Israel: the making of a racist state – 2nd edition

The controversies of recent years have left many left-wingers scrambling for answers to key questions around Zionism, antisemitism, the history of Israel, and the Palestinian cause.

Why do supporters of Palestine insist on calling Israel a racist state? How did the conflict begin? Has the injustice inflicted on Palestinians come about in the decades since Israel’s birth, or was it always inherent in Israel’s nature?

rs21’s 2017 pamphlet, Israel: the making of a racist state, was a timely and succinct resource to answer those questions. Historian Neil Rogall traces the birth of the Israeli state, from the onset of small-scale Jewish migration to Palestine through to the establishment of the Israeli state in the military conflict of the late 1940s.

Included in this narrative is a detailed look at the assorted political ideas which together became known as Zionism, an ideology proposing a Jewish state in Palestine as a solution to the escalating persecution of Jews in Europe. Also documented is the all-important role of Britain – Palestine’s imperial ruler after World War One – in facilitating this project and savagely repressing any resistance from the indigenous Palestinians. The author also rebuts many of the Israeli propaganda claims that are still widely circulated today about the state’s founding – most notably, that this mass displacement of Arabs was an accident of war rather than conscious ethnic cleansing, or that 1948 represented a struggle for Jewish survival against Arab aggression.

In its new 2024 edition, extra chapters provide an explanation of the 1967 war, the failure of the Oslo Accords, the birth of Hamas, and the prospects today. A new afterword by Anindya Bhattacharyya charts the escalations of the international Palestine solidarity movement since the attacks on Gaza in winter 2023.

The pamphlet will be an invaluable resource for socialists arguing for solidarity with Palestine in the face of recent campaigns – waged by the Tories, the Labour Party and encouraged by the mainstream press – to delegitimise any fundamental opposition to Israel’s system of ethnic exclusion and discrimination.

As the foreword puts it:

“These facts matter because Israel’s founding set the pattern for its politics in the decades to come; preserving the Jewish ethnic predominance in Palestine established in 1948 has been the central obsession of Israeli government policy in the decades since. Grasping Israel’s origins is essential to understanding why Israel is necessarily a racist state.”