Dissident Forms: Images of Anti-Zionism from the Archives of Matzpen

Ken Ehrlich

Abstract:

Dissident Forms: Images of Anti-Zionism from the Archives of Matzpen is an archival project that seeks to activate and reflect on the publications produced between 1967 and 1986 by Matzpen, an Israeli socialist political organization. Dissident Forms examines how race is discussed and represented in Matzpen pamphlets, Khamsin journal, and Israeli Revolutionary Action Committee (Abroad) bulletins of that period. Through the process of collaging, cutting, re-cropping and rephotographing archival images, this photo essay revisits and reconfigures the role of race in the purported anti-Zionist politics of the period.

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Matzpen represents a small and relatively marginalized segment of the self-described “Israeli left.” The name, Matzpen, refers to both an Israeli socialist political organization that formed in the wake of a split with the communist party in 1962 and a series of publications produced in affiliation with that group. The archive of Matzpen publications provides a unique perspective on the evolution of Zionism and the question of race and its relation to the colonization of Palestine, in part because of the marginal status of political perspectives even moderately critical of Zionism within the Israeli state. I have focused specifically on imagery and language around race in the Matzpen archives as a way to trouble both representations of racialized people and static notions of race. My research takes as its starting point Alana Lentin’s conception of racialization as a “matter of rule”¹ to frame evolving notions of race as central to the Zionist project.

In 1986, Matzpen published a pamphlet “Arabs, Jews and Racists,”² which aimed to challenge the ways that race and racialization structured Israeli society. That same year, the photographer and writer Allan Sekula published his formative text on the relationship between photographs and archives. Sekula’s text poses a set of materialist questions related to the truth claims of photographs. In particular, he zooms in on the ways that portraiture developed as a form of 19th century police science in the United States and Europe, structured by evolving constructs of race. The text delivers a complex analysis of the ways that surveillance, the criminalized body, and modes of classification intersect in structures of power. Sekula looks to the archive as a way to document the “microphysics of barbarism.”³

To engage the history of Matzpen, I have selected material from the publication archives and re-printed and photographed fragments to create images that capture some of the historical specificity of the original publications. The images of extracts from the Matzpen archives included in this text are taken from reproductions of print material produced between 1967 and 1986. I took the liberty of cutting up and rearranging images to dissect the visual forms in the archive and, by extension, the perspectives of the authors and artists whose work is represented. Following Sekula, I am trying to use the camera to activate this archival material and at the same time, unravel some of the dynamics around ideology and image-making within the Matzpen-affiliated publications. 

Precisely because colonial structures of domination overdetermine who has the power to remember and narrate the legacy of Zionism, including Israeli dissident perspectives, my goal is not simply to point to ideological struggles during this period within the history of Zionism. I have been motivated, in part, by what Areej Sabbagh-Khoury describes as scholarly and cultural practices that aim to dismantle “persistent reproductions of epistemological violence in knowledge production.”⁴ Ultimately, I am interested in using archival research to highlight the ways that racial logics structure settler colonies in different ways at different times, with an eye towards undermining those logics and structures.

Sabbagh-Khoury suggests that, “In Israel/Palestine, Zionist memory has reenacted and reframed settler colonialism, justifying past deeds and legitimating enduring privileges, while raising questions about individual and collective political and moral responsibility for perpetuating violence and dispossession. An explanation of settler colonialism entails attending to the epistemological and representational mechanisms that empower settlers as a durable force.”⁵

Debates within the Matzpen-affiliated groups often reproduced an understanding of race based on practices of discrimination rather than as constitutive of the Zionist project as a whole. As Matzpen evolved—often learning from Palestinian writers and comrades—the questions of representation, racialized terminology, and analysis shifted and morphed. The writings of Jabra Nicola, for example, who published several texts in Matzpen publications under the pen name A. Said was widely cited as a key interlocutor for many writers in the Matzpen circle on the question of colonization.⁶ In the 1969 publication “Anti-Ulpan,” Matzpen characterizes Israeli policy toward Palestinians that are referred to as Arabs as “discrimination;” whereas, in a 1986 text “Arabs, Jews, and Racists,” the lexicon has expanded to include the term “national oppression.”⁷ The use of this latter term in Matzpen texts operates across various registers. On the one hand, it refers to the explicitly racist policies enacted by the Israeli state. It also signifies an uneasy relationship to one of the founding myths of Zionism—namely that the formation of the state was the realization of nationalist project rather than an ongoing settler colonial one. 

Facing state censorship, overt violence from Zionist institutions and actors, and repressive administrations wielding charges of treason and jail time for those deemed to be working against the interests of the Israeli state, the writers, artists and activists associated with the Matzpen group fought to articulate a socialist, anti-Zionist perspective. Nevertheless, Jewish Israeli members of Matzpen continued to benefit from the privileges granted by the settler colony. As Sabbagh-Khoury has argued, socialism in its peculiar Zionist form was constitutive of settler colonialism in Palestine.⁸ For example, the conviction, articulated by some members of Matzpen, that it was possible to undo Zionism while retaining characteristics of a “Hebrew nation” in Palestine was subject to fierce debates both before and after the June 1967 Arab-Israeli war. For Israeli Jews with a leftist orientation, this anxiety about what Jewish life might look like in a decolonized Palestine was part of a larger set of political questions about broader revolutionary change in the region. Many members of the Matzpen group understood that political and cultural transformation in the region—whether via a Pan-Arab socialist model or anti-imperialist revolutionary struggles more broadly—hinged on the liberation of Palestine and the dismantling of the Zionist state.⁹

The legacy of Matzpen certainly reveals aspects of the representational mechanisms that continue to empower settlers, including leftist, socialist, and self-declared anti-Zionist Israelis. At the same time, the archives contain elements of writing and imagery that point toward transformational perspectives in and beyond Palestine – regarding the meaning of anti-colonial struggles, socialism, the nation, imperialism, and potential forms of international solidarity. There was not a single ideological line within the groups associated with Matzpen about how to end Zionism, but members of the group shared a basic critique of capitalism and the occupation of historic Palestine. Reading this historical material “against the grain”¹⁰ points to the centrality of race-making within the logic of settler colonialism. While the archival material presented here does not easily map onto the contemporary political reality in Palestine, the images illuminate both continuities and evolution in critiques of Zionist ideology and practices. The images constructed from this printed material represent forms of struggle around what might be described as “memory work.” Despite the ongoing efforts to erase Palestinian life and memory by the Zionist entity, remembering forms of struggle can inform visions of a future liberated Palestine. My aim is to contribute, even if in relatively modest ways, to building these long term visions of futurity. 

In 1969, Matzpen published a booklet of definitions with graphics in woodblock print style. They included definitions of many aspects of Israeli society that run counter to prevailing norms there and use humor and sarcasm as a recruitment tool. In the words of the booklet itself, Matzpen is defined as “compass” and stands for the “monthly paper of the Israeli Socialist Organization” (ISO). The booklet continues, “If you are disoriented in the jungle of chauvinism, racism, clericalism, militarism (some of which is disguised as socialism)—you can use this compass to reach the ISO, which represents the revolutionary tendency in the Holy Land. Jews and Arabs are equally welcome.”¹¹ Ulpan refers to Hebrew language schools, often for immigrant settlers to Israel. This booklet aims to offer an alternative to this form of Zionist propaganda. The image of Che, whose legacy in 1969 signaled an international symbol of revolutionary movements, links critiques of the occupation of Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem after the 1967 war with global anti-colonial struggles.

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In this illustration, the star of David functions as a symbol for administrative detention. At a time when the Israeli state was solidifying its military and economic ties with apartheid South Africa in particular, Matzpen drew attention to structural similarities between the policies of many settler colonies. 

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In the booklet, a curious equivalence is drawn between forms of discrimination across geographies. Matzpen posits Zionism as a form of colonization but does not distinguish between these very different forms of discrimination. Although the nature of the booklet is pedagogical, Matzpen ends up flattening the specificity of racial difference as a structure of power and glossing over the nature of settler colonial domination in different places.

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The “Anti-Ulpan” booklet takes aim at two Zionist socialist organizations and parties who fuse militarism and a particular form of class consciousness that never fundamentally questions the logic of colonization. Mapam was a Zionist Labor party. The Maki party evolved out of the Palestine Communist Party and eventually supported Israel in the 1967 war. 

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Excerpt of an editorial published in ISRACA 2:

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The cover of ISRACA in January, 1973 visualizes an attempt to disentangle Jewish identity from the Zionist state building project. Although Matzpen consistently affirmed that Zionism was a continuation and an extension of European colonialism and imperial hegemony, this cover seems to implicate Jewish blindness to the realities on the ground in Palestine. While land appropriation, ethnic cleansing, and genocidal violence continued apace, many Jewish individuals became myopically focused on the meaning and significance of their cultural and religious identity in the wake of the Holocaust and the “establishment” of Israel.

Akiva Orr, in an article entitled “Generations and Cultures in Israel” in this issue, writes: “The enormous apparatus of Israeli propaganda amongst Jews throughout the world now pushes the line that identification with Israel resolves the Jewish identity complex. Identification with the ‘Jewish state’ is projected as the new meaning of ‘Jewishness’. As we have shown earlier, the meaning of secular Jewishness remains undefined in Israel, whereas the emerging Israeli Identity has more in common with other settlers’ states than with Jews. Anyone who bases his identity on identification with Israel must uphold the principle of discrimination by nationality, and the placing of nationalistic morality above universal morality.” ¹⁴

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Through the use of cartoonish forms, the original illustration examines the right granted to Russian (Ashkenazi) Jews to become Israeli citizens and the anti-Black racism common among those emigrating. In 1971, the Soviet Union lifted restrictions on Soviet Jews emigrating to Israel and between 1971 and 1973 approximately 75,000 migrants from the Soviet Union became Israeli citizens. The author notes continuities between the anti-Black racism of new emigres, the anti-Arab racism pervasive to Israeli society, and the explicitly racist citizenship policies of the Israeli state.

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Issue 7 was devoted to an examination of Communist parties across the Middle East. In the issue, author Avashai Ehrlich writes about the particular way that race and gender intersect in an essay entitled “Zionism, Demography and Women’s Work.”¹⁵ Using the racialized and racializing language of “Orient” and “Occident” to differentiate between Jewish workers of different ethnicities, Ehrlich examines how the Zionist project turns to women in the labor force as a solution to demographic concerns about Palestinian workers. The exploitation of Palestinian labor produces a conflict within the Zionist project, as the demand for cheap labor competes with the goal of expelling Palestinians. Ehrlich notes both the racial patterns of labor and reproduction within Jewish communities and the ways that these dynamics respond to and are a product of the attempts to control demographics within Israel.

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Excerpt from the pamphlet “Arabs, Jews, and Racists”:

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Just as there are a wide range of political perspectives, the images within the archives of Matzpen are heterogenous. Notably absent from the pages of the magazines are documentary photographs. Instead, graphic illustrations and cartoons are often used to caricature racial hierarchies. Sifting through fragments of the archives reveals close attention to race as a fundamental structure of the Zionist colonization of Palestine and at the same time, a persistent ambiguity related to the mythology of Zionism as a nationalist project. The text and images of the Matzpen archives reveal the ways that nationalism often functions as cover for the settler colonial project.

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Race, as it appears in the archives, is sometimes reduced to individual discrimination or  a by-product of capitalist exploitation. At other times, it appears as a series of contradictions among Jews of different ethnicities. As Stephen Halbrook has convincingly argued, the roots of Zionism and its structuring principles lie in the “white settlerdom” of Palestine. ¹⁷

The fragmentary pictures presented here attend both to the evolving nature of representations of race in the archives and the blind spots that accompany them.