The Marxist Case for Israel: Defending the Workers Who Built the Land

“Labor is the source of all wealth, the political economists assert. And they are right.” 

— Karl Marx, Capital, Volume 1

It’s time to reframe the debate. For decades, the global left has increasingly aligned itself with narratives that cast Israel as a colonial aggressor. But if we return to the roots of Marxist principles, the defence of labour, the value of physical work, and the right of workers to build lives for themselves, then Israel is not the villain. It is the embodiment of exactly those values.

Early Zionist immigrants were not colonial powers backed by imperial armies. They were mostly refugees and workers, many of them poor Jews fleeing persecution in Europe and Russia, who arrived in Ottoman and later British-controlled Palestine to work the land, drain malarial swamps, build collective farms, and create self-sustaining communities.

They purchased land legally, often at high prices, from absentee Arab landlords. These were not colonial land seizures, but financial transactions, funded by labour unions, Jewish charities, and personal sacrifice. By 1947, Jews owned just 5–6 percent of the land in Mandate Palestine, yet they had transformed arid and neglected areas into productive farmland. If Marxism values those who produce and contribute to the economy, then it should value these people, not denounce them.

The first kibbutzim were not tools of capitalist exploitation, but socialist experiments in collective ownership. Workers shared property, responsibilities, and production. Many early Zionist leaders, including David Ben-Gurion, were committed socialists. The idea of building a Jewish homeland was tied not to wealth and power, but to physical toil, agrarian revival, and self-determination through labour.

The modern Jewish state was born not from conquest, but from decades of hard work. It was established in 1948 after the UN partition plan offered two states, one Jewish, one Arab. The Jewish leadership accepted the plan; the Arab leadership rejected it and launched a war. It is in this conflict that the narrative of dispossession begins, but it was not initiated by Zionist aggression. It was a response to the Jewish workers, builders, and refugees simply existing.

Where were the defenders of workers’ rights when Arab mobs attacked Jewish communities in Hebron in 1929, murdering over 60 Jews who had lived there peacefully for centuries? Where was international solidarity when Jews were blockaded in Jerusalem during the 1948 war, starved out for simply accepting a UN plan? These were attacks on labourers, on farmers, on people who built homes and institutions, not on imperialists.

Today’s left has drifted. It sees through a lens of power dynamics shaped by American or European histories, not Middle Eastern realities. It mistakes Jews, many of them brown, Mizrahi, refugees from Arab lands, for white colonisers. It ignores the fact that over 850,000 Jews were expelled from Arab countries after Israel’s creation, stripped of their assets and forced to start over. Where is their right of return?

The Marxist left used to stand with workers, regardless of race or religion. If it were consistent, it would recognise that Hamas and other Islamist factions do not represent workers or oppressed classes. They repress trade unions, imprison journalists, and enforce ideological conformity. Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have documented Hamas’s abuse of civilians in Gaza, including the violent suppression of protestors and the use of torture.

It is not Israel that bans unions or suppresses free expression, it is the de facto rulers of Gaza and parts of the West Bank. Palestinian workers deserve better, and Israeli workers, many of whom are from working-class backgrounds, should not be punished for defending their homes and families.

Furthermore, the land before the Zionists arrived was not a paradise of peaceful coexistence. Under the Ottoman Empire, the area was sparsely populated, underdeveloped, and plagued by disease. Many of the modern towns and infrastructure that exist today were built by Jewish immigrants and later Israelis. They did not “steal” a thriving civilisation, they helped create one in a place long neglected by its imperial rulers.

Palestinian nationalism, as a coherent political identity, did not emerge until the early 20th century, largely in reaction to Jewish immigration. That does not invalidate it, but it means that the conflict is not a case of ancient continuity being broken by foreign invaders. Both Jews and Arabs are indigenous in different ways, with complicated, overlapping histories in the land.

A Marxist view must prioritise material reality over romanticised or ideological distortion. And the reality is that Israelis, Jews and Arabs alike, are workers, farmers, builders, teachers, engineers. The left should not abandon them simply because they are inconvenient to a post-colonial narrative.

History is full of contradictions. But the idea that Israel is a colonial project in the same way that Belgium colonised the Congo is a profound misreading of history and Marxist theory. Israel is not an empire. It is the refuge of the formerly landless, the persecuted, and the working poor, many of whom arrived with nothing, and built something extraordinary.

A true Marxist lens sees through propaganda. It asks: who works, who builds, who produces? The early Zionists did. So do their descendants. And so do millions of Israeli citizens, Jewish, Arab, Druze, and others, who live, work, and contribute to society today.

They are not the enemy. They are the very people Marxists once stood up for. It’s time to remember that.