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The Israeli Red-Green Alliance and Gramsci’s War of Position

 
Filed under: Israel
Publication: Jewish Political Studies Review

Jewish Political Studies Review
Volume 30, Numbers 3–4

Abstract

This research examines the occurrence of Red-Green Alliance in Israeli politics and discusses its anti-Israeli approach, which is based on the strategies established by Antonio Gramsci with some inspiration from Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. The basic assertion of this article is that throughout decades, the Israeli Red-Green Alliance has become stronger and has moved from being a liberal-Islamist axis to a center-Palestinian one, enlarging its political strength and endangering Israel more than ever before. Marxist dynamics of Red-Green Alliance are possible in Israel because the ideological spectrum of Israeli politics is not a dichotomy. Consequently, Red-Green Alliance is liable to infiltrate even governmental parties and center parties, not to mention leading figures in the highest posts of the Israeli administration. In order to observe the way Red-Green Alliance emerged in Israeli politics, this article offers a chronological account of several political and social agents. Regarding the devastating outcomes of Red-Green Alliance, which, like a Trojan horse, threatens to destroy Israel from within, the paper also presents precautions that can immunize Israeli society. In particular, it raises, in its concluding remarks, the idea of a rightist pushback by means of embracing Gramsci’s ideas.

Definition of the Problem

The Israeli Red-Green Alliance is the association of “Red” left-wing parties, representing a spectrum of political philosophies from socialism to liberal progressives, together with “Green” Muslim ideologies, held mostly by Arabs and their supporters. This coalition aims to destroy Israel from within by undermining its social and cultural foundations.

Originally, the term Red-Green Alliance described a coalition where “Red” stood for social democrats and “Green” for agrarian or environmental parties. Such an alliance was based on a shared distrust of citizens toward Western capitalist state institutions. However, based on a previous article in this issue by Joel Fishman,1 this research refers to a different phenomenon that belongs to a broader category of political warfare, known as Crossover. A Crossover takes place when political groups, which ostensibly are hostile to each other, form an alliance of convenience in order to achieve a political goal. The Red-Green Alliance discussed in this article is that between Islamists and the progressive Left.2 It is defined by Pascal Bruckner also as Islamo-Leftism, where leftist adherents in different locations use Islamism as a platform to promote the collapse of free-market capitalism. For the leftists, destroying capitalism is the main goal, and the sacrifice of individual rights is seen as an acceptable trade-off; for the Islamists, imposing a totalitarian theocracy is the major objective, and in order to achieve it they are willing to join the struggle against racism, neocolonialism, and globalization. Essentially, Islamo-Leftism is an alliance of Islamists and leftists in opposition to Western values.3

Scholars have recently identified the presence of a Red-Green Alliance in the West, often harboring a deep hatred toward the United States as well as anti-Semitic attitudes, and pushing for the delegitimization of Israel, BDS, and hatred of Jews on American university campuses.4 In an effort to map out such organizations, a basic list was formulated comprising Islamic organizations in Germany, France, Belgium, and the United States. These organizations belong to a larger global enterprise, and they purposely frame their message in Western liberal language.5

This article examines the occurrence of Red-Green Alliance specifically in Israeli politics. Accordingly, it does not consider the threat of Red-Green Alliance to the American way of life or to Western culture, instead focusing on its anti-Israeli strategies and the dangers that it poses to Israel’s very existence. A review of the history of the political left wing in Israel is essentially an inquiry into a Trojan-horse phenomenon; the Red-Green Alliance has always been present within Israeli politics. Furthermore, the basic assertion of this article is that throughout the decades, for at least 70 years, the Israeli Red-Green Alliance has gained strength and moved from being a liberal-Islamist axis to a center-Palestinian one, enlarging its political strength and endangering Israel more than ever before.

In order to understand the evolution of Red-Green Alliance, a glimpse into its origins is necessary. The Bolshevik project aimed to construct a new social order, based on turning the people into a political protagonist. Once the Russian Revolution set sail, there was an urgent need to defend it from counterrevolution and from foreign invasions. Additionally, the crucial priorities were to rebuild the economy, to industrialize Russia, and to turn the population into a literate mass. This could not be done without building a popular consensus and relying on a new “democratic” relationship between the mass of the people and political power. Consequently, Marxism—and Leninism in particular—identified the crucial role of intellectuals in this process.6

In his well-known Prison Notebooks, Antonio Gramsci developed the idea of the War of Position, in which an intellectual and cultural struggle shapes society. Gramsci developed Lenin’s idea of hegemony.7 His point of departure is that society is dominated by a cultural hegemony. There are various cultural norms that prevail, and these are largely dictated by the ruling class. However, this cultural hegemony should not be regarded as the only option and should not be accepted as inevitable. Rather, cultural hegemony is an artificial social construct of collective beliefs, practices, and institutions that were essentially meant to facilitate a specific form of social-class domination.8

In Gramsci’s view, the anticapitalist leaders should create a proletarian culture that fundamentally contradicts the existing cultural hegemony of the bourgeoisie. This proletarian culture, once it spreads, will intensify class consciousness, communicate progressive ideology, and create the dynamics of propagating further revolutionary ideas and organizations within society. This “War of Position,” as Gramsci sees it, is a necessary condition for launching, in due course, the political warfare of radical socialism.9

According to Gramsci, the traditional intellectuals are the major force that perpetuates the social status quo of the cultural hegemony. Scholars and scientists, theorists and philosophers, yet also administrators and publicists—all are recruited to impose the continuity of the normative social beliefs. However, intellectuals do not necessarily have to remain the permanent proponents of the ruling class; they could also become its opponents. Artists and engineers, who are naturally close to industrial labor, alongside journalists and academics, can become the new autonomous intellectuals who will combat the hegemonic culture.10 In order to prevail and take power, the lower class, according to Gramsci, must break the hegemony of the established elites, undermine traditional loyalties, and assume full control of civil society.11

Gramsci’s followers were well aware of this process and of the time and effort that it demanded. Rudi Dutschke, a prominent leader of the leftist German protest movement of the 1960s and a forerunner of the Green movement in the 1970s, asserted that demonstrations were not sufficient to prevail over the Western capitalist system. Rather, he called for a long march through the state’s institutions where power was concentrated. Evoking the 1934-35 Long March of the communist Chinese People’s Liberation Army, Dutschke called for penetrating the establishment and conquering it from within. Interpreting Gramsci, he believed that in order to achieve radical change and overthrow the hegemonic culture, activists should become an integral part of the social system and its machinery. Moreover, they should produce working-class intellectuals who would reshape the dominant culture and replace it.12

The use of Gramscian strategies by Red-Green Alliance is widespread in the West. For example, in Londonistan (2006),13 Melanie Phillips describes the capture of social institutions—the school system, the universities, the churches, the media, and the legal system:

This intellectual elite was persuaded to sing from the same subversive song-sheet, so that the moral beliefs of the majority would be replaced by the values of those on the margins of society, the perfect ambience in which the Muslim grievance culture could be fanned into the flames of extremism.14

In Israel, Marxist dynamics of Red-Green Alliance were able to develop because of the political origins of the prevailing Zionist leaders of the first half of the 20th century. Furthermore, Marxist dynamics of Red-Green Alliance are possible in Israel because the ideological spectrum of Israeli politics is not constructed as a dichotomy. With the parties aligned along an ideological continuum, Red-Green Alliance is liable to infiltrate, even gradually, a mainstream faction like the Labor Party or various center parties, not to mention leading figures who have reached some of the highest posts in the Israeli administration.

In order to observe the way Red-Green Alliance has emerged in Israeli politics and society, a chronological account of several political and social organizations will be offered, with a close examination of the Red-Green Alliance for each one.

Maki: The Israeli Communist Party

From its very formation in 1919, Maki, then still called the Palestinian Communist Party, was established as a pro-Bolshevik Jewish-Arab party. Moreover, it was actually launched as a Zionist socialist workers’ party, with no contradiction whatsoever between its Zionist and its communist components.15 In an address to a party convention in September 1920, one of its leaders, Yitzhak Meirson, said: “Proletarian Zionism ties the realization of Zionist ideals to the victory of the socialist revolution. This is the only guarantee for the realization of all progressive ideals, and of Zionism in so far as it is progressive.”16

However, this was about to change in a short while. The Russian Bolshevik Party had always opposed Zionism. Both Lenin and Stalin wrote strong attacks on Zionism for its destructive effects. Already in 1920 a resolution of the Second Comintern Congress included the following critique of Zionism:

A glaring example of the deception practiced on the working classes of an oppressed nation, by the combined efforts of Entente imperialism and the bourgeoisie of the same nation, is offered by the Zionists’ Palestine venture…which under the pretense of creating a Jewish State in Palestine in fact surrenders the Arab working people of Palestine…to exploitation by England.17

In the party’s second congress in 1923, its members voted for a resolution that became a building block of the Israeli Red-Green Alliance:

We view the Arab national movement as one of the principal factors in the fight against British imperialism…. It is our obligation to do all we can to support this movement in so far as it fights imperialism…. Zionism is the movement of the Jewish bourgeoisie which seeks to create markets for itself and exploits romantic nationalist notions for this purpose. Zionism has tied its fate to British imperialism, and every project of Zionist colonization is economically based on exploitation. All the activities of the Zionist institutions prepare the ground for capitalist colonization at the expense of the exploited masses.18

Notably, despite this explicit Red-Green Alliance, at this point in time the party included no Arab members at all.19 This changed later on, however, as the Comintern gave a command to “Arabize” the party.20 Arabs then joined it, and in its 1924 conference Arabization became a slogan that would remain for many years; it was now believed that, in order to succeed, the party had to become an Arab mass party.21

In 1965 a largely Arab fraction, which was entirely anti-Zionist, left the party and formed a new one, Rakah, which the Soviet Union immediately recognized as the official Communist Party. From then on Rakah saw an increase of support, winning three and four seats in the Knesset during the late 1960s and early 1970s. Twenty years after the split, Rakah members again changed their name to Maki, emphasizing that they were the original and only communist party. Before the 1977 elections, the party joined up with some other marginal left-wing and Arab parties under a new name—Hadash, which means “new” in Hebrew and is also a Hebrew acronym for the Democratic Front for Peace and Equality. On November 29, 2017, commemorating 70 years since the UN vote in favor of the partition plan, Maki and Hadash published on their Facebook website the following text:

On the day of solidarity with the Palestinian People, we announce that…the international imperialism led by the U.S. and the reactionary forces in the region and the regimes of the Gulf states, are the partners of the Israeli government in the crime of preventing the legitimate rights of the Palestinian people. This is the same axis that prevented a Palestinian state in 1947, and blocked the formation of two states. The failure of imperialism and reactionaries in the Middle East, particularly in Syria and Yemen, leads them to reorganize their alliance in order to ensure their interests. They protect their energy resources by diminishing any local political force that opposes the American-Israeli regional hegemony.22

Hence, this Israeli Jewish-Arab party propagates the Palestinian national narrative, demonstrating solidarity with Israel’s enemies and viewing Israel as part of the dark side of the global trends. Under the statement there is a reproduction with a fist, symbolically half red and half green, combining communism with the Palestinian flag (see Figure 1).

Resisting Occupation
Figure 1: “Resisting Occupation,” from the Israeli Communist Party’s Facebook website

Figure 2 shows a call for activists to come to a demonstration on August 5, 2018, against the nation-state law; the poster refers to the law as official apartheid. Once again, the colors of the poster are not coincidentally red and green.

Demonstration poster
Figure 2: Demonstration poster

Mapam

Mapam was formed in 1948 by a merger of socialist Zionist groups. It was originally Marxist-Zionist and represented the left-wing Kibbutz Artzi movement. In the first Israeli elections, Mapam won 19 seats, making it the second largest party after the mainstream Labor Zionist Mapai.

Mapam entered Ben-Gurion’s 1948 coalition government, but it espoused a radically different policy toward Arab civilians. Unlike Ben-Gurion and his supporters, Mapam’s executive committee advocated Jewish-Arab coexistence and opposed the expulsion of Arab civilians. However, beyond humanistic stances on political issues, Mapam from the very first adopted the Palestinian narrative. The party favored the right of refugees to return to their homes after the war and opposed the destruction of Arab houses.23 Indeed, even in the midst of war, Mapam leaders in their political committee accused the IDF of killing innocent Arab civilians during the various military operations and of using the expulsion of civilians as a strategy.24 Accordingly, Mapam also opposed the establishment of settlements on Arab land, and where new kibbutzim were to be established beyond the proposed UN partition frontier, the party demanded sufficient “surplus land” at each location to permit the return of the original Arab inhabitants.25

Perhaps the greatest crisis for Mapam was the 1953 Slansky Trial. In a series of show trials against leaders of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, most of them Jews, 14 were convicted and 11—hanged. Even Mapam’s envoy in Prague was accused of being part of the alleged Zionist conspiracy.26 Shortly afterward, with the publicizing of Khrushchev’s Secret Speech of 1956 to the 20th Party Congress, Mapam distanced itself somewhat from its pro-Soviet radical positions on social democracy. Maintaining a steady level of nine seats in the Knesset throughout several elections, the party eventually dropped to three seats in 1988 and by 1992 merged with the newly formed Meretz. At every point in time, however, Mapam’s ideological tendency was to side with the Palestinian claims against Israel, fulfilling—in this sense—its role as the embodiment of Red-Green Alliance.

Sheli: The Left Camp of Israel

This party, the major political ancestor of Ratz and then Meretz, was founded on the eve of the 1977 elections through a merger of leftist political groups as well as former Labor Party executives. The party’s political platform called for mutual recognition with the PLO (Palestine Liberation Organization) and immediate negotiations. Notably, at that point in time, 15 years before the Madrid Conference, Israel and the United States still considered the PLO a terrorist organization that did not deny its intention to continue murderous attacks as part of its struggle.

One of the founders of Sheli and a significant figure in the Israeli Red-Green Alliance was Uri Avnery, whose attitude was anti-Zionist and whose views were meticulously aligned with those of the Soviet Union.27 A radical journalist who owned a newspaper that was notable for exposing various cases of corruption in the highest echelons of Israeli administration, he served as an MK for two nonconsecutive terms. Perhaps the peak of his political career was the founding in late 1975 of the Israeli Council for Israeli-Palestinian Peace. The goal of this initiative was a reconciliation with the Arabs, which would result from putting an end to Israel’s Jewish character.28 The project sponsored talks with PLO officials, which were held in Europe. The common denominator for the participants was an agreement about total Israeli withdrawal from the territories with a dismantling of Jewish settlements, alongside acts aimed at achieving equality for Arab citizens.29

On July 3, 1982, at the height of the battle between the IDF and PLO forces in Beirut, Avnery decided to cross the front lines and meet publicly with Yasser Arafat. In seeking Arafat out when he was under siege in Beirut, Avnery became the first Israeli to meet personally with the country’s leading enemy. Although some cabinet members demanded that Avnery be tried for treason, Attorney-General Yitzhak Zamir demurred. Avnery’s mother, however, never forgave him, and on her deathbed she disinherited him.30

Amnon Lord, who wrote about Avnery’s life,31 defined the man as a public opinion engineer. Indeed, from Lord’s interview with Avnery, he concluded that Avnery saw Willi Münzenberg as an inspiring role model. Münzenberg was a German communist politician who, within the framework of the Weimar Republic, established and led propaganda organizations. Influenced by Lenin, with whom he worked personally, he became a leading propagandist for the German Communist Party. An artist in manipulating popular opinion, he managed to raise large amounts of food and money for the victims of the 1921 Russian famine, and consequently sent millions of dollars’ worth of aid to the Soviet Union. Later he established a socialist pictorial newspaper in Germany and developed journalism as a means of promoting his political agenda. On top of his propaganda and political activity, Münzenberg was in close contact with the Soviet secret services.

Avnery, just like Münzenberg whom he admired, edited his weekly newspaper for 40 years, publishing his opinions, desires, and political objectives in it. The social messages that the newspaper circulated followed the party line, and Avnery’s political stance toward international events was usually pro-Palestinian and consequently anti-Zionist,32 constituting a distinct form of Red-Green Alliance.

The vivid pages of Avnery’s magazine were refreshing compared to the puritanical tone and dull content of the party-controlled newspapers of the 1950s and 1960s. It featured scandals, gossip about politicians, Tel Aviv bohemians, and celebrities, and flaunted risqué covers, alongside Avnery’s clear anti-Zionist line. Until 1968 there was no television in Israel; after that there was one governmental channel, and only later more options for the public. With no internet and with foreign newspapers always arriving late, Avnery knew how to deliver an alternative media for anyone who wanted to escape the pressures and problems of the young, struggling state and its purposeful, patriotic atmosphere. Thus Avnery’s magazine managed to attract many among the entertainment, media, business, academic, and military elites who were tired of the Labor Party’s ethos and its cultural hegemony. Eventually, in the 1980s with the rise of the right-wing Likud Party, the Labor political elite drew closer to Avnery’s positions.33

Hence, using the Münzenberg approach, in the case of Uri Avnery elements of the Red-Green Alliance scheme gained currency in a Gramscian War of Position against the dominant cultural hegemony. There was almost no leader in the Israeli establishment whom Avnery’s newspaper did not attack at one time or another, on moral grounds or for political reasons. These were always intertwined. The conclusion was always an end to the occupation and a call for civil equality.

Ratz

Ratz was a radical, dovish, and anticlerical party. It was founded in 1973 by Shulamit Aloni, a noted civil rights activist who lost her seat in the Labor Party. The Ratz Party was red, since it was a left-wing party that stood for liberal values such as secularism and separation of religion and state. It emphasized civil rights, human rights, and women’s rights. However, the Ratz Party was also green in the sense that it adopted the political stance of the Palestinians, opposing Israeli control over the territories and advocating peace negotiations with the PLO, which in 1973 was still considered a terror organization by all the other political factions in Israel.

It is worth looking at some of what Shulamit Aloni, the founder of this party, wrote for the left-wing CounterPunch on January 8, 2007. From an early age Aloni took part in Israel’s struggles for security and existence in a youth movement and in the Palmach, and in 1948 she was even captured by the Jordanian army during the struggle for Jerusalem. Nevertheless, and despite the fact that politically she grew up in Mapai, the hegemonic mainstream party, her statements could also have been pronounced, word for word, by some of Israel’s worst enemies:

It’s simply inconceivable that the ultimate victims, the Jews, can carry out evil deeds. Nevertheless, the state of Israel practices its own, quite violent, form of Apartheid with the native Palestinian population.

…through its army, the government of Israel practices a brutal form of Apartheid in the territory it occupies. Its army has turned every Palestinian village and town into a fenced-in, or blocked-in, detention camp. All this is done in order to watch the population’s movements and to make its life difficult. Israel even imposes a total curfew whenever the settlers, who have illegally usurped the Palestinians’ land, celebrate their holidays or conduct their parades.

…the generals commanding the region…have requisitioned further lands for the purpose of constructing “Jewish only” roads. Wonderful roads, wide roads, well-paved roads, brightly lit at night—all that on stolen land. When a Palestinian drives on such a road, his vehicle is confiscated and he is sent on his way.

…Apartheid does exist here. And our army is not “the most moral army in the world” as we are told by its commanders. Sufficient to mention that every town and every village has turned into a detention center and that every entry and every exit has been closed, cutting it off from arterial traffic.

…the U.S. Jewish community leaders…are convinced that [for] Israel…‍it’s OK to kill civilians, women and children, old people and parents with their children, deliberately or otherwise without accepting any responsibility. It’s permissible to rob people of their lands, destroy their crops, and cage them up like animals in the zoo.

Israel is an occupying power that for 40 years has been oppressing an indigenous people, which is entitled to a sovereign and independent existence while living in peace with us. We should remember that we too used very violent terror against foreign rule because we wanted our own state. And the list of victims of terror is quite long and extensive.

We [deny] the [Palestinian] people human rights. We…rob of them of their freedom, land, and water. We apply collective punishment to millions of people and even, in revenge-driven frenzy, destroy the electricity supply for one and half million [sic] civilians.34

During most of its years Ratz had no substantial electorate. With one to three seats in the Knesset, it had to merge with other leftist parties in order to become a significant parliamentary force. Hence it joined other leftist fractions until eventually, in 1992, Ratz formed an alliance with Mapam that produced a new party—Meretz.35

Meretz

Uniting several left-wing factions in 1992, Mertez was founded as a social-democratic party that promotes religious freedom, minority and human rights, peace, environmentalism, nonviolence, and social justice. After almost three decades of parliamentary activity, with 12 seats at its peak and down to four or five seats during the recent elections, Meretz has established itself as the ultimate leftist voice in Jewish Israeli society. It is red in the sense that its ideologies lead it almost naturally to membership in international organizations such as the Progressive Alliance, the Socialist International, and the Party of European Socialists. It is green in its alliance with the Palestinian cause, forming in Israel a domestic frontier together with the internal Palestinian political forces. Meretz ensured seats for its Arab members, and was therefore represented in the Knesset by figures who were in essence allied with Israel’s enemies. An example is Hussniya Jabra, who in 2002 went to meet with Yasser Arafat in Ramallah, where she denounced suicide bombers together with what she called Israel’s assassination policy.36

In April 2019 a group of Meretz members, led by MK Issawi Frej, passed a motion demanding the party immediately establish a joint Jewish-Arab parliamentary faction between Meretz and Hadash-Taal, an all-Arab party. Should the motion fail, announced Meretz activists, Meretz ought to become a Jewish-Arab party that would include two chairpersons, one Arab and one Jewish, in every official party institution. A Jewish-Arab Meretz, according to the motion, should stipulate that any future party publication must be published both in Hebrew and Arabic.37

Labor and Center

Labor and other center parties are, on and off, members of coalition governments. They produce Red-Green Alliance politics and spread the principles of the ideological alliance along with other parties. Take, for example, the notable Dr. Yossi Beilin, whose whole career—to a large extent—is the embodiment of Red-Green Alliance. Beilin was red in the sense that his basic political values were those of liberal democracy; furthermore, as director-general of the Finance Ministry during the mid-1980s, he played a key role in Israel’s transition to a globalized, neoliberal economy. Beilin was green in the sense that, together with his liberal beliefs, he supported the Palestinian narrative and its ramifications, and believed that the way to achieve peace was to satisfy their national aspirations.

Born with the establishment of the state of Israel, Beilin served in multiple ministerial positions. He began as a reporter for Davar, the left-wing party newspaper, and then became spokesman of the Labor Party. When Shimon Peres took office as prime minister in 1984, Beilin served as cabinet secretary and a couple of years later became director-general of the Foreign Ministry. Next he was appointed deputy finance minister. Already during the 1980s Beilin held contacts with Palestinian delegates, though at the time it was against Israeli law. In 1992, after Labor won the elections, Beilin was appointed deputy foreign minister under Peres. It was within this framework that secretly—and without informing his superiors—he set in motion the steps that launched the Oslo process.38

This is noteworthy, since the way in which the Oslo process was shaped constitutes an exception in the history of international relations. It was Beilin’s private initiative; he gathered a group of friends from the academy who met secretly with representatives of the PLO for five months without the knowledge of the foreign minister or the prime minister and in clear violation of governmental policy. Only after the negotiations had made progress were they made known to the senior political leaders, who gave their approval.39 Thus, initially keeping Peres in the dark even though Peres was his personal mentor and Israel’s foreign minister, Beilin promoted Israeli concessions that until then were commonly viewed as surrender and acceptance of Israel’s enemies’ positions. In his confidential contacts with the Palestinians, he offered an Israeli agreement to the establishment of a Palestinian state in the West Bank and an immediate withdrawal from the Gaza Strip.40

In 1995, as Labor’s economic minister, Beilin reached an agreement with Mahmoud Abbas in which further steps toward the fulfillment of Palestinian national aspirations at Israel’s expense were determined. According to the Beilin-Abbas construction, most of the West Bank and all of the Gaza Strip, including Jewish settlements, would be handed over to the Palestinian Authority together with some Arab neighborhoods of Jerusalem. In the Jerusalem suburb of Abu Dis, the Palestinians would establish their capital as a permanent substitute for east Jerusalem, which they would acquire in future negotiations. As for the holy sites in Jerusalem, sovereignty would be decided at a later date, with a clear possibility that the Holy Basin would be recognized in the future as the Muslim Haram al-Sharif, to be controlled by the Palestinians.41

Two major factors extricated Israel from this total capitulation and de facto surrender of all its historical and crucial strategic assets, as initiated by Beilin: the greediness of Israel’s enemies and the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. Regarding the greed, Israel’s approval of the return of Palestinian refugees was restricted only to the Palestinian state, whereas the Palestinian demand for a right of return encompassed all the territory between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River, including every part of mainland pre-1967 Israel. Either way, Rabin was murdered, and the new prime minister, Shimon Peres, was unwilling to approve the agreement.

Admitting in retrospect the failure of the Oslo Accords, Yossi Beilin never thought of blaming the Palestinian side. Instead he contended that it was the Israeli side that ruined them:

I am not exonerating the Palestinians, but in my view, the Israeli side was the biggest obstacle. The first mass killing was done by Baruch Goldstein [of Palestinians in Hebron] in February 1994, before buses blew up in Afula and Hadera. What Goldstein did is something we didn’t foresee. We were afraid the Palestinians would do something like that. We didn’t calculate enough the Jewish opposition to the agreement.42

In 2003 Beilin left the Labor Party for Meretz, serving as the party’s leader until his 2008 retirement. The year 2003, however, marked another milestone in his Red-Green Alliance political activity: the Geneva Initiative. In light of the political stalemate brought on by the Second Intifada, following a lengthy process Beilin launched a nongovernmental initiative for a permanent-status agreement between Israel and the Palestinians. It was intended to serve as a model, and was agreed upon by a number of prominent Israeli and Palestinian figures who did not hold official positions at the time. They were led by former Israeli and Palestinian negotiators: Beilin on the Israeli side and Yasser Abed Rabbo on the Palestinian side. In December 2003, at the end of the process, the two parties signed the document at a festive ceremony in Geneva. The Geneva Initiative took the Oslo agreements even one step further toward accepting the Palestinian ambitions: a total Israeli retreat to the borders of June 4, 1967; the evacuation of all the Jewish settlements; the creation of a safe passage between the Gaza Strip and the West Bank; the division of Jerusalem into two capital cities with Palestinian sovereignty over the Temple Mount and Israeli control over the Western Wall; an international-commission mechanism to enable the return of refugees not only to the new Palestinian state but also to Israel; and Israeli compensation for Palestinian loss of property and historic suffering.43

One of the signatories of the Geneva Initiative was Yaakov Perry, who headed the Israel Security Agency (Shabak) from 1988 to 1994 and years later would enter politics and become a member of the centrist Yesh Atid Party. In 2012 Israeli film director Dror Moreh produced a documentary called The Gatekeepers that was nominated for Best Documentary Feature at the 85th Academy Awards. The film portrays the history of the Shabak through in-depth interviews with six of its former commanders. Perry, in his interview, describes the First Intifada, which began in 1987, as a constructive event and reflexively uses we in personally identifying with the feelings of Palestinians:

The First Intifada was a genuine protest, led by the villagers and handled by people from the streets and by youth. We were under occupation, we were under foreign governance, and nobody was there to help us. So we could just take things under our own control and try to kick the Israeli authorities out of here. This is a positive revolution, because it reflects maturity and adulthood.44

The reason Perry can suddenly forget the lethal price of the terror activity that he now calls a “revolution” is that for him the murderers of Jews are simply peace activists. Perry recalls a meeting in the early 1990s with Jibril Rajoub. Rajoub was recruited to the PLO at age 16 and already then, in the late 1960s, assisted terror operatives who ambushed IDF patrols in the Hebron Hills. During those years, Arafat, the PLO leader under whom Rajoub would later serve as one of his deputies, organized dozens of such terror attack. As a result, from 1968 to 1970 over 160 Israelis were killed. In 1970 Rajoub was arrested for throwing a grenade at an Israeli bus; he was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment. In 1985 he was released along with over a thousand other security prisoners in exchange for three Israeli hostages held by a Palestinian terror cell, but he was soon rearrested for resuming militant anti-Israeli activity. Never in his life has Rajoub expressed any change of opinion about killing Jews. In 2013, in an interview to the Al Mayadeen network associated with Iran and with the Assad regime in Syria, he stated without hesitation: “We Palestinians…are in this country, and this country is ours. They [the Israelis] are our enemy, and our battle is against them. Until now we have not had nuclear weapons, but in the name of Allah, if we had nuclear weapons, we would be using them!”45

Like some of Israel’s worst enemies, Perry holds the opinion that the key to peace in the Middle East, or rather, the blame for its absence, is in the hands of Israel: “70 or 80 percent of the Palestinian population wants to live peacefully, to feed their children and raise them properly, just like the Jewish population. Hence you start growing angry with your own kingdom, with the state [of Israel] that does not achieve a peace treaty.”46

Perry’s Red-Green Alliance led him to display biased views. In 2013, after he had been elected to the Knesset and appointed minister of science, technology and space, The Gatekeepers was edited into a TV series shown on Israel’s Channel 1, and the former Shabak commander could at any point have modified or retracted his words if he felt that they had been distorted. But this gatekeeper, appointed to help defend Israel from its worst enemies, unexpectedly chose, in the political-cultural framework of the Red-Green Alliance, to stand by his earlier statements.

Scholars and Intellectuals

The role of the Israeli intelligentsia in Red-Green Alliance is embedded in an attitude, very common among its members, of negating Jewish heritage, and more so—denying the national foundations of the state. Former Supreme Court Chief Justice Aharon Barak called his followers, progressive Jews in Israel, enlightened citizens. In a circular logic, the enlightened citizen is entitled to be considered as such once he adopts the liberal approach of the elite, where particularistic values are ruled out. De-Judaization and denationalization of the state are conveyed, among other manifestations, in a distortion of Zionist history and the development of a narrative according to which Theodor Herzl had never really intended to title his visionary book The Jewish State, his initial suggestion having ascribed no significance to Jewishness. This position lays the foundations for further rejection of anything that makes Israel’s case in the world and allows an invalidation of its basic purpose.47

A description of the occurrence of Red-Green Alliance particularly within Israeli intellectual circles was offered during the emergence of the Oslo Accords by the writer Aharon Megged, who lamented, in an op-ed titled “One-Way Trip on the Highway to Self-Destruction”:

Hundreds of our society’s leading writers, intellectuals, academics, authors and journalists, joined by painters, photographers and actors, have been unceasingly and diligently preaching that our cause is not just. What is happening before our very eyes is the rewriting of Zionist history, a rewriting in the spirit of its adversaries and foes.

…Since the Six Day War, and at an increasing pace, we have witnessed a phenomenon which probably has no parallel in history: an emotional and moral identification by the majority of Israel’s intelligentsia, and its print and electronic media, with people committed to our annihilation; people who openly declare their intention to expel us from this land, branding us villains without a conscience, worse than British, French, Spanish imperialists.48

Red-Green Alliance in the Israeli academy goes all the way back to the pre-independence period when the Hebrew University was founded. Professors and leading intellectuals were active in groups like Brit Shalom, which sought a binational Arab-Jewish coexistence through the renunciation of the Zionist aim to create a Jewish state; the Canaanites, who advocated the establishment of a nonreligious Hebrew-speaking civilization; and the communists. As a rule, these influential scholars managed to gain an influence in society far beyond the small size of their movements. During the 1980s the activists of Matzpen, a fringe group of former communists and Canaanites, obtained academic positions and together with an emerging cadre of neo-Marxist faculty, produced a body of work that depicted Zionism as a colonial movement that had supposedly dispossessed the indigenous Palestinians. In this view, Israel had been led by an imperialist regime that exploited not only Palestinians but also Jewish immigrants from Arab countries. This logic paved way for accusations of atrocities and apartheid, and eventually led to calls for BDS from within the Israeli academy.49

One typical case is worth examining—that of Tal Nitzan, a graduate student in anthropology at the Hebrew University. In 2006 Nitzan completed her thesis about the rarity of military rape in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. One would, of course, naturally expect of an Israeli student making her first steps as a researcher that she would assume, for example, that IDF soldiers come from a culture that very much condemns rape. Another option that could be considered was the much-touted idea of purity of arms, that is, the high moral conduct that the IDF seeks to inculcate in all its soldiers from the very first day of their military service. Jewish tradition could also be considered a factor that prevents sexual abuse or any other sort of gratuitous violence that some victorious soldiers, as opposed to IDF soldiers, have practiced all over the world.

However, Nitzan was an excellent student with a genuine, if not ingenious, idea. The possibility that Israeli soldiers do not rape Arab women because they are simply decent and honorable people is something she simply dismissed. Instead, she suggested that IDF soldiers are racists, and that this is the prime reason they do not rape. Palestinian women in Judea and Samaria are dehumanized in the soldiers’ eyes because, she maintained, they are Arab women; the absence of any history of rapes of these Arab women by IDF soldiers proves that Jews are racists and oppressors, people who do not even regard Arab women as sexually desirable. As weird as it may sound, Nitzan argued that abstaining from rape is just as inhumane and oppressive as raping. In fact, abstaining from rape replaces rape because it serves to reinforce the intolerance felt toward Arabs by Jewish soldiers, who regard Arabs as so inferior and horrid that they do not even feel a compulsion to rape them.50

Furthermore, according to Nitzan, the dearth of IDF rapes of Palestinian women is designed to serve a particularistic political goal. Apparently, in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the lack of military rape merely strengthens ethnic boundaries and clarifies interethnic differences—just as organized military rape would have done. In other words, the fact that Jews do not rape Arabs is not based on morality but simply on immoral national motivations. Israel is so racist and anti-Arab that preventing rape is part and parcel of its determination to enforce rigid lines of division. Individual soldiers who refuse to rape represent an intentional policy of oppression roughly similar to what happens when governments promote mass rape, because in both cases the policy serves to subordinate and dehumanize the oppressed victim population.51

In addition to these political considerations, Nitzan maintained, the Jews in Israel fear the growing Arab population. Since in cases of rape during wartime the baby is generally assumed to be of the mother’s nationality, demographic concerns lead Israelis to refrain from raping Palestinian women.52

Tal Nitzan’s thesis draws its “scientific conclusions” from interviews with reserve soldiers in their twenties who served as combat troops in the territories during the intifada. However, none of the comments by any of these soldiers supports or provides any confirmation, even of the most indirect kind, for any of the conclusions reached by Nitzan. It is noteworthy that Tal Nitzan was not alone in her research; she was supervised by Professor of Anthropology Eyal Ben-Ari and Professor of Sociology Edna Lomsky-Feder. Moreover, her research paper won the Hebrew University Teachers’ Committee Prize. Facing a storm of public outrage, the president and the rector of the university jointly issued an announcement defending the student and dismissing those who expressed outrage over the contents of the thesis. The university’s Shaine Center decided to honor Nitzan’s work and to publish it as a paper. A year later, the Israeli Sociology Society awarded Nitzan’s MA thesis a special honor.53

The New Israel Fund

The major framework in which the Red-Green Alliance in Israel is propelled is the New Israel Fund (NIF), where the basic power of elites is reinforced by ample resources. The NIF is an American nonprofit organization which was established in 1979 with the objective of promoting social justice and equality for all Israelis. Their vision, repeatedly affirmed in every report and publication they have distributed, states:

The New Israel Fund is the leading organization advancing democracy and equality for all Israelis. We believe that Israel can live up to its founders’ vision of a state that ensures complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants, without regard to religion, race, gender, or national identity.

We fight inequality, injustice, and extremism because we understand that justice is the precondition for a successful democracy—and the only lasting road to peace. The New Israel Fund’s founders wanted to connect with Israel in a way that reflected their progressive values, and thousands of Israelis and Diaspora Jews have joined with us for that reason. Our supporters love Israel, and see it clearly as striving for an ideal not yet attained.54

This ultimate form of idealistic Zionism sounds utterly promising. Indeed, since its establishment the fund has acted as a front group and an interest group. It has invested over $250 million in different projects in Israel. Its yearly budget for 2014 was $31 million, and $24 million were donated to Israeli NGOs and to paying the salaries of the fund’s 130 employees. In all, in the history of Zionism this is perhaps one of the leading mechanisms in raising money and sponsoring social activity in Israel. This activity includes grants to “grassroots” organizations, demonstrations concerning civil rights and gender equality, and even “lawfare” in the form of appeals to the Israeli Supreme Court on social matters. The NIF’s board consists of community leaders, activists, academics, and philanthropists from the United States, Israel, Canada, and the UK. However, at least among its past and present Israeli board members, with very few exceptions, NIF leadership can clearly be colored with red. These include former Meretz MK Naomi Chazan; attorney Talia Sasson, best known for her legal struggle against the settlements; former Labor MK Avraham Burg, who has recently been urging citizens to vote only for anti-Israeli Arab parties; Israel’s most famous author Amos Oz, who recently passed away; and former Deputy Attorney-General Judith Karp.

The NIF operates joint programs with the Jewish Agency and various government ministries. However, a deeper look into the fund’s positions reveals a less pro-Israeli picture. In recent years, Israel has been increasingly attacked in various ways—accusations of war crimes; international denunciation; anti-Israeli demonstrations around the world; demands to prosecute IDF officers in Europe; pressure from the United Nations and various countries to promote economic sanctions against Israeli companies. Much of the ammunition for these defamation assaults, as will be detailed below, is supplied directly or indirectly by the NIF.

From its very foundation, those who occupied leadership positions in the NIF had long records of involvement in organizations that specialized in attacking Israel, particularly through lawfare. Already in a report written over 25 years ago, Joseph Puder, today’s executive director of the pro-Israeli organization StandWithUs, showed how the NIF was deeply involved with the activity of anti-Zionist groups who supported the Palestinian cause and were willing to meet with PLO officials years before they supposedly denounced terrorist activity within the framework of the Oslo Accords. The first Israeli group sponsored annually by NIF already during the 1980s was the Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI). It is important to note that behind the humanistic nomenclature of civil rights, the ACRI organized protests, political pressure, and litigation against IDF military actions that were intended to prevent terror attacks. Indeed, years of public activity, including appeals to the Supreme Court and other legal initiatives, eventually succeeded in forcing the Israeli system to rule, in 1989, that a terrorist’s home cannot be demolished until his relatives have exhausted every possible appeal in civilian and military courts. The defense minister at the time, Yitzhak Rabin, subsequently complained that while the number of Arab firebombs had been reduced by the demolition policy, the army would have to curtail demolitions because of the ACRI’s appeals to the Supreme Court. The ACRI has been equally persistent in its legal defense of Arab rock-throwers, despite the fact that in recent years several Israelis have been murdered in this way. Furthermore, the ACRI employed lawfare against IDF soldiers who used live ammunition when attacked by Palestinian firebomb-throwers. Sympathizing with the intifada rioters, the ACRI cooperated in judicial procedures while also initiating public pro-Palestinian events with Al-Haq, an East Jerusalem Arab group that supplied attorneys for violent Arabs and lobbied the European Economic Community to impose sanctions on Israel. This, in sum, was the kind of activity heavily sponsored by the NIF after it was first established.55

Perhaps the more modernized, and more radical, version of the ACRI is the Human Rights Defenders Fund (HRDF), an organization to which the NIF authorized annual grants of about $500,000 since the organization’s establishment in 2011. Arab social activist Alma Biblash, executive director of the HRDF, refers to Israel as racist, murderous, and a temporary Jewish apartheid state. She supports BDS campaigns and the return of Palestinian refugees.56

In 2014 Naomi Chazan, former NIF president, signed a petition that defined the IDF’s operations in Gaza as terror against civilians and demanded that Israel abide by all UN resolutions relating to the conflict, including the one that Palestinians interpret as granting them the right of return. This should come as no surprise when a full account is made of the hundreds of anti-Zionist organizations supported by the NIF. Among these are, for example, Adalah, also known as the Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, which has used its NIF funding to submit dozens of petitions to the Supreme Court seeking to diminish and even abolish Israel’s identity as a Jewish state. Another group funded by the NIF is Mada al-Carmel, which authored the Haifa Declaration, a set of orderly ideological and political theses challenging Israel’s Jewish character. Mada al-Carmel’s manifesto is based on the very clearly phrased assumptions that the Zionist movement committed massacres against the Arabs, that the state of Israel enacted racist land, immigration, and citizenship laws, and that it carried out policies of subjugation and oppression in excess of those of the apartheid regime in South Africa. Similar statements appear in the “Future Vision” produced by the Higher Arab Monitoring Committee.57 This organization is an independent political apparatus whose aim is to coordinate the political actions of various Israeli-Arab bodies. It is comprised of Arab MKs, Arab local-council heads, and representatives of different factions in the Arab sector. Following the 2000 Israeli-Arab riots, the Or Commission determined in its report that the Monitoring Committee exerted no restraining influence over the course of the riots, and in fact initiated the large-scale protests and general strikes while publicly blaming the police for being responsible for the events.58 Like many other anti-Israeli organizations, the Higher Arab Monitoring Committee, too, is an NIF grantee.59

A fairly updated account of the NIF’s pursuits was compiled by the grassroots Zionist student organization Im Tirtzu, which gathers reports, position papers, and updates on the activities of the NIF and the organizations it supports. On an NIF-monitor website, Im Tirtzu documents quotations from the directors of the NIF and the heads of the organizations that it backs. These include, among other activities:

  1. Calling for IDF soldiers to be put on trial for war crimes
  2. Encouraging draft evasion and refusal to serve in the IDF reserves
  3. Calling for BDS against Israel
  4. Taking legal actions in court against the state of Israel
  5. Encouraging international pressure on Israel

The site also traced monies from a Ramallah-based Palestinian organization that funded the reports accusing the IDF of crimes during the 2014 war in Gaza. These reports were made by Breaking the Silence and B’Tselem, founded by the NIF-sponsored ACRI. The Im Tirtzu data is verified by NGO Monitor, a body that documents biased campaigns against Israel.60

Because of the Israeli policy banning the 2009 Goldstone Commission from the country, the commission sought assistance from many NGOs as sources of confirmation for its biased arguments. These NGOs included 16 different groups from among the NIF’s circle. An analysis of the Goldstone Report reveals that the weight of its authors’ reliance on these sources amounted to 42 percent. Nearly all of the quotes from Israeli organizations that supported Goldstone’s allegations came from groups funded by the NIF. Put differently, without the NIF’s activity and publications, Goldstone would have had nothing on which to base most of his anti-Semitic charges. The publication of the Goldstone Report, nevertheless, was far from the first time that NIF-supported groups supplied supposedly objective confirmation of accusations against Israel. For example, in 2009, following the round of warfare in Gaza, the Public Committee against Torture in Israel, a group sponsored by the NIF, used the accusations against the IDF and the Israeli government to file individual suits in foreign courts against IDF officers and senior Israeli politicians. These organizations’ allegations are also used to promote calls for an economic boycott against Israel.61

The NIF supports additional organizations that are apparently operating against IDF policy and the Israeli government. For example, the Syncopa social-television network community received funding from the NIF, and the Shatil Center, another NIF-supported body, helped the community set up its social-television website. This site hosts various video clips, including some that accuse Israel of war crimes and others that encourage draft evasion and refusal to serve in the IDF. There are even clips calling for the indictment of IDF officers. In all, the organizations backed by the NIF operate by establishing dozens of niche groups, each of which has a small number of active members. These groups are involved mainly in gaining wide exposure for various aspects of alleged IDF crimes in all forms of the mass media. Each organization supposedly specializes in a specific field, and the scope of their activities creates the impression of broad international public activity, when actually all the organizations belong to a limited radical fringe funded by similar foreign sources. The NIF is the main financial supporter of these organizations.62

It is noteworthy that one of the substantial donors to NIF is the Ford Foundation. The declared mission of this private foundation is to advance human welfare all over the globe. It was created in 1936 by Edsel Ford and his father, Henry Ford, known primarily as the first to develop and manufacture cars that middle-class Americans could afford. However, Henry Ford was not only the entrepreneur of a gigantic motor industry; he was also a prominent anti-Semite. He was the owner of the Dearborn Independent, where he highlighted in each issue an allegedly Jewish-inspired evil of some sort. Starting in the 1920s, he published and distributed The International Jew, a set of anti-Semitic booklets.63 It should come as no surprise, then, that the Ford Foundation donates millions of dollars annually not only to the NIF but also to anti-Israeli organizations in Arab countries, the Palestinian Authority, and in Israel. For example, the Ford Foundation sponsors with millions of dollars the Palestinian Center for Human Rights (PCHR). According to Der Spiegel, the PCHR recently prepared 936 war-crimes suits against the IDF. With no connection whatsoever to human rights, this human rights organization uses its website to disseminate charges against alleged IDF atrocities.64

In all, then, the NIF is an enormous financial mechanism, certainly by Israeli standards, that maintains, wholly or partially, dozens of NGOs that are committed to harming Israel in every possible way. It as an organization that is sponsored by anti-Zionists and sponsors other related groups dedicated to the goals of Israel’s worst enemies. With many supporters in the Israeli media and political organizations, which benefit from the fund both directly and indirectly, the fund’s goal of transforming the state of Israel into one that is neither Jewish nor Zionist is largely immune from public exposure. This, probably, is one of the largest manifestations of the Red-Green Alliance in Israel.

Conclusion

If one looks at a century of intense activity in which neo-Marxism and radical progressive liberalism combined with anti-Zionism in the Israeli political sphere, one is impressed by the success and the continuity of Red-Green Alliance. Far away from the geography and politics of the Middle East, in an effort to bring about the advance of socialism, Antonio Gramsci propounded the idea of the War of Position. This was the battleground where an established cultural hegemony could be defeated by a proletarian cultural initiative that would eventually displace it. In order to gain such a victory, autonomous new intellectuals would act as the engineers of counterculture. Readers of Gramsci realized that the key for this victory lay in their ability, over the long term, to enter the establishment and to build their opposition from within.

Gramscian forces of Red-Green Alliance could work successfully in Israel because the parties were aligned along an ideological continuum. Hence, with no ethical barrier, Red-Green Alliance could infiltrate even the parties of governing coalitions, and eventually reach the top positions in administration, communications, justice, and any other source of power within the Israeli public sphere.

Starting with communists who collaborated with Arabs who had never concealed their support for the Arab cause, and continuing with socialists, liberals, and other Zionist left-wing factions who have shown an increasing willingness to cooperate and to associate with the country’s Palestinian or pro-Palestinian enemies, this phenomenon has been moving from the left fringes of political movements to the more central parties. Whereas during the 1950s it could be found only in the extreme edges of the communist Maki, along the 1960s one could identify evidence of the Red-Green Alliance even in parties like Mapam, which at one time was part of the government coalition. Later on, the Red-Green Alliance grew epidemically into groups like Sheli, followed by Ratz, which later became Meretz—a party that maintained its Red-Green Alliance foundation even when its leaders took office as heads of ministries. During the 1980s and 1990s, within a central party like Labor there were dominant forces that pushed—sometimes behind the scenes—for the implementation of Red-Green Alliance policies that endangered Israel. Gramscian techniques of intellectual warfare enabled dominant figures like Uri Avnery, Shulamit Aloni, and Yossi Beilin, who during their political careers moved from left to center and from center to left, to facilitate a War of Position and to turn Red-Green Alliance into a mainstream phenomenon. In fact, the Red-Green Alliance became so conventional that nobody was even shocked when a former Shabak director, who had held governmental positions, became the major hero of a documentary film in which he showed sympathy and understanding for Israel’s Palestinian enemies.

Gramsci spoke about the recruitment of proletarian intellectuals in order to change reality. Indeed, once pro-Palestinian and anti-Israeli research-academy cadets appear in the university, they are bound to gain top-down academic support. In a vicious circle, the more the Red-Green Alliance spreads, the more it succeeds, and the more it succeeds—the more it becomes ubiquitous.

Perhaps the most influential umbrella institute for Red-Green Alliance is the NIF. With pro-Palestinian and anti-Israeli elements as some of its major financial sponsors, led from its foundation almost only by left-wing advocates, this powerful economic force has completed a full invasion of social life, media, and politics in Israel.

One cannot underestimate the devastating outcomes of Red-Green Alliance. Like a Trojan horse, it threatens to destroy Israel from within. The inevitable search is, therefore, for the precautions that can immunize Israeli society to this threat. Although residing somewhat beyond the scope of this article, one answer can be found in a speech given by former minister and centrist MK Haim Ramon, who distinguished between a Zionist Left and a non-Zionist Left—referred to in this article as Red-Green Alliance: “If there is anything that will cause the Center-Left to lose the [next] election big time it will be as a result of the boundary between the Zionist Left and the non-Zionist Left having been blurred, and they will pay the price for that.”65

However, even if Ramon is right, there is an election after the election, and the hope that Red-Green Alliance will never achieve greater political power than it has already gained has no basis. Perhaps Gramsci and his principles of War of Position should also be promoted by ideologically right-wing national groups, within the social institutions, who would fight back and restore the former hegemonic culture. Perhaps loyal Zionists should take Rudi Dutschke’s advice and begin a long march through the state’s institutions.66 After all, there is at least one example of a rightist adoption of Lenin and Gramsci’s principles: President Ronald Reagan turned out to be one of the most effective practitioners of War on Position. During his terms in office he actually applied Gramsci’s methods in order to destabilize communist hegemony in Poland and to propel regime change throughout the Soviet Union. Accordingly, one of the major achievements of Reagan’s actions was the restoration of civil society in the Soviet bloc.67

As portrayed above, Israel has witnessed the control of Red-Green Alliance over official posts in the administration, in the academy, in the court system, and in the Knesset, and the time may have come for national ideologists to penetrate the establishment and take back former positions from the inside. As the post-Confucius Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu pointed out, the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.68

* * *

Notes

  1. Joel Fishman, “The Red-Green Alliance and the War against American Jewry, the American-Israel Alliance, and the Foundations of American Democracy,” Jewish Political Studies Review 30, 3-4 (2019).
  2. Philip Carl Salzman, “The Peculiar Progressive-Islamist Alliance,” PJ Media, April 29, 2019.
  3. Mark Silinsky, Jihad and the West: Black Flag over Babylon (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2016).
  4. Pierre-Andre Tagueiff, Rising from the Muck: The New Anti-Semitism in Europe, trans. Patrick Camiller (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2004); Michael Kelly, “Marching with Stalinists,” Washington Post, January 22, 2003, A15; Salzman, “Peculiar Progressive-Islamist Alliance.”
  5. Ehud Rosen, The Spider Web: The Roots of BDS and the Campaign to Delegitimize Israel (Jerusalem: Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, 2018).
  6. Ann Showstack Sassoon, “The People, Intellectuals and Specialized Knowledge,” Boundary 14, 3 (1986): 137-38.
  7. Joel Fishman, “The Thought of Antonio Gramsci,” unpublished manuscript, 2010.
  8. Quentin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith, eds. and trans., Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1971).
  9. Ibid.
  10. Ibid.
  11. Fishman, “Thought of Antonio Gramsci.”
  12. “Der Lange Marsch,” Der Spiegel, December 11, 1967.
  13. Melanie Phillips, Londonistan: How Britain Is Creating a Terror State Within (London: Gibson Square, 2006).
  14. Ibid., 124.
  15. Ran Greenstein, “The Palestinian Communist Party, 1914-1948,” in Ran Greenstein, ed., Zionism and Its Discontents: A Century of Radical Dissent in Israel/ Palestine (London: Pluto Press, 2014), 50-103.
  16. Joel Beinen, “The Palestine Communist Party, 1919-1948,” MERIP Reports 55 (1977): 6.
  17. Jane Degras, ed., The Communist International, 1919-1948, Documents, vol. 1 (London: Chatham House, 1960), 144, quoted in Beinen, “ Palestine Communist Party,” 4.
  18. Beinen, “Palestine Communist Party,” 6.
  19. Ibid.
  20. Johan Franzen, “Communism versus Zionism: The Comintern, Yishuvism, and the Palestine Communist Party,” Journal of Palestine Studies 36, 2 (2007): 6-24.
  21. Walter Laqueur, Communism and Nationalism in the Middle East (New York: Praeger, 1956), 77.
  22. https://www.facebook.com/hadash.org.il/photos/a.146262179433/10156049426099434/?type=1&theater, retrieved and translated August 1, 2019.
  23. Benny Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947-1949 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1988).
  24. Ibid.
  25. Ibid.
  26. Jonathan Brent and Vladimir Naumov, Stalin’s Last Crime (London: John Murray, 2003).
  27. Amnon Lord, A Murder among Friends: Uri Avnery—a Political Story of War (Kiryat Gat, Israel: Danny Books, 2011) (Hebrew).
  28. Ibid.
  29. Mordechai Bar-On, In Pursuit of Peace: A History of the Israeli Peace Movement (Washington, DC: U.S. Institute of Peace Press, 1996).
  30. Shlomo Nakdimon, “Did Journalist and Peace Activist Uri Avnery Serve a Communist Agenda in His Weekly News Magazine Haolam Hazeh?” Haaretz, February 17, 2011.
  31. Lord, Murder among Friends.
  32. Uri Avnery, My Friend, the Enemy (London: Zed Books, 2008).
  33. Lord, Murder among Friends.
  34. Shulamit Aloni, “Yes, There Is Apartheid in Israel,” Counterpunch, January 8, 2007, https://www.counterpunch.org/2007/01/08/yes-there-is-apartheid-in-israel, retrieved August 1, 2019.
  35. Frank Tachau, Political Parties in the Middle East and North Africa (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 1994).
  36. https://www.ynet.co.il/articles/0,7340,L-1620030,00.html, retrieved August 1, 2019.
  37. Oren Ziv, “Meretz Facing Internal Pressure to Become Jewish-Arab Party,” +972 Magazine, May 21, 2019, https://972mag.com/meretz-pressure-jewish-arab-party/141556, retrieved August 1, 2019.
  38. Yossi Beilin, Touching Peace: From the Oslo Accord to a Final Agreement (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1999); Avi Shilon, The Decline of the Left Wing in Israel: Yossi Beilin and the Politics of the Peace Process (New York: I. B. Tauris, 2019).
  39. Yoram Peri, The Israeli Military and Israel’s Palestinian Policy: From Oslo to the Al Aqsa Intifada (Washington, DC: U.S. Institute of Peace Press, 2002).
  40. Beilin, Touching Peace; Shilon, Decline of the Left Wing in Israel.
  41. Dore Gold, The Fight for Jerusalem: Radical Islam, the West, and the Future of the Holy City (Washington, DC: Regnery, 2007).
  42. Gil Hoffman, “Former Minister Yossi Beilin: Oslo Peace Process Was Not a Failure,” Jerusalem Post, September 15, 2018.
  43. Yossi Beilin, The Path to Geneva: The Quest for a Permanent Agreement, 1996-2004 (New York: RDV Books, 2004).
  44. Dror Moreh, The Gatekeepers (Tel Aviv: Miskal—Yediot Aharonot Books, 2014), 100 (Hebrew).
  45. Elior Levy, “Rajoub: Israel Should Beware, We Are Enemies,” Ynetnews, May 14, 2013, http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4379988,00.html, retrieved August 1, 2019.
  46. Moreh, Gatekeepers, 357-58.
  47. Yoram Hazony, The Jewish State: The Struggle for Israel’s Soul (New York: Basic Books, 2000).
  48. Jerusalem Post, June 17, 1994.
  49. Dana Barnett, Post-Zionism and Israeli Universities: The Academic-Political Nexus (Saarbrücken, Germany: Lambert Academic Publishing, 2016).
  50. Tal Nitzan, “The Rarity of Military Rape in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict” (MA thesis, Hebrew University, 2006) (Hebrew).
  51. Ibid.
  52. Ibid.
  53. Bonna Devora Haberman, Rereading Israel: The Spirit of the Matter (Jerusalem: Urim, 2012), 163-64.
  54. https://www.nif.org/about, retrieved August 1, 2019.
  55. Joseph Puder, The New Israel Fund: A New Fund for Israel’s Enemies (New York: Americans for a Safe Israel, 1990).
  56. The Jewish Voice 28, 6 (March 2015).
  57. Ghaida Rinawie-Zoabi, ed., The Future Vision of the Palestinian Arabs in Israel (Nazareth, Israel: National Committee for the Heads of Arab Local Authorities in Israel, 2006).
  58. “In-Depth: The Or Commission of Inquiry,” https://www.haaretz.com/1.5369221, retrieved August 21, 2019.
  59. Israel Harel, “The New Israel Fund for Deepening the Jewish-Arab Rift,” Haaretz, November 2, 2010.
  60. http://www.ngo-monitor.org, retrieved August 1, 2019.
  61. Im Tirtzu, The Influence of New Israel Fund Organizations on the Goldstone Report (Jerusalem: Im Tirtzu, 2010).
  62. Ibid.
  63. Albert Lee, Henry Ford and the Jews (New York: Stein & Day, 1980).
  64. Im Tirtzu, Influence of New Israel Fund Organizations.
  65. Yehuda Shlezinger, “Repealing Nation-State Law ‘Dangerous,’ Justice Minister Warns,” Israel Hayom, October 10, 2018, 5.
  66. “Der Lange Marsch,” Der Spiegel, December 11, 1967.
  67. Peter Schweitzer, Victory: The Reagan Administration’s Secret Strategy That Hastened the Collapse of the Soviet Union (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1994); Fishman, Thought of Antonio Gramsci.
  68. Jeananne Fowler, An Introduction to the Psychology and Religion of Taoism: Pathways to Immortality (Brighton, UK: Sussex Academic Press, 2005).