F. F. F. they don't come back. I imagine that may be the response many of you who listen to Navarre

FM may have to the very notion of an Israeli left and frankly that was once my response as well.

How is it possible to have a left-wing movement in a state built on stolen land?

I mean, I suppose you could say something similar about Britain,

fattened as it is on slave labor and colonial riches. It is undeniable

that Israeli Jews benefit from living in a Jewish ethnostate. It's also

arguable that Israeli Jews are both militarily and ideologically

conscripted into the Israeli state project through compulsory military service

and intensive state censorship.

Yet the notion that all Israelis are somehow complicit with Israeli apartheid,

now plausibly genocide, just by being there,

is reductive in a manner not dissimilar to conflating Palestinians with Hamas.

It also erases the decades-long struggle that leftists have waged to undermine the Israeli

state from within.

To be clear, I'm not talking about the so-called Labour Zionists who founded Israel, who started the

Kibbutzim with some fantasy of a socialist utopia exclusively for Jews and even then mostly

just the white ones. I'm talking about the revolutionary anti-Zionist movement Mutz-Pen,

about the Israeli Black Panthers, about Army Refusnik

organizations like Omet's Lesarev or courage to refuse, and more recently the activists

attempting to force the Palestinian question into the anti-government protests.

As this list suggests, the left in Israel has shrunk massively over the course of the 20th and 21st centuries.

The Hebrew term for leftist Smolani is now a slur in Israel and not just on the right.

...