Jewish Radicals: Zionism Confronts the New Left, 1967–1973 A Comparative Look: Introduction

Abstract

The identity crisis that many Jewish radicals in the West grappled with in the 1960s and early 1970s was the subject of Sol Stern’s essay “My Jewish Problem – and Ours,” which appeared in the August 1971 issue of Ramparts, one of the most important organs of the American New Left.1 Stern, a key New Left activist and a former editor of the magazine, pointed to a paradox at the root of this crisis. Classical Marxism viewed Jewish nationalism as diametrically opposed to Marxist ideology. Nonetheless, in the wake of the Holocaust and the founding of the state of Israel, the global Left supported the Jewish national cause. This support was, however, short-lived. It was shaken first by Israel’s collusion with Britain and France during the Suez crisis of 1956. The escalation of the Israeli-Arab conflict in the second half of the 1960s then completed the global Left’s turn against Israel.2 Stern and his Jewish comrades consequently found themselves torn between their allegiance to the New Left and their continued support for Israel, sustained by their conviction that the Jewish state had faced a deadly threat from its enemies in 1967. Following a series of aggressive military and diplomatic moves by Egyptian leader Gamal Abdul Nasser during the tense early months of that year, war broke out on June 5 and ended six days later in a decisive and unanticipated Israeli victory. Israel captured large swathes of Egyptian, Syrian, and Jordanian territory, most consequentially the West Bank and Gaza Strip, areas densely populated by Palestinian Arabs, including many who had become refugees just nineteen years earlier in the war of 1948. Most Jews, and many in the Israeli leadership, viewed these two areas as part of the Jewish birthright and saw their capture as the liberation of territories that justly belonged to the Jewish people and state. While the Jewish members of the New Left believed that Israel should relinquish the West Bank and Gaza Strip and permit them to become an independent Palestinian Arab state, they maintained that Israel had captured them in a war of self-defense. As they saw it, Israel’s astonishing victory was the triumph of a country with a strong socialist tradition against the forces of reaction. Stern maintained that the West’s Jewish leftists found themselves facing a new edition of the classic Jewish Question – to integrate into the modern world, they were expected to divest themselves of their particularist identity and adopt exclusively universal values. This volume examines the social, political, and ideological manifestations of this resurgence of that dilemma. Each article focuses on how the issue played out in a particular country – the United States, France, Argentina, and Israel – between 1967 and 1973, when the drama reached its climax. In each of these places, the New Left attacked Israel and pro-Zionists activists reacted, leading to internal tensions on each side. University campuses emerged as the main theater of action. In tracing these confrontations, this collection casts new light on the difficulties faced by experience of young Jewish radicals struggling to integrate their particularist ethnic sentiments with their socialist universal values. The conflict that followed the Six-Day War can, however, only be understood against the background of the relationship between the Jews and the Left prior to 1967.