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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.

The third chapter, ‘The Invention of a Hebrew Nation’, examines the enormous cultural foundation underpinning Matzpen’s political vision of a post-colonial existence for Israeli Jews. Matzpen built on a process of transformation that had worked to turn Diaspora Jews into new Hebrews, or Israelis. Drawing on the research of Yaacov Shavit and James Diamond into the movement of the Young Hebrews, or ‘Canaanites’, the chapter outlines an emerging Hebrew-language culture that blossomed in the young Israeli state of the 1950s and ’60s and defied the discourse of a unified Jewish people. This exposes a cultural context that had its roots in the Zionist Right, but grew far beyond its political origins. Culturally, it centred on the magazine Haolam Hazeh, which was published by Uri Avnery (1923–2018), and extended as far as Matzpen on its far-left fringe. This vibrant creative milieu included such figures as Shimon Tzabar, Amos Kenan, and Dan Ben-Amotz. Finally, the internal political differences within this milieu, gaps that the Six-Day War ultimately rendered unbridgeable, are highlighted.

This book explores the history of the Israeli Socialist Organization – Matzpen (compass) – that splintered off from the Communist Party of Israel in 1962. After the Six Day War of June 1967, Matzpen shook Israeli society, calling for a withdrawal from the recently occupied territories, and placing itself outside the national consensus. Even before the war, the group emphasised the colonial dimension of the conflict between Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs, which was irresolvable within the paradigm of the nation-state. Matzpen instead advocated for Israel’s de-Zionisation and a socialist revolution in the Middle East in order to both restore the rights of Palestinian Arabs and guarantee the existence of Israeli Jews as a new Hebrew nation. However, in the era after Auschwitz, when the Jewish world stood in almost unanimous solidarity with the Jewish state, Matzpen’s radical perspective was at odds with the history and memory of the Holocaust. Against this backdrop, this study places Matzpen’s political stance in its historical context and sheds new light on the political culture of Israel.

The chapter focuses on the developments in the period after the Six-Day War. Matzpen’s immediate rejection of the occupation and its solidarity with the occupied Palestinians placed the group at the extreme political fringes of Israeli society. Against this background, the chapter discusses how Matzpen’s members differed over possible solutions to the Israel-Palestine conflict and in their stance towards the Palestinian organizations (for example the DFLP), which caused several splits of the group. The chapter tells the story of Ilan Halevi, who sought to introduce a kind of Third-World nationalism into the group and later became the first Jewish representative of the PLO. It continues with the story of Udi Adiv, who first split from the group and later chose to go underground, entering the parallel world of Jewish-Palestinian armed resistance. The chapter ends with a discussion of political developments after the October 1973 War, when a new era of diplomacy in the Middle East also triggered a discussion on “state or revolution” within Matzpen. In November 1975 this led to a meeting between Moshé Machover and Said Hammami, the London representative of the PLO, where they discussed a two-state solution in the near and a shared country in the far future.

This chapter explores the history of the journal Khamsin. Revue des socialistes révolutionnaires du Proche-Orient. The chapter demonstrates how the language of progress, socialism, and revolution provided the basis for cooperation between Jewish-Israeli and Arab intellectuals throughout the Middle East of the 1970s. The publication of Khamsin, which was founded in 1975 and published until 1987, was one major result of this cooperation. First the biography of Matzpen’s Eli Lobel is outlined, who was known for his unparalleled support for post-colonial states in Asia and Africa but who was also the guiding spirit behind Khamsin. Proceeding from the biographies of Leila S. Kadi, Sadik J. Al-Azm and Lafif Lakhdar, the chapter sketches in the experiences of a generation of the Arab Left that, after the defeat of June 1967, voiced a radical self-critique of the Arab world and the demand for its secularization and modernization. These two different political constellations eventually found a common political platform in 1975 with the creation of Khamsin. Finally, the chapter illustrates how Khamsin provided a political platform that opposed the rise of religious fundamentalism and Islamization in the Middle East. Socialist internationalism seemed to point to a common future beyond national and religious partisanship.

The first chapter illuminates the genesis of Matzpen, which started with the expulsion of four members from the Communist Party of Israel in autumn 1962. The chapter begins by situating this event within the much broader processes of de-Stalinization after Nikita Khrushchev’s “secret” revelations at the 20th Congress of the Soviet Communist Party in 1956. Yet, although the founding of Matzpen paralleled in many ways the path of the European New Left, the chapter emphasizes the specific objections to the Communist Party’s analysis of Israeli society and the Middle East conflict that played a role in the early evolution of Israel’s New Left. First, Matzpen’s criticism of the Israeli trade union Histadrut is reconstructed. Matzpen’s call for the establishment of a new, democratic representation for the Israeli workers is traced back to the famous seamen strike in Haifa in 1951. Second, the chapter discusses the emergence of the dissidents’ independent interpretation of Israel’s conflict with the Arab world: At variance with their party’s ideological interpretations of the war of 1948, they began delving into the questions of Israel’s borders and Palestinian refugees to expose a previously concealed link between the founding of the Jewish state and the Palestinian catastrophe – the Nakba.

The book opens with an Introduction that gives a tight description of the historical place Matzpen occupied in the Israel of the 1960s and 70s. Looking at Daniel Cohn-Bendit’s famous visit to Israel in the spring of 1970, the chapter offers an extensive interpretation of the Israeli debate that was triggered by the arrival of the leader of the European student revolt, but much more by his advocacy of the Israeli leftists of Matzpen. Taking this event as my departure point, an overview of Israeli society in the years following the Six-Day War is given, with an emphasis on three aspects that become relevant for the entire book: first, the return of the Palestine question with the beginning of the occupation, second, the place of Matzpen as a dissenting voice within Israeli society, and third, the continuing impact of Holocaust memory on political debates about the Israel-Palestine conflict. Only within this broader historical context is it possible to evaluate not only the significance of Matzpen in Israeli history but also the rejection the group encountered.

The last chapter deals with the complex place of the Holocaust in the worldview of the Israeli Left. The chapter explores the degree to which Israeli leftists’ social and national utopias of socialist revolution and Hebrew nationhood contributed to their avoidance of the significance of the Holocaust and its impact on Jewish consciousness. The chapter illustrates that, from the outset, the notion of a new Hebrew nation was somehow detached from the Jewish experiences in Europe. By sticking to their faith in progress that was rooted in the Socialist teleology of history, the distance to the consequences of mass extermination increased further – despite the fact that Matzpen had inherited the revolutionary hopes of Eastern European Jewish Communists of the interwar period for whom this utopia had proven terribly futile. Thus, the book provides insight into a historical aporia: the tension between the effects of the Holocaust, on the one hand, and the unresolved Israel–Palestine conflict, on the other. Turning eventually to the activities of the Frankfurt Jewish group (in Germany) during the Lebanon war of 1982, the chapter shows how the quest for a road out of that aporia and to detach the interpretation of the Israel–Palestine conflict from the memories of the Holocaust is also part of Matzpen’s history and legacy.