https://www.marxists.org/archive//draper/1948/07/israel.htm
I read this recently, and I was honestly kind of shocked because it's just so different from how leftists talk about this issue now.
Draper's ultimate proposal is one that we would probably agree still with today (socialist one state solution, Jewish and Arab workers united together, both groups overthrowing their bourgeois or feudal rulers), but a lot of the premises he endorses in the process of reaching that conclusion are just not things that you would hear supporters of Palestine say anymore today. For example:
- he is very supportive of the concept of Jewish self-determination
- he referred to the Arab countries that declared war on Israel as "semi-feudal oppressors" and "some of the most backward and reactionary kingships and dynasts of the world"
- he writes further that "The attack upon the Jews’ right to self-determination comes from a deeply reactionary social class – the Arab lords – whose reactionary aims in this case are not alleviated by the fact that they themselves suffer from the exploitation of British imperialism (at the same time that they cling to that imperialism in order to defend their privileges against their own people)."
- he accuses the UK, and in particular the British Labour Party (which was the majority governing party at the time) of "propping up the Abdullahs and Arab landlord-princes of the Middle East against the Jewish state"
- he expresses support for "full recognition of the Jewish state by our own government; for lifting the embargo on arms to Israel; for defense of the Jewish state against the Arab invasion in the present circumstances"
This is all certainly a lot more charitable to Israel/Zionism than we are today. Now, Jewish Israelis are considered undeserving foreign invaders and settlers; it is believed that the state of Israel is an unambiguous creature of Western Imperialism and has always been such; and Arab opposition to the state of Israel is considered progressive instead of reactionary.
What should we make of this? Is this a good representation of how Marxists generally talked about this conflict at that time, or was Draper an outlier? At the time he wrote this, was he wrong about any of his judgments? Was he right to characterize the conflict in this way at the time, but just proven wrong by later history?
Well, among other things, he was incredibly wrong and this is a great example of the problem with falling for idealist traps. The main thing he was wrong about was that the state and Zionism would naturally work hand-in-hand on a settler-colonial project to recreate a racial system just as happened in the US and South Africa (and a few other places). He falsely believed that settlers would be class conscious enough to not get bought off by labor imperialism and ethnic supremacy despite the fact that this literally happened for decades in his own country, with genocide leading the charge.
His logic was the same as the (also wrong) Trots that tried, often successfully, to convice Palestinians that Zionist unions and socialists were strong and aligned with Palestinian interests so there was no need for militancy, just building friendly labor relationships. Palestinians as a whole were slow to realize the violence and intransigence they faced with Zionists. Most thought there would be integration and a resolution through appeals to the British and working with sympathetic Zionists.
In his views of Arab countries he was simply using the logic of a Western chauvinist, and likely just a racist. While one could validly analyze the states there as being something other than simply capitalist, they were also not simply feudal, and he's projecting his understanding of Western Europe's economic history onto the former Ottoman Empire. More importantly, this is not a coherent criticism of the backlash to a colonial project. There is no valid logic that says, "they're bad so everything they do is wrong", despite how often this is deployed by lazy thinkers. Even the worst of enemies will make decisions that are overall neutral or make sense in the grander scheme, even if they're not exactly what you'd want to see. This is Draper also revealing some ultra tendencies, namely the impetus to label anything that isn't socialist, and particularly emerging from a workers' movement in a capitalist country, as unworthy and dismissable. Simplistic thinking, materially ungrounded. You might say, deeply unserious.
You asked whether Draper's view was common. I would say yes when it came to Western labor imperialists, basically the DSA libs of the time. These were the "neither Moscow nor Washington" activists that naively thought settler culture would be overcome soon by labor solidarity (they often couldn't even recognize settler culture, they didn't care about how the people right in front of them actually behaved towards, say, black people and women). This idea that socialism is imminent or just requires unions is naive and historically disproven. Anyone selling you a similar line will have to explain how their plan will result in a different outcome, what makes conditions different.
average social-imperialist it seems. reminds me of the very similar "Palestinian bourgeoisie" and other nonsense that weirdos have apparently been spreading on social media.
He was writing this while the Nakba was taking place, so he literally had no clue what he was talking about, opposition to "Jewish self-determination" as he calls it was not contained solely within the "Arab landlord-prince" class (whatever the fuck that's supposed to mean, seems like he confused Peninsular tribal structures with Arab Palestinian post-feudal class relations, which were and are different) the whole of Palestinian society, mostly importantly the working class opposed the ethnic cleansing and campaigns of terrorism that had taken place for almost two decades prior, then culminating in the Nakba
It's beyond ludicrous and idealist to assume that Palestinian workers would be fine getting kicked out of their villages and cities and "join" the settler "working class" who definitely weren't vicious anti-arab racists, there's no configuration where that would result in socialism let alone a stable state, the dude was just justifying his bigotry using a tortured understanding of Marxism and huffing a canister of copium along the way, it's unfortunately a common tendency of western "marxism" to try and smuggle white nationalism and European race logic through a kind of radical backdoor
