Moshé Machover

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

Machover has written extensively on the Middle East conflict. In 1961, while still members of the Israeli Communist Party, Machover and Akiva Orr, under the pseudonym, A Israeli, wrote the pioneering anti-Zionist analysis of the Arab-Israeli conflict Shalom, Shalom ve'ein Shalom (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". 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".

This insight was an implicit challenge to the line of the Israeli Communist Party, which considered Israel's alliance with the US 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 and were expelled. Machover and Orr, together with others expelled at the same time, then established Matzpen.

Machover was a lecturer in mathematics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem from 1960-64, and again from 1966-8; during 1964-6, he was a visiting lecturer at the University of Bristol in England. In 1968, he moved permanently to London, where he was Reader in Mathematical Logic at King's College from 1973 to 1995. 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 influential article on The Class Nature of Israeli Society. 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

In 1975, Machover was one of the founders of Khamsin, the "Jourmal of revolutionary socialists of the Middle East". Many of his articles from Khamsin are included in the collection Forbidden Agendas.

Machover's academic publications include 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, 1983), Set Theory, Logic and their Limitations (1996), and The Measurement of Voting Power: Theory and Practice, Problems and Paradoxes (with D. Felsenthal, 1998).

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

Bibliography

• Peace, Peace and there is no Peace (with Akiva Orr) (Hebrew)
• The Other Israel: the radical case against Zionism
• Articles on the University of Cork Palestine Solidarity Campaign website

See also

• Matzpen
• Shimon Tzabar
• Daniel Machover
• Letter of British Jews on 60th anniversary of Israel