Israel in Revolution—Matzpen, the Palestine Conflict, and the Hebrew Nation

The article presents a short history of the Matzpen group and aims at scrutinizing their history as a possible approach to broader questions of Jewish, Israeli, and general history. Starting with the political origins of the group as split from Israeli communism, it concentrates mostly on Matzpen’s dealing with the Palestine conflict. Based on a socialist “horizon of expectation”, Matzpen struggled for a so-called de-Zionization of Israeli society and simultaneously for the recognition of Israeli Jewry as a Hebrew Nation within the Arab world. It concludes by discussing the central tension arising from the Israeli Left’s struggle for a Hebrew nation and a socialist revolution. It led them to maintain distance from a new collective notion of Jewishness after Auschwitz, which regarded the existence of a Jewish state as a guarantee for Jewish life after the Holocaust.