The British Left and Zionism - by Paul Kelemen (Paperback)

About the Book

The changes and divisions on the British left over the Israel-Palestine conflict forms the central theme of this archive based study.

Book Synopsis

The changes and divisions on the left over the Israel-Palestine conflict forms the central theme of this archive based study. While the Labour Party supported establishing a Jewish state in Palestine, as a modernising force, the communist movement opposed it, on the grounds that it facilitated imperial influence in the Middle East. In 1947, however, the British Communist Party rallied to the Zionist cause, leaving the Palestinian cause with no effective protagonists in Britain. The left's sympathy, at the time, was overwhelmingly with the Israeli state, considering its establishment a recompense to the Jewish people for the Holocaust. It was only after the 1967 Arab-Israeli War and Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, that the new left in Britain began to articulate a critical attitude to Israel and support for Palestinian nationalism. It is a perspective which has gradually gained ground in the political mainstream.

From the Back Cover

How did the various currents of the British left respond to two competing nationalisms seeking to found a state in Palestine? The Labour Party from 1917 onwards helped to popularise the Zionist project as a social democratic experiment that would bring progress to the Middle East. The party's colonial experts largely ignored the sectarian practices of the Labour Zionist movement, which through its trade union and kibbutzim, sought to build an exclusively Jewish economy. The British Communist party alone provided a critique of Labour Zionism but in 1947 in line with the Soviet Union's Middle East policy it reversed its position. Over the following two decades the left was overwhelmingly supportive of the Israeli state considering its establishment as a recompense to the Jewish people for the Holocaust. The left-wing Zionist party, Poale Zion played an important role as intermediary between, on the one hand, the British labour movement and, on the other, Anglo-Jewry and the Israeli Labour Party. By contrast, there was no significant political force in Britain to represent the Arab nationalist viewpoint. The destruction of Palestinian society in the 1948 war and the refugee crisis resulting from it barely registered in Western public consciousness. It was not until the rise of the new left in the late 1960s, that Palestinian nationalist aspirations found a voice on the British left and began to command mainstream attention. After highlighting the major shifts in the left's appraisal of Israel and Zionism, this study examines the argument that its pro-Palestinian sympathy stems from antisemitism.

Review Quotes

"Paul Keleman provides many answers in this revelatory and investigative book."

"the book provides a historically accurate, informed overview of how the British Left shifted from support to criticism of Zionism in opposition to Israel's 'blood and soil' nationalism and the expansion of Israeli settlements in the Occupied Territories."
(Ekaterina Kolpinskaya, Political Studies Review Volume 12, Issue 3, September 2014)

Kelemen's book... is meticulously well researched and well written.

'It is not often that a book can be classed as indispensable to an understanding of Zionism - the ideology of the movement that established the Israeli state - and its relationship to the left and the labour movement. But The British left and Zionism is one.'
Tony Greenstein, Weekly Worker, 24th March 2019

About the Author

Paul Kelemen is Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Manchester