Moshé Machover

Moshé Machover (Hebrew: משה מחובר; born 1936) is a mathematician, philosopher, and socialist activist, noted for his writings against Zionism. Born to a Jewish family in Tel Aviv, then part of the British Mandate of Palestine, Machover moved to Britain in 1968 where he became a naturalised citizen. He was a founder of Matzpen, the Israeli Socialist Organisation, in 1962.

Moshé Machover
Born1936 (age 86–87)
Tel Aviv, Mandatory Palestine
NationalityIsraeli
CitizenshipBritish
Alma materHebrew University of Jerusalem
Scientific career
FieldsMathematics
Philosophy
InstitutionsKing's College London
Doctoral advisorsAndrzej Mostowski
Michael Oser Rabin
Doctoral studentsPaul Ernest

Career

Machover has written extensively on the conflict in the Middle East. In 1961, while still members of the Israeli Communist Party, Machover and Akiva Orr, under the pseudonym 'A Israeli', wrote the anti-Zionist analysis of the Arab-Israeli conflict Shalom, Shalom ve'ein Shalom (Hebrew: שלום, שלום, ואין שלום; "Peace, Peace, and there is no Peace"). The intention of the book was to explain, from publicly available sources, why in 1956 "Ben-Gurion preferred to invade Egypt, alongside France and Britain, rather than to make peace with Egypt".[1] In the course of writing the book, "It became clear to us that the roots of the Israeli–Arab conflict lay, not in the conflict between Israel and the Arab states, but rather in the conflict between Zionist colonialism and the Palestinians over the land of Palestine and its independence".[1] This thesis was an implicit challenge to the line of the Israeli Communist Party, which considered Israel's alliance with the U.S. to be a matter of political choice, not deriving from the colonial nature of the state. When Machover and Orr followed this by criticising the party's adherence to the Soviet line, and called for the publication of the party's history, they were expelled. Machover and Orr, together with others expelled at the same time, then established Matzpen.[2][3] Together with Jabra Nicola (pen name A. Said), Moshé Machover developed the position, adopted by Matzpen, that the solution to the Israeli Palestinian problem is in a struggle to defeat Zionism and its allies – imperialism and Arab Reaction – and “rally to itself a wider struggle for the political and social liberation of the Middle East as a whole”. The struggle for Palestinian liberation can succeed only when the Palestinian and Israeli masses enter “a joint struggle with the revolutionary forces in the Arab world".[4]

Machover was a lecturer in mathematics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem from 1960 to 1964, and again from 1966 to 1968; during 1964–66, he was a visiting lecturer at the University of Bristol in England. In 1968, Machover moved permanently to London where he became Reader in Mathematical Logic at King's College London until 1995. He joined Kings from the Chelsea College of Science and Technology's Department of History and Philosophy of Science which was merged into the Philosophy Department in 1993.[5] Since 1995, he has been Professor of Philosophy at the University of London.

In London, together with Orr and Shimon Tzabar, Machover established the Israeli Revolutionary Action Committee Abroad. In 1971, Machover, Orr and Haim Hanegbi published an article in the New Left Review on "The Class Nature of Israeli Society".[6] This article, which has been frequently republished, is included together with several more of Machover's early writings on the Middle East in the collection The Other Israel: the radical case against Zionism.[7]

In 1975, Machover was one of the founders of Khamsin, the "journal of revolutionary socialists of the Middle East".[8] Many of his articles from Khamsin are included in the collection Forbidden Agendas.[9] In 2012, Haymarket Press published a collection of Machover's essays from 1966 to 2010, under the title Israelis and Palestinians Conflict and Resolution.[10]

October 2017 expulsion and readmission into the Labour Party

Machover is a Labour Party member of the Hampstead and Kilburn Constituency Labour Party. In October 2017, he was expelled from the Labour Party on suspicion he was associated with the Communist Party of Great Britain (Provisional Central Committee), in contravention of party rules. The expulsion came when an article he wrote for the CPGB (PCC)'s newspaper, the Weekly Worker was being investigated as, according to the party's head of disputes, it "appears to meet the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism".[11] The Guardian subsequently published a letter of protest undersigned by 139 Labour Party members, including Sir Geoffrey Bindman dismissing the insinuation of anti-Semitism as "personally offensive and politically dangerous".[12] His expulsion was rescinded on 30 October.[13]

Machover's son Daniel Machover is a solicitor in London, specialising in human and civil rights cases.

Technical publications
  • Lectures on Non-Standard Analysis (with J. Hirschfeld, 1969)
  • A Course in Mathematical Logic (with J. L. Bell, 1977)
  • Laws of Chaos: A Probabilistic Approach to Political Economy (with E. Farjoun, London, 1983)
  • Set Theory, Logic and their Limitations (1996)
  • The Measurement of Voting Power: Theory and Practice, Problems and Paradoxes (with D. Felsenthal, 1998).[14]

Selected books

References
  1. Moshé Machover and Akiva Orr, "Foreword after 38 years", in the 1999 second edition of Shalom, Shalom ve'ein Shalom, privately published from PO Box 3050, Herzliya 46104, Israel.
  2. "Matzpen – A Short History" Archived 2012-11-29 at archive.today
  3. Ghilan, Maxim (1974). How Israel Lost Its Soul. London: Penguin. p. 158.
  4. "ARAB REVOLUTION AND NATIONAL PROBLEMS IN THE ARAB EAST
  5. Michael Campbell, Andrew Johnson, David Papineau Philosophy at King’s College London– a History
  6. New Left Review I/65
  7. Copy on the Matzpen website Archived 2012-11-30 at archive.today
  8. Khamsin on the Matzpen website Archived 2014-02-19 at the Wayback Machine
  9. 'Forbidden Agendas: Intolerance and Defiance in the Middle East (ed. Jon Rothschild), Saqi Books 2001, ISBN 978-0-86356-021-7
  10. Machover, Moshé (2012). Israelis and Palestinians : conflict and resolution. Chicago, Ill.: Haymarket Books. ISBN 9781608461486.
  11. Harpin, Lee (9 October 2017). "Israeli-born anti-Zionist expelled from Labour Party". The Jewish Chronicle. Retrieved 9 October 2017.
  12. 'Censorship battle and an antisemitic charge cause anger,' The Guardian 15 October 2017.
  13. 'Expelled anti-Zionist Moshe Machover readmitted to Labour Party,' The Jewish Chronicle 31 October 2017.
  14. KCL: Philosophy]
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