
[[link removed]]
* Palestinians
[[link removed]]
* Arab-Jewish partnership
[[link removed]]

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

 

 

 

INTERPRET THE WORLD AND CHANGE IT

 

 

Submit via web
[[link removed]]

Submit via email
Frequently asked questions
[[link removed]]

Manage subscription
[[link removed]]

Visit xxxxxx.org
[[link removed]]

Twitter [[link removed]]

Facebook [[link removed]]

 




[link removed]

To unsubscribe, click the following link:
[link removed]