In the early 1970s, Israeli officials began to take note of a disquieting phenomenon: the rise in pro-Palestinian sentiment on the European left, which in the aftermath of the Holocaust had been largely supportive of the Jewish state. The French youths who had declared 'we are all German Jews' after the arrest of the student leader Daniel Cohn-Bendit, whose German Jewish parents had fled to France in 1933, were now protesting against the Israeli occupation - Cohn-Bendit among them. Israel, like most occupying powers seeking to delegitimise an insurgency, detected the invisible hand of outside agitators. The culprits were identified as members of the Israeli Socialist Organisation, a groupuscule of about fifty anti-Zionist, left-wing Israelis, some Arab but mostly Jewish. The ISO was better known as Matzpen ('Compass'), after the party's newspaper. This 'gang of traitors', the head of the youth department of the Jewish Agency thundered, 'are the real initiators and planners of the poisonous Fatah propaganda against Israel . . . distributed in Britain and Europe'.

LRB 3 August 2006 | PDF Download