Introduction

The terms ‘left’ and ‘right’ are widely used to designate political positions, but they are now much abused in common parlance and in the media, and as a result the online resource Wikipedia writes: “Despite the prevalence and durability of these terms, there is little consensus on what it actually means to be Left or Right at the present time.”[1] When there is a breakdown in the meaning of words that are widely used in one domain of social life, one solution for the social scientist is to invent new technical terms. In this particular case, however, I predict that whatever connotations of ‘left’ and ‘right’ the reader was using would immediately be mapped to whatever terms I chose to innovate, abolishing any benefit. So, given that my purpose is to rescue the -- still surviving -- main meanings of these words, I have concluded that what I must do is confront the current confusion head on: I will keep the terms and I will explictly defend my way of using them as the most sensible.

Despite the breakdown in meaning, the original uses of these words are not in doubt. In its list of possible meanings of ‘left’ and ‘right,’ Wikipedia gives the following first:

“Support for the economic interests of the less privileged classes as part of the left, or of the more privileged as part of the right. …this issue of class interests was the original meaning of the dichotomy.”

Where did the dichotomy arise? At the time of the French Revolution. Wikipedia states:

“The terms Left and Right have been used to refer to political affiliation since the early part of the French Revolutionary era. They originally referred to the seating arrangements in the various legislative bodies of France, specifically in the French Legislative Assembly of 1791, when the moderate royalist Feuillants sat on the right side of the chamber, while the radical Montagnards sat on the left.”

So, in the context of the French Revolution, which gave birth to these terms, the opposition of the ‘right’ and ‘left’ had a rather clear meaning, which I sense is still the main meaning, despite the modern confusion. I have therefore chosen to isolate these meanings from other meanings in order to clean these words up and turn them into useful technical terms for the practice of social science.

My definitions are as follows:

Left : defends the interests of the many against the interests of the wealthy few.

Right : defends the interests of the wealthy few against the interests of the many.

Notice, first, that the above definitions are broad, so they admit of all sorts of qualifiers, such as ‘radical leftist,’ ‘extreme right-winger,’ ‘center-right,’ ‘moderate left,’ etc., but the basic contrast remains. Thus, for example, if you are on the ‘moderate right’ you do not favor sadistic oppression of workers, but neither do you want the workers to be in power; if you are on the ‘moderate left’ you favor reforms that will improve the lives of the workers, but you are not calling for revolution. The most extreme right-wing system will be a slave-making state run by a tiny, sadistic, and wealthy aristocracy. The most extreme left-wing system will be a state where the working and middle classes are not merely free to make choices in every domain of life, but where they also constitute the overwhelmingly dominant force in politics. Further, since my definitions are broad and identify merely whose interests one supports, they do not say a thing about one’s proposed solution to a perceived problem. In other words, for example, my terms in no way require that a leftist opposes private property and market economics, or that a rightist favors them. I think this is a sensible way of speaking, because disagreements about proposed solutions are secondary to the question of whose interests one is trying to advance.

Second, my terms are descriptive, not normative. In other words, the above definitions do not say that the left is ‘good’ and the right ‘bad,’ though if you are a leftist you will naturally tend to map this normative equivalence to the terms, because your politics are always, inevitably, about your values. Conversely, if you side with the wealthy few, then the left will be ‘bad.’

Third, it is possible to be on the left -- as per my definitions -- and simultaneously to tell people that you are on the ‘right’ because the way these terms are now abused in common parlance and in the media has affected you, or because you wish to spread disinformation about yourself or about the thing you are supporting or opposing. The converse -- being on the right but saying that you are on the ‘left’ -- is likewise possible. This is the most important point here, so I will rely on a few historical examples to make myself clear, before moving to the case of Israel, my ultimate quarry.

The Soviet Union
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I claim that the Soviet Union was an extreme right-wing system. Why?

First, in the Soviet Union the workers were coerced to live and work in a certain way, and imprisoned or murdered if they disagreed, by the millions. So there was no liberty.

Second, those who benefited were a tiny elite in the Communist Party that monopolized political power and lived in considerable luxury from the fruits of the oppressed workers. In other words, in the Soviet Union the workers were the slaves of the Communist Party elite. So there was no equality. (By the way, it is precisely because the Soviet Union made slaves that, like any slave-making state, it developed a problem with runaway slaves -- e.g., athletes going to an international competition who took advantage of the trip to escape. These were called ‘defectors,’ which strikes me as a rather tendentious label for wanting to impute to the act of escape a propagandistic ideological statement. Merriam Webster Online gives the following definition of to defect: “to forsake one’s cause, party, or nation for another often because of a change in ideology.” But the desire not to live under conditions of extreme oppression seems to me quite enough to motivate escape.)

Third, in the Soviet Union people had to be careful because anybody -- one’s neighbor, co-worker, etc. -- might be reporting one’s activities or statements to the authorities. So there was no fraternity.

The goals of the French revolutionaries, who bequeathed to us the meaning of the term ‘leftist,’ were liberty, equality, and fraternity. All three were absent in the Soviet Union, and then some. It follows that the Soviet Union was not a leftist state. The Soviet Union is one of the worst things that ever happened to the workers.

And yet everybody talks about the Soviet Union as a ‘leftist’ system. Why?

Several reasons. The Soviet Union was created after the triumph of the Russian Revolution. The Russian Revolution was a pro-worker movement,[2] and the Soviet leaders after the revolution always continued to claim to be ‘leftist’ in their propaganda (when they murdered the workers, it was in the name of the workers…). They also financed the growth of movements in various parts of the world that likewise called themselves ‘leftist.’ But a social scientist may not take official propaganda and turn it into the foundation of his analysis. Joseph Stalin destroyed the revolution and re-enslaved the workers, so it is absurd to call his and subsequent Soviet systems ‘leftist.’ Neither were many of the Soviet-sponsored movements leftist in the least. For example, almost every supposedly ‘leftist’ government and movement that the Soviet Union sponsored in the Arab world was right-wing -- and some of these supposed ‘leftists’ had been enthusiastic allies of the Nazis in WWII. Not coincidentally, the Soviet Union became an enemy of Israel, which was a genuinely leftist state.

But it was not just Soviet propaganda that pushed the interpretation of the Soviet Union as ‘leftist’: the ruling elites in the West -- the same ones that determine how the Western media talks -- also pushed this equivalence. Why did they? In my view, because by identifying the nightmare that was the Soviet Union with the ‘left,’ they harmed the prestige of worker movements in the West, the same movements that the wealthy Western elites had an interest in undermining. After all, why would workers in the West want to be enslaved like those in the Soviet Union? If that’s what the ‘left’ promised, the workers would want nothing to do with the ‘left.’ This was a brilliant strategy, especially because many Western leftists assisted it by offering contorted defenses of the Soviet Union. The consequence? The Western state which developed the sharpest public confrontation with the Soviet Union has also had the weakest worker movements and in consequence the starkest inequalities in the industrialized world: the United States.

The United States
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The United States has two large right-wing parties, both of them controlled by the wealthy elites. One of them, the Democratic Party, sometimes pretends to be on the ‘left,’ but the pretense does not affect the reality. Since neither party cares about defending the workers, the terms ‘right’ and ‘left’ -- because they must describe politics that happen almost entirely on the right -- have taken, in the United States, rather narrow meanings that moreover appear not to describe anything that actually happens. Thus, for example, many Americans have learned to think of the ‘right’ as standing for smaller government and fiscal responsibility, and the ‘left’ for bigger government and fiscal profligacy. At one time, this was grounded in the traditional meanings of the terms, because leftists originally became enamored of big government as a way of correcting the disproportionate advantages of the wealthy few, redistributing income to the many; whereas those on the right -- representing the interests of the wealthy -- naturally opposed this. But the one balancing the budget and dismantling the welfare apparatus (already the smallest in the West before his surgery) was Bill Clinton, from the supposedly leftist party; whereas the ones massively increasing government spending while slaughtering the tax revenues were Ronald Reagan and George Bush Jr., supposedly on the right. In my terms, they are all on the right, because the combination of fewer government services and tax breaks for the rich -- the combined policy of both parties -- benefits the wealthy few and hurts the unwealthy. In the United States, a party representing the unwealthy simply does not exist, and in Bush Jr.’s tax policies (and tax enforcement regime) even the middle class is under attack.[3] The ones who benefit are the very, very wealthy.

The use of the terms ‘right’ and ‘left’ has also become rather strange in Israel. Just as the United States does not have a significant left-wing, Israel has never had a significant right-wing when it comes to issues unrelated to the Arab-Israeli conflict. Just as all politics in the United States is conducted on the right, because both major parties are right wing, most politics in Israel are conducted on the left, and this skew, as in the mirror-image that is the United States, accounts for the curious manner in which these terms are used in Israel. But to better grasp the problems with these terms as they are used in Israel, it will be useful to discuss first where the German Nazis fit, something that I doubt will elicit much controversy.

The German Nazis
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According to my definitions of ‘left’ and ‘right,’ the German Nazis were an extreme right-wing movement because they viciously attacked the working and middle classes, turning everybody into the victim of a racist, autocratic, and totalitarian policy, or else rewarding those with correct ‘racial’ background and ‘good’ behavior by turning them into proud cannon fodder. Again agreeing with my technical terms is the fact that this movement was generously financed by the wealthy German (and American[4]) elites, and it came to power by defeating genuine leftists.

The promotion of racism -- a specialty of the German Nazis -- has traditionally worked quite well for the extreme right wing. When racism is not providing the justification for the elite oppression of a particular group (e.g. blacks in the US), it helps pit the workers against each other, distracting them and weakening their political resistance to the depradations of the upper classes.  Either way, racism can only benefit ruling elites, never the unwealthy. The Nazis were particularly adept in the promotion of racism, which they deployed to create a slave-making state, with Jews working until they were executed in death camps, and prisoners of war from the Soviet Union and many other places worked to death in Nazi factories that produced war materiel with which to bring more slaves. The culmination of the Nazis’ specifically anti-Jewish policy is known as the Final Solution: the effort to kill every last Jew in Europe.

Now, it turns out that the controlling core of the so-called Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) -- Al Fatah -- traces its roots to the Nazis. Al Fatah was created by veterans of Hajj Amin al Husseini’s Arab Higher Committee.[5] Hajj Amin al Husseini, from his position as Mufti of Jerusalem, had used his Arab Higher Committee to organize large terrorist riots against innocent Jews in British Mandate ‘Palestine’ in the 1920s and 30s, so he naturally felt a great affinity with Adolf Hitler, who in fact supplied the weapons for the largest such conflagration, which was called the ‘Arab Revolt’ (1936-37). So when the World War exploded Hitler recruited Hajj Amin as a leader of his Final Solution, and Hajj Amin organized tens of thousands of Bosnian Muslim volunteers into large SS units that played a major role in the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of Serbs, Jews, and Roma (Gypsies) in Yugoslavia. He was also instrumental in the extermination of hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews and in speeding up the killings in the death camps.[6] After the war, Hajj Amin al Husseini mentored Yasser Arafat and it was his own Arab Higher Committee that created Al Fatah, Arafat’s organization, which by 1970 had swallowed up the PLO.[7] This naturally means that the PLO -- which, true to its heritage, calls for the extermination of the Jews in its founding charter[8] -- is an extreme right-wing organization.

Israel
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So here is the contradiction: it is precisely those who call themselves ‘leftists’ who have pushed for an Arab state in the West Bank and Gaza run by the PLO. This absurdity obtains generally but we are talking about Israel, where there is a surprisingly large contingent of Jews who have pushed hard for this suicidal outcome, and who call themselves not merely ‘leftists’ but proponents of ‘peace’!

By symmetry, those opposed to the PLO are called…‘rightists.’ This label is applied especially to the religious Jews in Israel, which brings us to the next curiosity. Religious Jews are people who take the Torah (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy) quite seriously. The Torah is also known as the Five Books of Moses, or the Law of Moses, and it happens to be a radically leftist law. The Law of Moses is carefully designed to protect the workers from the repressive excesses of the wealthy elites -- not coincidentally, it is based on the story of a successful slave revolt (Exodus), after which the successful revolutionaries created a utopian law to forever protect the lower classes.[9] Therefore, the religious Jews in Israel, keepers of a radically leftist law, and bitter enemies of the PLO, an extreme right-wing organization, are of course leftists, but the media calls them ‘right-wingers’ and as a result many religious Jews have learned to call themselves that too -- particularly since they feel a need to distinguish themselves from the alleged ‘leftists’ who mistakently believe that supporting the enemies of the Jewish state is a strategy to achieve peace.

What explains these curiosities in the use of the terms ‘right’ and ‘left’ in Israel? Are they tethered in any way to the traditional meanings of ‘left’ and ‘right’?

Yes. The so-called ‘peace’ camp in Israel is traditionally tied to the Labor party, and the Labor party emerged out of what was a radically leftist movement among those who founded the state of Israel. Before the state of Israel was declared in 1947-48, the Yishuv (the Jewish community in what became modern Israel) was dominated by a collection of unions and their associated political parties. These leftists were opposed by the Revisionists: liberal democrats who did not frown on private property and did not like collectivization. The Revisionist camp and its descendants traditionally received support from religious Jews, which in some ways makes sense: the Labor Zionists were largely secular, and believed in collectivization, whereas the Law of Moses, though radically leftist, has never frowned on private property.

A series of mergers eventually brought together the various leftist parties in what became the ‘Labor Alignment’ that produced the Labor Party. For its part, the Likud party is a descendant of Menachem Begin’s Herut, which grew out of the Revisionist movement. Likud has identified itself with the ‘right,’ in opposition to Labor, and has favored market economics. Since religious Jews were more on the Likud side than Labor, they ended up identified with the ‘right.’ But these are liberal democrats -- there is no far right in Israel.

It was those in Labor who originally developed the argument that ‘peace’ would result from empowering the PLO, and it is for this reason that this position has become identified as a ‘leftist’ one. It isn’t, however. No matter where you originally come from, if you are now supporting extreme right-wing terrorists descended from the German Nazis your claim to be on the left is suspect, to put things mildly.

There is, however, an additional argument behind the identification of PLO supporters in Israel as ‘leftist.’ Support for the downtrodden is of course a traditionally leftist position, so the media representation of the West Bank and Gaza Arabs as a third-world people oppressed by supposed Israeli ‘colonialists’ is meant to activate associations in the brain based on the original and main meaning of ‘leftist.’ This has been assisted by the fact that, during the Cold War, the PLO spouted leftist slogans in public. However, this media representation contradicts reality. Israel acquired the West Bank and Gaza defending itself from a genocidal Arab attack, not in a war of conquest.[9a] And it is simply false that the West Bank and Gaza Arabs are oppressed by the Israelis -- it is trivial to document that these Arabs were much better off when directly governed by the Israelis.[9b] The West Bank and Gaza Arabs are oppressed by the PLO, which makes sense because the PLO is an extreme right-wing movement, and any such movement will always oppress the majority once in power. The PLO ‘police’ has routinely tortured or murdered any Arab who disagrees with it, which has led the Arabs to refer to this police as the “death squad,” a moniker that speaks volumes (despite some recent propaganda to the contrary, Hamas is not different -- they are also in the business of oppressing Arabs who disagree with them, and have in fact cooperated extensively with the PLO to oppress Arabs).[10] The PLO leadership has also been notorious for stealing the monies ostensibly contributed for the welfare of the Arab population in the West Bank and Gaza, using this money to live in luxury while the rest of the Arabs chafe. Obviously, support for a PLO state, which has characterized so many people on the Israeli so-called ‘left,’ cannot have anything to do with compassion for ordinary Arabs, and so this is not really a leftist position. It is the Israeli patriots, who oppose the PLO, who are in fact defending ordinary Arabs.

There is also an additional argument supporting the identification of Israeli patriots with the ‘right’ that must be examined: the widespread perception among Israeli patriots that the American ‘right’ defends Israel. While it is true that many ordinary people who identify themselves as Christian conservatives in the US, and who tend to vote Republican, support Israel against its terrorist enemies, the Republican Party’s own rhetoric of support for Israel is completely contradicted by its actual policies. It was a Republican President, George Bush Sr., who threatened Israel for 8 months until it forced the Israelis to participate in a diplomatic process that would bring the PLO -- then completely defeated, and in Tunisian exile -- into the Jewish state! Bush and his Secretary of State, James Baker III, threatened Israel with the denial of all US economic support (coinciding with a moment of great need in Israel, for there were hundreds of thousads of immigrants from the Soviet Union to resettle), plus the threat that the US would decide the future of the Middle East with the Arabs and without consulting Israel, if the Israelis did not go to the Madrid ‘peace’ talks that became the platform for the Oslo ‘peace’ process. The threats worked.[11] This was perhaps the single most detrimental policy to the security of the Jewish state in its entire history, and it was pushed through by the leadership of the Republican Party -- though of course the leadership of the Democratic party loves this policy too.

Let us now reflect on who benefits from the identification of PLO supporters with the ‘left’ and Israeli patriots with the ‘right.’ The propaganda against Israel is that it is supposedly a racist state oppressing a third-world population. In other words, Israel is slanderously accused of being an extreme right-wing state: the Israelis are supposed to be the ‘new Nazis’ and the West Bank and Gaza Arabs are supposed to be the ‘new Jews’! This is assisted in the media by the representation of PLO supporters as ‘leftists’ and Israeli patriots as ‘right-wing extremists’ (consult the footnote for an example).[11a] If Israeli patriots identify themselves as being on the ‘right,’ they assist the propaganda of their enemies.

George Orwell famously explained that the point of a propaganda that inverts the meanings of words (“war is peace,” “freedom is slavery,” “the left is the right”…) has for purpose making it impossible for ordinary people to speak in such a way that they can think clearly about their political situtation, making their self-defense impossible. Across the ages, propaganda mobilized against the Jews has been terribly effective, as evidenced by the mass killings of Jews that have been one of the most reliable features of Western ‘civilization’ (most centuries, for the last 2000 years, have contained at least one great anti-Jewish bloodletting).[12] In my view, Israeli patriots, rather than adopting the absurd Newspeak of their enemies, thus assisting their own destruction, should confront and deny this way of speaking. They should point out to their so-called ‘leftist’ brethren that the policies which Israeli ‘leftists’ support are not leftist in the least, nor do they really express any compassion for the West Bank and Gaza Arabs; and they should point out, also, that the Law of Moses which so many secular Jews find uninteresting is actually the historical inspiration for Western progressive politics, and therefore for the modern socialist movements that these Israeli leftists are so fond of. This strategy contains the possibility of Enlightenment, which is the only thing that can bring the Jews together to effectively defend Israel. To use the language of the enemy, by contrast, will be to continue to assist him.

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Footnotes and Further Reading
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