Mr. Löwy, you are a Jewish man. How important is this identity to you today? Could you tell us a bit about your family history?

Michael Löwy - I am indeed Jewish, and this identity is very important to me. As much as my other identities: Brazilian (born in Brazil, where I lived for the first 23 years), French (I’ve lived in Paris since 1969) and internationalist... I’m not religious, Judaism for me is a history and a culture, which includes some important secularized spiritual moments (messianism, biblical prophecy). I have a lot of sympathy for Jewish socialist movements, such as the Bund, and for “non-Jewish Jews” (to use the concept proposed by Isaac Deutscher) who are internationalists, such as Karl Marx, Rosa Luxemburg and Leon Trotsky. I have enormous admiration for the heroes of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising and for the Jewish resistance fighters of the group led by Missak Manouchian [in France, during WWII], who were shot by the Nazis in 1944.

My parents were Jews from Vienna, sympathetic to Zionism and Austrian social democracy, who emigrated to Brazil in 1934. They were not very religious, but the family celebrated Hanukkah, Pesach and visited the synagogue on Yom Kippour, like most Central European Jews, who were quite assimilated. German was spoken at home, with a few words in Yiddish.

My dear brother Peter Löwy and his wife Susana left early (1954) for Israel (Kibbutz Bror-Chayl) and my mother went there in 1962, after my father died in an accident. In order to be close to my family, I went to Israel in 1964, but in 1968 I chose to leave the country. During those four years I studied Hebrew at kibbutz Ein Hashofet (Hashomer Hatsair), worked as a tractor driver at kibbutz Bror-Chayl, and taught at the Universities of Jerusalem and Tel-Aviv.

Curiously, during these years in Israel I had little interest in Judaism. It wasn’t until ten years later, in Paris, around 1978, that I began researching the elective affinity between Jewish messianism and libertarian utopias in the work of Jewish authors from Mitteleurope: Martin Buber, Gershom Scholem, Franz Kafka, Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch, among others. This work was published in several languages under the title Redemption and Utopia. The book won me a silver medal from the CNRS where I was working, but my aim was not academic: it was to propose a humanist, liberating Jewish culture, critical of capitalist modernity and the state. A possible alternative to the reactionary nationalist and/or intolerant religious tendencies that thrived in the Jewish community in France.

You lived in Israel and came into contact with the Zionist movement through your older brother. Can you tell us a bit about how this experience influenced your intellectual career and your socialist militancy?

My brother Peter and his wife Susana were very important to me. I admired them very much. It was Peter who gave me a copy of the Communist Manifesto, which made a deep impression on me. At the age of 15, I even attended a Machané (summer school) of the Zionist youth movement in which Peter and Susana participated, the Dror. I learned a lot about socialism from Dror, but soon decided that I wouldn’t go to Israel, but would stay in Brazil to fight for a socialist revolution in this country. My brother then suggested that I go and see Paulo Singer, a former Dror leader who had opted for socialism in Brazil. I became friends with Paulo Singer, who made me discover the work of Rosa Luxemburg, which was decisive for my intellectual and political career.

Currently, in Brazil, there is a heated debate in the progressive camp about the possibility of a “left-wing Zionism”. Those who defend the idea of a progressive or left-wing Zionism understand Zionism as a movement of Jewish national liberation. In your opinion, is this “left-wing Zionism” still viable today?

Left-wing Zionists see Zionism as a movement of Jewish national liberation and opponents of Zionism see it as a settler colonialist movement. Perhaps Zionism is a mixture of several things? I’ll quote a text by a Palestinian opponent of Zionism, Rashid Khalidi, a professor at Columbia University in New York, in a recent interview:

“Israel is by no means a typical settler colony; it is also a national project, with a significant biblical dimension, and a refuge from persecution. No colony has ever been such a refuge for the persecuted”. [1]

It could be argued that at the beginning, with the Balfour Declaration (1917), Zionism was a colonialist project, allied to British imperialism. But at the end of the 1930s, the British Empire changed its orientation and opposed the Zionists, trying to prevent Jewish immigrants from entering Palestine. The Jews who arrived in Palestine at this time were refugees from Nazism and, after 1945, survivors of the Shoah. They cannot be defined as “colonial settlers”: colonization implies a metropole that sends its settlers. Palestine was, until 1948, an English colony, but the Jews who came from the end of the 1930s were anything but “English settlers”. Discussing the creation of the State of Israel while ignoring the Shoah makes no sense.

There is an interesting text by another uncompromising opponent of Zionism, Leon Trotsky, which analyzes the situation in Palestine in 1940:

“The attempt to solve the Jewish question by immigrating Jews to Palestine can now be seen for what it really is: a tragic deception of the Jewish people. Interested in winning the sympathy of the Arabs, who outnumber the Jews, the British government has radically changed its policy towards the Jews, and has in fact renounced its promise to help them found their “own home” in a foreign country. The further development of military events could well turn Palestine into a bloody trap for hundreds of thousands of Jews. It has never been clearer than it is today that the salvation of the Jewish people is inseparably linked to the overthrow of the capitalist system”. [2]

You can argue with the argument, but Trotsky sees the contradiction between British imperialism and the Zionist project, and shows genuine concern for the fate of the Jewish community in Palestine.

Zionism at this time (1938-1948) was a very heterogeneous movement. We can distinguish at least three currents:

- a left-wing Zionism, in favor of a bi-national, Jewish-Arab state: this was Brit Shalom (Peace League), of Martin Buber, Gershom Scholem, Yehuda Magnes (rector of Jerusalem University), and the kibbutzim movement Hashomer Hatzaïr, sympathetic to communism. This position was also adopted by the Jewish-Arab Communist Party of Palestine.

- A “center-left” Zionism, the Laborism of David Ben Gurion, in favor of a Jewish state, whatever the cost, in a part of historic Palestine.

- A right-wing Zionism, founded by Jabotinsky - a Mussolini sympathizer - who wanted to impose a Jewish state from the banks of the Jordan to the sea.

The opposition between left-wing and right-wing Zionism was very clear. Albert Einstein and Hannah Arendt were sympathetic to left-wing Zionism. On the occasion of the visit of Menachem Begin, Jabotinsky’s heir, to the United States in December 1948, the two signed a declaration, together with twenty other American Jewish personalities, denouncing him and his party as “a mixture of ultra-nationalism, religious mysticism and racial superiority, similar to other fascist parties”.

The bi-national project failed because it was rejected by both communities: the Jews, who mostly supported Ben Gurion’s project, and the Palestinians, at the time led by the Mufti of Jerusalem, an anti-Semite sympathetic to Nazism during the Second World War. The partition of the country, decided by the United Nations in 1947, was not the ideal solution, but it was, under the circumstances, the only possible one.

How can the 1948 war be defined? For the Israelis, it was a war of independence, in defense of the Jewish community, against the invasion of the Arab countries (supported by England), which did not accept the partition of the country. For the Palestinians, a Zionist aggression resulting in the expulsion of 700,000 Palestinians, the Nakba (catastrophe ). Both interpretations contain part of the truth, but the result was that historic Palestine was divided between Israel and Jordan, and the Palestinian refugees were never allowed to return.

Today, left-wing Zionism is very marginal in Israel, where the disciples of Jabotinsky (Netanyahou !) predominate, along with other even more reactionary and neo-fascist forces. The main opposition is the Communist Party of Israel (Hadash), a Jewish-Arab movement that opposes the colonization of the West Bank and discrimination against Palestinians who are citizens of Israel.

How do you see contemporary anti-Zionism over the last twenty or thirty years? Do you agree with the views that associate Israel with a colony of white settlers?

It’s understandable that, in the eyes of the Palestinians, the Zionists appear as “white settlers”, as European invaders of their territory... But as we saw above, the story is a little more complex.

Obviously, there are anti-Zionist movements that are antisemitic: Hamas is a good example! But it doesn’t make sense to say, as official Zionist propaganda claims, that anti-Zionism is intrinsically anti-Semitic. The Jewish Bund was anti-Zionist, but no one can accuse it of anti-Semitism! The same goes for many left-wing movements and critical Jewish organizations (Jewish Voice for Peace) that are anti-Zionist without being anti-Semitic. You can argue about their analysis of Israel’s role, and their proposals for the conflict, but criticizing Netanyahou’s criminal government, or even the State of Israel as such, does not mean anti-Semitism.

There is no doubt that anti-Semitic arguments appear within the movements protesting against Israel and in solidarity with the Palestinians, but they are far from predominant. Moreover, today we have far-right, anti-Semitic movements and even governments that support the Israeli government; indeed, they would like all Jews to leave their countries to emigrate to Israel.

We must avoid superficial generalizations. By concretely analyzing an anti-Zionist movement or discourse, we can verify whether or not it is antisemitic.

How do you see Israel’s political history, especially in terms of its relations with the West and from a Western perspective since the Cold War?

I can’t give a history of Israel’s politics here, it would take a book... In a nutshell: in 1948 Israel appeared as an adversary of British imperialism, and a country where a left wing with sympathies for the Soviet Union had a lot of influence. This explains the Soviet support for the creation of the state at that time. But shortly afterwards, the Israeli government aligned itself with the United States in the Cold War. From that moment on (let’s say 1950) Israel appeared, from a geo-political point of view, as a bastion of the “West” and an unconditional ally of the United States.

In the debate on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, we often come across two extremist and opposing perspectives that, in our view, feed off each other: on the one hand, a right-wing discourse that defends Jewish supremacy from the River Jordan to the Mediterranean Sea, often preaching the expulsion of Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza Strip; on the other, a more left-wing discourse that defends Arab-Palestinian supremacy from the River to the Sea. How do you see this scenario?

In effect, these two discourses deny the rights of the “other nation”. But I wouldn’t say that they are equivalent: an old Leninist argument, which rejects all forms of nationalism, nevertheless states that the nationalism of the oppressors (in this case the Israeli government) is worse than that of the oppressed. This can be seen in the current conflict: the infamous Hamas terrorism, which has murdered more than a thousand people in Israel, most of them civilians, is far outstripped by Netanyahou’s terrorism, which has massacred 40,000 Palestinians, most of them women and children.

Until recently, there was a kind of implicit complicity between the two “extremes”: the Hamas suicide bombings during the Second Intifada favored the seizure of power by Netanyahou and his reactionary gang. And Netanyahou said a few years ago that he favored Qatari aid to Hamas, as an efficient way of dividing the Palestinians and preventing the creation of an independent Palestinian state.

The historic territory of Palestine, from the Jordan River to the sea, is the common homeland of two nations with equal rights. Any solution to the conflict must respect these rights.

Do you believe it is possible to overcome these dichotomous and revanchist perspectives surrounding the conflict? If so, in general terms, which way?

There are various proposals for overcoming the conflict: one state, two states, etc. But it seems to me that the fundamental thing is to start from the Leninist principle: the right of peoples to self-determination. Any proposal that respects this principle seems legitimate to me. At the moment, through the occupation of the West Bank, the Israeli government is denying the Palestinians’ right to self-determination and is imposing on this territory a process of colonization in the strict sense of the word: a metropole that sends settlers into the territory of another nation.

It seems to me that currently the only proposal that could have the support of the majority of both peoples would be a separation, on the basis of the 1967 border. I say “could” because, at the moment, I don’t know if the Israeli population would agree to leave the occupied territories. This implies the dismantling of Israeli settlements in the West Bank, the recognition of Jerusalem as the common capital of the two states, an end to discrimination against Palestinians in Israel, etc. The solution of a single state seems unrealistic to me at the moment, given the degree of mutual distrust between the two nations. The example of South Africa is not very suitable, since there was an 80% majority there (black Africans), which is not the case in the territory of historic Palestine. But in the future, after a period of transition, we could imagine a multi-national confederation, with two autonomous republics, as Yugoslavia was at the time of Tito. And perhaps, one day, part of a Union of Socialist Republics of the Middle East. But we’re a long way from that...

Although we don’t know how much you have been following the internal movements of Israeli society, we have seen the growth of important anti-occupation social movements and in defense of coexistence between Israelis and Palestinians. These are left-wing, socialist movements, almost always led by Jews and Palestinians, such as Standing Together, Peace Now and Women Build Peace. How do you see this phenomenon?

I see these movements as very positive, a hope for the future. We can add the Yesh Gvul movement, of soldiers who refused military service in the occupied territories, the protest movements against the Separation Wall, and the left-wing anti-colonialist movements. Not forgetting that the main left-wing Jewish-Arab opposition to the criminal Natanyahou government and its genocidal war against the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank is the Communist Party of Israel.

Speaking of internal politics and the history of Zionism: Israel was a state built on a collective, minority and, to a large extent, popular or at least participatory movement, founded on collective and cooperative farms, which was governed for thirty years by the Labor left. At what point did Israel come to be seen as a right-wing or imperialist state? Was there an alternative?

The “collective farms” - kibbutzim - were, despite their limits, a beautiful experiment in local communism, which Martin Buber, in his book on the “Paths of Utopia”, considered to be exemplary. But the State of Israel was, from the outset, a capitalist society in which the Palestinian minority was discriminated against. The social aspects that existed under the Labor governments were gradually hollowed out, before being entirely dismantled by the Likud governments. The kibbutzim were left isolated and under increasing pressure from the capitalist logic of the country. I don’t know what their future will be...

Over the last 20 years, Israeli politics has taken a sharp turn to the right, with long periods under Kadima/Likud management (2001-2021 and again 2022). In your opinion, what elements have contributed to this and what are the alternative ways of overcoming the current state of affairs?

Right now I can’t offer an explanation for the hegemony of the ultra-colonialist and racist right (Likud) and its current fascist associates (Smotrich, etc.). We mustn’t forget that it’s a global phenomenon, very influential in Europe, the United States, India, etc. Not to mention its equivalents in the Muslim world - ISIS, Iran, Saudi Arabia - and in Latin America: Bolsonaro, Millei, et al.

Alternative paths? Only the struggle of the anti-colonialists in Israel and the Palestinians. But the methods of struggle are very important. Terrorism - attacks on the civilian population - by Hamas and other Palestinian groups has favored the extreme right in Israel. Armed resistance against an occupying army is legitimate in principle, but in the case of Palestine a popular mass movement, using symbolic violence, is much more effective. The First Intifada was essentially such a movement. Its symbol was a picture of a Palestinian boy with a slingshot, facing an Israeli tank. It had a huge impact all over the world, arousing sympathy even within Israel. The result of the First Intifada was the only political victory achieved by the Palestinians so far: the Oslo accords and the formation of the Palestinian Authority. After the assassination of Isaac Rabin, Oslo was emptied by the Labour governments that continued to colonize the occupied territories, and, more brutally and directly, by the Likud governments. Little remains of this agreement today... Could a new non-violent Intifada facilitate the resurgence of a pacifist, anti-colonial movement in Israel? Perhaps. But without an internal opposition in Israel, the situation is unlikely to change.

You mentioned two very important anti-Zionist movements: the Bundist movement, which was active in Eastern Europe and Russia from the end of the 19^th century until it was extinguished by Stalinism and the Shoah, and Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), an American anti-Zionist movement which today serves as a reference point for other anti-Zionist movements around the world. We note that there is a significant change between them. While the Bundists saw anti-Zionism as part of a larger struggle, the class struggle to be waged in Russia itself and the constitution of a revolutionary Jewish proletariat, the JVP and similar movements seem to focus exclusively on the struggle against Zionism. How do you see this difference and the disappearance of the centrality of the class struggle in today’s anti-Zionist movements?

These are completely different realities... The Bund was a Marxist political party that tried to organize the Jewish proletariat - workers, artisans, street vendors, etc - in Eastern Europe. Obviously, its main objective was the class struggle, the fight for socialism and the national/cultural rights of the Jewish people. Anti-Zionism was a minor aspect of their activity, considering how little weight Zionism had in these countries before the Shoah.

Jewish Voice for Peace is not a political party, but a social movement around a specific issue, comparable, for example, to the Black Lives Matter movement. Its base is not made up of proletarians, but of students and young middle-class Jews. Some of these young people militate in a left-wing party, such as the Democratic Socialists of America, which stands for the class struggle. But the focus of the JVP is solely solidarity with the Palestinians and the manifestation of a “different Jewish voice”, opposed to the Zionist establishment and its unconditional support for all Israeli governments, including the current criminal Netanyahou.

Some of the JVP’s theses can be criticized, for example its definition of the State of Israel as colonial since 1948, or its proposal for a solution to the conflict: a democratic state of Jews and Palestinians, “from the Jordan River to the sea”. But in no way could he play a role in the class struggle comparable to the Bund. And his criticism of Zionism cannot be accused of “antisemitism”. On the contrary, the existence of the JVP contributes to delegitimizing certain forms of antisemitism, which confuse all Jews with the government of Israel.

The Bund was certainly right to fight for socialism in Poland, but after the Shoah, many of the Jewish survivors in Eastern Europe decided to leave for Israel, which is perfectly understandable.

In your interview, you brought up a very strong message that resonates deeply with my feelings as a left-wing Jew. I would like to know if this is the meaning you wanted to convey: that, both in Israel and beyond, we Jews must not lose sight of the fact that the Jewish messianic horizon must be that of an internationalist emancipation?

If we read the biblical prophets again, we realize that their messianism had a universalist character. The famous messianic pacifist appeal, lo issa goy el goy herev, ve lo ilmedu od milchama, “no nation shall lift up the sword against another, and war shall no longer be taught”, is addressed to the whole of humanity. Undoubtedly, the “non-Jewish Jews” internationalists referred to by Isaac Deutscher in his famous essay - Rosa Luxemburg, Leon Trotsky and many others - were atheists and did not refer to the messianic tradition. But as Deutscher notes, their internationalism had deep Jewish social and cultural roots.

Among the central European Jewish thinkers I have studied, we find an “elective affinity” between Jewish messianism and libertarian utopianism. For example, in the writings of Walter Benjamin, messianism and historical materialism come together in the internationalist struggle against fascism. Despite his friendship with Gershom Scholem, Benjamin did not want to emigrate to Israel, preferring to take part in the internationalist struggle for socialism in Europe, a choice he paid for with his life. The German Jewish anarchist Gustav Landauer, who took part in the Munich Workers’ Council Revolution in 1919 (and was assassinated by the military when the revolution was defeated) considered that Jews had an international messianic/revolutionary role in modern history: their mission, their vocation, their task was to contribute to transforming society and creating a new humanity.

Obviously, the Jewish messianic tradition has also been the object of reactionary, oppressive nationalist interpretations, as in the so-called Bloc of Faith of the religious Zionist settlers occupying the West Bank. But we must not abandon the Jewish messianic tradition to these adversaries...

You studied liberation theology and Jewish messianism as religious expressions that sought to realize an earthly and emancipatory utopia. Nowadays, however, we see the growth of religious fundamentalisms - Christian, Jewish and Islamic - that go in the opposite direction to these ideas. Isn’t the strength of these fundamentalisms today a reflection of an apocalyptic vision that is gaining weight amid a widespread sense of crisis, collapse and even the end of the world?

We are in fact witnessing a growth in these intolerant fundamentalisms, which can be seen as a religious variant of neo-fascism, which is also developing on a large scale in “profane” movements. In France, for example, the main force of neo-fascism, Marine Le Pen’s party, is not at all religious. And in Brazil, neo-Pentecostalism is just one of the components of Bolsonaro’s neo-fascism.

Do fundamentalisms draw their strength from the sense of crisis and even the end of the world? Maybe. But the main crisis and “end of the world” threat of our time is the ecological crisis and climate change, which could effectively bring humanity to the brink of the abyss within a few decades. However, a common characteristic of these “religious neo-fascisms” is their total lack of interest in the climate crisis, their denial of the danger it represents, and their categorical opposition to any ecological measure, which they reject as “communism”.

I feel that we still don’t have a pertinent explanation for this spectacular growth, in the most diverse countries of the world, of neo-fascist leaders and movements, some religious, others not. In each country we can find specific explanations, but we lack an analysis of the planetary phenomenon...

You recognize that Hamas is an anti-Semitic group and that anti-Semitism can also manifest itself in the form of anti-Zionism. How do you qualify or understand this type of antisemitism?

If a movement like Hamas cites in its anti-Zionist documents the Protocols of the Sages of Zion, a famous forgery by agents of Tsarism at the beginning of the 20^th century, this is obviously antisemitism. The “anti-Zionists” who deny or consider as an “exaggeration” the Nazi genocide against the Jews are antisemites. Those who accuse the “Zionist lobby” of controlling the world’s banks, press and governments are generally antisemites. The “anti-Zionist” who spray-paints a synagogue to protest against Israel’s policies is an anti-Semite. Et cetera.

There are other anti-Zionist arguments that may be “outside the bounds” of what is acceptable - “expelling Zionist students from universities”, or “destroying the Zionist entity (Israel)” - but they are not necessarily anti-Semitic in the strict sense of the word.

That said, most of the protests in solidarity with Palestine, and against the criminal (if not genocidal) policy of the Israeli government, cannot be characterized as anti-Semitic.

Finally, what message would you leave for young people, especially Jews and left-wingers, who feel culturally identified with Israeli society, and for young Arabs or non-Arabs, left-wingers, who are in solidarity with the Palestinian people?

To be left-wing is to be internationalist, and to think on the basis of universal principles : the right of peoples to self-determination, against colonialism and the military occupation of other nations. A just peace, respecting these principles, is in the interests of both Israelis and Palestinians. Ultimately, as Trotsky said, only with socialism will we have a world without social, racial or national oppression. But that doesn’t stop us from fighting for concrete solutions, here and now, that are a step on the road to a socialist future.

I would like to conclude this conversation with a quote from the great Latin American revolutionary José Carlos Mariategui. Mariategui, who had great sympathy for the Jewish people, was not hostile to Zionism, but believed in the internationalist vocation of the Jews. In a 1927 article entitled “Israel and the West” he wrote:

“Ostracism has lasted so long and made the Jewish people so great that they can no longer be content with their land of origin and, after Marx, their last great prophet, their homeland is the world”.

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