John Clayden
An Army Like No Other: How the Israel Defence Force Made a Nation
Verso, 2020
by Haim Bresheeth-Zabner
Not long ago some of us went to demonstrate outside Hackney Police Station when we learnt the police were receiving training from the Israeli security services. Our MP Dianne Abbott turned up thereby no doubt sealing her own fate as far as the Labour Party is concerned.
It is after reading this book I have begun to get the much bigger picture of the phenomenon of the state that is Israel.
For example, without considering the nature of the training given, consider how many other police stations throughout the country and world-wide have been and still are being so trained. All of them have to pay for this so the amount paid to the Israeli government must be vast and this is only a small part of military systems, equipment and weapons they sell throughout the world. This amounts to a Military Industrial Complex (MIC) which as Haim Bresheeth-Zabner shows forms the basis of the Israeli economy and warded off economic decline.
Because a majority of countries worldwide are dependent on this industry it makes them dependent. In India until recently Russia provided most of India’s weapons now the majority of India’s military spending is to Israel.
Israel started developing surveillance and other systems to combat the PLO. These proved effective and were purchased by countries facing similar threats. These were followed by high tech weapons systems which were first developed by qualified Russian technologists. Its MIC grew as the Israeli state set up educational institutions and universities. These Israeli institutions set up research departments in many foreign universities, which have agreements with Israel which supplies lucrative grants to do their work.
So you can see that when students oppose Israeli genocide it is often seen by their universities, not just in political terms but as a possible financial loss to the Universities themselves. This vastly influential Israeli Military Industrial Complex is economically crucial, it is also the only activity which keeps the Israeli state economical alive.
Bresheeth-Zabner says that Israel failed to produce a working class because religious and ethnic divisions even among Jews were stronger than class. Palestinians before they were excluded were paid much lower rates than Jews for the same work. (An ex-miner I knew in Ashington who had worked down the pit in South Africa told me the blacks working alongside him were paid much less than white miners like himself.) Bresheeth doesn’t think there is any likelihood of class consciousness developing.
After the first Intifada when much to the surprise of the even the PLO the Palestinians rose up spontaneously, the Israelis decided the Palestinians were no longer sufficiently subservient, so they were excluded even from manual work and labourers were enticed in from countries with high unemployment, but on arrival they quickly discovered they were reduced to being indentured labourers, coolies. (Much as was the case with Indian and Chinese labour in the West Indies after the freed slaves refused to work in the plantations.)
The various non-Ashkenazi waves of Jewish immigrants failed to adapt to manual work or farming and were and still are poor and excluded although their political influence has grown as has that of the settlers. The gap between rich and poor in Israel is among the highest in the world, this is without taking into consideration the Palestinian population who have no control over their conditions and are in extreme poverty.
Furthermore there is no politics of any socialist nature which would seek to remedy these vast inequalities within the Jewish population. The only thing which unites and gives Israeli national identity to the various Jewish ethnic and religious groups is that they all have to serve in the IDF where they are trained in the most brutal methods to suppress the Palestinians; a mind-set which is inculcated from an early age even before school, and this induces a collective irrational paranoid fear of the Palestinians and the rest of the world. Bresheeth-Zabner says there are even posters depicting foetuses wearing military gear.
He says a long perceived Jewish threat from the goys is what motivated Zionism in the first place, and it was very real in parts of Europe but it never existed in the Ottoman empire of which Palestine was a part.
Although Zionism sought a safe haven for the Jews, it is ironic it largely shared the contemptuous view of The Jew held by European anti-Semites and for this reason Jews on entering parts of Palestine controlled by the Zionists and later Israel were forced to abandon their Yiddish culture and had to speak Hebrew. As these historic Ashkenazi links were broken, there was presented to the Zionist founders like Ben- Gurion a problem; namely on what was the nation’s self-awareness and national identity to be founded ?
Ben-Gurion and others decided that the only way this could be accomplished was to elevate the experience of universal service in the Israeli military forces so it would determine what it was or is to be an Israeli. This presents a problem for those from outside the state trying to gain an insight into the nature of what the Israeli state is. The almost universal conception that most people from other national perspectives have as to what a nation is and how its citizens see themselves, makes the almost unique Israeli situation difficult to grasp.
Ben-Gurion’s solution also presents another problem for it excludes the Palestinian People. This has been the case since the beginning of the Zionist project. In the original Israeli state the Palestinians comprised according to Bresheeth-Zabner at least 22% of the population and once the occupied territories were included they are in the majority. The military has made the brutal treatment of the Palestinians, since its inception a normality ,with merciless killing and destruction of the homes of the Palestinian population considered normal and even enjoyable . Today of course in the wider world, more and more especially young people are becoming aware of the genocide in Gaza, thanks to mobile phones and the internet etc. This book was written before the latest genocide. I have attempted to give what I think are some of the main points of the book but there is much more valuable information therein.
I have found Bresheeth-Zabner’s book very thought provoking. As Sun-Tzu advises “Know your enemy”. Bresheeth-Zabner has made a great contribution to that.
The lesson of the book is in my opinion that equal rights for all in Palestine can only exist beyond the Jewish exclusivity of Zionist ideology just as a true South African nation and national identity does now exist beyond the white superior ideology of the Apartheid state.
I highly recommend Haim Bresheeth-Zabner’s book and his undogmatic Marxist approach.
[Note about the author; Haim Bresheeth-Zabner teaches at SOAS in London; watch his video where he comments on the Palestinian marches. It begins: “There is a lot of nonsense begin talked about London being unsafe for Jews”
Labour Affairs 