The Last of the First Israeli Anti-Zionists: A Conversation w/ Moshe Machover About Israel, Jabotinsky’s Iron Wall, Colonialism, and Matzpen

On this edition of Parallax Views, a few short months ago I had the opportunity to speak with Moshe Machover amidst the horrors we are seeing in Gaza. for the unfamiliar, Moshe Machover has become known as "The First of the Last Israeli Anti-Zionist". Born in Tel Aviv when Israel was still British Mandate Palestine, Machover was one of the founders of Matzpen, Officially known as the Socialist Organisation in Israel, Matzpen were a group of Israelis who broke away from Maki, the Israeli Communist Party. Matzpen believed in radical, left-wing, revolutionary politics and were proponents of anti-Zionism from a socialist perspective.

On September 22, 1967, three months after Six-Day War that ended with the Israeli capture and occupation of the Sinai Peninsula, the Golan Heights, the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem, an ad appeared in the pages of the Israeli publication Haaretz. A Declaration of only 52 words in length, it read:

Our right to defend ourselves from extermination does not give us the right to oppress others.
 
Occupation entails foreign rule.
 
Foreign rule entails resistance.
 
Resistance entails repression.
 
Repression entails terror and counter-terror.
 
The victims of terror are mostly innocent people
 
Holding on to the occupied territories will turn us into a nation of murderers and murder victims
 
Let us get out of the occupied territories immediately.

 

The ad was accompanied by a number of signatures, including Moshe Machover.

In this conversation we'll discuss that declaration as well as Machover's analysis of influential Revisionist Zionist Vladimir Jabotinsky's seminal text The Iron Wall. Machover wrote a translation of the infamous Jabotinsky essay for Jewish Voice for Labour that can be read here.

In addition to discussing Matzpen, the 1967 Declaration that appeared in Haaretz, and Jabotinsky's Iron Wall we will also delve into why Moshe, as a socialist, opposes Zionism and his socialist analysis of Israel in relation to the phenomena of colonialism. Moshe describes colonization as "like a gas" that seeks to occupy all available space and continually expand.