Some Zionists claim that there is such a thing as “progressive” or “socialist” Zionism, which is quite separate from the mainstream of the Zionist movement. This is a form of Zionism that is not racist or in favor of ethnic cleansing or settler colonialism, they claim. Furthermore, this is a form of Zionism that is separate from, not reducible to, and disavows the official Zionist movement. A close comparison of these arguments with the historical record shows that every part of this argument is incorrect.

Recently, the self-professed “proud progressive” Zionist and UK academic Justin Schlosberg has argued that there is such a thing as Socialist Zionism. Furthermore, he has gone so far as to claim that socialist Zionism was and still is separate from the mainstream of the Zionist movement. According to Schlosberg, “There are and always have been plenty of Zionists who never identified with” the World Zionist Organization. He has even claimed that “few who identify as Zionists are racist towards Palestinians, many are not.” However, the historical record shows that none of these claims is true.

Schlosberg, in addition to being an academic, is close to the Peace and Justice Project set up by Jeremy Corbyn after he stepped down as leader of the British Labour Party.  His wife, Chloe, is the director of the project.

Schlosberg is a former member of the Zionist youth group Habonim Dror, which is associated with the Labour Zionist movement. Was this movement skeptical of the official Zionist movement? In fact, it was the leading tendency in the movement as demonstrated by the fact that its leader David Green (who is better known by his Zionistic name Ben Gurion) became the first Prime minister of the Zionist entity. But this was already clear in the 1920s and 30s when the socialists of Poale Zion defended the abject racism of the “Jewish labor” policy to exclude Arabs from the labor market. As David Hacohen, later a member of the Knesset, recalled in a speech in 1969:

I remember being one of the first of our comrades to go to London after the First World War ... There I became a socialist ... When I joined the socialist students – English, Irish, Jewish, Chinese, Indian, African – … I had to fight my friends on the issue of Jewish socialism, to defend the fact that I would not accept Arabs in my trade union, the Histadrut; to defend preaching to housewives that they not buy at Arab stores; to defend the fact that we stood guard at orchards to prevent Arab workers from getting jobs there. ... To pour kerosene on Arab tomatoes; to attack Jewish housewives in the markets and smash the Arab eggs they had bought;… to take Rothschild, the incarnation of capitalism, as a socialist and to name him the “benefactor” – to do all that was not easy. 

So, if he was referring to Poale Zion (or its successors), Schlosberg is clearly not correct.  But there is a detail in one of his tweets that suggests that he was thinking of a different “socialist” Zionist grouping. He states that plenty of Zionists never identified with the WZO, "especially after 1942”. “The early (Socialist) kibbutz movement,” he states, “was ardently Zionist and largely opposed to any sort of exclusionary Jewish state.”

What happened in 1942? There was a Zionist movement conference held at the Biltmore Hotel in New York City. It voted for the so-called Biltmore Program, which explicitly called for a "Jewish state" for the first time. There was one key grouping that voted against the policy – a self-identified left group called Hashomer Hatzair. Instead, they advanced a policy of “bi-nationalism” and a rapprochement between the Arabs and the Jews in Palestine. But what did that policy mean? In fact, as Tony Cliff, the founder of the British Socialist Workers Party, who had direct experience of Hashomer Hatzair in Palestine, wrote in December 1946:

All matters of immigration and settlement, according to Hashomer Hatzair, must be dealt with by the Jewish Agency, which will be concerned – as it has been concerned until today – with the “development of the Arab economy.” Of course Hashomer Hatzair is ready to co-operate with the Arabs on such a basis. They only forget one small question: will the Arab masses accept this as a basis for collaboration? Is not control over immigration and colonisation in such a country as Palestine control over the most important functions of the state? Does the programme of has Hashomer Hatzair differ from the Jewish State programme in other than a greater dose of hypocrisy?

Cliff asks rhetorically:

Are not Hashomer Hatzair really enthusiastic about bi-nationalism and fraternity with the Arabs? After all, all they ask of them is consent to only two “small” points – imperialist domination and Zionism.

As he goes on to note, “there has been no case of picketing against Arab labor which was not supported by Hashomer Hatzair.” Hashomer Hatzair, he says, had a “heroic record” in collaborating with other leftists in “the eviction of Arab tenants from their land.”

Colonizing the Naqab - 1946

The support of Hashomer Hatzair for an effective Bantustan policy was further emphasized as they developed the Kibbutz movement. Hashomer Hatzair was among the pre-eminent groups developing the network of Kibbutzim. They formed the apparently radical “Kibbutz Artzi”. It was on one of their kibbutzim that Tony Benn, the famed British leftist and Labour MP, spent the evening celebrating the surrender of the Nazis on VE Day May 8, 1945, while on an extended visit. Benn later wrote a laudatory foreword to a book on the Kibbutz Artzi experience. Just over a year later, Kibbutz Artzi members were a key element in the October 1946 operation known as the “eleven points in the Negev” which was a Jewish Agency plan for establishing eleven settlements in the Naqab desert (called the "Negev" by the Zionists). The plan was to maximize the territory controlled by their so-called "Jewish state" since the Naqab was to be part of the UN-envisaged Arab state. Six of the eleven points were associated with “Socialist” Zionist groups, three of them with Hashomer Hatzair.

World Zionist Congress - 1946

The Hashomer Hatzair policy on "bi-nationalism" – racist as it was – did not survive the next Zionist Congress held in December 1946 in Basel, Switzerland. At that meeting, Hashomer Hatzair (still a member of the World Zionist Organization) fell in line with the racist “Jewish commonwealth”.

Atrocities committed by “socialists”

It could hardly have been otherwise. The Zionist movement increased its terror attacks and ethnic cleansing efforts over the next two years. At the cutting edge of this was the Palmach; the elite “strike force” of the Haganah; the terror group under the control of the Jewish Agency. Hashomer Hatzair members reportedly “formed the nucleus” of the Palmach, and the Hashomer Hatzair leadership was well-represented at the top of the strike force. Joel Beinin declares in his book Was the Red Flag Flying There? that “most” of the officers of both the Palmach and the Haganah were members of Mapam (the party created by the merger of Hashomer Hatzair and the Ahdut HaAvoda Poale Zion Movement in January 1948). They were thus centrally involved in the atrocities and massacres committed in the creation of the so-called “Jewish state”.

For example, in October 1948, the village of Safsaf was wiped off the map by the 7th company, one of the units forming part of the three brigades of the Palmach. Here is the account of Yossef Vashitz, a Hashomer Hatzair veteran, in a document subsequently removed from the official archives:

They took 52 men, tied them to one another, dug a ditch and shot them. Ten were still squirming when [unclear]. Women came, begging for mercy. The bodies of six old men were found. There were 61 bodies [in total?]. Three cases of rape. One [of the rapists was] a Mizrahi man from Safed, a 14 years old girl [was one of the rape victims], four men were shot and killed. One of them had his fingers removed by a knife so as to take the ring.

In Galilee (al-jalīl in Arabic), kibbutzniks urged the Haganah militia to continue the ethnic cleansing they had started earlier in the year. “Many of the kibbutzim in this part of the Galilee,” writes Ilan Pappe, “belonged to the Zionist socialist party, Hashomer Hatzair, some of whose members tried to adopt a more humane position.” Some “complained to Ben Gurion about what they saw as an ‘unnecessary’ expansion of the cleansing operation. Ben Gurion was quick to remind these conscientious kibbutzniks that they themselves had been glad to see the first phase initiated in the area back in April 47.” “Indeed”, as Pappe concludes, “if you were a Zionist Jew in 1948, this meant one thing and one thing only: full commitment to the de-Arabisation of Palestine.” 

The contradictions of “socialist Zionism”

Tony Cliff summed up the contradiction in his autobiography:

The Zionist socialists were trapped ideologically. They believed that the future belonged to socialism, that in the kibbutz we could see the embryo of a future socialist society (rather than a collective unit of colonists). But in the meantime, Arab resistance to Zionist colonisation had to be overcome so they collaborated with Zionist moneybags and rich institutions as well as the British army and police. The Zionist socialists held the Communist Manifesto in one hand and a coloniser’s gun in the other.

Hashomer Hatzair is, to this day, affiliated with the WZO through the Council of World Zionist Youth Movements. While we can’t tell how closely its members “identify” with the WZO, they are a clear formal element of the Zionist movement. 

We can conclude that there is no “socialist” Zionism that is not fundamentally and irreducibly racist and practically and ideologically supportive of ethnic cleansing and settler colonialism in Palestine. Schlosberg’s apparent ignorance of the history of the Zionist groups with which he appears to identify results in him making false claims about the actual record of “socialist” Zionism. He is hoisted by his own petard.