He was a Zionist.

THE CLAIM

The charge circulates online, built almost entirely on one op-ed: “Attacks on Israel Ignore the Long History of Arab Conflict,” published in the Burlington Free Press on May 4, 1986 (often misdated later).

THE CRITIQUE — IN HIS OWN FRAMEWORK

The label did not come from nowhere, and honesty serves Murray better than defense — so the critique comes first. The 1986 piece fails tests he set everywhere else. It treats the Palestinian catastrophe as a byproduct of the 1948 Arab invasion and of later regimes’ cynicism — refugees “used … as pawns” — and passes over what the documentary record establishes: roughly 750,000 Palestinians displaced in 1947–49, more than 400 villages depopulated, expulsions ordered and carried out (Plan Dalet, March 1948; Lydda and Ramle, July 1948), and massacres that accelerated flight (Deir Yassin, April 1948).

It generalizes something real — the Haifa appeals urging Arab residents to stay — into a broad claim that “many Arabs remained” disproves expulsion. The same archives record both the appeals and the expulsions; the roughly 156,000 Palestinians who remained lived under Israeli military rule until 1966. It says nothing of Zionism’s settler-colonial formation — the Balfour Declaration’s promise of a “national home” in a land then about ninety percent Arab; land purchases that dispossessed tenant farmers; the movement’s own institutional vocabulary of “colonization”; Jabotinsky’s 1923 “Iron Wall,” which argued openly that colonization must advance behind force because the native population would resist it.

And its title frame — a “long history of Arab conflict” — essentializes a people, exactly the parochialism his internationalism forbade. He was right that pre-Zionist coexistence was no idyll; the comparative scholarship nonetheless finds Jewish life under Islam, though unequal, substantially safer than under Christendom. Both the rosy myth and the eternal-enmity frame flatten history.

One point of fairness: the Israeli archives that established the expulsion record began opening with Benny Morris’s first edition in 1987 — the year after the op-ed. But Murray had twenty more years and never revisited the piece. The conclusion belongs in his own key: his tools — the critique of nationalism, of statecraft, of “my enemy’s enemy” — require naming the Nakba and the occupation as products of nation-state formation exactly as the op-ed names the Arab regimes’ ambitions. Anti-nationalism that cuts only one way becomes statecraft’s alibi.

IN GOOD FAITH — THE RECORD

With the critique given its full weight, good faith requires the rest of the record. Read the op-ed itself: Murray’s stated hope in it is “a Swiss-like confederation of Jews and Arabs” — a binational confederation, not a Jewish nation-state. Political Zionism is, precisely, a nation-state project; Murray’s mature corpus rejects the nation-state as such, every nation-state, in terms as absolute as he ever used: “Nationalism has always been a disease.” He condemned “national liberation” state-building universally, named ethnic cleansing and wars for territorial gain in the Middle East as regressive, and opened the very op-ed in question by criticizing Israeli policy — “particularly under the Likud government which orchestrated the invasion of Lebanon.” He belonged to no Zionist current at any point in his life. His political formation — recounted in his own “The Left That Was” (1991) and his autobiographical interviews — was the Communist youth movement of the 1930s Bronx, the Young Pioneers and the Young Communist League, a movement whose line in those years condemned Zionism as bourgeois nationalism.

What the op-ed actually was: a defense of Israel’s population against annihilationist rhetoric, and of Jews against a left he believed had normalized anti-Jewishness. Holding that Israelis must not be driven into the sea is not Zionism, and a man whose entire politics denied the legitimacy of any state makes an odd recruit to an ethnostate’s cause. Read the op-ed beside his “Nationalism and the ‘National Question’” and assess which is the deeper Bookchin.

“For years I had hoped that Israel or Palestine could have evolved into a Swiss-like confederation of Jews and Arabs.”

— BURLINGTON FREE PRESS, MAY 4, 1986 · READ THE FULL TEXT ↗

“Frontiers have no place on the map of the planet, any more than they have a place on the landscape of the mind.”

— “NATIONALISM AND THE ‘NATIONAL QUESTION,’” 1993, IN FREE CITIES · FIND THE BOOK →

Sources for this entry: Benny Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited (2004) · Ilan Pappé, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (2006) · Rashid Khalidi, The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine (2020) · Avi Shlaim, The Iron Wall (2000) · Patrick Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native” (2006) · Mark R. Cohen, Under Crescent and Cross (1994).