An Israeli socialist examines the crisis in the Communist Party of Israel
When I was only 19 years old, I had the rare chance to visit the apartment of THE comrade: comrade Meir Vilner. Vilner was, for many years, the general secretary of the Communist Party of Israel; he had long and excellent relations with the Kremlin, was loved by the leaderships of the Communist Parties around the world, and in return to the international support given to his leadership, he demonstrated full loyalty to the Moscow bureaucracy and served for decades the policies of the leading Soviet leaders, first and foremost Stalin, in the Middle East. Vilner played an historic role, maybe more than he was capable of acknowledging, after the newly born Israeli state was getting weapon from Czechoslovakia in order to defeat the Arab aggression in the war of 1948. Vilner, along the mythological communist leader Eliyahu Gozansky (who was killed in an airplane accident during the war), contributed to Israeli victory and signed on Israel's declaration of independence.
I was elected to the Central Committee of the Communist Youth League in 1997; being a Stalinist hardliner, I had great sympathy toward Vilner: while the majority in the Party, who overthrew Vilner after the collapse of the Soviet Union and blamed him in too long loyalty to the Kremlin, wanted to get rid of the long lasting commitment to Marxism-Leninism and was effected by 'Euro-communism', Vilner was the only leader who continued to be self-proclaimed Leninist and stood for the old Stalinist program, accusing his friends in being "revisionists", labeling them as "reformists". He did so even when there was no person in the Kremlin who wanted to go on with these perspectives, including his veteran comrades in the Communist Party of the Russian Federation.
A Stalinist celebrity
The door was opened in the small flat that was located in the southern area of Tel Aviv; Vilner was a very ascetic person who lived from small pension given to him after serving for almost 40 years in the Israeli parliament. Even after his wife passed away, their living room continued to be filled by many souvenirs and dolls they got in their visits to the USSR and the Eastern Block countries. Vilner, maybe the most hated politician in Israel, used his contacts in the Kremlin in order to advance Israeli-Palestinian peace dialogue and met the late Palestinian leader, Yasser Arafat, in secret meetings held in Prague, Moscow and Berlin, under the patronage of the World Peace Council, a Stalinist-led international organization which was aiming at promoting the Soviet policies across the globe. Now, after the collapse of what he regarded as the "realistic socialism", he had nothing but memories.
Together with his son, Vilner and I walked to the club of the communist party. There he was the main speaker in a special evening that marked 82 years to the Russian Revolution and 90 years to the establishment of the Party (it was founded in 1919 as the Socialist Workers Party and changed its name in 1922 to the Palestinian Communist Party). Among his fellow comrades, Vilner was a genuine "star". There, within a small crowd of men and women, all of them around 70 years old, he felt "at home". They were trained for decades to accept everything he said; for years they were paying enormous monthly membership fees, selling everything they had in order to help the party to print its press, walking days and nights in the streets in order to sell the party's papers, suffering humiliation and abuse due to their beliefs. Most of them, holocaust survivors, regarded Stalin as their savior and swore to defend the USSR. Vilner convinced them that the USSR collapsed as a result of conspiracy within the CPSU, that Gorbachev was a CIA agent, that Stalin made "mistakes" and committed "errors" but wasn't so bad after all. He attempted to encourage them by hailing the newly born CPRF as the hope of the Russian masses, promising that the "communism will return soon". He grasped Cuba and China, North Korea and Vietnam, as socialist states that should be defended without any reservation.
The evening was covered by Israel's Channel 1 after an ad was published in the press. The media was interested in the "last communist on earth", following the decision of the Socialist International to choose Ehud Barak, then Israel's Prime Minister, to serve as the International's president. Barak, who was deeply influenced by Toni Blair, had nothing to do with genuine socialist politics but the press regarded the small event of the old Stalinist guard as something worth mentioning. For the first time, Vilner read a live speech and repeated that he is confident in the socialist future of Russia. Yedioth Aharonot and Haaretz, Israel's most influencing daily newspapers, wrote on the event with cynicism. Vilner's character, resembling the one of late Erich Honecker (former leader of the DDR), was ridiculed. Even the leadership of the CPI announced that the bizarre evening doesn't represent it.
Short History of Israeli Stalinism
Vilner died in Tel Aviv, on June 5, 2003, aged 84. A couple of days before passing away, he was approached by a male nurse in the hospital where he spent the last months of his life. "You see, even Ariel Sharon thinks that we should get rid of the occupation!" the nurse told Vilner, and the latter reacted with a smile of triumph. Although Sharon didn't want to end the 41 years old occupation, and despite the fact that Sharon was influenced by the warmongering Bush administration, Vilner could have feel satisfaction as he was the first to oppose the war of June 1967, the first to demand full Israeli withdrawal from the Territories, the first to challenge the Israelis with his Two States Solution program. He passed away and was buried while his comrades were singing the Internationale near his grave.
However, Vilner's death didn't end the historic polemic between the Communists and their critics, mainly the Trotskyists, over the question of the USSR. Even today, after the generation of Stalinist hardliners has passed away, the Communists continue with defending their past as cheerleaders to Stalin and the Soviet regime, hailing the Red Army without understanding the contribution of Stalin to the lengthening of the Second World War (the USSR used nationalist instead of class propaganda when it dealt with the German workers and youth), justifying the Soviet foreign policies without making self-criticism in regard to the invasions into Czechoslovakia and Hungary, the repression turned against the Polish Solidarity led by Lech Walesa, the Soviet contempt regarding the Revolution of May-June 1968, the terrible war in Afghanistan et cetera. The Communists are still obliged to check their past, to understand what wrong did their movement and why the regime in the USSR collapsed (not to speak of the need to analyze what the Soviet Union really was: a workers' state, state capitalism or bureaucratized collectivism?).
This kind of discussion was never held in the Communist Party in Israel; the Israeli Communists did not write any Marxist analysis of their past, refused to approach their history, continued with unfounded examination of the Soviet regime (based on pure mechanistic and idealistic concepts, e.g., the conceptual separation of democracy from socialism, as if socialism is not the only democracy, as if a true democracy isn't the heart of any socialist project). Moreover, following Vilner's way, they are refusing to open their archives and tell the real story of the party's leadership that ruled until the late 1920s.
The truth is that the leaders of the Party were all assassinated by Stalin's agents in camps of concentration and penal servitude, many of them blamed for being Trotskyists. They were brought to the USSR without knowing their fate, charged for crimes against socialism and were sentenced to severe penalties. Today's Communists ignore the fact that Moscow encouraged a process of Arabization of the Party, enforcing the leadership of Palestinian Stalinists who were trained in the Soviet School for Workers of the East. After the old leaders were assassinated, Vilner et al were nominated and play prominent role in making the party a wing of the Palestinian national movement, transforming it into active agent of the Kremlin in the Middle East. Only one historian, Samuel Dotan, managed to get an access to the archieves and publish a fat book titled, Reds: the Communist Party in Eretz Israel (Hebrew, 1991). He was the first to expose the party's support in the Soviet-Nazi pact.
Today, five years after his death, the Party is torn into two rival factions. The one, Arab nationalist, strives to build a Palestinian oriented Communist party and change the party's name into the Communist Party in Israel (today the name is "of Israel"). The Arab nationalist faction, led by Muhammad Barake MK, bases itself upon pan-Arab version of socialism, the one that was adopted by former leader of Egypt, Gamal Abdel Nasser, and wishes to create an Arab unity of the Middle East, based on socialist program (the late Nasser was aided significantly by the Kremlin).
The other faction, led by former MK Tamar Goaznsky and former General Secretary of the party, Issam Mahul, is not Leninist in the old Marxist-Leninist sense; it wishes to promote Red-Green politics, aims at building coalitions with non-parliamentary groups (including Zionist ones) and tends toward more flexible approach regarding critical Marxist thinkers, including Leon Trotsky. Above all, this faction resembles groups like Italian Rifondazione Comunista or the German Die Linke (formerly the Partei des Demokratischen Sozialismus). The first group is associated with more Stalinist parties like German KPD (Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands), the Communist Party of the United States and the Communist Party of Britain (Morning Star). The common ground to all of these groupings is their opposition to the idea of socialism from below, their rejection of Marxism as the way of the workers to liberate themselves by themselves. Above all, they play significant reformist role in their national politics, allying with forces that are hostile to the workers class.
The Future of Socialism
The Communists in Israel will not be capable of building a revolutionary party, a genuine Marxist party, and will not recover themselves and their reputation, without changing their way of thinking, their entire set of concepts, their uncritical approach to their past. They will not be able to regenerate themselves without debating seriously the nature of the USSR. The question "What was the USSR?" is a key question which brings those who really want to learn from history to a position of using theoretical conclusions and implementing them in their political work. The Soviet question is the key for a genuine, real regeneration of the Left.
Today, when the regime in Cuba is being changed under the leadership of Raul Castro, when China is a capitalist nightmare for millions of poor and exploited toilers, when North Korea is proved to be a vicious dictatorship, when Venezuela is exposed as populist regime under socialist guise, communists should check their thought and answer where are they: in the side of the workers – or not.
The Communists in Israel, who really want to see a way out of the crisis in their party, should take a clear position and start with socialist internationalism which rejects any nationalist ideology. There is no doubt that the party will face a serious split; the question is, however, which role would play the internationalists and those who stand for authentic Marxism. A situation of no communist representation in the Knesset will be unfavorable to communists in general, but there are no shortcuts in the way of bringing genuine class politics into parliament.
The fact that so many Israelis support Two States solution only demonstrates that socialism in Israel has a future. There is a huge support amongst the masses in Israel for a situation in which democracy and solution to the long-lasting conflict will prevail, and the workers of the two nations will be capable of carrying forward a perspective of better future for their families and children.