No genuine solution without a struggle for a socialist Middle East
Moshé Machover, the last of the founders of the historic socialist organisation Matzpen, has been active in Britain in recent decades and continues to struggle against the logic underlying the war of annihilation. We spoke about the relevance of key analyses formulated around six decades ago under the leadership of the Palestinian Trotskyist Jabra Nicola regarding a fundamental solution to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict
Moshé Machover, a British‑Israeli socialist born in 1936, is the last of the founders of the organisation Matzpen, established in Israel in 1962. Since migrating to London in 1968, he has continued to promote socialist ideas, with a particular focus on Israel–Palestine. In 2017 he was expelled from the Labour Party in a witch‑hunt, on the scandalous charge of antisemitism, following an article he published criticising the hypocrisy of pro‑Zionists who slander criticism of Zionism and of the oppression of Palestinians as ‘antisemitism’. A solidarity campaign overturned the decision.
We spoke against the backdrop of the ongoing crisis of the war of annihilation and the regional military campaign. Although there are certain differences in approach between historical Matzpen and the Socialist Struggle Movement, which need not be addressed here, we have also learned over the years from the accumulated experience left by Matzpen. The excerpts presented from the conversation with Machover highlight several shared conclusions, currently rare on the left, regarding a fundamental — socialist — solution to the national‑colonial conflict. Machover’s words are presented verbatim in quotation marks, the emphases are ours.
Machover has indeed been in Britain for some six decades, and Matzpen disbanded already back in 1983. Yet the experience developed within that organisation has served over the years as a point of reference for the local and international left, including the contribution of the Palestinian Trotskyist Jabra Nicola (1912–1974).
‘One could say he was the person who had the greatest influence on Matzpen’s positions on the Israeli–Palestinian issue’, Machover emphasises. He continues to defend key analyses formulated within Matzpen under Nicola’s leadership regarding the Zionist–Arab conflict.
Our conversation took place on 15 February, just before the imperialist offensive on Iran. While Netanyahu’s ultra‑right capitalist occupation government was revving its engines ahead of the offensive, and intensifying measures of military aggression and occupation in Lebanon and Syria, it continued to advance accelerated ethnic‑cleansing measures in the West Bank and East Jerusalem — which is ongoing relentlessly — alongside preparations for the possibility of renewed high‑intensity escalation in the war of annihilation in the Gaza Strip. Accompanying this is a policy of repression and marginalisation of the Arab‑Palestinian population within the Green Line.
All Israeli establishment parties share the logic underlying the military campaign, which is promoted under the cover of security demagogy while it also undermines the personal security of millions of Israelis. And to finance the war machine, and in the service of the interests of Israeli capital, the living conditions of the working class in Israel are also being attacked economically.
Tendencies towards national dispossession, territorial expansion and military build‑up are inherent in Zionist ideology. It is reflected in institutions, legislation and policies that express the unique historical form of Israeli capitalist rule established by the Zionist movement in 1948 under the auspices of global powers — cynically exploiting the horrors of the Holocaust and antisemitic persecution, at times initially cloaked in ‘socialist’ rhetoric, and through the mass uprooting and destruction of hundreds of Palestinian localities in the Nakba. Since then, Israeli capitalism has inevitably continued to implement a systemic logic fundamentally aimed at ‘Judaizing’ and displacing the Palestinian population. This logic has been central to the barbaric siege of the Gaza Strip over the years and to the blood‑soaked crisis shaking the region and sending global shockwaves over the past two and a half years.
The aim: ‘transfer’
For the Israeli government, Machover says, ‘the armed attack by Hamas on 7 October 2023 was an opportunity, and it exploited that opportunity to the full’ — a savage assault on the Palestinian people, accompanied by unprecedented killing, alongside military showcase bombings across the region under Washington’s auspices.
‘Even if we had not seen this in action, and even if we had not read all the discussions from the beginning of the Zionist enterprise, from more than 120 years ago, which speak of the need to get rid of the local population, this is inherent in its [Zionism’s] nature. The aim is transfer’, Machover describes.
As for the unprecedented mass slaughter, the genocide in Gaza, ‘it is a means, not the aim. That is, Zionism does not necessarily intend to carry out genocide. It carried out genocide because that was the tool for getting rid of the population. But it would have been happy to get rid of them by other means. If it had been possible to send them by plane to Canada, then [the government] would have done so, and indeed tried to do so. In various ways they tried to influence people from Gaza and from other parts of the Palestinian territories to emigrate’.
Zionist nationalist aspirations to ‘Judaise’ the land — ethnic cleansing — take different forms. Machover recalled how in 2002 assessments grew that Sharon’s government would try to exploit a ‘window of opportunity’ in the geopolitical situation to carry out a mass expulsion of Palestinians to Jordan (he refers to an article at the time presenting such an assessment by an Israeli military historian). Sharon was forced to settle for the separation wall and the ‘Disengagement Plan’ to fortify the occupation and the colonial settlement project in the West Bank — creeping ethnic cleansing. But, as Machover says, ‘the danger of ethnic cleansing from the West Bank towards Jordan exists and remains’.
As noted, 7 October was exploited as a ‘window of opportunity’ to advance concentrated ethnic cleansing. In Gaza, the official, conservative death toll crossed the 72,000 mark in April, and the massacre continues under the shadow of the ‘ceasefire’. According to a 2025 estimate, around 100,000–150,000 Palestinians fled Gaza to Egypt since October 2023 under the occupation’s murderous assault, and by February this year 80,000 of them registered on a waiting list to return — while entry into the Strip remains under severe restrictions.
Yet compared with 1967, and certainly with 1948, despite the unprecedented scale of killing, the space available to the Israeli regime to carry out a mass expulsion to neighbouring countries has proved more limited.
Machover agrees. ‘It runs into difficulties. That is, in order to get rid of the population, not through genocide — without killing them and without destroying them — you have to evacuate them. To evacuate them, you have to evacuate them to where?… Look, the neighbouring states are not blind. The rulers there are not completely blind. They see where this development leads, and they try to block it’. He adds, ‘The Palestinians themselves also have experience of repeated uprooting, and they too have learned… There is historical experience both among the victims of expulsion and among the countries that are the target of expulsion. They are not willing to allow it’.
The Jordanian monarchy collaborated with the Israeli regime in 1948 in an effort to foil the establishment of a Palestinian state. But after absorbing waves of refugees that created a Palestinian majority within its borders — which was also the basis for the 1970 uprising — and after being forced to relinquish its claims to the West Bank following the First Intifada, it fears the consequences of a new mass expulsion of Palestinians into its territory and beyond. Similarly, the el‑Sisi regime fears the mass solidarity in Egypt and the region with the Palestinians. This fear drove the Arab rulers to reject Trump’s original demand that they align themselves with the Israeli occupation’s transfer ambitions.
A unique process of settlement and dispossession
The analysis formulated within Matzpen under Nicola’s leadership regarding the process of settlement and dispossession differed from common characterisations today in academia and on the international left, which tend to suffer from an idealist method and from oversimplification, where analogies to historical forms of oppressive regimes serve mainly for the sake of denunciation of reactionary phenomena.
‘Academic discourse on colonisation speaks of settler colonialism, but it does not distinguish, as Marxists do, between the Australian model and the South African model’, Machover explains, ‘because Marxists focus their attention on political economy — on who the principal producers are’.
The starting point for the analysis was the distinction developed in the Marxist movement between different models of colonialism (see, for example, ‘Socialism and Colonial Policy’, Kautsky, 1907, when Kautsky was still a Marxist). Yet the Zionist settlement project did not belong to the model of ‘exploitative colonialism’ that characterised the countries in which the anti‑colonial revolutions developed during the period in which Matzpen was forming.
‘The Zionist project is anachronistic in the sense that it resembles other forms, other cases of colonisation that were already closed and concluded by the end of the nineteenth century’, Machover describes, and therefore the challenge was to sharpen the analysis of ‘a case essentially unique in our period’.
In addition, Zionist settlement had no ‘mother country’ (metropole) — the Zionist movement sought patronage from global powers. And we would also emphasise that the component of antisemitic persecution is unique and key in the dynamics of the historical process, including Zionism’s success in mobilising mass support following the fascist counter‑revolution in Europe and the Holocaust, and in shaping the mass consciousness of Israeli Jews.
Machover clarifies the importance of distinguishing between different models of colonial processes of settlement and dispossession.
‘In South Africa, the victims of colonialism had leverage — they were necessary to the political economy of the colonisers. In Australia they were a “surplus population”… From its inception, Zionism had an outlook more similar to what existed in Australia than to South Africa’, he elaborates.
If we examine the cases of Australia and North America (while in the areas constituting today’s southern United States and the Caribbean the economic system was originally based on slavery that primarily enslaved an “external” population), we are dealing with a model ‘not of reliance on the labour power of the local population, but of their complete externalisation — the indigenous population had no leverage against the colonisers. In all the historical cases in which colonisation followed this model, the colonisers ultimately prevailed. This shows the difficulty we face in the Israeli–Palestinian case’.
The Zionist settlement process established a capitalist society of exploitation in which part of the Palestinian labour force is subjected to extreme exploitation, while the fundamental logic of the process strives for the dispossession of the Palestinian population, including repeated attempts to replace Palestinian workers with immigrants.
In these circumstances, Machover explains, ‘Zionism created a situation in which it has an essential advantage of forces over the dispossessed, who lack the leverage that, for example, the local population in South Africa had. That is, a situation has arisen here in which the dispossessed alone do not have sufficient power advantage to overthrow the Zionist regime’, which dispossesses and oppresses them.
The Palestinian masses can achieve significant gains in their struggles for national and social liberation, including through armed self‑defence. However, Machover points out that strategically, given the balance of forces, the main struggle cannot be conducted on the military plane: ‘The Israeli government is interested in an armed Palestinian struggle, because it has an answer — it has its own army, and it is much stronger’. Faced with this challenge, ‘the First Intifada proved that there are other ways… This is not a moral judgement one way or the other, it is a strategic judgement’. A path of mass struggle, accompanied by strikes and the organisation of democratic action committees, shook the occupation regime profoundly despite the military balance of forces.
International solidarity
The Palestinian question, which has inspired international solidarity for decades, has become all the more a central banner of global liberation aspirations in a counter-response to the war of annihilation since October 2023.
According to Machover, ‘First of all, on the positive side of the balance, this is a change whose importance cannot be overstated… For the first time in my life — which has lasted perhaps a little longer than yours — the issue of the liberation of the Palestinian people [has become a marker] of progressivism, that is, the dividing line between a progressive position and a reactionary one. This is similar to what existed in its time [around] the Vietnam War, and later around apartheid in South Africa’.
‘This is a change of very great significance, because the enormous support Israel receives from the imperialist powers, mainly from the United States and its satellites, is of essential importance. That is on the one hand. On the other hand, in my opinion it is a mistake to exaggerate the potential of this change… There is a tendency — in my view a mistaken one — among many progressive people to attribute, for example, the fall of the apartheid regime in South Africa to external pressure. Without the internal leverage of the indigenous Black working class in South Africa, without its struggle, apartheid would not have fallen. The factor of international pressure, which itself was caused by world public opinion, was an important factor, but it was not what brought down the regime’.
We have seen how the development of global public opinion and the international solidarity movement with Gaza, including cases of militant workers’ strikes, succeeded in exerting pressure on governments. This was a real factor in the dynamics that led to the partial ceasefire.
International solidarity can play a supporting role, both in building international pressure and in the development of class struggle in the countries where such actions are organised.
In the revolutionary wave of 2011, Machover says, if ‘we look at the most important factor, the most massive factor in 2011 — that is the Egyptian working class, an enormous force… And we have comrades we are connected with who were involved in Egypt in 2011, and they will tell you that a large part of the radicalisation of the Egyptian working class was the Palestinian issue’.
We may add that fear within the upper echelons of the Israeli regime of the solidarity of the masses in Egypt and the region with the Palestinians served, at the height of the mass movements then, as a relative deterrent against large‑scale massacres of Palestinians. As part of the dynamics that developed, demonstrations were held on Israel’s borders on Nakba Day, bringing the issue of Palestinian refugees back onto the agenda.
Machover also recalls the effect of the 2011 revolutionary wave on Israeli society in its initial phase. Despite the revulsion felt by the Israeli ruling class, sections of the working class and middle layers of the Jewish population drew inspiration from it.
‘A sense of solidarity — not so much with the Palestinian people, but with the Egyptian and Syrian masses… One of the popular slogans was: “Mubarak—Assad—Bibi Netanyahu”. If you think about it, that is an astonishing thing’.
And there were further inspired slogans, including in the struggles of social workers and railway workers.
Machover warns against excessive optimism, but ‘it shows that there is some thread, some path, some potential’, particularly for a positive resonance among parts of the Israeli masses to revolutionary developments in the region.
The interest and key role of the working class in Israel
No society develops in a vacuum, and global and regional transformations always play a significant role. But when it comes to a subjective force that can act as an agent of change, Israeli capitalism — founded on class exploitation, oppression and a process of national dispossession — ‘cannot be overthrown from the outside’, by a force external to Israeli society, Machover emphasises. For the overthrow and replacement of the Zionist capitalist regime, he explains, ‘an internal force is necessary. What could this internal force be? This internal force can only be the working class, the Israeli masses, above all the Hebrew working class’.
This is due to the most fundamental contradiction in Israeli society, the class contradiction, and due to the key role of the working class in the economic process and the potential power that derives from it.
‘Is the Hebrew working class capable of, and interested in, being a partner in overthrowing the Zionist regime?’ It is, he notes, ‘an exploited class. It has an interest in abolishing this situation, in removing the yoke of exploitation from its shoulders’.
But if confronted with the hypothetical choice, on a capitalist basis, of abolishing only the situation in which it constitutes a relatively ‘favored group’ — still exploited and subject to forms of mass deprivation, but with relative privileges over other sections of the working class — Machover argues that the logical response would be: ‘I will remain exploited’, in a worse situation. ‘That is not a deal’.
The idea of a ‘more democratic’, non‑Zionist capitalism replacing Israeli capitalism — as proposed in various forms by many voices on today’s international left — is utopian. We would also emphasise that in real dynamics it cannot offer a path to overcoming the extreme inequality between the national groups and generally national conflicts in the regional sphere. Such an idea cannot, in itself, offer a real answer to the existential and security fears among the Israeli masses. Those fears form fertile ground for the stoking of national chauvinism and for support for Zionism’s false promise — through discrimination, national dispossession, militarism, and alliances with global imperialist powers and regional regimes of oppression — to serve as a protective wall for the Jewish masses. Zionist nationalism dictates a forever war, which exacts a price from them as well.
An alternative to Zionism that could be perceived as relevant and clearly preferable by a significant section of the working class within the Jewish‑Israeli population is obstructed under conditions of entrenched capitalist and imperialist relations in the region. Only an alternative in the context of a struggle for socialist change can offer a horizon of full integration in the regional sphere under conditions that can guarantee personal security, liberation from exploitation and economic deprivation, and democratic regional partnership based on equality for all peoples.
Under the impact of global and regional upheavals and transformations, there is potential for a development in which the working class of the region lead a struggle for a ‘socialist spring’. While the working class in official Israel extends across national communities, its overwhelming majority is within the Jewish population.
As Machover puts it, ‘The solution can only be a regional solution, and based on inviting the Israeli working class, under certain circumstances, to be a partner. This is not possible if you deny its national identity’.
The context of the struggle for socialism
In the present context, the people whose right to self‑determination and basic human rights is being forcibly denied are, of course, the Palestinian people. On the face of it, the question of the self‑determination of the Israeli-Jewish people is supposedly settled. It is fortified by the strongest military power in the region, under the backing of the strongest state in the world. Yet in the context of a perspective for a root‑and‑branch solution to the national‑colonial conflict, the question of future self‑determination re‑emerges. The entire Israeli, Zionist establishment feeds it with Holocaust‑laden meanings, permanently warning about threats to ‘annihilate the State of Israel’.
Zionism has never defended the right of self‑determination of Israeli Jews as equal partners in the region. It claims a right on behalf of all Jews worldwide to all of historical Palestine/Eretz‑Israel west of the Jordan and beyond — even though, ironically, the Zionist State of Israel selectively recognises Jews and discriminates among them on ethnic and religious grounds — while denying the Palestinian people their rights to freedom, welfare and equality in their own land. The uprooting and oppression of Palestinians is not an expression of self‑determination.
In the 1930s, in the face of the fascist counter‑revolution, the international Trotskyist movement then began raising the idea of the possibility of a territorial national self‑determination solution for Jews in a socialist, voluntary context, as an alternative to Zionism, with no dispossession or oppression of other peoples (see, for example, ‘On the Jewish Problem’, Trotsky, 1934). But the question was then more abstract.
In the complex circumstances created by the establishment of the State of Israel through the 1948 Nakba, with the formation of a Hebrew nation that became the social base of a Zionist capitalist state under the auspices of the world’s strongest imperialist powers, this is a key question for any perspective of socialist transformation in the region. As Nicola and Matzpen concluded in the 1960s, in the context of a struggle for socialist change there arises a need to recognise the right of self‑determination of the Israeli-Jewish people, who constitute a national minority in the region (see, for example: ‘The Middle East at the Crossroads’, Nicola and Machover, 1969).
Machover sharpens the point: ‘Is it possible or conceivable that socialists would support the forced incorporation of the Hebrew people into a regional union? If you pose the question in that way, I think the answer presents itself’.
Without such an alternative, it will be far easier for the Israeli ruling class to present a regional ‘socialist spring’ not as a path to social liberation and regional peace, but as an existential threat to millions of Jews. Such an ‘existential threat’ would trigger mass armed mobilisation in defence of Israeli capitalism.
The socialist programme is fundamentally different from the various initiatives for a ‘just’ arrangement between Israeli capitalism and the Palestinians. On the basis of capitalism, imperialism and Zionist ideology, no political‑legal arrangement in itself can end the bloody dynamic of a ruling national group and a dispossessed and subjugated national group. Only in the context of a struggle for a socialist Middle East can the path be opened to ending the historical conflict.
The Socialist Struggle Movement rejects the cynical double standard in the Zionist nationalist demand to recognise the right of Jews ‘to return after two thousand years of exile’ and to deny a principled right of Palestinian refugees and their descendants — expelled by force of arms some eight decades ago and ever since — to recognition, compensation and possibilities of return.
‘Because Israel seized their land, they don’t deserve a right of return?’ Machover asks. As if the Israeli establishment, ‘the more it dispossesses, the more right it has to the areas it has managed to conquer’.
The policy of abusing the refugees is implemented through demagogy that plays on deep existential fears among Jews, and the circumstances illustrate that resolving the issue itself requires socialist change — to guarantee infrastructure and decent living conditions for all, equal national and social rights, and the development of democratic understandings and arrangements that can also address fears.
Machover, approaching the age of ninety, insists that this is not a dreamlike conception blind to the immense obstacles in today’s struggle.
‘Look, I won’t deny that the atmosphere of our time is far less optimistic than it was in the 1960s and 1970s… but one must not lose hope; the possibility in its essence exists… Capitalism, as [we discussed], has not resolved its contradictions; its crisis is more severe today than it was sixty years ago. The negative difference is the situation of the workers’ movement. In that period there were still mass left‑wing parties. They were mostly infected with Stalinism, but they contained some agitating and organising force for struggle’.
Nevertheless, the revolutionary wave of 2011 demonstrated, Machover concludes, ‘a certain possibility, at least theoretically, that could be realised. That is all I would say. I would say that a non‑malicious solution to the colonial conflict — one that does not consist in the final triumph of the dispossessing side, but contains the possibility of liberation — such a potential exists… This is the only way in which a liberatory solution to the colonial conflict of Israel–Palestine can be realised’.
And he warns: ‘This is not something certain, neatly packaged… The chances of its realisation depend to a large extent on the subjective action of the socialist forces in the region’.