Redwashing refers to when a state or organization appeal to socialism or the image of progressive politics in order to deflect attention from its harmful practices.

Note: While many Palestinian activists and allies have used redwashing to refer to Israel’s cynical weaponization of indigeneity discourse, and its attempted recruitment of the Indigenous peoples of Turtle Island to cover up its settler-colonial nature, we have chosen here instead to use redwashing to refer to depictions of early Zionist institutions in Palestine as socialist, as well as current claims of Zionism being compatible with leftism or even progressivism. Still, the separate phenomenon of Israel’s audacious indigeneity claims is a significant one also worth critiquing, and so an article addressing this is forthcoming. However, it will be presented under the title of “Brownwashing”, as it will include an exploration of Israel’s exploitation of Arab cultural markers even amidst its deeply interwoven anti-Arab racism and orientalism.

“Those are our comrades up on that hill, looking down on us from that settlement! How sweet of them. Careful, we can’t get any closer or they’ll shoot at us like they did last time.”

This was the tongue-in-cheek statement of a Jordan Valley guide as he led a small group of students and activists around the Jericho area to demonstrate the daily havoc Israeli settlements wreak on Palestinians. His statement was in reference to how the particular settlement he was referring to was a kibbutz, one of the agricultural collectives that built exclusively Jewish settlements on Palestinian land and militantly guarded them. Kibbutzim have been the subject of much flowery romanticized language, presented as an ideal of socialist egalitarianism. As Palestinians were forced to learn, the purpose of these kibbutzim and the ideas and actions of their founders were anything but egalitarian, and ultimately helped entrench a racist and capitalist system of domination which continues to exploit and dispossess Palestinians to this very day. Palestinians, like the Jordan Valley guide, have been forced to live with the consequences of Zionism’s settler-colonial manifestation, even and often especially by Zionists who touted socialist ideals of equality and anti-imperialism; after all, it was the Labor Zionists who engineered and put into action the catastrophic ethnic cleansing campaigns of the Nakba [You can read more about this here]. 

Unfortunately, the portrayal of kibbutzim and Israel’s Labor founding fathers as socialists or leftists is a stubborn one which still pops up now and again despite all the evidence to the contrary. More commonly, those Zionists who consider themselves leftist or at least progressive (deemed by Palestinians as  “Progressive Except for Palestine”, or PEPs) have failed to reckon with how their professed ideology and the state they support lies in complete contradiction to any liberatory ideals. The purpose of this article then is to critique the ways in which redwashing, or the painting of the State of Israel and Zionism in practice, past or present, as leftist or progressive obscures the disastrous effects of Zionism on the indigenous Palestinian population. Zionist settler-colonialism, as with all forms of settler-colonialism, is and always will be incompatible with socialism. Thus, the Israeli state and Israeli society’s increased descent into right-wing fanaticism was largely inevitable, rather than an aberration or a betrayal of any supposed “earlier values” as some Zionists still wish to pretend.

‘Socialist’ Zionists initially attempted to distance themselves from Theodor Herzl’s Zionist Congress, which opposed mixing Jewish nationalism and socialism, as well as from Vladimir Jabotinsky’s Revisionist Zionist movement, which was openly sympathetic to fascism, to the point where a Revisionist newspaper once ran a column which stated that Hitler’s movement “has both a shell and a kernel; the antisemitic shell is to be discarded, but not the anti-Marxist kernel”. The Socialist Zionist camp ranged from orthodox Marxists like Moses Hess and Ber Borochov to populist socialists like David Ben-Gurion (a Labor Zionist who would go on to become Israel’s first Prime Minister). 

‘Socialist’ Zionism was once the most significant iteration of Zionism, building off of the historical popularity of socialism among oppressed Jewish Europeans. However, vast numbers of them were deeply opposed to Zionism. In 1905, the anti-Zionist Bund, the revolutionary organization of Jewish workers, condemned Zionism both for its “solution” to antisemitism and for its colonization of Arabs and actively worked to drive out Zionists from their unions. In 1910, socialist Karl Kautsky wrote:

“It is labor that gives people a right to the land in which it lives, thus Judaism can advance no claim on Palestine. On the basis of the right of labor and of democratic self determination, today Palestine does not belong to the Jews of Vienna, London, or New York, who claim it for Judaism, but to the Arabs of the same country, the great majority of the population.”

Nevertheless, ‘Socialist’ Zionists trudged on with attempting to combine liberatory socialism with reactionary ethnonationalism only to ultimately choose the latter. Hess, who was once an associate of Marx and Engels, would go on to write that if the choice must be made between Jewish Emancipation and Jewish Nationalism, then the former must be done away with, leading Marx and Engels to denounce him as “a proponent of bourgeois society.” Borochov founded the Workers of Zion (Po’ale Zion), which actually played a reactionary role in the Russian labor movement, arguing against any and all united action with non-Jewish workers, a mentality which will be explored in further detail regarding the engineered stratification of Jewish and Palestinian labor in Palestine. Ben-Gurion, who founded MAPAI (Workers’ Party of the Land of Israel, today’s Labor Party), pushed ideas of exclusive Jewish labor on lands owned by the Jewish Nationalist Fund, declaring in 1922 that “The only big concern which dominates our thinking and activity is the conquest of the land and building it through mass immigration (aliya). All the rest is only phraseology.” 

The Labor Zionist movement did not raise any principled argument against private property, nor did it challenge the capitalist system. Its demand from the emerging bourgeoisie was for private capital to fulfill its role in developing the land and absorbing immigrants, and for Labor Zionism’s total monopoly over the local economy, its modes of production, and market share to expand the Zionist nationalist project. Overall, Ben-Gurion and his Labor Zionist ilk frequently and explicitly argued for the elevation of ethnic and nationalist interests over class solidarity, reinforcing social hierarchies, ethnic hegemony, and religious oppression. 

As Ghassan Kanafani, one of the foremost Palestinian Marxists, wrote on the 1936 Palestine Revolt, the actually progressive labour movement between Jews and Arabs “..suffered crushing blows…the Zionist movement, which was rapidly becoming fascist in character and resorting to armed terrorism sought to isolate and destroy the Communist Party, most of whose leaders were Jews.” Indeed, the Labor Zionists would go on to unite with the Revisionists in 1945 to turn on their British benefactors and wage war on Palestinians. 

And so, Zionists of multiple tendencies worked to destroy the Palestinian economy, drive Palestinians out of the labor market, and attempted to erase the very memory they’d ever been there, much of which they were able to do with the support of the British. This meant carrying out a war on a number of fronts, reflected in the three slogans of the pioneer Zionists: “conquest of land,” “conquest of labor,” and “produce of the land”.

“Conquest of the land” and “produce of the land” was strived for through the founding of kibbutzim. Historically, this facet of Zionist colonialism was perceived as having embodied the ostensibly socialist ideology of the Zionist labor institutions, with lands placed under the ownership of the nation for Jews to settle and cultivate. But this model was not derived from any affinity to socialist values; much of the literature on kibbutzim which uncritically depicts them as socialist projects ignores that there is no contradiction between state ownership of land and agricultural capitalism, and that that which requires analysis is the mode through which kibbutzim exploited the land and for what purpose. 

In fact, the purpose of kibbutzim was set, not by their members, but by the Jewish National Fund (JNF), whose capital advancements in the form of land and other means of production came with economic and political stipulations, which included boycotting Palestinian workers. The JNF even went so far as to impose a penalty on any Jewish owner who would hire a Palestinian, all with the blessings of the British.  Kibbutzim’s value was not their “socialist traits” but the geo-political and military services which they provided to the Zionist colonial project. Kibbutzim went on to drive Palestinians off their lands and harvest their crops, with this appropriation of Palestinian property, a form of primitive accumulation occurred that allowed Zionist economic development and paved the way for the events of 1948. 

Decades on, non-Jews are still largely not allowed to be members of kibbutzim, unless to be exploited in menial jobs such as garbage disposal; a revealing example of this is when kibbutzim members found that cotton picking is cheaper when done by underpaid Palestinian women rather than by a modern combine. The women who do this work were called the “Fatima Combine” so much so that this expression has become part of colloquial Hebrew. A Druze who became a member of the kibbutz Sde-Boker, the kibbutz where Ben-Gurion ended his life, was able to do so only after joining the Israeli army and per the following conditions: Not to attempt to marry a Jewish girl before converting to Judaism, to observe the Jewish holidays, not to be conspicuous in observing Druze ceremonies, and several others of a similar nature. This Druze member accepted these humiliating conditions. 

Regarding kibbutzim’s militant nature, the result of the conditions through which kibbutzim were created is shown in the numbers of kibbutzim members who have taken part in Israeli military offenses. In 1982, when Beirut, the Palestinian refugee camps, and so many other localities in Lebanon were being mercilessly destroyed, kibbutzniks were 25 percent of the air force pilots and 30 percent of the army officer corps. What made the kibbutz so valuable was that it was “first and foremost, a militaristic institution, a place where the young are being educated to be unthinking soldiers and tough army officers. Everything else is subordinated to.”  That multiple Western socialists visited kibbutzim over the years and took part in redwashing their exclusionary, militaristic nature and regarded kibbutzim as progressive while dismissing Palestinian villages as primitive is more indicative of the orientalism of these Western socialists than anything regarding the kibbutzim themselves. Predictably, these Western socialists who tout kibbutzim as a progressive model took for granted the old Zionist line that there was no Palestinian working-class movement. As David Horowitz, Jewish Agency representative and first Governor of the Bank of Israel, claimed when he first settled in Palestine: 

“The fabric of social life in Palestine is not that of a modern industrial nation but rather that of an Oriental, backward, feudal society. These social conditions rob the fellah (Palestinian farmer) of the benefits that should have accrued to him through Jewish colonization.” 

This talking point of course belied the complex nature of Palestinian collective landholding practices, oversimplifying the nature of land deeds as a means of arguing that Palestinians did not deserve the land in the first place, only Jews did.

“Conquest of labor” was pursued by the Histadrut which drove forward the Zionist colonial project. The Histadrut is the overarching organization of Zionist workers’ trade unions, beginning by controlling key areas including economic production and marketing, defense, and control of the labor force, as well as creating jobs outside the free market so as to avoid competition with abundant and cheap Palestinian labor. The Histadrut thus introduced the irregular phenomenon of a “trade union” that established its own industrial, financial, construction, transport, and service enterprises. As Kanafani reported: 

“The Histadrut summed up its policy by declaring that ‘to allow Arabs to penetrate the Jewish labor market meant that the influx of Jewish capital would be employed to service Arab development, which is contrary to Zionist objectives’.” 

Furthermore, as Palestinian trade unionist George Mansour wrote of his time organizing with the Arab Workers Society leading up to the 1936 General Strike, the Histadrut’s fundamental aim was to introduce as many Jews as possible into every sector and to oust Palestinians as they did it. The view of Histadrut members was that:

“No matter how many Arab workers are unemployed, they have no right to take any job which a possible immigrant might occupy. No Arab has the right to work in Jewish undertakings. If Arabs can be displaced in other work too, say, in Haifa or Jaffa ports, that is good. If a port can be established in Tel Aviv and Jaffa ports are ruined, that is good. If some Jews still employ Arab labour in their orange orchards, either because Arab labour is cheaper and better for this purpose, then the fact can be used as evidence of the employment provided by Zionism for Arabs. But if Arab labour can be pushed out by ‘picketing’ and ‘pressure’, that is much better. The Histadrut never employed a single Arab if it could help it; when it was forced to do so, it paid them half the wages that it paid to its own men; and whenever it could oust Arab from any sphere of work, it did so.” 

Nahla Abdo in her brilliant article “Racism, Zionism, and the Palestinian Working Class” demonstrated how when political/diplomatic means to encourage Jewish employment over Palestinian employment failed, force was often used. Terror squads, referred to by the Histadrut as “Labor Guards” were formed in almost all settlements and construction sites which employed Palestinian workers. Composed of unemployed or new settlers looking for work, these “Labor Guards” were often engaged in disrupting the labor process and attacking both Palestinian workers and Jewish employers, such as the incident in the Palestinian village of Milabbis, known now as Kfar-Saba. In this incident, 40 of these armed guards were sent to force the Jewish owner-farmer of the settlement to dispense with the Palestinian laborers. When the farmer refused, he and other farmers-employers and the Palestinian workers were assaulted. 

David Hacohen, a Labor Party leader, in his own words confirms Kanafani, Mansour, and Abdo’s findings as he recalled the ideological difficulties of reconciling the dispossession of Palestinian workers with socialism, saying: 

“I had to fight my friends on the issue of Jewish socialism, to defend the fact that I would not accept Arabs in my trade union, the Histadrut; to defend preaching to housewives that they not buy at Arab stores; to defend the fact that we stood guard at orchards to prevent Arab workers from getting jobs there…. To pour kerosene on Arab tomatoes, to attack Jewish housewives in the markets and smash the Arab eggs they had bought”. 

This dogmatic pursual of Jewish labor made its mark, with the official census in 1937 indicating that the average Jewish worker received 145% more in wages than their Palestinian counterpart: These disparities reached ludicrous amounts, with Jewish workers being paid as high as 433% more in textile factories employing Jewish and Arab women, and 233% in tobacco factories. By July 1937, the real wages of the average Palestinian worker decreased 10% while those of a Jewish worker rose 10%. Overall, the experiences described affirms Gershon Shafir’s thesis that the very nature of Zionists’ goals -to create a national home for Jews in Palestine with a European standard of living- necessitated their developing a “militarist-nationalist approach to the Palestinians during their struggle to displace them and conquer their jobs.” 

Thus, Zionism, in collaboration with the British, successfully undermined the development of a progressive Jewish labor movement and of Jewish-Arab Proletarian brotherhood, and the reactionary Histadrut completely dominated the Jewish labor movement. The influence of Palestinian progressive forces within Palestinian labor federations in Haifa and Jaffa diminished, leaving the ground open for their control by reactionary leaderships that monopolized political action.

By April 1951, not even three years after the founding of the State of Israel, Ben-Gurion had already declared that he viewed Israel to be neither a capitalist state nor a socialist one, but a Jewish one. Additionally, while numerous analyses have claimed that Israel was a “socialist-type” economy prior to the mid-1980s, the fact that Israel’s economy was state-controlled and directed for decades by the Labor Zionist movement was not a reflection of socialist ideology but an outgrowth of the context in which it developed: during the colonization period, the absence of a strong indigenous Jewish capitalist class led the state (or proto-state) to control investment, but this control was not antagonistic to private capital. On the contrary, from 1948 on, the state pursued policies aimed at nurturing a capitalist class by encouraging a few key families to undertake joint projects and investment with state and quasi-state enterprises. The turning point in this state-led class formation was the 1985 Economic Stabilization Plan (ESP), which led to the emergence of private capital as a class independent from the state.

The Israeli state also came to deeply rely on race and class antagonisms: with the expulsion of most of the indigenous Palestinian population in 1948, resulting in the absence of the readily exploitable working class traditionally found in colonial situations, the state embarked on a massive immigration program aimed at bringing Jews from the Middle East and North Africa (Mizrahi Jews) to settle in the new state. The imported Mizrahi Jews were able to constitute a working class on which the economic foundations of the country could be built. Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip in 1967 also increased the size of Israel’s domestic market and provided a new cheap and highly exploitable source of labor in the Palestinian population. By 1985, approximately one third of the West Bank and Gaza Strip labor force worked in Israel.

This proletarianization of the Palestinians allayed protests by Mizrahi Jews who were a rung up the ladder in comparison and often wished to cling to this relative privilege rather than fight back against the discrimination they faced from Ashkenazi Jews. Frequently, Mizrahi immigrants to Israel resented and continue to resent being identified with Arabs, Africans, and natives of any kind, and often their response has been to side with the most chauvinist, racist, and discriminatory elements of Israeli society. As members of the Israeli Communist Party Moche Machover and Akiva Orr wrote decades ago, there has not been:

“..a single example of Israeli workers being mobilized on material or trade-union issues to challenge the Israeli regime itself; it is impossible to mobilize even a minority of the proletariat in this way. On the contrary, Israeli workers nearly always put their national loyalties before their class loyalties. Although this may change in the future, this does not remove the need for us to analyze why it has been so”. 

It has been so because of the racist divides Zionism entrenched between non-Jewish and Jewish Arabs and between Palestinians and Jews overall. This divide must be borne in mind by those whose revolutionary strategy for Israeli society is based upon a future alliance of Palestinians and Mizrahi Jews, whether on the basis of their common exploited condition or on the basis of their cultural affinity, as the Israeli Black Panther party once did in regards to anti-Zionism and likening Israeli practices against Palestinians to U.S imperialism and the Palestinian struggle to the Black struggle in the U.S.

As Marx famously said, “a people oppressing another cannot itself be free”. He did not mean this merely as a moral judgment; he also meant that in a society whose rulers oppress another people, the exploited class which does not actively oppose this oppression inevitably becomes an accomplice in it, as Israeli Jews who do not oppose Zionism are complicit in the oppression of Palestinians.

In 1969, Jabra Nicola, a Palestinian communist, and Machover wrote: 

“The Palestinian people are waging a battle where they confront Zionism, which is supported by imperialism; from the rear they are menaced by the Arab regimes and by Arab reaction, which are also supported by imperialism. As long as imperialism has a real stake in the Middle East, it is unlikely to withdraw its support for Zionism, its natural ally, and to permit its overthrow; it will defend it to the last drop of Arab oil.”

We would go on to add that the usefulness of Israel on behalf of imperialism includes but goes far beyond “Arab oil”. Zionism from the onset had the support it did from the British in large part because most Zionist leaders presented their cause as a bulwark against the backwards Orientalist hordes. Even the left-leaning Zionists framed their activities in Palestine in this way, all of which obviously did not provide fertile ground for a socialist revolution.

More recently, In the case of the U.S.’s exorbitant spending on Israel which has only increased over time, its return on its investment is not economic profit. As was phrased decades ago, but remains true well into the 21st century:

“Israel has been given a role not unlike that of a watchdog. One need not fear that it will exercise an aggressive policy towards the Arab states if this will contradict the interests of the USA and Britain. But should the West prefer for one reason or another to close its eyes one can rely on Israel to punish severely those of the neighboring states whose lack of manners towards the West has exceeded the proper limits.”

In fact, the entire Israeli economy is founded on the special political and military role which Zionism, and the settlers’ society, fulfill in the Middle East as a whole. Keeping this role in mind elucidates the reasons for why a massive part of the capital inflow into Israel is not intended for economic gain and is not subject to considerations of profitability. For example, donations raised by Zionists in the United States for transferring to another country, are regarded by the U.S Treasury as “charity donations” qualifying for income tax exemptions. These donations depend on the good will of the United States Treasury and it is only reasonable to assume that this good will would not continue were Israel to conduct a principled anti-imperialist policy. This means that although class conflicts do exist in Israeli society, they are constrained by the fact that the society as a whole is subsidized from the outside. This privileged status is related to Israel’s role in the region, and as long as this role continues there is little prospect of the internal social conflicts acquiring a revolutionary character.

Bernie Sanders’s 2016 and 2020 run for U.S. president sparked a new debate over the socialist nature of kibbutzim, with mainstream media collectively clutching pearls at his past on a commune. As is typical, Palestinians and especially Palestinian leftists were rendered invisible and certainly not asked or listened to on what kibbutzim really are. The erasure of Palestinian working class resistance to Zionism is perhaps even more true now than it was in the 20th century when the Zionist project was well underway, as now, socialism and leftism in general are more taboo than ever; few Zionists would actively identify as leftists, and young Israelis are growing more right-wing by the day. Instead, there is focus on vaguely depicting Zionism as “progressive”, eliding or excusing its racist history which still continues to undermine solidarity between Palestinians and Jews.

Simply put, Zionist institutions and the state of Israel were never and cannot be socialist when imperialist-backed ethnonationalism was repeatedly chosen over the liberatory alternative Jewish and Palestinian communists tried to pose along the way. The current Likud and Kahanist, “death-to-Arabs”, capitalist hellscape that we’re stuck with today is thus not surprising, if not inevitable from the start. Still, a free liberatory Palestine for all based on class solidarity rather than ethnicity or religion is possible, but only through the mass rejection of Zionism and through collective movements to change the balance of power to make Israel’s political-military role in the region obsolete. Those still drawn in by the fantasy of Zionist socialism in Palestine would do well to abandon their Zionism and organize alongside Palestinians for a socialist reality.

• Abdo, Nahla. “Racism, Zionism and the Palestinian Working Class, 1920–1947.” Studies in Political Economy 37.1, 1992: 59-92. [Link] 
• Abdo, Nahla. “Colonial Capitalism and Agrarian Social Structure: Palestine: A Case Study.” Economic and Political Weekly, 1991: PE73-PE84. [Link] 
• Mansour, George. “The Arab Worker under the Palestine Mandate (1937).” settler colonial studies 2.1, 2012: 190-205. [Link] 
• Honig-Parnass, Tikva. The False Prophets of Peace: Liberal Zionism and the Struggle for Palestine. Haymarket Books, 2011. 
• Bober, Arie. The other Israel: The radical case against Zionism. Doubleday, 1972. [Link] 
• Kanafani, Ghassan. The 1936-39 revolt in Palestine. Committee for Democratic Palestine, 1972. [Link]
• Assi, Seraj. Why Kibbutzism Isn’t Socialism. Jacobin Magazine. August 10, 2016. [Link] 
• Shahak, Israel. “Israeli Society and the Kibbutzim.” Arab Studies Quarterly, 1985: 15-23. 
• Lockman, Zachary. Comrades and enemies: Arab and Jewish workers in Palestine, 1906-1948. Univ of California Press, 1996. 
• Lockman, Zachary. “The left in Israel: Zionism vs. socialism.” MERIP Reports 49 (1976): 3-18. 
• Hanieh, Adam. “From state-led growth to globalization: The evolution of Israeli capitalism.” Journal of Palestine Studies 32.4, 2003: 5-21. 
• Scottish Palestine Solidarity Campaign, The Israeli Histadrut: an Apartheid institution. 2011. [Link]