By Martin Thomas
A few AWL members attended a session at the CPGB (Weekly Worker)'s summer school on 17 August, when they had invited Sean Matgamna of the AWL to speak on "Marxism and Zionism".
Sean started by saying that our immediate practical priority must be support for the Palestinians. Yet the only workable way forward for the Palestinians is for them to win the right to an independent state of their own alongside Israel. The programme of a "free", i.e. Arab, Palestine "from the river to the sea" both denies the democratic rights of the Israeli Jews and anyway is impossible to carry out.
To insist on "from the river to the sea", and nothing less, as so much of the kitsch left does, is in fact to give backhanded succour to Sharon.
As small Marxist groups, our prime role must be to clarify the left on this. And the left is deeply imbued with a demonisation of Israel. It stems from Stalinism - in the first place from the Comintern's Third Period embrace of supposedly "anti-imperialist" Arab pogromist movements in 1929 and after, and in the second place from a huge campaign of official "anti-Zionist" (in fact anti-semitic) agitation conducted by the USSR from 1949. (See the article by Stan Crooke in the AWL pamphlet "Two Nations, Two States").
The Weekly Worker now agrees, in principle and in general, with the AWL's advocacy of "two states". But its emphasis is to minimise its differences with the kitsch-left and to maximise polemics against the AWL, insisting, for example, that while the existence of Israel must now be accepted, its establishment in 1948 was "a crime".
As a footnote, it is instructive to recall the history of the disagreements between the Weekly Worker and the AWL on this. The Weekly Worker long had a radically anti-Israel position, and officially adopted "two states" only in theses adopted in May 2002.
Meanwhile, in April 2002, the Muslim Association of Britain had made its first large-scale public appearance, with a large demonstration on the themes Zionism = Nazism, Sharon = Hitler, Star of David = Swastika, the Israeli brutalities in the Occupied Territories are the "real" Holocaust.
The Socialist Alliance Executive met a few hours before that demonstration. Everyone at the Executive claimed ignorance about the MAB (and thus about the likely character of the demonstration). I expressed concern because the MAB's website - which was all I had been able to check out - highlighted a link to Jamaat e-Islami, the main Islamic fundamentalist party in Pakistan. That the MAB was an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood was not yet clear.
The SWP proposed that the Socialist Alliance join the march with placards (which in fact they had already printed with the SA logo) saying: Freedom for Palestine, Victory to the Intifada. John Rees of the SWP recommended these slogans by saying that we must above all be in tune with militant Muslim youth.
Marcus Strom of the CPGB/WW was inclined to accept the SWP's slogans. He voted for them, but in the end I convinced him to vote also for the slogans AWL proposed for the SA - Solidarity with the Palestinians, Israel out of the Occupied Territories, Two Nations Two States - all of which were voted down by the SWP.
When we saw the nature of the demonstration itself, the AWL refused to join in, and stood at the side of the road with placards showing our slogans. Some of the Asian marchers, shocked by the tenor of a march that they had thought would be pro-Palestinian, welcomed our presence and asked to take our placards. All the other British left groups joined the demonstration without any of the concern to differentiate that those Asian marchers showed.
Not just SWP, but SP, ISG, WP... and CPGB/WW too. That was the start of the whole strange cycle of political events which led to the SWP allying with the MAB in the anti-war movement and then in Respect, and the CPGB/WW tagging along with the SWP (with faint demurs) at every point of decision.
The CPGB/WW made a first formal step out of the miasma of kitsch-left Israelophobia. That could have been an important first step to rethinking the whole huge baggage of ideas on the issue which they had inherited from what they call "the official communist movement". In fact they allowed itself to be pulled back by the magnetic attraction of the big battalions of the MAB, transmitted through the SWP.
Better to think the issue through thoroughly, and set up a clear pole of opposition to the entire force-field of the MAB.