The Lions' Den by Susie Linfield

Author:Susie Linfield
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780300245196
Publisher: Yale University Press

Maxime Rodinson, Isaac Deutscher, and Albert Memmi belonged to roughly the same generation and shared many traits. Each emerged from poverty on the basis of outstanding intellectual abilities; each was a self-made man. Each came of age during the rise of fascism and, then, the Shoah; each subsequently observed, and cheered, the emergence of millions of people from colonial oppression into independence. Each adhered to principles that were anti-fascist, anti-colonialist, secular, and socialist, and defined himself as such. Each was a bridge between the Old Left and the New, and responded to the challenges the latter posed. Each was a brilliant intellectual. Yet each was wrong about a lot of things: for Rodinson, belief in a progressive Arab revolution; for Deutscher, faith in a democratized Soviet Union; for Memmi, expectation that Israel would become a secular and socialist beacon. Each was, I suspect, a disappointed man.

It was their attitudes toward Israel that separated them most radically—or, put another way, that starkly illuminated the ways in which their worldviews diverged. Rodinson, the traditional Communist and confirmed anti-Zionist, viewed Israel as at best a colonial fact and blamed it for the Middle East’s relentless political strife. Deutscher, the dissident Marxist, came to accept Israel as a result of the Shoah but turned sharply against it after its 1967 victory. Memmi, the anti-colonialist, believed that Jews and Arabs could and must achieve national independence in tandem. In the following chapter we will see how Fred Halliday, a New Leftist from a younger generation, navigated the tension between anti-colonialism and democratic values with which Rodinson, Deutscher, and Memmi had wrestled. For Halliday, too, Israel would become decisive, divide him from longtime friends and allies in Europe and the Middle East, and force him to reevaluate the bedrock principles of the New Left.

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