Was the Red Flag Flying There? Marxist Politics and the Arab-Israeli Conflict in Egypt and Israel 1948-1965

by Joel Beinin

Was the Red Flag Flying There? examines the Palestinian/Arab-Israeli conflict through the lens of Marxist politics. Joel Beinin asks how the proposal to partition Palestine into an Arab and a Jewish state—a solution endorsed by international consensus in 1947-49—became an obscure and even unthinkable option by the mid-1960s. As the most consistent adherents of the two-state solution both before and after the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948, the Marxists serve as the focal point of his analysis.

Beinin discusses three Marxist political formations in Egypt and the communist movement in Egypt; the Communist Party of Israel (MAKI); and the United Workers' Party of Israel (MAPAM), which attempted, but ultimately failed, to sustain a dual commitment to Marxism and Zionism. The failure of these movements and their progressive abandonment of an internationalist orientation toward resolving the Arab-Israeli conflict is explained as a consequence of the ultimate hegemony of nationalist politics in both Egypt and Israel.

Employing both the analytical methods of political economy and a discourse analysis informed by insights drawn from Antonio Gramsci's conception of hegemony, Beinin offers a new interpretation of the significance of Marxist politics in Egypt and Israel. This work builds on and extends the scope of the revisionist history of the Arab-Israeli conflict developed by Israeli scholars during the 1980s, challenging traditional Marxist conceptions of the relationship between anti-imperialist nationalism and the struggle for socialism.

Genres: Middle East, History, Politics, Africa

328 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1990

About the author

Joel Beinin is Donald J. McLachlan Professor of History and Professor of Middle East History at Stanford University. From 2006 to 2008 he served as Director of Middle East Studies and Professor of History at the American University in Cairo.
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Reviews

[Paul · Rating 5 out of 5]

In Was the Red Flag Flying There?, Joel Benin seeks to examine the impact of Marxism on the development of the Arab-Israeli conflict prior to the 1960s. By studying the Israeli political parties of MAKI and MAPAM, as well as Egyptian communists, he seeks to understand how these movements failed to become part of the national scene in their respective countries, and why they were unable to come together to promote internationalism over the nationalist rhetoric that would eventually drive them apart. In short, the author argues that this was the result of both internal failings and obstacles created by the state. He focuses in particular on the notion of hegemony, and how the Marxist movement’s initial inability to come up with an alternative to this narrative led to its political obsolescence.

After working through some theoretical concerns in his introduction, Benin, who organizes his narrative chronologically, begins with an examination of the period surrounding the creation of the Israeli state. MAPAM emerged as the conglomeration of three socialist entities. Its constituent parts had a history of opposition to the hegemonic Zionist narrative and supported binationalism, thus leading it to reject partition at first. Eventually, however, they realized that they would have to be flexible if they wanted to participate in national politics, because they were unable to articulate an alternative to the pro-partition narrative that was being promulgated by the hegemonic MAKAI party. Thus they came eventually to support partition and, in doing so, made the first of many concessions that would lead them firmly into the hegemonic camp and distance them from an internationalist solution. Egypt, meanwhile, ignored the Palestinian question generally until the mid-1950s, as it was focused on domestic issues, although Henri Curiel did attempt to place it on the agenda of the Egyptian communist movement.

The author’s next chapter focuses on the continued failure of MAPAM to offer an alternative to the government’s hegemonic program and the growth of its more conservative support base. Meanwhile, in Egypt, the Free Officers staged a revolution in 1952 to overthrow the monarchy, but although their rhetoric was socialist, most of their actual programs and practices were dependent on capitalism. The regime of Gamal Abdul Nasser, therefore, initiated a trend of leftist suppression that would expand, albeit unevenly, throughout the period of study. In their fight for political survival, therefore, Marxists began to latch on to the President’s rhetoric of anti-imperialism as a way of remaining politically relevant. Thus unlike MAPAM, who had the freedom to articulate an alternative version, the Egyptian communist movement gravitated towards the hegemonic narrative as a survival method under state coercion. Gamal Abdul Nasser did accept these overtures from the Marxists, but did so cautiously and always in a way that allowed him to repress any facet that deviated from his objectives.

Gradually, domestic concerns enveloped the Egyptian communist movement and prevented it from focusing too heavily on the Palestinian question. In Israel, MAPAM and a more vocal Marxist party MAKI were elected in as the government’s leftist opposition, but to do so required more concessions to the hegemonic narrative, and even when MAKI was vocal about Arab rights, it was not influential. Continued concessions led the leftist faction of MAPAM to split off and continue its alliance with MAKI, while the broader party shifted further to the right. Much like the Egyptian communists, MAKI had to maintain its focus on domestic considerations, and thus attempts to foster internationalism between the Marxist groups of both countries led to limited success.

Both factions’ gravitation towards the hegemonic narrative grew more problematic as each nation’s rhetoric moved in different directions. Israel was moving towards the west and away from the Non-Aligned Movement, while Gamal Abdul Nasser was doing the exact opposite. These trends were bolstered by numerous developments, most notably the Suez War in 1956. A split over its relationship with Nasser led to the dissolution of the communist party, while MAPAM eventually abandoned its Marxist heritage, which in turn steered its emphasis away from the issues surrounding the Arab-Israeli conflict. Even MAKI encountered a split, in their case over the party’s relationship to the Soviet Union, that broke them apart and led to their political obsolescence. Thus, every concession and every debate over the relationship with the hegemonic narrative split the Marxist movements of both nations again and again, until they disintegrated.

Overall, Was the Red Flag Flying There? is a very detailed and theory-driven account of its subject matter, but one that is easy to understand in broad terms, thanks in large part to Benin’s signposting, recapitulation, and overall style. It is a valuable reader for scholars of Marxism, Egypt, Israel, or the Arab-Israeli conflict as, even though it is relatively old (written in 1990), it provides a fresh and understudied perspective to each of these topics. Despite this large range of applicability to different fields, it remains accessible to allow of them as it covers the contextual fundamentals of each in a way that is informative for the uninitiated, but unobtrusive for the experts.

[Mike · Rating 4 out of 5]

In this book, Joel Beinin explores why Marxist politics failed in Egypt (primarily during the rules of Farouk I and G.A. Nasser) and the settler-colony of israel during the mid-20th century. The case-study is made of these two countries as they were the two leading regional powers in the Middle East during the time period in question. Beinin argues that Marxists in both states failed to escape from their respective ruling classes’ ideologies; in other words both Egyptian and israeli Marxists failed to build counter-hegemonic narratives to that of the bourgeois states in which they operated. In practice this took the form of accommodating their theory, language of discussion, and politics to the norms of their respective societies, leading to devastating results.

Outside of some minor errors corrected by modern scholarship and signs of age (the book is from 1990), this is an important book that illustrates several problems Marxists face to this day, both in the imperialist countries and the global south, such as social-chauvinism, the immense difficulty of socialist organizing under extreme undemocratic repression, opportunistic tailism, and repetitions of dogmatic formulas that prevent the concrete analysis of a concrete situation.