There exists a particular minority within the American Left which, despite its political irrelevance, is quite vocal on the question of Palestine. While I must admit that I believe we are at a crucial turning point regarding the opinions of the American public on "Israel", the conversation is currently clouded by two strands of thought.

The first comes from the aforementioned small but vocal segment of the Left, Trotskyists, who posit that the Israeli working class and Palestinian working class should come together against the Israeli state. The second comes from Right libertarians who argue that America’s ‘special relationship’ with "Israel" is actually a threat to our own pocketbooks and ‘strategic interests,’ and thus a pro-American foreign policy should take the helm. While this article will only deal with the former Trotskyist tendency, suffice it to say that the libertarians are correct about American tax dollars needing to be diverted to domestic projects, while being egregiously wrong about an ‘America First’ foreign policy which does not challenge imperialism or neo-colonialism.

The Trotskyist tendency in the United States is mostly centered around key elements of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), and other splinter groups like Socialist Alternative and the Spartacist League. As a point of clarification before continuing, the term ‘Trotskyist’ is problematic given that historically, Leon Trotsky and his following in the USSR and abroad represent a unique historical phenomenon, in a given context: post-revolution USSR, inter-war Europe and USA, and the question of socialism in power.

While Trotsky himself is a complicated figure who cannot be denounced whole cloth, it is safe to say that the groups who operate in his name after his death are exactly what Anouar Abdel-Malek terms the ‘Trotskyist-Zionist Apparatus’. So for the ease of the reader, given the cumbersome nature of Abdel-Malek’s terminology, ‘Trotskyist’ will suffice for the purposes of this article.

Two factors shape the critique of this political position. Firstly, the idea of an “Israeli working class” is problematic, given the settler structure of “Israeli” society. Secondly, the idea of unity between these two groups is premised on the historical existence of a joint Palestinian-Israeli group called Matzpen (Compass) in the 1960s and 1970s, an overly optimistic reading of the protests against the Netanyahu government, as well as the ignorance to calls by Palestinian trade unions to boycott Israeli labor unions and products.

The first point to be dissected revolves around the idea of an Israeli working class which espouses a socialist internationalism at maximum, and class solidarity with Palestinians at minimum. Prior to the Nakba and the establishment of the Zionist garrison state, the Histadrut was one of the main instruments of Zionist colonialism. The Histadrut is the Israeli trade union federation, which currently represents the majority of Israeli workers, about 800,000 in total.

One of the factors which led to the 1936-39 revolt in Palestine was the exclusion of Palestinian workers from unionizing. According to Ghassan Kanafani, not only did Zionist settlement “ensure a concentration of European Jewish capital in Palestine” but also “[t]he policy that raised the slogan of “Jewish labor only” was to have grave consequences, as it led to the rapid emergence of fascist patterns in the society of Jewish settlers”. 

These fascist patterns continued to blossom after 1967, and especially after the Oslo capitulation. In Ali Kadri’s book A Theory of Forced Labor Migration, he details the realities of both Israeli and Palestinian workers. Within the colony, there exists a racial hierarchy among Israeli Jews, with Palestinians below this hierarchy’s reach. Kadri shows how Arab and African Jews, when they did not relinquish unskilled manual labor jobs to Palestinians, still made a much higher income than Palestinians while also remaining the lowest-paid workers in Israeli society. By 1990, 94% of construction workers in “Israel” were Palestinians commuting from the West Bank. Quoting an Israeli research duo, it is pointed out in Kadri’s book that “in some cases, the wages of Israeli workers were 30% higher than…Arabs in the same jobs…These figures should be taken as conservative estimates”. Arab workers inside the colony are directly paying taxes into Zionist social security funds, and at least 40% of these taxes are going to subsidize the military and security forces.

With increased resistance activity after Oslo, the Zionists have now moved towards a system of importing cheap labor from Thailand, Nepal, and India. With the launching of the BDS Movement in 2005, and especially now 6 months after the launch of Operation Al-Aqsa Flood and the genocidal response by the Zionists, the Palestinian General Federation of Trade Unions is calling for a boycott of “Israeli” labor unions worldwide. According to Palestinian trade unionists, “the struggle to ban the occupation’s trade unions internationally” is key, “as they are partners in the war of genocide”.

The second element of this Trotskyist fantasy focuses on the existence of Matzpen, a joint Arab-Israeli socialist party which at its height had roughly twenty members. The party centered around Akiva Orr, Jabra Nicola, and Moshe Machover, and was active from 1967 until about 1982, after which many died, were exiled, or split into multiple other tiny factions. The strict focus on ideology instead of praxis effectively put the cart before the horse and made them irrelevant to the actual concrete struggle for Palestinian liberation. It is worth quoting at length the statement of Ehud Adiv during his trial in the Zionist court; he was a member of one of the short-lived Matzpen splinter groups, Red Front:

…if the Jews will prove to the Arabs, who have been fighting Zionism for dozens of years, that they [the Jews] are on their side, that they are prepared to sacrifice everything they have, to be subjected to the same ‘treatment’ and to share everything with them. Without this, no Arab will have confidence that the sincerest Jewish revolutionary is really revolutionary. No ideology, not even the most equitable and progressive, can convince the Arabs unless it is accompanied by action on the part of those who adhere to it.

This laser focus on Matzpen, despite them being no more than a socialist, anti-racist book club has translated into high hopes for the current wave of protests rocking “Israel” before and after October 7th, despite their reactionary character. The liberal, anti-Netanyahu protestors have shown in poll after poll that they want Benny Gantz to replace Netanyahu. As is now well known, Benny Gantz is a maximalist war hawk who will do his best to shield Israelis from the effects of resistance and thus allow them to live in their insulated fantasy settler world without interruption, unlike Netanyahu. None of these protests have called for an end to the occupation. According to the ‘left-wing’ +972 Magazine “it remains unclear” if Israelis will acknowledge that perpetual warfare achieves nothing and that a society where there are equal rights for all is the only solution.

The only glimmer of hope offered by this supposedly left-wing magazine’s author is the Oslo Accords, where Yitzhak Shamir was replaced by the ‘dove’ Yitzhak Rabin who facilitated further settler land grabs, created the neo-colonial comprador PA, and accelerated the criminalization and repression of resistance. So long as Zionism is an operative ideology and colonial system, working class solidarity between Israelis and Palestinians is blocked off. The Israeli working class is fully committed to the project of Zionist colonialism, and reaps the benefits of this through land grabs, broad unionization, universal healthcare, and high wages. As is known by Palestinian revolutionaries and revolutionaries of the Third World, the only solution is total liberation from the river to the sea.