Q
20th September 2009, 14:15
Within the Weekly Worker there has been a debate going on for quite a while now between Jack Conrad and Tony Greenstein on the topic of the Israel /Palestine conflict. Jack Conrad wrote an extensive four page article (http://www.cpgb.org.uk/worker/781/theisrael.php) on it in an attempt to put an end to the matter once and for all. In my opinion this was an awful article for the reasons Tony will describe below. Anyway, I think Tony's article is very good, it cleared up quite a few matters for me too, so I think it would be good to have a discussion on it here :)
For a secular, democratic state (http://www.cpgb.org.uk/worker/784/forademocratic.php)
Tony Greenstein replies to Jack Conrad and explains why Israeli Jews cannot be granted self-determination
Whilst flattered to be the subject of a four-page supplement by Jack Conrad, notwithstanding the “shallowness” of my political theory, I must confess to a certain puzzlement.1
What is the purpose of this logic-chopping, nit-picking and rambling attack? Instead of making out a cogent case for the CPGB’s position of two democratic, secular states - Israel and Palestine - he instead concentrates on a number of quite esoteric and minor points. In addition, of course, to the usual ad hominems.
To deal with the red herrings and straw men first.
No-one disputes that the Israel-Palestine conflict cannot be solved within the borders of what was mandate Palestine. It is indisputably a conflict that can only resolved in the context of the wider struggle for liberation of the Arab countries. And this is a struggle which can only successfully be led the Arab working class and the exploited masses of Egypt and Iraq in particular.
Comrade Conrad’s defence of the idea that the independence of Ireland is a “two-state solution” is the height of absurdity. Two states in the Irish context means two states within Ireland: ie, Ulster and Eire. Unification of Ireland is a single-state solution: ie, one Irish state. And the Protestants also consider themselves a separate people from the Irish. It is only a two-state solution if you look at the Irish conflict through imperialism’s spectacles. Yes, it is true that Irish MPs sat in the British parliament. The same was true of the French colonies. Because of its proximity there was a very close economic and political linkage between the British and Anglo-Irish ruling class, with the latter effectively the former’s junior partners. Ireland was both a victim of British imperialism and a beneficiary of its economic imperialism.
The TUC opposed the immigration of Jews in 1895 not because they were Jews, but because they were immigrant labour. The TUC clung to the idea, and still does, that an influx of foreign labour undermines the conditions of British labour. In so doing it seeks an alliance with its own exploiters. That was why Jewish workers formed their own trade unions in a campaign which successfully weaned British unions away from racism and nationalism. Hence why, in the 1930s, when Moseley’s British Union of Fascists were on the rampage, it was the Catholic dockers of the East End and other trade unionists who stood side by side with their Jewish brothers and sisters at Cable Street, as the Zionists and the bourgeois leaders told them to stay at home.
I have never ‘upheld’ the formulations of the Palestinian National Covenant. Where on earth did Jack get that idea? The Covenant has long since been a dead letter and thus Jack tilts at windmills that have long since rusted over.
If Weyman Bennett of the Socialist Workers Party’s central committee’s slogan was ‘Jews out of Israel’, then that is an illustration of his political illiteracy, not anti-Semitism. Jews are the most privileged section of Israeli society, the beneficiaries of Zionism’s apartheid society.
No-one in their right mind would have advocated returning Jews to Nazi Germany in the 1930s. However, that entirely misses the point. It was the Zionist movement that fought long and hard against any alternative refuge to Palestine, what they termed ‘refugeeism’. The Zionist leaders openly sabotaged the offer at Evian in 1938 of 100,000 places in San Domingo. Jewish refugees were seen as the battering ram to open Palestine to unlimited Jewish immigration.2
The phenomenon of Israel and Zionist groups lobbying western governments not to allow Jewish immigration to their countries is well documented in the case of America and Soviet and German Jewry. However, until recently I was not aware that the Zionist leadership even put pressure on Nazi Germany to only allow Jewish emigration to Palestine.
There is no “hopelessly tangled legal confusion in Israel between being Jewish as a religion and being Jewish as a nationality”. On the contrary, this is a necessary consequence of the fact that it is impossible to define ‘race’ for the simple reason that it is an artificial political construct. The situation in Israel is quite clear. If your grandparents were Jewish, you are Jewish according to the ‘law of return’ (the Nazi definition!). If you wish to marry another Jew or be buried in consecrated land you have to be Jewish halachically: ie, have a Jewish mother, which is a racial definition. Religion is the foundation stone of the Israeli definition of who is part of the Herrenvolk, regardless of religious adherence or practice. That is why, however ‘atheistic’ a Zionist is, his right to settle the land of Palestine is predicated upon a god whose existence he denies! In fact as the Supreme Court made clear in the case of Brother Daniel, there is no difference between being Jewish as a religion and as a nationality in Israel.
This ‘legal confusion’ was not unique to Israel. South Africa and Nazi Germany had their honorary whites and Aryans.
Zionism does not “obstinately” hold on to the idea of a Jewish world nation. On the contrary, it is fundamental to its claim that Israel is a Jewish state, as opposed to being a state of all its citizens. It is this which allows Israel to deny equality and basic democratic rights to its Arab citizens, because the Jewish population in Israel is the advance guard of far greater numbers.
The right to divorce is indeed a fundamental democratic and personal right. However, when one partner lacks all power and is subject to her husband’s reciting ‘I divorce you’ three times, divorce can simply be the entrance ticket to poverty and despair. Individual partnerships and civic entitlement are chalk and cheese. The right to ‘divorce’ in these circumstances can be a ‘right’ to ethnic cleansing and banishment.
It is true that Israelis today would “furiously resist” a single Palestinian state. Just as they furiously resist any measure of equality for Palestinians and they furiously resist the entrance of non-Jewish children to kindergartens, for example. The privileges of apartheid are often furiously defended and that is why relying on the privileged to give up their privileges smacks more of liberalism than Marxism.
Not guilty
Comrade Jack begins by describing me as a “leftish” member of the Alliance for Green Socialism, as well as a supporter of “third-worldist economism”. In both cases he is wrong!
I am indeed a member of AGS, part of a minority of revolutionary socialists. I joined AGS because of the lack of any socialist alternative, not least with the demise of the Socialist Alliance. The rest of Jack’s pontifications are sheer nonsense. In view of his strictures about accurately defining fascism, the sloppy description of the ‘No to the European Union, Yes to Democracy’ electoral bloc as “red-brown” is crazy. There were no fascists inside the bloc. The Communist Party of Britain is a good example of the capitulation to national chauvinism of a left grouping. However, it is not a fascist group or anything resembling such and it does not help clarity of debate to imply otherwise.
In fact I opposed entering an electoral alliance with No2EU, given the political basis on which it stood in the elections. I only supported it critically as the least worst alternative. The CPGB, of course, considered New Labour more progressive politically and urged support for them instead! Presumably ‘British jobs for British workers’ is an advance politically on ‘No to the European Union’.
However, since Jack has now raised it, I should explain that I was asked by AGS to be a candidate in the European elections and refused, both on personal and political grounds. It was only after considerable pressure from comrades in a number of political groups, including the Socialist Party and Socialist Resistance, that I reconsidered, by which time the positions had been filled anyway! But I remain absolutely opposed to socialists calling for withdrawal from the European Union, as if British capitalism is somehow more progressive than its European version.
As Jack feels the need to pigeon-hole me, I have become a “third-worldist economist” politically. He offers no evidence in support of this assertion. True, I do not believe the British and European working classes retain a revolutionary potential. Most of the Marxist left share this view, although they prefer to keep quiet about it as they engage in cross-class alliances. What made the working class potentially revolutionary was its concentration in the cities and large factories. In the past 25 years we have seen the atomisation of the British working class, with the disappearance of the dockers as a particularly militant part. Likewise shipyard workers, car workers and, of course, miners. Instead the last repository of trade union militancy, the RMT, consists of workers who in previous decades were considered ancillary to the great struggles and were normally to be found on the right of the labour movement.
This decline has been witnessed not only in the virtual disappearance of the NUM, but in the unification of the once-mighty TGWU and AEEU, together with an assortment of white collar trade unionists, and the growth of Unison. The idea that these structural changes in the British working class have no political implications is fanciful and unMarxist.
However, Jack is wrong to suggest that I therefore look to a substitute in the national struggles of third-world peoples and their leaders. That may indeed be true of most of the remnants of the International Marxist Group (of which I have never, incidentally, been a member despite Jack’s assertion to the contrary), but it is not my position.
Instead I see a redivision of the working class internationally. It is to the working class of countries such as South Korea that the historic task of overthrowing capitalism falls. Now I may be wrong, of course, and it is possible that the working class of Britain and Europe will wake up. However, I see no evidence for that. I also have no crystal ball, but neither does the CPGB and comrade Jack. What is missing in the socialist movement is any real debate about these issues.
Palestine and Zionism
I do not understand why Jack Conrad repeatedly feels the need to revisit minor disputes at such length in his article, when the key issue is an overall analysis of Zionism and Israel and how best to build solidarity. It appears that I got under his skin, hence the put-down ‘expert’. Issues such as Zionism/Palestine are too important for ‘lines’ to be laid down on the basis of an impressionistic understanding.
Even if he got it wrong, at least Marx took the trouble to learn and understand the operation of British imperialism in India. That was the gist of my criticisms of Jack Conrad, not any attempt to demonstrate superior knowledge. If you do not understand the particular nature of Zionism and its creation, Israel, you will inevitably fail to see the way ahead. It is clear that Jack Conrad sees Israel as just another capitalist country, akin to the USA, France, etc.
For all the reasons that Jack Conrad himself enumerates, such as withdrawal of troops from Iraq, I do not conflate the politics of the CPGB and Alliance for Workers’ Liberty. However, nothing is static in politics. I also took part in the debate that Socialist Organiser held in 1983. Overnight the position of SO jack-knifed from support for a democratic, secular state to a two-statist position.
In August 1982 Martin Thomas could write an open letter to Tony Benn (‘Why does Israel wage war?’) in which he declared: “Can we not support both Israel and the Palestinians, oppose aggression on both sides and seek reconciliation? In truth, no such even-handedness is possible, because, the situation is not even-handed … The aim of a democratic, secular state proclaimed by the Palestinians offers a place for the Israeli Jews as equals. It is compatible with (and we would fight for) maximum cultural and communal rights for them … True, the vast majority of the Israeli Jews do not believe that. But the Palestinians are not willing (and why should they be?) to delay a fight for their rights until the Israeli Jews change their minds, or until socialists develop a united Arab-Jewish working class struggle.”
A few months later and Martin Thomas would be singing the praises of the very two-state solution he denounced in this article! True, Martin Thomas is a particularly sad example of someone who has fallen under the influence of a malign guru, but he is not unique in his servility. Such about-turns are not unknown in the history of the left and nor is the CPGB immune to such shifts.
The hallmark of the ‘debate’ in SO 25-plus years ago was a rejection of the concept of the democratic, secular state. Jack Conrad’s assertion that a unitary, democratic, secular state is “an attempt to reverse the poles of oppression and potentially genocidal” was exactly the argument formulated at the time by Sean Matgamna. It was wrong then and it is wrong now.
Now I know that what remains of the left often becomes so trapped by the inner logic of its political formulations that it loses touch with reality, but the above statement is in a class of its own. Does Jack really think that counterposing a unitary, democratic, secular state to a racist, settler colonial state that defines privilege on the basis of religion is merely reversing the poles of oppression and potentially genocidal? This is to drain words of their meaning.
Nor is it true that a unitary state would mean that most Israeli Jews are to be granted religious, not national, rights. I would be in favour of any concessions that did not involve the re-imposition of the rule of the settlers over the indigenous population - including language rights (which are being taken away at this very moment from Israeli Arabs), cultural and religious rights. Just what national right would Israel’s Jewish population be deprived of, bar the ability to kick and abuse Israel’s Arabs? And, although the majority of Israeli Jews do indeed consider themselves secular, they have already made their Faustian pact with the religious. That is why they reside in Palestine.
The kernel of Jack Conrad’s confusion is his portrayal of the conflict as one between two nations. He is not alone. This was and remains a fundamental misconception. As the Palestinians themselves have discovered, it is the road to transfer. It reduces the expulsions, dispossession, massacres and racism of settler colonialism to a conflict between two peoples. When Jack uses the term “mutual recognition” between two peoples he probably does not realise that this was the key slogan of the overtly Zionist Union of Jewish Students. It reduces a political, economic and social conflict to one of collective psychology. If only ‘they’ could get on. It is the basis of ‘racial awareness’ and ‘diversity training’ in this country as a means of countering racism. At heart it is fundamentally reactionary.
And from this misconception it is but a short road to ‘Two states for two peoples’ and the pro-imperialist and Zionist politics of the AWL. I accept that the CPGB is not a pro-imperialist or Zionist organisation. But neither was the AWL. The road to hell is paved with good intentions and none come better than Jack Conrad.
The real problem with the CPGB’s position is its utopian and absurd slogan of ‘Two democratic, secular states’. It embodies a fundamental contradiction. It is the height of unreality. A two-state solution (or one state plus Palestinian cantonisation) would reinforce and cement sectarianism and conflict. In exactly the same way as partition in Ireland did. A Jewish state in Palestine could not help but be a racist, sectarian state looking for a pretext to march into its weaker neighbour. Two states is the solution of imperialism to the Israel-Palestine conflict, bearing in mind that the USA has no particular interest in West Bank settlements, dispossession or transfer.
Some of the most racist elements of the Israeli ruling elites - people such as Arnon Sofer, the Haifa University professor whose obsession it is to warn of the biological and demographic bomb that the Palestinians represent - support two states precisely because it is a way of permanently depriving Palestinians of any civil or political rights. Two states, as the AWL demonstrates, is a Zionist solution and the tacking on of ‘secular’ to the formulation merely emphasises the contradiction.
In exactly the same way, the creation of a Protestant statelet in Ireland could not help but be a sectarian anti-Catholic state, whose identity was based on supremacy over the nationalist population.
Jack feigns outrage at the comparison between the AWL and the politics he articulates. Yet he has only himself to blame. There are repeated references to ‘extermination’ of Israel’s Jews, genocide and, of course, the Nazi extermination. This was exactly the AWL’s method, drawing a straight line between the anti-Zionist Jewish working class of Europe, who died in the Hitlerite furnaces, and the Israeli military who drop one-ton bombs on the houses of civilians, torture and imprison children, and aid and abet the settlers’ pogroms.
To compare the unarmed peasant population of Palestine, who are now under the thumb of the CIA-trained militias and gangsters of the Palestine Authority, with the fascist butchers of European Jewry is frankly obscene. It demonstrates that Jack Conrad lives in a parallel universe. Is he unaware of the fascination that Israel has for the neo-Nazi soldiers of fortune of the far right? That European fascists, including the BNP, are largely pro-Zionist, because Israel is a model example of how you deal with ‘terrorists’ and Muslims? Even the dumbest Israeli soldier, who scrawls ‘We have come to annihilate you’ on the walls of a Palestinian home, understands that he has more in common with those who perpetrated the extermination of the Jews than with those who died. Because the Jews who died in the holocaust were no more of a threat to their neighbours than the Palestinians of Gaza and the West Bank are today. That is why, despite Zionism’s misuse of the holocaust as a propaganda weapon, Israeli soldiers subconsciously identify their Arab victims with the Jews of pre-war Europe. If extermination were to be on the agenda, it would not be Israel’s Jews who were in danger.
And nor is it just a question of Palestinian suffering. Israel has trained and armed the juntas of South and Central America, the Guatemalan genocidalists of Rios Montt and many and various dictatorships, not least the former apartheid regime in Pretoria. These are the comparisons that Jack Conrad fails to draw on. Zionism did indeed draw certain conclusions from the anti-Semites and Nazis, but they were not the ones that socialists articulate.
When I said that Jack was indifferent to the slogans of the pogromists of Yisrael Beiteinu and the mobs of Acre who shout ‘Death to the Arabs’, he protested vigorously. Yet how else is one to describe the political positions of someone who, in the context of the terrible oppression that the Palestinians undergo, describes the goal of a unitary, secular democratic state as “potentially genocidal”. If extermination and genocide has any relevance, it is for the Palestinians that we should tremble, not their racist overlords and oppressors. Socialists do not sympathise or empathise with fanatic racists and chauvinists, whatever their lineage, merely on the speculative grounds that one day they too may become the oppressed.
‘Into the sea’
Jack Conrad makes unnecessary concessions to the ‘fears’ of the settlers in Israel without any attempt to analyse where such fears come from or even whether there is any rational basis for them. One such example was the possibility he mentions of an “attempt to drive the Jews into the sea”. It was not contextualised, but simply cited as a self-evident truth: “It is fair to say, then, that the projected single Palestinian state would include roughly equivalent numbers of Hebrews and Arabs. Presuming, that is, there is no forcible movement of peoples. No attempt to drive the Jews into the sea.”
The Palestinian origin of this phrase, as Jack now concedes, is apocryphal: ie, a myth. As he also admits, it is a myth of Zionist creation. Strange though it might be, I do not believe that socialists should repeat, without comment, the propaganda formulations of colonisers. The fact is that the only people who were ever driven into the sea were the Arabs of Haifa.3 The purpose it served, however, was to turn polar opposites around. Instead of the actuality of Palestinian dispossession it served to focus the question on the fears of Israeli Jews, reinforcing the idea that the Palestinians were the reincarnation of the Nazis, whose sole purpose was to drive Jews into the sea: ie, exterminate them.
But Jack Conrad’s quite amazing conclusion - “and this is the moot point” - is that what matters is that it is believed on the streets of Tel Aviv, etc. To Jack this matters a great deal. Actually it does matter, but not for the reasons that he gives. It matters that settler populations, as part of their own justifications, will ascribe violence and genocidal intentions to the very people they are busy killing and dispossessing. But there is nothing unique in this. The reaction of the oppressed has always been the excuse for further violence of the oppressor. This is one of the features of settler colonialism, as those who remember the old westerns will recall - the Indians were always bad, rotten and above all violent.
Fascism
Jack in his original article asserted: “Conventionally, in Britain at least, what passes for the mainstream left damns Zionism as almost akin to fascism”.4 And what examples does he give to back this up? The Revolutionary Communist Group, the Workers Revolutionary Party, the Socialist Labour League, the Syrian Communist Party and American ex-leftist James Petras! Leaving aside the last two, who are not British, the first three are hardly “mainstream left”. In fact the mainstream left was historically pro-Zionist and today advocates a two-state solution.
But apparently I am also guilty of this sin, or rather Jack Conrad has difficulty in assimilating what is a quite simple argument. I have made many comparisons between Nazism and Zionism, not because I believe that Zionism is “akin” to fascism, but because in terms of their racist policies and practices, there are without doubt similarities between Zionism and Nazism. The Reich citizenship law, which stripped German Jews of their nationality and introduced a distinction between nationality and citizenship, thus undoing one of the fundamental aspects of the bourgeois revolutions and emancipation, is mirrored by the law of return and Israel’s citizenship law.
There are many similarities in the Nazi attitude to Jews and the Zionist attitude to non-Jews. The emphasis on racial purity, which in Israel means that some one-third of a million, mainly Russian, Jews cannot marry other Jews because the rabbinate does not consider them Jewish5 or the legal ban on Israeli Arabs marrying Palestinians of the occupied territories and living together in Israel. These are the Mischlinge (mixed race) of Israel. The same, of course, was true of South Africa with its coloureds.
Zionism, like all separatist movements, although originally a reaction to anti-Semitism, was unique in accepting the terms of reference of their oppressors. Just as radical feminists end up with a biologically determinist outlook, so Zionism too has always accepted the framework of the debate as set by anti-Semites - except that Jews are now in the driving seat. From its inception, Zionist ideologues were fascinated by social Darwinism, theories about the survival of the fittest and the need to select only the best ‘human material’ as immigrants.
But I have never argued that Zionism is fascist. Even the revisionist wing of Zionism, although attracted by European fascism (to the extent that in the 1930s its Hebrew paper Doar Hayom included a ‘Diary of a fascist’ column by Abba Achimeir), was not a fascist movement. It never sought the destruction of the Histadrut, the Zionists’ Jewish-only labour movement in the Yishuv (Jewish Palestine), since the Histadrut was creating the very state that the revisionists desired. Indeed the labour Zionists were more racist than their revisionist opponents! It was Histadrut which pioneered Jewish labour only (which the revisionists opposed, given their petty bourgeois base!). Their attacks and massacres of Palestinians such as Deir Yassin have become notorious, but that is because the labour Zionist movement sought to publicise them, whilst keeping under wraps their own butchery in Tantura, Safsaf, Dawayme, Lydde and Ramleh, etc.
Unlike Jack Conrad, I was involved in student politics from 1974 onwards. No platform for fascists and racists, which I supported, was never intended to be applied to Zionists or any other form of racism, such as those who support immigration controls. It was a defensive measure against those who sought to destroy others’ democratic rights. When it was misapplied, as it occasionally was, then I and others on the left opposed it. What in fact some misguided activists did was to cut off funding from Zionist societies (which nonetheless called themselves ‘Jewish’). Zionist societies, speakers or organisers were never no-platformed.. In fact the major example of no-platforming Zionism was not that given by comrade Conrad, but Sunderland Polytechnic.
However, whereas the Zionists blew out of all proportion the attempts by well-meaning student activists to support Jewish but not Zionist societies, the far greater example of the misuse of no platform - by the Union of Jewish Students, against myself and other Jewish anti-Zionists - is ignored. In the case of the AWL, they consciously ignored, indeed tacitly supported, the attempted banning of people like myself. In the case of Jack Conrad I will put it down to ignorance of what actually happened.
Another red herring of Jack is his conflation of the destruction of the Israeli state and the people who reside within its borders. In fact I use the term ‘destruction’ quite deliberately: to emphasise the peculiar nature of the settler colonial state of Israel. It is a state which actively seeks to impoverish and marginalise 20% of its own population. Even the bourgeois states of Britain and the USA seek to eradicate the most obvious examples of racism and pursue equal opportunities and multi-racial strategies.
In Israel the ‘anti-racist’ law was supported by the Jewish-Nazi rabbi, Meir Kahane, because it excepted any discrimination based on religion! Incidentally the term ‘Judaeo-Nazi’ was coined by the distinguished scholar and religious philosopher, professor Yeshayahu Leibowitz, to describe the mentality of the settlers. It was used by Israel Shahak, another professor at the Hebrew University, and the late Baruch Kimmerling, a sociologist at the Hebrew University who called Israel a “Herrenvolk republic”.
By the way, to describe someone like Avigdor Lieberman as a fascist is not to therefore say that even the party he leads is a fascist party. It is a description of the man.
Jack Conrad mourns in advance the disappearance of Israel: “It would be erased, obliterated, destroyed.” This is instructive. Just what is there to mourn about the disappearance of a state which has brought untold misery to millions of Arabs and has presided over massacres, pogroms and a vicious, Nazi-style racism against the indigenous population? We should welcome the fact that one day its Jewish citizens will be free from the permanent insecurity that comes with oppression. There is no comparison whatsoever with the attempted abolition of Poland, which had welcomed the immigration of Jews from western Europe in the 12th and 13th centuries. Poland was a nation which had struggled to achieve national independence and, once it did, it turned on its Jewish citizens. Israel is an artificial state, the product of western colonialism and the romanticists of the Victorian era.
Self-determination
Like all other issues to do with Zionism and Palestine, Jack makes heavy weather of this. There is no need to cite the biblical authorities of the left, Lenin and Trotsky, because the matter is quite simple. Self-determination only arises in the case of those who are denied it. You do not demand equality for men in a patriarchal society or freedom for whites in a society that discriminates against black people. Or if you do the chances are that you are a misogynist and/or racist.
Likewise the idea that what is at issue is self-determination for a people that has its boot on the neck of the Palestinians is frankly obscene. This is the politics of the AWL. Israel, for reasons which are economic, political and geographical, is in a permanent conflict with the Palestinian Arabs. It is the only major settler-colonial state left. Its real intention is to ‘transfer’ Israel’s Arabs once the time is right. Indeed the identity of the “Israeli Jewish nation” is based upon the oppression of the other. That is the glue that binds Misrahi and Oriental Jews to the Ashkenazis. It is the bond between the religious and secular. Take that away and what is left?
Of course, it makes no sense to talk about self-determination for the British or American nations. They determine others; they are not subjugated. Of course, if, like France during the war, they are occupied by a bigger and stronger power, we will support their right to resist occupation, but this is a fantasy of the imagination. I prefer to deal with reality. What is termed the Israeli Jewish nation was not formed as a result of the historical process of unification of lesser parts. It did not have a bourgeois revolution: on the contrary it acted to prevent the natural political and historical development of the Arab world.
The fact that there are five million settlers does not make them a nation. Language and territory - yes; but a nation is something more than that. It is an association of people for whom class divisions are the most important. As Count Clermont-Tonnerre put it in 1789, “To the Jews as individuals everything, to the Jews as a nation nothing”.6 Israel, however, is not a state that encompasses all its citizens regardless of religion or ethnicity. Quite the contrary: it is a state of only one section of the populace. To call that a nation is to confer the same title on whites in South Africa, the French in Algeria and the Protestants in Ulster.
The disappearance of the Israeli state and the living together of Jew and Arab as equal, regardless of religious difference (bearing in mind that in Israel religion and nationality are the same), cannot come quickly enough. Unlike Jack I shall not engage in any sentimental mourning for the monster that Israel has become.
This debate has been very interesting, but it has also been very academic. What the Palestinians urgently require is solidarity, not just pontification. Of course, I am proud of my role in building solidarity with the Palestinians and opposition to Zionism in Britain. When I first became an anti-Zionist there were just a handful of Jewish anti-Zionists. Zionism had rewritten Jewish opposition to its creed out of most texts. Today there is a flourishing and growing Jewish opposition to Zionism. I particularly welcome the new found interest in Bundism and secular alternatives to Zionism.
But the CPGB, despite Jack’s description of it as “militantly anti-Zionist”, has not in practice played any role in the solidarity or boycott movement. To adopt a programme without it having any effect practically is to ape the mistakes of the fast disappearing revolutionary left.
And finally. I suggested that Jack and myself, and others, debate these issues in a comradely fashion. I am therefore surprised that despite this suggestion, the CPGB did not think of holding such a debate at its Communist University.
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Notes
‘The Israel-Palestine question once again’ (http://www.cpgb.org.uk/worker/781/theisrael.php) Weekly Worker August 6.
See, for example, SB Beit-Zvi Post-Ugandan Zionism on trial: a study of the factors that caused the mistakes made by the Zionist movement during the holocaust Tel Aviv 1991.
See I Pappe The ethnic cleansing of Palestine Oxford 2007, p103.
‘Zionist imperatives and the Arab solution’, January 22.
See ‘Rabbis ban marriage for Israeli “untouchables”’:www.counterpunch.org/cook08062009.html (http://www.counterpunch.org/cook08062009.html)
Encyclopaedia Judaica Vol 6, p7.
For a secular, democratic state (http://www.cpgb.org.uk/worker/784/forademocratic.php)
Tony Greenstein replies to Jack Conrad and explains why Israeli Jews cannot be granted self-determination
Whilst flattered to be the subject of a four-page supplement by Jack Conrad, notwithstanding the “shallowness” of my political theory, I must confess to a certain puzzlement.1
What is the purpose of this logic-chopping, nit-picking and rambling attack? Instead of making out a cogent case for the CPGB’s position of two democratic, secular states - Israel and Palestine - he instead concentrates on a number of quite esoteric and minor points. In addition, of course, to the usual ad hominems.
To deal with the red herrings and straw men first.
No-one disputes that the Israel-Palestine conflict cannot be solved within the borders of what was mandate Palestine. It is indisputably a conflict that can only resolved in the context of the wider struggle for liberation of the Arab countries. And this is a struggle which can only successfully be led the Arab working class and the exploited masses of Egypt and Iraq in particular.
Comrade Conrad’s defence of the idea that the independence of Ireland is a “two-state solution” is the height of absurdity. Two states in the Irish context means two states within Ireland: ie, Ulster and Eire. Unification of Ireland is a single-state solution: ie, one Irish state. And the Protestants also consider themselves a separate people from the Irish. It is only a two-state solution if you look at the Irish conflict through imperialism’s spectacles. Yes, it is true that Irish MPs sat in the British parliament. The same was true of the French colonies. Because of its proximity there was a very close economic and political linkage between the British and Anglo-Irish ruling class, with the latter effectively the former’s junior partners. Ireland was both a victim of British imperialism and a beneficiary of its economic imperialism.
The TUC opposed the immigration of Jews in 1895 not because they were Jews, but because they were immigrant labour. The TUC clung to the idea, and still does, that an influx of foreign labour undermines the conditions of British labour. In so doing it seeks an alliance with its own exploiters. That was why Jewish workers formed their own trade unions in a campaign which successfully weaned British unions away from racism and nationalism. Hence why, in the 1930s, when Moseley’s British Union of Fascists were on the rampage, it was the Catholic dockers of the East End and other trade unionists who stood side by side with their Jewish brothers and sisters at Cable Street, as the Zionists and the bourgeois leaders told them to stay at home.
I have never ‘upheld’ the formulations of the Palestinian National Covenant. Where on earth did Jack get that idea? The Covenant has long since been a dead letter and thus Jack tilts at windmills that have long since rusted over.
If Weyman Bennett of the Socialist Workers Party’s central committee’s slogan was ‘Jews out of Israel’, then that is an illustration of his political illiteracy, not anti-Semitism. Jews are the most privileged section of Israeli society, the beneficiaries of Zionism’s apartheid society.
No-one in their right mind would have advocated returning Jews to Nazi Germany in the 1930s. However, that entirely misses the point. It was the Zionist movement that fought long and hard against any alternative refuge to Palestine, what they termed ‘refugeeism’. The Zionist leaders openly sabotaged the offer at Evian in 1938 of 100,000 places in San Domingo. Jewish refugees were seen as the battering ram to open Palestine to unlimited Jewish immigration.2
The phenomenon of Israel and Zionist groups lobbying western governments not to allow Jewish immigration to their countries is well documented in the case of America and Soviet and German Jewry. However, until recently I was not aware that the Zionist leadership even put pressure on Nazi Germany to only allow Jewish emigration to Palestine.
There is no “hopelessly tangled legal confusion in Israel between being Jewish as a religion and being Jewish as a nationality”. On the contrary, this is a necessary consequence of the fact that it is impossible to define ‘race’ for the simple reason that it is an artificial political construct. The situation in Israel is quite clear. If your grandparents were Jewish, you are Jewish according to the ‘law of return’ (the Nazi definition!). If you wish to marry another Jew or be buried in consecrated land you have to be Jewish halachically: ie, have a Jewish mother, which is a racial definition. Religion is the foundation stone of the Israeli definition of who is part of the Herrenvolk, regardless of religious adherence or practice. That is why, however ‘atheistic’ a Zionist is, his right to settle the land of Palestine is predicated upon a god whose existence he denies! In fact as the Supreme Court made clear in the case of Brother Daniel, there is no difference between being Jewish as a religion and as a nationality in Israel.
This ‘legal confusion’ was not unique to Israel. South Africa and Nazi Germany had their honorary whites and Aryans.
Zionism does not “obstinately” hold on to the idea of a Jewish world nation. On the contrary, it is fundamental to its claim that Israel is a Jewish state, as opposed to being a state of all its citizens. It is this which allows Israel to deny equality and basic democratic rights to its Arab citizens, because the Jewish population in Israel is the advance guard of far greater numbers.
The right to divorce is indeed a fundamental democratic and personal right. However, when one partner lacks all power and is subject to her husband’s reciting ‘I divorce you’ three times, divorce can simply be the entrance ticket to poverty and despair. Individual partnerships and civic entitlement are chalk and cheese. The right to ‘divorce’ in these circumstances can be a ‘right’ to ethnic cleansing and banishment.
It is true that Israelis today would “furiously resist” a single Palestinian state. Just as they furiously resist any measure of equality for Palestinians and they furiously resist the entrance of non-Jewish children to kindergartens, for example. The privileges of apartheid are often furiously defended and that is why relying on the privileged to give up their privileges smacks more of liberalism than Marxism.
Not guilty
Comrade Jack begins by describing me as a “leftish” member of the Alliance for Green Socialism, as well as a supporter of “third-worldist economism”. In both cases he is wrong!
I am indeed a member of AGS, part of a minority of revolutionary socialists. I joined AGS because of the lack of any socialist alternative, not least with the demise of the Socialist Alliance. The rest of Jack’s pontifications are sheer nonsense. In view of his strictures about accurately defining fascism, the sloppy description of the ‘No to the European Union, Yes to Democracy’ electoral bloc as “red-brown” is crazy. There were no fascists inside the bloc. The Communist Party of Britain is a good example of the capitulation to national chauvinism of a left grouping. However, it is not a fascist group or anything resembling such and it does not help clarity of debate to imply otherwise.
In fact I opposed entering an electoral alliance with No2EU, given the political basis on which it stood in the elections. I only supported it critically as the least worst alternative. The CPGB, of course, considered New Labour more progressive politically and urged support for them instead! Presumably ‘British jobs for British workers’ is an advance politically on ‘No to the European Union’.
However, since Jack has now raised it, I should explain that I was asked by AGS to be a candidate in the European elections and refused, both on personal and political grounds. It was only after considerable pressure from comrades in a number of political groups, including the Socialist Party and Socialist Resistance, that I reconsidered, by which time the positions had been filled anyway! But I remain absolutely opposed to socialists calling for withdrawal from the European Union, as if British capitalism is somehow more progressive than its European version.
As Jack feels the need to pigeon-hole me, I have become a “third-worldist economist” politically. He offers no evidence in support of this assertion. True, I do not believe the British and European working classes retain a revolutionary potential. Most of the Marxist left share this view, although they prefer to keep quiet about it as they engage in cross-class alliances. What made the working class potentially revolutionary was its concentration in the cities and large factories. In the past 25 years we have seen the atomisation of the British working class, with the disappearance of the dockers as a particularly militant part. Likewise shipyard workers, car workers and, of course, miners. Instead the last repository of trade union militancy, the RMT, consists of workers who in previous decades were considered ancillary to the great struggles and were normally to be found on the right of the labour movement.
This decline has been witnessed not only in the virtual disappearance of the NUM, but in the unification of the once-mighty TGWU and AEEU, together with an assortment of white collar trade unionists, and the growth of Unison. The idea that these structural changes in the British working class have no political implications is fanciful and unMarxist.
However, Jack is wrong to suggest that I therefore look to a substitute in the national struggles of third-world peoples and their leaders. That may indeed be true of most of the remnants of the International Marxist Group (of which I have never, incidentally, been a member despite Jack’s assertion to the contrary), but it is not my position.
Instead I see a redivision of the working class internationally. It is to the working class of countries such as South Korea that the historic task of overthrowing capitalism falls. Now I may be wrong, of course, and it is possible that the working class of Britain and Europe will wake up. However, I see no evidence for that. I also have no crystal ball, but neither does the CPGB and comrade Jack. What is missing in the socialist movement is any real debate about these issues.
Palestine and Zionism
I do not understand why Jack Conrad repeatedly feels the need to revisit minor disputes at such length in his article, when the key issue is an overall analysis of Zionism and Israel and how best to build solidarity. It appears that I got under his skin, hence the put-down ‘expert’. Issues such as Zionism/Palestine are too important for ‘lines’ to be laid down on the basis of an impressionistic understanding.
Even if he got it wrong, at least Marx took the trouble to learn and understand the operation of British imperialism in India. That was the gist of my criticisms of Jack Conrad, not any attempt to demonstrate superior knowledge. If you do not understand the particular nature of Zionism and its creation, Israel, you will inevitably fail to see the way ahead. It is clear that Jack Conrad sees Israel as just another capitalist country, akin to the USA, France, etc.
For all the reasons that Jack Conrad himself enumerates, such as withdrawal of troops from Iraq, I do not conflate the politics of the CPGB and Alliance for Workers’ Liberty. However, nothing is static in politics. I also took part in the debate that Socialist Organiser held in 1983. Overnight the position of SO jack-knifed from support for a democratic, secular state to a two-statist position.
In August 1982 Martin Thomas could write an open letter to Tony Benn (‘Why does Israel wage war?’) in which he declared: “Can we not support both Israel and the Palestinians, oppose aggression on both sides and seek reconciliation? In truth, no such even-handedness is possible, because, the situation is not even-handed … The aim of a democratic, secular state proclaimed by the Palestinians offers a place for the Israeli Jews as equals. It is compatible with (and we would fight for) maximum cultural and communal rights for them … True, the vast majority of the Israeli Jews do not believe that. But the Palestinians are not willing (and why should they be?) to delay a fight for their rights until the Israeli Jews change their minds, or until socialists develop a united Arab-Jewish working class struggle.”
A few months later and Martin Thomas would be singing the praises of the very two-state solution he denounced in this article! True, Martin Thomas is a particularly sad example of someone who has fallen under the influence of a malign guru, but he is not unique in his servility. Such about-turns are not unknown in the history of the left and nor is the CPGB immune to such shifts.
The hallmark of the ‘debate’ in SO 25-plus years ago was a rejection of the concept of the democratic, secular state. Jack Conrad’s assertion that a unitary, democratic, secular state is “an attempt to reverse the poles of oppression and potentially genocidal” was exactly the argument formulated at the time by Sean Matgamna. It was wrong then and it is wrong now.
Now I know that what remains of the left often becomes so trapped by the inner logic of its political formulations that it loses touch with reality, but the above statement is in a class of its own. Does Jack really think that counterposing a unitary, democratic, secular state to a racist, settler colonial state that defines privilege on the basis of religion is merely reversing the poles of oppression and potentially genocidal? This is to drain words of their meaning.
Nor is it true that a unitary state would mean that most Israeli Jews are to be granted religious, not national, rights. I would be in favour of any concessions that did not involve the re-imposition of the rule of the settlers over the indigenous population - including language rights (which are being taken away at this very moment from Israeli Arabs), cultural and religious rights. Just what national right would Israel’s Jewish population be deprived of, bar the ability to kick and abuse Israel’s Arabs? And, although the majority of Israeli Jews do indeed consider themselves secular, they have already made their Faustian pact with the religious. That is why they reside in Palestine.
The kernel of Jack Conrad’s confusion is his portrayal of the conflict as one between two nations. He is not alone. This was and remains a fundamental misconception. As the Palestinians themselves have discovered, it is the road to transfer. It reduces the expulsions, dispossession, massacres and racism of settler colonialism to a conflict between two peoples. When Jack uses the term “mutual recognition” between two peoples he probably does not realise that this was the key slogan of the overtly Zionist Union of Jewish Students. It reduces a political, economic and social conflict to one of collective psychology. If only ‘they’ could get on. It is the basis of ‘racial awareness’ and ‘diversity training’ in this country as a means of countering racism. At heart it is fundamentally reactionary.
And from this misconception it is but a short road to ‘Two states for two peoples’ and the pro-imperialist and Zionist politics of the AWL. I accept that the CPGB is not a pro-imperialist or Zionist organisation. But neither was the AWL. The road to hell is paved with good intentions and none come better than Jack Conrad.
The real problem with the CPGB’s position is its utopian and absurd slogan of ‘Two democratic, secular states’. It embodies a fundamental contradiction. It is the height of unreality. A two-state solution (or one state plus Palestinian cantonisation) would reinforce and cement sectarianism and conflict. In exactly the same way as partition in Ireland did. A Jewish state in Palestine could not help but be a racist, sectarian state looking for a pretext to march into its weaker neighbour. Two states is the solution of imperialism to the Israel-Palestine conflict, bearing in mind that the USA has no particular interest in West Bank settlements, dispossession or transfer.
Some of the most racist elements of the Israeli ruling elites - people such as Arnon Sofer, the Haifa University professor whose obsession it is to warn of the biological and demographic bomb that the Palestinians represent - support two states precisely because it is a way of permanently depriving Palestinians of any civil or political rights. Two states, as the AWL demonstrates, is a Zionist solution and the tacking on of ‘secular’ to the formulation merely emphasises the contradiction.
In exactly the same way, the creation of a Protestant statelet in Ireland could not help but be a sectarian anti-Catholic state, whose identity was based on supremacy over the nationalist population.
Jack feigns outrage at the comparison between the AWL and the politics he articulates. Yet he has only himself to blame. There are repeated references to ‘extermination’ of Israel’s Jews, genocide and, of course, the Nazi extermination. This was exactly the AWL’s method, drawing a straight line between the anti-Zionist Jewish working class of Europe, who died in the Hitlerite furnaces, and the Israeli military who drop one-ton bombs on the houses of civilians, torture and imprison children, and aid and abet the settlers’ pogroms.
To compare the unarmed peasant population of Palestine, who are now under the thumb of the CIA-trained militias and gangsters of the Palestine Authority, with the fascist butchers of European Jewry is frankly obscene. It demonstrates that Jack Conrad lives in a parallel universe. Is he unaware of the fascination that Israel has for the neo-Nazi soldiers of fortune of the far right? That European fascists, including the BNP, are largely pro-Zionist, because Israel is a model example of how you deal with ‘terrorists’ and Muslims? Even the dumbest Israeli soldier, who scrawls ‘We have come to annihilate you’ on the walls of a Palestinian home, understands that he has more in common with those who perpetrated the extermination of the Jews than with those who died. Because the Jews who died in the holocaust were no more of a threat to their neighbours than the Palestinians of Gaza and the West Bank are today. That is why, despite Zionism’s misuse of the holocaust as a propaganda weapon, Israeli soldiers subconsciously identify their Arab victims with the Jews of pre-war Europe. If extermination were to be on the agenda, it would not be Israel’s Jews who were in danger.
And nor is it just a question of Palestinian suffering. Israel has trained and armed the juntas of South and Central America, the Guatemalan genocidalists of Rios Montt and many and various dictatorships, not least the former apartheid regime in Pretoria. These are the comparisons that Jack Conrad fails to draw on. Zionism did indeed draw certain conclusions from the anti-Semites and Nazis, but they were not the ones that socialists articulate.
When I said that Jack was indifferent to the slogans of the pogromists of Yisrael Beiteinu and the mobs of Acre who shout ‘Death to the Arabs’, he protested vigorously. Yet how else is one to describe the political positions of someone who, in the context of the terrible oppression that the Palestinians undergo, describes the goal of a unitary, secular democratic state as “potentially genocidal”. If extermination and genocide has any relevance, it is for the Palestinians that we should tremble, not their racist overlords and oppressors. Socialists do not sympathise or empathise with fanatic racists and chauvinists, whatever their lineage, merely on the speculative grounds that one day they too may become the oppressed.
‘Into the sea’
Jack Conrad makes unnecessary concessions to the ‘fears’ of the settlers in Israel without any attempt to analyse where such fears come from or even whether there is any rational basis for them. One such example was the possibility he mentions of an “attempt to drive the Jews into the sea”. It was not contextualised, but simply cited as a self-evident truth: “It is fair to say, then, that the projected single Palestinian state would include roughly equivalent numbers of Hebrews and Arabs. Presuming, that is, there is no forcible movement of peoples. No attempt to drive the Jews into the sea.”
The Palestinian origin of this phrase, as Jack now concedes, is apocryphal: ie, a myth. As he also admits, it is a myth of Zionist creation. Strange though it might be, I do not believe that socialists should repeat, without comment, the propaganda formulations of colonisers. The fact is that the only people who were ever driven into the sea were the Arabs of Haifa.3 The purpose it served, however, was to turn polar opposites around. Instead of the actuality of Palestinian dispossession it served to focus the question on the fears of Israeli Jews, reinforcing the idea that the Palestinians were the reincarnation of the Nazis, whose sole purpose was to drive Jews into the sea: ie, exterminate them.
But Jack Conrad’s quite amazing conclusion - “and this is the moot point” - is that what matters is that it is believed on the streets of Tel Aviv, etc. To Jack this matters a great deal. Actually it does matter, but not for the reasons that he gives. It matters that settler populations, as part of their own justifications, will ascribe violence and genocidal intentions to the very people they are busy killing and dispossessing. But there is nothing unique in this. The reaction of the oppressed has always been the excuse for further violence of the oppressor. This is one of the features of settler colonialism, as those who remember the old westerns will recall - the Indians were always bad, rotten and above all violent.
Fascism
Jack in his original article asserted: “Conventionally, in Britain at least, what passes for the mainstream left damns Zionism as almost akin to fascism”.4 And what examples does he give to back this up? The Revolutionary Communist Group, the Workers Revolutionary Party, the Socialist Labour League, the Syrian Communist Party and American ex-leftist James Petras! Leaving aside the last two, who are not British, the first three are hardly “mainstream left”. In fact the mainstream left was historically pro-Zionist and today advocates a two-state solution.
But apparently I am also guilty of this sin, or rather Jack Conrad has difficulty in assimilating what is a quite simple argument. I have made many comparisons between Nazism and Zionism, not because I believe that Zionism is “akin” to fascism, but because in terms of their racist policies and practices, there are without doubt similarities between Zionism and Nazism. The Reich citizenship law, which stripped German Jews of their nationality and introduced a distinction between nationality and citizenship, thus undoing one of the fundamental aspects of the bourgeois revolutions and emancipation, is mirrored by the law of return and Israel’s citizenship law.
There are many similarities in the Nazi attitude to Jews and the Zionist attitude to non-Jews. The emphasis on racial purity, which in Israel means that some one-third of a million, mainly Russian, Jews cannot marry other Jews because the rabbinate does not consider them Jewish5 or the legal ban on Israeli Arabs marrying Palestinians of the occupied territories and living together in Israel. These are the Mischlinge (mixed race) of Israel. The same, of course, was true of South Africa with its coloureds.
Zionism, like all separatist movements, although originally a reaction to anti-Semitism, was unique in accepting the terms of reference of their oppressors. Just as radical feminists end up with a biologically determinist outlook, so Zionism too has always accepted the framework of the debate as set by anti-Semites - except that Jews are now in the driving seat. From its inception, Zionist ideologues were fascinated by social Darwinism, theories about the survival of the fittest and the need to select only the best ‘human material’ as immigrants.
But I have never argued that Zionism is fascist. Even the revisionist wing of Zionism, although attracted by European fascism (to the extent that in the 1930s its Hebrew paper Doar Hayom included a ‘Diary of a fascist’ column by Abba Achimeir), was not a fascist movement. It never sought the destruction of the Histadrut, the Zionists’ Jewish-only labour movement in the Yishuv (Jewish Palestine), since the Histadrut was creating the very state that the revisionists desired. Indeed the labour Zionists were more racist than their revisionist opponents! It was Histadrut which pioneered Jewish labour only (which the revisionists opposed, given their petty bourgeois base!). Their attacks and massacres of Palestinians such as Deir Yassin have become notorious, but that is because the labour Zionist movement sought to publicise them, whilst keeping under wraps their own butchery in Tantura, Safsaf, Dawayme, Lydde and Ramleh, etc.
Unlike Jack Conrad, I was involved in student politics from 1974 onwards. No platform for fascists and racists, which I supported, was never intended to be applied to Zionists or any other form of racism, such as those who support immigration controls. It was a defensive measure against those who sought to destroy others’ democratic rights. When it was misapplied, as it occasionally was, then I and others on the left opposed it. What in fact some misguided activists did was to cut off funding from Zionist societies (which nonetheless called themselves ‘Jewish’). Zionist societies, speakers or organisers were never no-platformed.. In fact the major example of no-platforming Zionism was not that given by comrade Conrad, but Sunderland Polytechnic.
However, whereas the Zionists blew out of all proportion the attempts by well-meaning student activists to support Jewish but not Zionist societies, the far greater example of the misuse of no platform - by the Union of Jewish Students, against myself and other Jewish anti-Zionists - is ignored. In the case of the AWL, they consciously ignored, indeed tacitly supported, the attempted banning of people like myself. In the case of Jack Conrad I will put it down to ignorance of what actually happened.
Another red herring of Jack is his conflation of the destruction of the Israeli state and the people who reside within its borders. In fact I use the term ‘destruction’ quite deliberately: to emphasise the peculiar nature of the settler colonial state of Israel. It is a state which actively seeks to impoverish and marginalise 20% of its own population. Even the bourgeois states of Britain and the USA seek to eradicate the most obvious examples of racism and pursue equal opportunities and multi-racial strategies.
In Israel the ‘anti-racist’ law was supported by the Jewish-Nazi rabbi, Meir Kahane, because it excepted any discrimination based on religion! Incidentally the term ‘Judaeo-Nazi’ was coined by the distinguished scholar and religious philosopher, professor Yeshayahu Leibowitz, to describe the mentality of the settlers. It was used by Israel Shahak, another professor at the Hebrew University, and the late Baruch Kimmerling, a sociologist at the Hebrew University who called Israel a “Herrenvolk republic”.
By the way, to describe someone like Avigdor Lieberman as a fascist is not to therefore say that even the party he leads is a fascist party. It is a description of the man.
Jack Conrad mourns in advance the disappearance of Israel: “It would be erased, obliterated, destroyed.” This is instructive. Just what is there to mourn about the disappearance of a state which has brought untold misery to millions of Arabs and has presided over massacres, pogroms and a vicious, Nazi-style racism against the indigenous population? We should welcome the fact that one day its Jewish citizens will be free from the permanent insecurity that comes with oppression. There is no comparison whatsoever with the attempted abolition of Poland, which had welcomed the immigration of Jews from western Europe in the 12th and 13th centuries. Poland was a nation which had struggled to achieve national independence and, once it did, it turned on its Jewish citizens. Israel is an artificial state, the product of western colonialism and the romanticists of the Victorian era.
Self-determination
Like all other issues to do with Zionism and Palestine, Jack makes heavy weather of this. There is no need to cite the biblical authorities of the left, Lenin and Trotsky, because the matter is quite simple. Self-determination only arises in the case of those who are denied it. You do not demand equality for men in a patriarchal society or freedom for whites in a society that discriminates against black people. Or if you do the chances are that you are a misogynist and/or racist.
Likewise the idea that what is at issue is self-determination for a people that has its boot on the neck of the Palestinians is frankly obscene. This is the politics of the AWL. Israel, for reasons which are economic, political and geographical, is in a permanent conflict with the Palestinian Arabs. It is the only major settler-colonial state left. Its real intention is to ‘transfer’ Israel’s Arabs once the time is right. Indeed the identity of the “Israeli Jewish nation” is based upon the oppression of the other. That is the glue that binds Misrahi and Oriental Jews to the Ashkenazis. It is the bond between the religious and secular. Take that away and what is left?
Of course, it makes no sense to talk about self-determination for the British or American nations. They determine others; they are not subjugated. Of course, if, like France during the war, they are occupied by a bigger and stronger power, we will support their right to resist occupation, but this is a fantasy of the imagination. I prefer to deal with reality. What is termed the Israeli Jewish nation was not formed as a result of the historical process of unification of lesser parts. It did not have a bourgeois revolution: on the contrary it acted to prevent the natural political and historical development of the Arab world.
The fact that there are five million settlers does not make them a nation. Language and territory - yes; but a nation is something more than that. It is an association of people for whom class divisions are the most important. As Count Clermont-Tonnerre put it in 1789, “To the Jews as individuals everything, to the Jews as a nation nothing”.6 Israel, however, is not a state that encompasses all its citizens regardless of religion or ethnicity. Quite the contrary: it is a state of only one section of the populace. To call that a nation is to confer the same title on whites in South Africa, the French in Algeria and the Protestants in Ulster.
The disappearance of the Israeli state and the living together of Jew and Arab as equal, regardless of religious difference (bearing in mind that in Israel religion and nationality are the same), cannot come quickly enough. Unlike Jack I shall not engage in any sentimental mourning for the monster that Israel has become.
This debate has been very interesting, but it has also been very academic. What the Palestinians urgently require is solidarity, not just pontification. Of course, I am proud of my role in building solidarity with the Palestinians and opposition to Zionism in Britain. When I first became an anti-Zionist there were just a handful of Jewish anti-Zionists. Zionism had rewritten Jewish opposition to its creed out of most texts. Today there is a flourishing and growing Jewish opposition to Zionism. I particularly welcome the new found interest in Bundism and secular alternatives to Zionism.
But the CPGB, despite Jack’s description of it as “militantly anti-Zionist”, has not in practice played any role in the solidarity or boycott movement. To adopt a programme without it having any effect practically is to ape the mistakes of the fast disappearing revolutionary left.
And finally. I suggested that Jack and myself, and others, debate these issues in a comradely fashion. I am therefore surprised that despite this suggestion, the CPGB did not think of holding such a debate at its Communist University.
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Notes
‘The Israel-Palestine question once again’ (http://www.cpgb.org.uk/worker/781/theisrael.php) Weekly Worker August 6.
See, for example, SB Beit-Zvi Post-Ugandan Zionism on trial: a study of the factors that caused the mistakes made by the Zionist movement during the holocaust Tel Aviv 1991.
See I Pappe The ethnic cleansing of Palestine Oxford 2007, p103.
‘Zionist imperatives and the Arab solution’, January 22.
See ‘Rabbis ban marriage for Israeli “untouchables”’:www.counterpunch.org/cook08062009.html (http://www.counterpunch.org/cook08062009.html)
Encyclopaedia Judaica Vol 6, p7.