What is “Jewish” about the Jewish Left in Palestine/Israel?

The independent Jewish Left in Palestine/Israel before 1948

An important distinction needs to be articulated between the so-called Zionist Left in Palestine/Israel and the “radical” or “independent Left. Both are rooted in socialist and communist ideologies that originated in Europe. However, in the context of the Zionist settler colonial project in the pre-state period known as the Yishuv, many settlers fused their socialist utopian imagination with the exclusionary nationalist project of “redemption.” The early waves focused not only on a systematic land purchase, mainly from absentee landlords but also on segregating Jewish and Arab labor (e.g., Shafir 1996), a move that reveals the nationalist boundaries of their socialist imagination. This initial nationalization of the socialist discourse relied for its fulfillment on settler colonial mechanisms in addition to knowledge production, infusing accumulation in Palestine with ideological/spiritual meanings (Sabbagh-Khoury 2023). The socialist Zionist Left became the core of the early decades of the Jewish Zionist political hegemony. It is this socialist Zionist Left that orchestrated the Nakba, which, through military offense, destroyed over 500 Palestinian cities, villages, and towns as it displaced at least 750,000 Palestinians and acquired their lands (Sabbagh-Khoury 2023). The kibbutz, or the agricultural collective, fashioned itself as a socialist/communist collective and was emblematic of the early decades of Zionist settler colonial activities in Palestine, initially under the patronage of the British and eventually under US patronage. Most lands of the kibbutzim, established in strategic locations (reflecting how Zionist strategists always integrated settlements or colonies into their “security” apparatus), are layered on top of Palestinian villages destroyed during the Nakba, once again clarifying the Zionist limits of the socialist “Left” imagination. While socialist and communist ideologies permeated the initial moments of accumulation through dispossession (Sabbagh-Khoury 2022), the Israeli Jewish “Left” eventually lost to explicitly ethnoreligious nationalist discourse that manifested itself in neoliberalism and privatization (Haddad 2016) during the Oslo moment (referring to the Oslo Accords signed between Israel and the Palestinian Liberation Organization beginning in 1993) and the germination of annexionist and messianic ideologues who appropriated the Kibbutz ethos of settling/colonizing the land with an initial focus on the lands occupied in 1967 and later redirecting of settlement tactics back to lands within 1948, especially after the so-called unilateral disengagement from Gaza in 2005 (Noy 2023).

While the Zionist Left eventually became overcome by its contradictions due to the confinement of the socialist vision within an exclusionary nationalist discourse, as I further describe below, the independent Left had germinated from an anti-imperialist outlook linked to other struggles worldwide. There is a long legacy of an anti-Zionist and anti-colonial Left in Palestine, dating back to 1919-20 (Hen-Tov 2017; Beinin 1977). Unlike the Zionist socialists of the Second Aliya, Jewish communists in Palestine, working in tandem with other Indigenous communities in the country, thought of Zionism as antithetical to the struggle of all labor, a way of imperial fragmentation and division. Anti-Zionist Communists in Palestine after WWI adopted Moscow's pro-Palestinian directives. The Executive Committee of the Communist International or the Comintern declared in 1930 the need to support local “Arab labor” against the weaponization of Zionism in the service of British imperialism (see e.g., Budeiri 1979). The Palestine Party, however, remained primarily Jewish during this early historical period in the 1920s, eventually adding a few local Palestinian members. After the 1929 protests, the Comintern ordered the “Arabization” of the Palestine Party, which was accomplished by 1935 in the report of the Palestinian delegates to the Comintern Congress of that year.

Still, the Party had little traction among Palestinian labor. By the time of the Arab Revolt of 1936-1939, it was fraught with splintering and disintegration, which was accelerated by the support dictated by the Kremlin of the Nazi-Soviet Pact of August 1939. In 1943, the Comintern allowed the split of the Party in Palestine into an Arab and a Jewish one. The Palestinian or “Arab” one (The Arab League for National Liberation) consolidated at this point around a nationalist outlook consistent with pan-Arabism. At the same time and closer to the end of WWII, the anti-Zionism of the Jewish Communist Party in Palestine eroded, becoming more in line with the Zionist Left, especially after the Soviets voted in favor of the UN Partition Resolution in 1947. At this juncture and after negotiation between the Jewish and Arab Parties, by the end of 1948, Maki, the Israeli Communist Party, was formed. It never garnered significant political power (most of it came from the Palestinian citizens of Israel). Notably, after WWII, its Jewish constituents eventually shifted back to an anti-Zionist outlook, following the Kremlin. The tensions between the nationalist Jewish Zionist discourse and the directives from Moscow resurfaced with a vengeance during the Suez War (1956), which the Kremlin framed as brave Egyptian resistance against imperialism (once again positing the Zionists/Israel as a pawn of imperialist designs).

The “radical” or rather “independent” Left in Israel has socialist and anti-colonial communist underpinnings, but it also reflects a process of gradual distancing from the Soviet Union. From 1962 to the 1980s, the Socialist Organization in Israel, known by the name of their publication Matzpen or Compass (involving individuals such as Akiva Orr, Hayim Hanegbi, Moshe Mehubar, Lea Tsemel, Michael Warschawski, and Halil Touma,) upheld an anti-Zionist outlook embedded in anti-capitalism and anti-colonial discourse (Fiedler 2022). In the 1960s, they saw with clarity the Zionist brainwashing of Israeli society and the denial of ongoing Palestinian catastrophes of depopulation and refugeehood. Unlike the contemporary moment, as a Left movement (which was incredibly small yet a target of hateful campaigns that made it appear larger than it was), it had access to and support from international Left activism.

Matzpen’s members were particularly successful in gaining access and influence in socialist anti-colonial organizing in England, also connecting with Palestinian activists such as Ghada Carmi, Wasim Abdullah, Halil Hindi, and Nayef Hawatmeh (Torbiner 2016). This Left organizing was bi-national as a matter of course, imagining full equality in the land and the right of Palestinians to return to their lands in Palestine as pivotal for their political vision. The 1970s saw efforts to build relationships across the region among socialist activists. Famously, Udi Adiv and Daud Turki traveled (in 1972) to Damascus as part of a Matzpen offshoot, The Red Front, seeking to establish revolutionary regional links (Rubin 2001). However, they were subsequently subjected to Israeli torture, trial, and imprisonment. Matzpen began to crumble in the early 1970s and manifested its ideas, now mostly focused more narrowly on the 67’ occupation, which it rendered in publications as a victory of American imperialism (Matzpen 1967) in various activist spaces in the 1980s. Over time, the spatial imagination continued to shrink and become ever fragmented.

However, the socialist independent left mobilized and agitated during the 1970s and 1980s through the Oslo “peace” framework with a focus on the territories occupied in 1967. According to Lev Greenberg, Kampus (students’ movement during 1977-1982 formed initially after the 1973 War under the leadership of Jewish newcomers mainly from Latin America) in particular, should be credited with transmitting internationalist sensibilities the Jewish immigrants brought with them to university campuses with the formation of Jewish-Palestinian anti-racist politicizing work (that also engaged with the Mizrahi struggle) among university students (Grinberg 2019, 90). This cultivated the ground for the later Palestinian-Jewish activism of the 1980s with a focus on the first intifada or the Palestinian uprising of 1987-1993.

Activists with the New Israeli Left traveled to Bir Zeit University with the intention of building relationships with professors and students already in 1972 to protest the occupation’s public relations decision to hold elections in the West Bank. The military regime orchestrated this elections to demonstrate Palestinian pro-Jordanian sentiments, thereby activating a political vision/aspiration seeking to see the “Palestinian problem” become subsumed under and assimilated into other Arab countries. Jewish Left activists supported Palestinian mobilization to boycott the elections (Beinin and Kaminer 2019, 23). However, this movement diminished in political traction until the mobilization against the Lebanon War in 1982 with the Yesh Gvul movement. This moment marked a new peak of Jewish Left activism in Palestine/Israel, which included organic (as opposed to NGOized) relationship-building with Palestinian activists in the West Bank. This wave of activism included the formation of the Committee for Solidarity with Birzeit University, the Committee against Torture and House Demolitions, the Committee against the aggressive repression policies implemented under Yitzhak Rabin’s effort to combat the first intifada, Kampus, Alternative Information Center, Women in Black, Women Against the Occupation, Women Committees for Female Political Prisoners, Da’am Workers Party (established in 1995), a joint Palestinian-Jewish political party, Hadash in the aftermath of the 1973 War, and other Jewish-Palestinian efforts to enter the political game mobilizing a peace and equality discourse (see Dayan 2019) with occasional moderate electoral successes. The parliamentary activism never gained transformative traction due to the ever entrenched and intensifying Zionist hegemony and disinclination of the Zionist Left to interrogate Zionism’s definitional (settler) colonial history and infrastructure. The eventual and brief inclusion of Palestinian political party Ra’am in the short-lived coalition of 2021 also denotes the eventual sectorization of Palestinians in Israel and an ironic depoliticization in reference to the broader Palestinian struggle for freedom.

However, even though many leaders of the independent Left in the 1970s and 1980s felt they were making connections between the broader anti-colonial and anti-occupation struggle and feminist and Mizrahi grievances, women in the movement reflected on persistent male hegemony (see Doitch 2019). Mizrahim/yot experienced their incorporation into the Left in the 1970s differently. Reflecting on the era of the Israeli Black Panthers’ mobilization, Reuven Abergel blames the independent Left for disregarding the pain of Mizrahim/yot (Haritan 2019). ¹ This disregard ultimately prevented transformative coalitional work because even while the leaders of the independent Left found the Panthers useful, they saw themselves as those with the knowledge, ideology, and know-how (Haritan, p. 80). For example, they missed how Arab-Jews inhabit a counter-hegemonic Jewish hyphen that European Zionism sought to erase, rendering “Arabs” and “Jews” as antonyms (Shenhav 2006). Abergel recalls, for example, the discrepancy in how the Ashkenazi university-educated independent Left activists documented the Palestinian and Mizrahi struggles and how they failed to acknowledge the Mizrahi despair. For Abergel, the source of his anti-Zionism is the pain of marginalization and the police brutality that he experienced as a child in the depopulated Palestinian neighborhood of Musrara, which the anti-Zionist Ashkenazi Left only recognized as “raw material” for them to shape rather than lead the struggle (Haritan 2019, 84-85). Abergel felt immediate links to the Palestinian Arabs: the language and culture. He did not need theory to comprehend his organic link with the Palestinians on the other side of the “No-Man Land” in Jerusalem (Pierce 2017). Abergel concludes that the Jewish Left’s paternalism and misrecognition have prevented the development of a genuine Left that was independent of Zionism. Such a Left would have to connect Ashkenazi, Palestinian, and Mizrahi communities (Haritan 2019, 85). This intersectionality that at one point could have developed organically now will amount to a hermeneutical turn. Such a turn necessitates not only arguing from within the Jewish tradition in abstraction but also decolonizing the racialization of the Jewish community. Instead, Mizrahim/yot were ethnicized and folklorized which resulted ultimately in the political shifts in the Israeli mainstream toward the Zionist messianic Right.

While the independent Left has been a contested space, strong currents within it have interpreted Zionism as an instrument of imperial forces and advocated at different periods in the chronology for de-zionization (Beinin and Kaminer 2019). As a result, the independent Left is distinguished from the Zionist Left in understanding the anti-colonial struggle as necessarily a common one for Palestinian Arabs and Jews. This is different from how Jewish-Palestinian work under various co-existence initiatives came to be interpreted through a binary and segregationist lens. However, over time and often punctured by wars and shaped by the ongoing Nakba, the anti-imperial and anti-colonial analysis diminished in favor of a more contained analysis of anti-occupation restricted to the 1967 territories, thereby de facto accepting the overall framing of the Zionist Jewish Left. The difficulty of co-resistance and relationship-building across and within national divides has increased due to the fragmentation of the geopolitical space in historic Palestine. Consequently, Palestinian-Jewish work is either NGOized when engaging Palestinians in the West Bank and occupied East Jerusalem (and also occasionally with Palestinian citizens of Israel within the 1948 “Israel proper” lines) or sectoralized through the parliamentary representation in the Knesset. A few exceptions of the Jewish-Palestinian Left in Palestine/Israel remained grounded in an anti-colonial stance and expansive emancipatory and democratic vision, such as the marginalized political party Balad (founded in 1995) led by Sami Abu Shehadeh. Balad anchors itself in a defragmented vision of Palestinian geographies of struggle and is inclusive of non-supremacist notions of Jewish equal citizenship. Balad, like other Palestinian Israeli initiatives, has been under intensified attack by neo-Kahanist and neo-fascist forces of Religious Zionism and Jewish Power and the eliminative and messianic visions they have promoted with impunity and intensified force, especially since the “unilateral disengagement” from Gaza in 2005.

The early years of the independent Jewish Left, as I observed above, already revealed tensions between its anti-colonial and anti-imperial inclinations and the creeping in of Zionist Left sensibilities. This also explains the difficulty of generating a mass Palestinian-Jewish mobilization even if, in general, the independent Jewish Left in the Yishuv period and later Palestine/Israel understood its Left agenda as centering a critique of imperialism and necessarily involving Palestinians and Jews, not through a segregationist formula that ghettoizes “Jewish interests” versus “Palestinian interests.” A broader Left prism illuminates how the politics of empire divides to diminish the force of anti-colonial emancipatory forces. Accordingly, to be Left means precisely disrupting this fragmentary logic through an intersectional analysis, which has become harder and harder to do in an ever-increasing fragmentary political geography in historic Palestine.

Fragmentation, not intersectionality

Drawing on an extensive history of radical Mizrahi protest, including the legacy of the Israeli Black Panthers of the 1970s, Mizrahi feminists (such as Smadar Lavie 2011) have been challenging the myopic function of the Green Line for decades. While Kampus and other Left organizations built relationships with some currents of the Black Panthers in the neighborhoods to mobilize protests against the regime (shouting “money to the hoods, not the settlements,” for example), the independent Left failed to connect systematically Mizrahi struggles to their political binational vision. Likewise, Mizrahi feminists were indeed ignored and dismissed by Ashkenazi feminist peace activists. The latter mobilized for and with Palestinian women while overlooking Mizrahi feminist struggles’ relevance for the Jewish Left. This oversight and neglect signaled why sociologically large segments of Mizrahi demographics interpret “peace” as an Ashkenazi agenda item that militates against their interests. This provides the background to the tragic myopias and failed intersectionality with the Palestinian struggle. Failed intersectionality defined decades of Mizrahi mobilization (and sometimes cooptation) on “domestic” social justice issues such as representation in textbooks and public housing (see also Chetrit 2000), which did not intersect with the anti-occupation stance or a deeper critique of Zionism, partly as a matter of pragmatism indicative of the fragmentary landscape.

In an effort to preserve knowledge of the long legacy of radical Mizrahi mobilizations since the 1950s, the movement Shovrot Kirot or Breaking Walls created an actual (digital) archive (Mizrahiyon) designed to resist the erasure of knowledge about social justice struggles. Centering a critique of Zionism as a European movement and project, Shovrot Kirot seeks to mobilize queer, Mizrahi, and feminist objectives as a Left agenda that has myopically intersected with the Palestinian Nakba as an event and ongoing predicament of depopulation, domination, fragmentation, and erasure.

The fact that such a movement’s actual mobilization with Palestinians is restricted to 1948 Palestinian citizens of Israel reveals the ever-shrinking spatiality of the Jewish Left in Palestine/Israel. By shrinking spatiality, I denote how Oslo’s legacy of Palestinian fragmentation (Nassar 2021) and the materiality of an intricate system of walls, identification cards, checkpoints, and the remapping of the West Bank according to Areas A, B, and C (denoting different levels of Palestinian subjugation to Israeli hegemony) which further delimits movement and interaction also delimited the Jewish Left’s imagination into fragments. If during the first intifada and in earlier eras of independent Left mobilization such as the various solidarity committees, the spatial imagination of the independent Left was expansive, encompassing everyone from the river to the sea, the segregationist formula of Oslo and its material upshot of the geography of Bantustans (an intricate landscape of Gaza under a blockade and then small Gazas throughout the West Bank, chocked by Jewish settlements, a de-facto annexation, and a regime of apartheid) has resulted in a restricted spatial Left imagination.

This restrictive spatial and substantive imagination of Left objectives subordinates itself to a “Left” Zionist logic that accepts as a given the minority status of Palestinian citizens of Israel (about 20% of the population within 1948 or “the Green Line”). The spatial and normative fragmentation obscures the minoritization of Palestinian citizens of Israel as part of the Nakba and as constitutive of the Zionist political project of creating a “Jewish democracy” in historic Palestine through active majoritarianization (Omer 2023). Mizrahi activism that connects to the historical lineage of Left Mizrahi mobilization since the 1950s restricts their intersectional lens to the lines imposed by Zionist frames. In personal conversations with leaders in those social justice organizing spaces, I surmised that they may have a broader spatial analysis of intersecting struggles. However, decades of fragmentation and the history of the independent Left’s arrogance vis-à -vis Mizrahi grievances render the possibility of breaking walls physically and metaphorically sociologically unimaginable. For organizers, for a Mizrahi Left intersectional agenda to garner sociological traction, it stops within the Green Line and, at best, only encompasses Palestinian citizens or African asylum seekers, such as around mobilization against femicide which cuts across sectors.

Still, an apparent sociological unimaginability is not inevitable but rather an outcome of policies and Zionist ideological scaffolding which over time ghettoized the Jewish Left in Palestine/Israel. In effect, this made the label “Left” a misnomer. The ghettoization of Jewish Left visions during the Oslo decades also informed the NGOization of various co-existence initiatives and programs, some of which, such as A Land for All and Standing Together or The Bereaved Parents’ Circles and Combatants for Peace, connect deeply to the need for a new script for Palestinians and Jews in the land while offering differing degrees of historical accountability for and acknowledgment of the Nakba and its ongoing manifestations. They do not interrogate foundational justice questions regarding Zionism from a Palestinian perspective. Instead, they grapple with second order questions of justice that normalizes the Nakba (Zreik 2020). Such initiatives are NGOized by attracting investments from and receiving platforms in the “international community,” especially in Euro-America. Unlike the earlier international reception of Matzpen in global Left circles, the promotion of such NGOized initiatives functions myopically. Through the languague of pragmatism and poitical realism, their embrace bypasses root causes and power analysis, focusing instead on “reconciliation” between “two peoples” seemingly in contention for “one land”. Naming and interrogating the undergirding settler colonial logic and structures of apartheid and eventual genocidal violence comes across as threatening to “peacebuilding.” ² Most of such NGOized “Left” initiatives do not address Mizrahi and other marginalized communities such as Ethiopians, thereby reproducing the logic of the Zionist “Left” and the independent Left broadly, which, as I noted above, too bracketed or dismissed the links between the racialization of Jewish communities and the Nakba as an event and an ongoing settler-colonial nationalist process.

While Oslo produced a fragmentary spatiality of Jewish Left activism determined by geopolitical lines, this “peace” framework facilitated the ever-expansion of Jewish settlements/colonies in the West Bank, preventing Palestinian territorial contiguity and providing a fertile ground with total impunity for the cultivation of right-wing messianic territorial expansionist visions. Mobilized by “landlords’ theology” underwritten by biblical grammar (Rouhana 2024), the messianic Right visions refuse fragmentations and spatial divisions. This refusal came to be on full display when messianic and neo-Kahanist political leaders (Magid 2021) began to embrace openly before October 7, 2023, the “need” for a “Second Nakba” (Rapoport 2024) and after October 7^th, amid an unfolding genocide in Gaza, spoke in dedicated triumphalist public forums about plans to “resettle” Gaza after its utter destruction and also expand to southern Lebanon (Pfeffer 2024).

The settlers’ messianic maximalist spatiality is eliminative of the Palestinians. This eliminative logic is, however, definitional (even if not inevitable) of the Zionist project, which, under secular “Left” or religious Right leadership, entailed throughout Zionist history in Palestine/Israel, land theft and accumulation of wealth predicated on Palestinian depopulation. This is also where Mizrahi and Palestinian experiences intersect most profoundly but also where this intersection is myopically concealed through the mobilization of Zionism. Arab-Jews were often settled as “human shields” in Palestinian neighborhoods and villages, later to be targets of gentrification such as in the underserved neighborhoods of south Tel Aviv, and be violently evicted from their homes which, once were depopulated Palestinian villages and now became sites of demolition to make space for expanding high-rises (Lavie 2019).

The story of the Asi River is likewise indicative and clarifying (Yona 2020). In the summer of 2020 through mid-2023, there was public mobilization against and for preventing public access to the Asi River that passes through Kibbutz Nir David in the northern part of Palestine/Israel. Ironically, many in the Ashkenazi “Left” (with its legacy rooted in the socialist kibbutz movement, which turned to neoliberalism since the 1990s) spoke in favor of gated communities and preventing access to this source of water. At the same time, mostly Mizrahi working class from the town of Beit She’an (itself depopulated during the Nakba) insisted on entering the kibbutz to bathe in the cool water of the Asi, claiming that according to Israel’s Water Act (a point that was also foregrounded in later litigation), water sources are for public use. However, the Kibbutz residents imposed admission fees and erected fences to prevent Mizrahi “crowds” from “trespassing.” Some analysts recognized at the time how the battle over the Asi both obscures the original sin of the Nakba and the land theft from Palestinians and brings to the foreground Mizrahi resentment of Ashkenazi hegemony and racism (Yona 2020). Yet, decades of fragmentation and racialization of Mizrahi as “Jewish” and not “Arab” (e.g., Shenhav 2006) prevent people’s ability to connect the dots, puncturing the pretenses of the Zionist left for the formation of potentially transformative alliances across identity boundaries. The mobilization to liberate the Asi unfolded within a Jewish supremacist discourse (B’tselem 2021). This means, in its simplest form, that the proverbial cake is for Jews and Jews only (as sanctified in the so-called Jewish Nation-State Law ratified in the Knesset in 2018). It means that the question of justice as fairness is asked within a Jewish supremacist context that privileges Jews as “landlords.” Accordingly, “it is not fair” that only some Jews get so much of the cake. That the cake was stolen violently, to begin with, is not being addressed. This ahistorical starting point is precisely what demobilizes the possibility of an expansive Jewish Palestinian Left vision based on acknowledgment, equity, and accountability through distributive and restorative justice principles.

Most Mizrahi mobilizations against Ashkenazi intergenerational wealth, which is a Left agenda pivoting around issues of distributive justice, do not center the relevance of the Nakba and Palestinian dispossession to Mizrahi marginalization. ³ There are a few notable exceptions in activist circles around the systematic kidnapping in the 1950s (mostly from transit camps or ma’abarot) of Yemeni and Balkan Jewish babies (Mehager 2020). This “Kidnapping Affair,” as it is known, a bleeding wound in Israeli society that is still a target for denialism from the Ashkenazi establishment, requires a robust analysis that interlinks without equating the story of Palestinian displacement with Mizrahi narratives of displacement and violence. Both stories connect differently to euro-Zionism as articulated powerfully by critical Mizrahi scholars (e.g., Shohat 1988). However, Left Mizrahi mobilization, like the Ashkenazi Zionist Left, for the most part, remained ghettoized within a methodological nationalist discourse. Before Oslo and even further before 1948, the communist/socialist independent Left harbored an expansive spatial vision that was necessarily also Palestinian and regional. The expansive vision critiqued Zionism and its exclusionary focus on “Jewish labor” and “Jewish nationalism” as a detraction from a Left agenda. In distinction, the Jewish Left in Palestine/Israel during the Oslo decades could only be Left if it also interrogated and reinterpreted hermeneutically the meaning of “Jewish” in the space through an analysis of race and racialization as well as counter-archival unlearning of Zionist historiography.

For example, over its decades of work, the organization Zochrot deepened its work from an initial focus on educating the Israeli and other publics about the Nakba of 1948 to a robust interrogation of the one hundred years of Zionism as a settler colonialism by focusing on exposing, the Jewish National Fund’s systematic displacement and colonization of Palestine as well as its greenwashing technologies (e.g., Aparicio 2014). Likewise, Zochrot’s public education increasingly incorporated critical Mizrahi insights to wrestle with its own Ashkenazi normativity and assumptions, thereby facilitating research and conversation on the intersections of the Nakba with Arab-Jewish stories of dislocation and marginalization (e.g., Zochrot 2019). Additionally, Zochrot is one of the only Israeli groups that have tried to engage people in imagining Palestinian return pragmatically outside of zero-sum rhetoric and through interaction with Palestinian imaginations of return, which is pivotal for Palestinian conceptions of justice (Zochrot n.d). This kind of introspective and hermeneutical work marked the Oslo years, even if Zochrot has also shaped as an NGO rather than a social movement.

After the October 7th attacks and the ensuing genocidal assault on Palestinians in Gaza, the Jewish Left needs to de-ghettoize its own spatial imagination. Indeed, the thirty years of Oslo saw such processes of conceptual de-ghettoization amid the fragmentation of the geography of the Palestinian struggle. If the pre-Oslo independent Left asked how we might all live together across the geography, the Left of the Oslo years, amid the intensification of Right-wing expansive spatiality and aggressive colonization in the West Bank and the binational towns (eroding the Green Line), began to interrogate its assumptions and blinders. The Oslo moment, therefore, denoted a shift from internationalist Left secular ideological “solutions” (diminished as is with the collapse of the USSR) to historical, cultural, and political Jewish hermeneutics.

Therefore, in recent decades, the Jewish Left in Palestine/Israel has undergone (what I have termed) hitmazrehut, or the becoming of the East (see Omer 2017). Hitmazrehut entails reclaiming and reimagining Mizrahi histories and counter-historical potentialities (not restricted only to Arab-Jews), which necessarily involves disrupting a methodological nationalism that constrains the Jewish political and ethical imagination. This conveys the importance of counter-knowledge production in disrupting Zionist historiography and the myopias it imposes on intersecting struggles. Hitmazrehut is distinctive from a utopian longing for Jewish belonging in the region outside a settler colonial discourse born in Europe. Likewise, it is decidedly not about settler-indigeneity claims that rely on biblical warrants (Feldman and McGonigle 2023). Hitmazrehut is “Jewish” and hermeneutical to the degree that it thinks historically rather than through biblical redemptive fantasies that are themselves products of internalized Christian conceptions of “Jewish return” (Raz-Krakotzkin 2022), about Jewish life in Palestine/Israel and the region.

Hitmazrehut as religious critical literacy

The predominantly Ashkenazi Left, relying on European Left discourses and secular assumptions, overlooked the potential of the radical Mizrahi Left’s regional imagination (especially its queer and feminist manifestations) to disrupt Zionist methodological nationalism. The Toledo conference in 1989 offers a glimpse in hindsight into a tragic example of what could have been (Shohat 2014). It brought together Arab-Jewish and Palestinian figures to recover and reimagine a regional restorative political discourse predicated on the intersections of their geographies of dislocation vis-a-vis Euro-Zionism and colonialism broadly (See Shohat 2006). This moment of potentiality was shortly subverted by the Oslo Accords and their fragmentary matrixes of domination, framed erroneously as a peacebuilding agenda. However, in effect, Oslo has meant the fragmentation of Palestinians from one another and the entrenchment of Israeli occupation and settler-colonial praxis in the West Bank and occupied East Jerusalem. It has also signaled the demobilization of the Jewish Left in Palestine/Israel because a Left vision cannot be walled off by segregated identity discourse.

While Palestinians increasingly became fragmented from one another, Mizrahi activism too became fragmented from the Palestinian struggle, denoting that a meaningful Jewish Left in Palestine/Israel would need to defragment and recover regional political thinking that transcends and disrupts a racialized geography. ⁴ For Mizrahi activists in the context of Israeli racialized discourse (Yiftachel 2023), to connect to the Palestinian struggle meaningfully entails linking a socioeconomic critique (thus a deployment of a Left analytic prism) with political ethics and accountability to Palestinians. The hermeneutical dimension of such a process requires a decolonial epistemic work, which we see displayed in a wave of scholarship that recovers counter-archival histories of Jewish thinkers eclipsed by Zionist historiographies such as in the work of Avi-Ram Tzoreff (2024), who recovers the anti-colonial regional thinking of Rebb Benyamin under the British Mandate and his pondering of why the Jews in Palestinian are not forming alliances with the Arabs’ anti-colonial mobilization, the work of Moshe Behar and Zvi Ben-Dor Benite (2013) who collected an alternative canon of Mizrahi political thought written in the late nineteenth-century through the middle of the twentieth, including excluded thinkers such as Hayyim Ben-Kiki, Nissim Ya’acov Malul, and Esther Azhari Moyal. Such scholarship, which mainly focuses on late nineteenth-century’s Jewish thinkers in Palestine is critical for activist efforts on the ground to retrain the political imagination (Musih 2023).

We see, therefore, a need to supplement a Eurocentric and mostly hetero-normative Left critique as embodied in Matzpen and the broader independent Jewish Left in Palestine/Israel with hermeneutical work that is also Mizrahi, feminist, and queer. Other kinds of studies, such as Amnon Raz Krakotzkin’s analysis in his study of sixteenth-century Safed (Raz-Krakotzkin 2022) of the biblical model which Zionism presumably enacts as ultimately a form of Christian colonization of Judaism, also connect meaningfully to the activist Left spaces, including to the recent mobilization of a movement that calls itself “The Faithful Left” seeking to reclaim Jewish diasporic ethics within an ambiguous Zionist anti-occupation frame (see Manekin 2023). Unlike the conventional secular Zionist peace camp, the Faithful Left's anti-occupation stance connects social justice issues to the occupation while hermeneutically interrogating masculinist and dominating Jewish Israeli discourse from within the sources of the Jewish tradition.

The Faithful Left’s strength is in challenging the religious messianic Right (religious Zionism) from within the sources of the Jewish tradition and often also from within the very religious Zionist networks of institutions. A subsection (Bnei Avraham) of this mobilization that formed in the aftermath of the 2022 election of a fascist-messianic coalition participates in co-resistance or solidarity work with Palestinians in the West Bank and in binational towns such as Lyd/Lod within the boundaries determined as part of the Nakba of 1948. ⁵ At the same time, while concerned with questions around labor and economic justice, the Faithful Left is not centrally mobilizing on Mizrahi and other struggles considered “social justice” issues. The Faithful Left does not necessarily disrupt the Zionist frame nor does it interlink a critique of the occupation and valorization of Jewish power and domination to the racialized and stratified geography of Jews in Palestine/Israel. Still, it illuminates the need to argue hermeneutically within to challenge messianic-fascist accounts of Jewish domination and redemption which have gained power in Israeli society. Religious literacy matters in challenging Right ideological formations warranted by religious claims. Indeed, Zionism in its secular varieties, including that of the early Kibbutz movement and the hegemonic legacy of Labor Zionism itself, constitutes a political theology in its reliance on biblical entitlement to the land. The demobilization of the Jewish Left in Palestine/Israel exposes the requirement to interrogate and unlearn this political theology through critical religious literacy (see also Omer 2011) without which its ghettoization along identity lines will persist.

We saw that the Left that neglected hermeneutical dimensions dissipated. Still, a hermeneutical focus alone does not necessarily translate into an anti-colonial agenda. The hermeneutical turn co-occurs with the fragmentation of the geopolitical space which introduced physical and conceptual obstacles for Palestinians and Jews in Palestine/Israel to form activist spaces together organically (rather than through NGOized activism) and through common anti-colonial and anti-imperialist analysis of Zionism. The diminishment of an anti-colonial analysis that interprets Zionism as an imperial tool also entailed the diminishment of the Jewish Left in Palestine/Israel and of Palestinian-Jewish coalitional work. At the same time, the increased fragmentation of the geopolitical terrain meant a more nuanced interrogation of Zionism’s claims to narrate Jewish meaning, history, and destiny. This hermeneutical turn is indispensable for rearticulating a defragmented political-ethical vision that disrupts ethnoreligious-centric segregationist or eliminative-expansionist visions which increasingly came to dominate with impunity.

Hence, the Jewish Left in Palestine/Israel cannot be Left if it is not also intersecting Jewish Left agendas with a defragmented Palestinian struggle. Though the weaponization of the “peace process” to further entrench the ongoing Nakba and resulting Palestinian fragmentation and NGOization of a co-existence agenda meant a diminished level of organic Palestinian “buy-in” in Jewish Left activism. The independent anti-Zionist Left historically wanted to see itself as a Jewish-Palestinian movement for equality and regional integration activated by an anti-imperial outlook. Yet, this Jewish Left overlooked the Mizrahi struggle on its own terms. It also overlooked how and why the meaning of “Jewish” needed to be interrogated and rearticulated hermeneutically from within and not simply through the imposition of secular ideologies which themselves were rooted in Eurocentric positionality. In the context of Palestine/Israel, during the Oslo period, which marked the end of the robust independent Left activism of the 1970s and 1980s with its focus on Jewish-Palestinian common mobilization, Left activism has shifted partly to cultural terrains such as in the anti-colonial binational translation movement of Maktoob, the establishment of the forum for regional thinking, and learning Arabic for communication rather than securitization such as in the binational school systems and other initiatives. These are all sites of hitmazrehut, an unlearning and relearning Jewish meanings and normativity in the land through a critique of Euro-Zionism. Maktoob, through a Palestinian-Jewish “dual sovereignty” translation methodology of predominantly Arabic literature “seeks to combat the segregation of Jews and Palestinians” (Maktoob n.d.).

The Mizrahi Civic Collective further exemplifies the potential ramifications of the hermeneutical and intersectional turn to hitmzrehut. This is an intellectual activist space that consolidated during the early days of the Israeli Jewish uprising against the “judicial coup” that was orchestrated by the extremist annexationist and conservative coalition formed late in 2022. Building upon decades of critical Mizrahi scholarship and activism, the Mizrahi Collective rejected the myopic romanticism regarding the presumed “democracy” that the judicial reform would demolish by significantly diminishing the independence of the Supreme Court. The “old order” was not only “democratic only for Jews,” but also enormously discriminatory toward nonnormative Jewish citizens. Hence, the Mizrahi Collective mobilized to offer a rejection of both the “judicial reform” and protests' cries to return to the “good old” non-democracy.

Written collectively by prominent critical Mizrahi thinkers, the Mizrahi Civic Collective’s position paper on masortiyut or traditionalism (Mizrahi Civic Collective n.d) retells how the history of anti-hegemonic Mizrahi mobilization, in its various modalities since the 1950s, often drew on Mizrahi traditionalism. However, the twenty-first century introduced various diffusion mechanisms for American neo-conservativism, which non-organically transformed the discourse in Israel to mirror American anti-LGBTQIA+ currents, anti-labor organizing, an anti-feminist focus on “family values,” and exclusionary nationalism, which, in this context, translates into Jewish supremacist positionality (Katsman 2023). Accordingly, Mizrahi traditionalism, a source of sociopolitical and cultural empowerment and oppositional struggle, became coopted into hegemonic structures, dulling its critical and intersectional edges and economic critique. As a result, a coopted Mizrahi traditionalism is deployed to promote patriarchy, neoliberalism, and Jewish-centric exclusionary nationalism. What can be observed, the authors of the position paper continue, is the consolidation of an ideology of traditionalism that does not challenge the status quo, even while presenting itself as a presumed alternative (a so-called “second Israel”), but that nonetheless coheres with the political chauvinistic Right-wing discourse. The cooptation of mizrahiyut and masortiyut can be explained within the broader framework of fragmentation that persistently worked against intersectional and cross-cutting expansive Left visions throughout the geopolitical space of historic Palestine.

Indeed, the position paper on masortityut rejects the deployment of tradition to sanction the settler colonial link between nationality and citizenship; instead, it aspires to dismantle this link as a scaffolding for a future of total civic equality between Palestinians and Jews in the land. As in Raz-Krakotzkin’s retrieval of Mishnaic Judaism in Ottoman Palestine, the position paper draws on alternative Jewish archives of centuries of Jewish life in Palestine outside of a settler colonial and modernist/secularist Christian European nationalist discourse where Jews were interwoven into the local Ottoman milieus, living with a sense of the sacredness of the place and yet in persistent exile, not seeking a (partial and selective) Zionist reenactment of a biblical script. This counter-archival work reveals the hermeneutical turn of the Jewish Left in Palestine/Israel and its de-fragmentary potential. Hence, inhabiting the Jewish Left in Palestine/Israel entails a decolonial intervention that disrupts Zionism’s negation of Palestinian lives and histories and denial of political aspirations, Zionism’s erasure of Jewish belonging to (rather than domination) in the region, its racialization of Arab-Jews, Ethiopians, and others, and its denial of the Jewish tradition itself. Therefore, critical religious literacy as hitmazrehut convey the political transformative potential of the hermeneutical turn of the Jewish Left in Palestine.

In other words, the Jewish Left in Palestine/Israel cannot just rely on Left ideological anti-imperial, anti-militarism, and anti-capitalism discourse nor on reclaiming Jewish exile or diaspora as more authentically Jewish. Rather than “parting ways” as Judith Butler’s (2012) Jewish ethics of alterity demands or recovering yidishkeit and diasporism (Boyarin 2023), the Jewish Left in Palestine/Israel has the embodied task of re-signifying the Jewish meanings of their belonging to the land. This process of resignification is categorically different from an intensified messianic/biblical Zionist discourse defined as “settler-indigeneity” (Feldman and McGonigle 2023) that, too, claims a process of settlers’ “re-indigenization” through settler-colonial mechanisms and performativity of biblical agriculture and shepherding in addition to the violent use of biblical archeology, to offer a few examples of epistemic violence’s direct relation to settler-colonial violence (Abu el-Haj 2001). A Jewish re-signification process corresponds with defragmenting Palestinian geographies of struggle. It has to be hermeneutical in disrupting a Jewish Right’s expansive and eliminative settlers’ imagination of the space. The thirty-year period of the “Oslo peace” framework, because of how it has enhanced a logic of segregation and Palestinian fragmentation which also segregated the Jewish Left, signaled this shift to a focus on reimagining Jewish meanings in the region outside a Zionist hegemony and through a direct grappling with the ongoing realities of the Nakba.

To conclude, in the early decades of organizing and especially during the heydays of communism and socialism, Left Jewish politics in Palestine/Israel meant anti-colonial mobilization that had to be Jewish-Palestinian though Palestinian representation was not massive and ever diminishing with the fragmentary trend. The more fragmented the political geography of Palestine/Israel became, the more walled in the political and socioeconomic Jewish Left discourse became, and the more cut off it became from a global anti-colonial struggle. The thirty years of the “peace process” that Palestinians have experienced as further entrenchment of the occupation, fragmentation, and settler colonial violence is where the Jewish Israeli Left becomes necessarily less communist (also due to the broader diminishment of internationalism after the Cold War) and more hermeneutical in terms of reimagining the meaning of Jewish life in Palestine and the region through a discourse of equality and historical accountability. The sources for such a Jewish Left in Palestine require hitmazrehut, drawing on and creating counter-archives to re-signify what Jewish means for the Jewish Left in Palestine/Israel.

While the early decades relied on international Left secular ideologies that identified Zionism as an imperialism tool, the years of the Oslo “peace process” clarify that the Jewish Left in Palestine/Israel need to connect “traditional” Left issues around labor, distributive justice, education, and healthcare with restorative justice dimensions vis-à-vis Palestinians. This entails wrestling with Zionism as a colonial movement as it was experienced from a Palestinian perspective (Said 1979). Without a robust analysis of Zionism as colonialism, the Jewish Left in Palestine/Israel is not Left at all.