Anti-Zionism = Anti-Semitism

[Fionnagáin]

Yeah, nations are social constructs, and thus as of now a Jewish nation exists and a Palestinian nation also exists, whatever Hitler or L1NKS or "there's no such thing as a Palestinian" winguts say.

If it's a construct, then we're able to adopt a critical attitude towards it, same as any other construct. Just because something exists doesn't mean we have to condone it.

[blake 3:17]

It is too old to be a Nazi fantasy; it is most certainly a Christian/Islamic/Jewish fantasy.

But in what sence is it more questionable than the idea that all Palestinians form a nation of their own?

Well, some Jews now do have a nation state, and no Palestinian does.

According to certain models, if a people are insufficiently war and state minded, they shouldn't be. The whole of the political spectrum has used this to justify mass atrocity, displacement, murder, and theft.

[Nicolas_Cage]

In response to OP, the Israel/Palestine transcends one/two countries. It is a source of hatred towards the US and many other western countries throughout the Arab world. While being anti-Zimbabwe might seem as important to you as being anti-Israel or an anti-Zionist, it's really not (by the way, Zionism is an ideology whereas Zimbabwe is a country so they're in two separate fields ).

It can be explained this way. Say if we take it that identifying ourselves as anti-Zionists and not anti-Zimbabweists(? ) is based on some sort of dormant antisemitism. Could it not also be said that since we identify ourselves as anti-fascists that we are racist against Germans or Italians? You might say this is a silly comparison but let's break it down. It is true that there are fascists in other countries and it is an ideology that can be applied to any country but there are also Zionists who aren't Jews and support establishing a Zionist state in Palestine despite they themselves not being Jewish and despite the fact that they aren't living in Palestine.

[Devrim]

That is an organisational and a logistical problem; obviously there are downswings in any sort of struggle.

I don't think that the situation that the Palestinian nationalist movement finds itself in today is the result of any temporary 'downswing'. The PLO suffered a series of historic defeats, including their expulsion from Jordan in Black September, and their expulsion from Lebanon after the siege of Beirut. These aren't something that can be rectified with better organisation and logistics.

And the appropriate response to a downswing is not throwing one's arms up and quitting - that is not an option the Palestinians have - but regroupment.

What do you mean here by regroupment? Which of the Palestinian nationalist factions would you like to regroup, and under what banner? How do you think that this would affect their struggle?

I think that you must live in some sort of leftist newspaper fantasy world, where the struggle is always militant and just lacking in the right leadership, presumably Trotskyist, to take it forward.

The reality is that no amount of regroupment, or improvements in the organisation, or logistics of the Palestinian nationalist organisations is going to fundementally change the balance of power.

National liberation movements are nationalist...

This is simply not the case; I have already explained the distinction, and until you at least address it, instead of screaming about nationalism, I refuse to debate you any further.

I would advise you to go to the original source material, and look at the sort of things that the leaders of national liberation movements have said to describe their own movements. To talk of one of the movements that has been mentioned on this thread, the Irish nationalist movement, I think you will find that Pádraig Pearse,leader of the 1916 uprising, was a particular blood and soil nationalist.

Right, because an Entente-partitioned Turkey would have been so incredibly friendly to communists, workers and minorities, just like the various White directorates in Russia, no?

At the time that the Russian Party fostered this policy of supporting the Turkish nationalist movement onto the Turkish communists, there was massive discontent, and industrial strife, not to mention war-weariness through out the country.

Was there a possibility of a workers' and peasants' revolution at the time? We will never know, but certainly there was no chance of it when the communists were advocating 'national unity', of the type, incidentally that Trotsky later objected to in China.

It isn't a question of supporting either the nationalists or the occupying powers, but in a situation where the neighbouring country had just had a revolution, and there was massive working class discontent and struggle of supporting a class policy. Would it have been worse if the occupying powers had won? Possibly it would have, possibly it wouldn't have. The Turkish nationalists though were genocidal. Policies of ethnic cleansing and mass murder were that had begun under the Ottoman state were continued under the new republic. This shouldn't have been surprising to the Bolsheviks as the people who they had supported and armed were essentially a part of the Ottoman military machine who had been carrying out these genocides in the first place.

No, Israeli racism will be ended by space fairies from the planet Zog, or when a class-conscious proletarian movement leaps from the foreheads of the leftcom intelligenty and spontaneously overthrows capitalism, whichever comes first.

I said earlier in the thread that outside of mass class struggle across the region, I don't think that it will be ended. I don't believe that 'space fairies' will do it, or that some class movement will emerge in Palestine/Israel. You, on the other hand, seem to believe that there will miraculous be a change in the fortunes of the Palestinian nationalist movement, presumably caused by 'regroupment', 'improved organisation and logistics'. It seems just as absurd as the 'space fairies'.

National liberation struggles tended to succeed when they were backed by foreign states and used as pawns in regional power struggles. They also succeeded when they were movements of the overwhelming majority of the population against small minorities.

Like in Algiers?

Yes, like in Algeria, where the colonists made up less than 20% of the population.

Like in Tatarstan?

No, not like Tatarstan, which I believe is still a member of the Russian Federation.

Oh God, you can't seriously think that the United States would go to war over Israel? At best they'd sell weapons - at worst, if the pressure against the war becomes too much (and this is one of the tasks of the US proletariat - made rather difficult by people on the alleged left scaring them with racist caricatures of bloodthirsty Palestinian "nationalists" who want to kill every Jew in Palestine), they would force Israel to the negotiating table.

No, I don't think that the US would currently go to war over Israel. It doesn't need to. If there was a real change in the balance of power it might feel the need to assert its authority again within the region, which it has done before.

Devrim