Yehuda Stern
7th April 2009, 21:11
The following is a reply to the interview with Dov Khenin, MK for Hadash, by the 21st Century Socialism website. An abridged version of it has been posted as a comment on the Links website.
Internationalist Socialist League’s Reply to Dov Khenin
There is a very good reason why Marxists see themselves as rivals to the reformist and centrist groups: in times of social peace, their function is to block the development of a revolutionary consciousness among radicalizing workers and youth. In times of crisis for the ruling class, they use the trust they have gained from these activists over the years to hold back any struggles that would be too threatening to the capitalists’ power. Historical examples abound, but there’s no need to go to far back when, in the interview with Dov Khenin, we find a concrete and relevant example of this very simple fact: the Stalinist Communist Party’s patriotism rises in inverse proportion to the strength and stability of the Zionist state.
This letter is more about Khenin’s positions than ours. However, we spell out clearly: we are an Israeli Trotskyist group, dedicated to a workers’ revolution in all of the Middle East and the world. Our solution to the national question is the creation of a Palestinian workers’ state stretching from the Jordan River to the sea. For more information on our politics, please contact us at [email protected]
Pacifist Attitude to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict
Marxists always support oppressed nations struggling against imperialism: that is ABC. However, even to non-Marxists on the left, the recent Israeli assault on Gaza proved once more that the “Israeli-Palestinian conflict” is not one in which both sides are equally to blame, but one in which an imperialist state seeks to enforce its will on an entire people, which it has expropriated and which it continues to oppress to this day.
At least, that should’ve been its effect. But pseudo-Marxists of Khenin’s type never fail to offer a twisted interpretation of reality in favor of their ruling class. Khenin doesn’t only blame the Palestinians equally for the failure of the fake peace process, in which he and his party continue to sow illusions, but also seems to insinuate that the blame lies mainly with the Palestinians:
“…the rise of the extreme right wing in Israel and the rise of Hamas as the administration in Gaza are both developments in the direction of further escalation… the right-wing Palestinians, the Palestinians who oppose the two-state solution, can say to their people that the way of negotiations does not lead anyone to any progress."
Reality is turned on its head: are the “right-wing Palestinians” those that oppose a two-state solution, or is it that conservative and reactionary Palestinian leaders – a category which includes both Hamas and the CP’s and western imperialism’s sweethearts, Fatah – use radical rhetoric to disguise their willingness to compromise with Israel? As Khenin himself points out in the interview, “the Palestinian sections all agreed to give Abu Mazen a mandate to conduct negotiations with Israel. This was also part of the prisoners' document, initiated by all the leaders of the Palestinians in Israeli prisons, including the leaders who belong to Hamas.”
In fact, opposition to the two-state solution is becoming more and more widespread not only among the radicalizing Palestinian masses – who, like Khenin, understand the precariousness of the Zionist state’s continued existence, but whose diametrically opposite class interests lead to a diametrically opposite response to Khenin’s fear of Israeli isolation – but among groups supporting the Palestinian struggle against Israel worldwide.
Blaming more radical opponents of “aiding the right wing” is a common slander used by the CP for a long time now. The truth is that those who really assist the right-wing are the CP politicians, who offer themselves as the left flank of the Zionist state. After all, the ICP considers itself a patriotic Israeli party, and it has already shown its true allegiances in the past – for example, when it voted for the evacuation-compensation law to save Sharon’s government during the disengagement, and its refusal to vote against the plan itself even though it claimed to be against it.
Truth and Myth of Israeli Elections
Khenin’s claims regarding the recent elections to the Knesset and the mayoral elections in Tel-Aviv fare no better when checked against the facts. First and foremost, despite the fact that even the majority of Israeli Palestinians do not believe in the possibility to change society through the Knesset, and that Palestinians in the “occupied territories” – i.e., the parts of Palestine that the Zionists have conquered more recently – have no right to vote, the ICP continues to participate in the elections. Marxists know that there is no parliamentary way to socialism. They only participate in elections to expose this fact to the mass of workers. What excuse could the ICP have for going along with the charade of the Knesset, other than the basest parliamentary cretinism?
It is clear that participation in the Knesset has not strengthened the ICP in any way. In fact, it has peaked at 6 MKs in the distant past, and until the recent elections had only 3 MPs. It does have 4 MKs in the new Knesset – but this is owed mostly to the fact that since Azmi Bishara’s flight from Zionist persecution, his party Balad has weakened considerably. We will parenthetically note that as far as we know, the ICP has never spoken against this persecution, and has in fact said that Bishara should return to Israel to face its very special brand of justice.
Aside from Khenin’s fantasy of the ICP finding new strength in this election, he also mentions another wild dream of his: that the Israelis have voted for the right wing for, apparently, all the right reasons:
"Israeli voters really punished both Kadima and Labour, and elected a right-wing government, without any real enthusiasm… the old left, what we call the moderate Zionist parties, who had a crushing defeat in this election, partly because of their indecision, vis-a-vis the Gaza war for example. They supported the war at the beginning, then they hesitated for a while."
First of all, no Zionist party ever “hesitated” over the war: all supported it from the beginning, only debating how long and how far it should go. But does Khenin suggest that the Israelis voted for the right wing because… they were upset over the left’s support of the war, as one can infer from his claim that they “punished” Kadima and Labor? If so, then this is sheer nonsense. This claim may fool people outside Israel, but those of us who actually live here can say that support for the extreme right was anything but unenthusiastic.
We will only touch shortly on Khenin’s mayoral campaign – in doing this, we will be giving it no less attention than the Israeli media and populace at large have. Indeed, Khenin managed to get an impressive percentage of the vote. However, it must be noted that Khenin did not run on either a CP or Hadash ticket, but on the Ir LeKulanu (“City for All of Us”) ticket, which did not go much further then advocate some coexistence between Arabs and Jews and some minor social reforms. Obviously, in a city like Tel-Aviv, with its mainly secular and liberal population, such a campaign would find many supporters – especially considering how right-wing Huldai is.
The Peace the CP envisages
If Khenin’s version of the past has little to do with reality, then his vision of the future is no less ambitious. To have utopian dreams is admirable; to have liberal-imperialist ones is deplorable for anyone masquerading as a communist. Here are two of Khenin’s offers for a more lax Pax Americana in Palestine:
"[The Israeli establishment’s] logic is that the only way to solve problems is through force, and if force cannot solve something then you should use more force. This is the inner logic of the Israeli establishment's attitude towards the Middle East conflict and to the Palestinians especially. Of course, this cannot really achieve anything…
"Concerning the politics of the Obama administration, it is to [sic] early to tell what they are willing to do here in the Middle East. I think it is high time for the United States to realise that the current policy as conducted by the Bush administration caused a lot of damage to American influence here in the Middle East. So I do believe that the Americans should change their attitude. Are they willing to do so? It is too early to really know."
In fact, Israel has been using its force to effectively put down not only challenges to its power in Palestine, but it has been an active force in the battle against any sort of Arab social progress. The ICP, however, cannot be blamed for wanting to forget such historical lessons: in the early years of Israel’s existence, when some of its leaders still toyed with the idea of making some sort of peace with Nasser’s bourgeois-nationalist regime in the Knesset, its leader at the time, Meir Vilner, was busy hysterically condemning Nasser as a “fascist,” pre-dating Zionist anti-Egyptian propaganda by years. But then, compared to the fact that the CP, with the help of the Soviet regime, gave the Zionists weapons from Czechoslovakia in order to facilitate the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians, this is only a minor offense.
Either way, it is not just that Israel can achieve its goals using force; it’s that force is the only way in which it can do so, although it of course needs to throw in the mix some occasional diplomacy, for the sake of PR and renewing its forces of repression periodically. As for the generous proposal on how to repair damage to “American influence” in the Middle East – we must say that even we are somewhat struck by this. Is Khenin seriously suggesting that, now that Obama is America’s President and not Bush, that its intervention in the region is somewhat legitimate? We regret to say that that is simply not a “change we can believe in.”
Khenin has already repeated the CP’s pro-imperialist line that Fatah should lead the negotiations with Israel, that Hamas cannot be dealt with directly, and that anyone opposing a two-state solution is a right-winger. But what does the ICP’s “solution,” which has failed miserably to materialize for the last couple of decades, really offer the Palestinians? One might find Khenin’s genius assertion that “you cannot really compare very different places and histories,” and therefore one cannot compare Israel to apartheid-era South Africa, to be somewhat bewildering. It's no realy mystery, though - Khenin just does not really wish to say that Israel is an inherently racist state that could never give equal rights to the Palestinians.
On the question of refugees, Khenin’s position is even fouler. For a long time, the ICP had at least the merit of being one of the only parties to advocate – as always, in theory – the right of return for Palestinian refugees. Recently, it has been rather silent on the subject. But now Khenin reveals what we have always suspected – that this advocacy was indeed so much rhetoric:
"There is a basic recognition of rights on the one hand, and there is a practical political solution based on agreement between the political leaderships of the two peoples on the other hand."
This sneaky passage, truly befitting for a cynical reformist politician, really says a lot about Khenin and his party. What he is basically telling the Israeli ruling class is “look, don’t be too stubborn about words. If you agree to recognize to right of the Palestinian refugees to return, that alone will give you a lot of credit. And if you do so, we promise that we – along with our collaborators in the West Bank and Gaza – make sure that this recognition isn’t mistaken by anyone as a signal that refugees can really return to their land. We will help you make sure that this recognition remains yet another smokescreen for your real policies and for creating a separate Palestinian state, wholly dependent on Israel.”
Khenin and his party currently have no buyers among the Zionist bourgeoisie. When the time comes, though, they will be instrumental in sowing such illusions among not only Palestinian but also radicalizing Jewish workers. Those who support this party today, enthusiastically or as a lesser evil, are in fact aiding this party in its work. We advise all who are truly interested in Marxism and in a society without prejudice or discrimination to contact us and enter into a dialogue with us.
A Final Paragraph on Stalinism
Khenin says that "we should learn from the history of the 20th century; we should not repeat the mistakes, both the political mistakes and the theoretical mistakes of 20th century socialism. We should realise that socialism is not possible without democracy. Democracy is part and parcel of what is socialism about.” Sasha Khenin, Dov’s father, was a CP politician back in Stalin’s days. Despite knowing of the state capitalist regime’s brutal oppression of the working class and the Left Opposition, Khenin had no problem condemning Trotskyists as “counter-revolutionaries” who want nothing more than to sabotage Soviet “socialism.” Today, his son and his party cry crocodile tears over the “mistakes of 20th century socialism.” Such is the moral and political legacy of the Stalinist party.
Internationalist Socialist League’s Reply to Dov Khenin
There is a very good reason why Marxists see themselves as rivals to the reformist and centrist groups: in times of social peace, their function is to block the development of a revolutionary consciousness among radicalizing workers and youth. In times of crisis for the ruling class, they use the trust they have gained from these activists over the years to hold back any struggles that would be too threatening to the capitalists’ power. Historical examples abound, but there’s no need to go to far back when, in the interview with Dov Khenin, we find a concrete and relevant example of this very simple fact: the Stalinist Communist Party’s patriotism rises in inverse proportion to the strength and stability of the Zionist state.
This letter is more about Khenin’s positions than ours. However, we spell out clearly: we are an Israeli Trotskyist group, dedicated to a workers’ revolution in all of the Middle East and the world. Our solution to the national question is the creation of a Palestinian workers’ state stretching from the Jordan River to the sea. For more information on our politics, please contact us at [email protected]
Pacifist Attitude to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict
Marxists always support oppressed nations struggling against imperialism: that is ABC. However, even to non-Marxists on the left, the recent Israeli assault on Gaza proved once more that the “Israeli-Palestinian conflict” is not one in which both sides are equally to blame, but one in which an imperialist state seeks to enforce its will on an entire people, which it has expropriated and which it continues to oppress to this day.
At least, that should’ve been its effect. But pseudo-Marxists of Khenin’s type never fail to offer a twisted interpretation of reality in favor of their ruling class. Khenin doesn’t only blame the Palestinians equally for the failure of the fake peace process, in which he and his party continue to sow illusions, but also seems to insinuate that the blame lies mainly with the Palestinians:
“…the rise of the extreme right wing in Israel and the rise of Hamas as the administration in Gaza are both developments in the direction of further escalation… the right-wing Palestinians, the Palestinians who oppose the two-state solution, can say to their people that the way of negotiations does not lead anyone to any progress."
Reality is turned on its head: are the “right-wing Palestinians” those that oppose a two-state solution, or is it that conservative and reactionary Palestinian leaders – a category which includes both Hamas and the CP’s and western imperialism’s sweethearts, Fatah – use radical rhetoric to disguise their willingness to compromise with Israel? As Khenin himself points out in the interview, “the Palestinian sections all agreed to give Abu Mazen a mandate to conduct negotiations with Israel. This was also part of the prisoners' document, initiated by all the leaders of the Palestinians in Israeli prisons, including the leaders who belong to Hamas.”
In fact, opposition to the two-state solution is becoming more and more widespread not only among the radicalizing Palestinian masses – who, like Khenin, understand the precariousness of the Zionist state’s continued existence, but whose diametrically opposite class interests lead to a diametrically opposite response to Khenin’s fear of Israeli isolation – but among groups supporting the Palestinian struggle against Israel worldwide.
Blaming more radical opponents of “aiding the right wing” is a common slander used by the CP for a long time now. The truth is that those who really assist the right-wing are the CP politicians, who offer themselves as the left flank of the Zionist state. After all, the ICP considers itself a patriotic Israeli party, and it has already shown its true allegiances in the past – for example, when it voted for the evacuation-compensation law to save Sharon’s government during the disengagement, and its refusal to vote against the plan itself even though it claimed to be against it.
Truth and Myth of Israeli Elections
Khenin’s claims regarding the recent elections to the Knesset and the mayoral elections in Tel-Aviv fare no better when checked against the facts. First and foremost, despite the fact that even the majority of Israeli Palestinians do not believe in the possibility to change society through the Knesset, and that Palestinians in the “occupied territories” – i.e., the parts of Palestine that the Zionists have conquered more recently – have no right to vote, the ICP continues to participate in the elections. Marxists know that there is no parliamentary way to socialism. They only participate in elections to expose this fact to the mass of workers. What excuse could the ICP have for going along with the charade of the Knesset, other than the basest parliamentary cretinism?
It is clear that participation in the Knesset has not strengthened the ICP in any way. In fact, it has peaked at 6 MKs in the distant past, and until the recent elections had only 3 MPs. It does have 4 MKs in the new Knesset – but this is owed mostly to the fact that since Azmi Bishara’s flight from Zionist persecution, his party Balad has weakened considerably. We will parenthetically note that as far as we know, the ICP has never spoken against this persecution, and has in fact said that Bishara should return to Israel to face its very special brand of justice.
Aside from Khenin’s fantasy of the ICP finding new strength in this election, he also mentions another wild dream of his: that the Israelis have voted for the right wing for, apparently, all the right reasons:
"Israeli voters really punished both Kadima and Labour, and elected a right-wing government, without any real enthusiasm… the old left, what we call the moderate Zionist parties, who had a crushing defeat in this election, partly because of their indecision, vis-a-vis the Gaza war for example. They supported the war at the beginning, then they hesitated for a while."
First of all, no Zionist party ever “hesitated” over the war: all supported it from the beginning, only debating how long and how far it should go. But does Khenin suggest that the Israelis voted for the right wing because… they were upset over the left’s support of the war, as one can infer from his claim that they “punished” Kadima and Labor? If so, then this is sheer nonsense. This claim may fool people outside Israel, but those of us who actually live here can say that support for the extreme right was anything but unenthusiastic.
We will only touch shortly on Khenin’s mayoral campaign – in doing this, we will be giving it no less attention than the Israeli media and populace at large have. Indeed, Khenin managed to get an impressive percentage of the vote. However, it must be noted that Khenin did not run on either a CP or Hadash ticket, but on the Ir LeKulanu (“City for All of Us”) ticket, which did not go much further then advocate some coexistence between Arabs and Jews and some minor social reforms. Obviously, in a city like Tel-Aviv, with its mainly secular and liberal population, such a campaign would find many supporters – especially considering how right-wing Huldai is.
The Peace the CP envisages
If Khenin’s version of the past has little to do with reality, then his vision of the future is no less ambitious. To have utopian dreams is admirable; to have liberal-imperialist ones is deplorable for anyone masquerading as a communist. Here are two of Khenin’s offers for a more lax Pax Americana in Palestine:
"[The Israeli establishment’s] logic is that the only way to solve problems is through force, and if force cannot solve something then you should use more force. This is the inner logic of the Israeli establishment's attitude towards the Middle East conflict and to the Palestinians especially. Of course, this cannot really achieve anything…
"Concerning the politics of the Obama administration, it is to [sic] early to tell what they are willing to do here in the Middle East. I think it is high time for the United States to realise that the current policy as conducted by the Bush administration caused a lot of damage to American influence here in the Middle East. So I do believe that the Americans should change their attitude. Are they willing to do so? It is too early to really know."
In fact, Israel has been using its force to effectively put down not only challenges to its power in Palestine, but it has been an active force in the battle against any sort of Arab social progress. The ICP, however, cannot be blamed for wanting to forget such historical lessons: in the early years of Israel’s existence, when some of its leaders still toyed with the idea of making some sort of peace with Nasser’s bourgeois-nationalist regime in the Knesset, its leader at the time, Meir Vilner, was busy hysterically condemning Nasser as a “fascist,” pre-dating Zionist anti-Egyptian propaganda by years. But then, compared to the fact that the CP, with the help of the Soviet regime, gave the Zionists weapons from Czechoslovakia in order to facilitate the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians, this is only a minor offense.
Either way, it is not just that Israel can achieve its goals using force; it’s that force is the only way in which it can do so, although it of course needs to throw in the mix some occasional diplomacy, for the sake of PR and renewing its forces of repression periodically. As for the generous proposal on how to repair damage to “American influence” in the Middle East – we must say that even we are somewhat struck by this. Is Khenin seriously suggesting that, now that Obama is America’s President and not Bush, that its intervention in the region is somewhat legitimate? We regret to say that that is simply not a “change we can believe in.”
Khenin has already repeated the CP’s pro-imperialist line that Fatah should lead the negotiations with Israel, that Hamas cannot be dealt with directly, and that anyone opposing a two-state solution is a right-winger. But what does the ICP’s “solution,” which has failed miserably to materialize for the last couple of decades, really offer the Palestinians? One might find Khenin’s genius assertion that “you cannot really compare very different places and histories,” and therefore one cannot compare Israel to apartheid-era South Africa, to be somewhat bewildering. It's no realy mystery, though - Khenin just does not really wish to say that Israel is an inherently racist state that could never give equal rights to the Palestinians.
On the question of refugees, Khenin’s position is even fouler. For a long time, the ICP had at least the merit of being one of the only parties to advocate – as always, in theory – the right of return for Palestinian refugees. Recently, it has been rather silent on the subject. But now Khenin reveals what we have always suspected – that this advocacy was indeed so much rhetoric:
"There is a basic recognition of rights on the one hand, and there is a practical political solution based on agreement between the political leaderships of the two peoples on the other hand."
This sneaky passage, truly befitting for a cynical reformist politician, really says a lot about Khenin and his party. What he is basically telling the Israeli ruling class is “look, don’t be too stubborn about words. If you agree to recognize to right of the Palestinian refugees to return, that alone will give you a lot of credit. And if you do so, we promise that we – along with our collaborators in the West Bank and Gaza – make sure that this recognition isn’t mistaken by anyone as a signal that refugees can really return to their land. We will help you make sure that this recognition remains yet another smokescreen for your real policies and for creating a separate Palestinian state, wholly dependent on Israel.”
Khenin and his party currently have no buyers among the Zionist bourgeoisie. When the time comes, though, they will be instrumental in sowing such illusions among not only Palestinian but also radicalizing Jewish workers. Those who support this party today, enthusiastically or as a lesser evil, are in fact aiding this party in its work. We advise all who are truly interested in Marxism and in a society without prejudice or discrimination to contact us and enter into a dialogue with us.
A Final Paragraph on Stalinism
Khenin says that "we should learn from the history of the 20th century; we should not repeat the mistakes, both the political mistakes and the theoretical mistakes of 20th century socialism. We should realise that socialism is not possible without democracy. Democracy is part and parcel of what is socialism about.” Sasha Khenin, Dov’s father, was a CP politician back in Stalin’s days. Despite knowing of the state capitalist regime’s brutal oppression of the working class and the Left Opposition, Khenin had no problem condemning Trotskyists as “counter-revolutionaries” who want nothing more than to sabotage Soviet “socialism.” Today, his son and his party cry crocodile tears over the “mistakes of 20th century socialism.” Such is the moral and political legacy of the Stalinist party.