Israel/Palestine

See our publications on Israel/Palestine, and articles on fighting left antisemitism.

Why we have “peace” in the headline

The front page headline on Solidarity this week says “Peace”. It is a way of saying in one word what we said in three (“stop the massacre”, “stop the war”) in previous issues . It is also a slogan rarely used by Marxists in recent decades. Why, and what is different now? From the early 1950s, and the reverberations persist, the Communist Parties in the stronger capitalist countries made “peace” a big slogan and busied themselves heavily with building “peace movements” designed essentially as adjuncts to the USSR’s diplomacy. For Algeria’s independence war, the French Communist Party’s slogan...

What left Palestinians and Israelis say

On 24 October, Standing Together leaders Sally Abed and Uri Weltmann, alongside Palestinian educator and activist Kefah Abukhdeir and Israeli activist Yael Berda, a supporter of the “A Land for All” initiative, spoke at an online webinar organised by activists in the USA. These are lightly edited excerpts from their comments, some of which were made in response to questions from the moderator and therefore do not necessarily reflect “prepared” remarks. The webinar can be viewed on YouTube Sally Abed I identify as a Palestinian citizen of Israel. Especially these days, unfortunately, the...

Choosing life over revenge

This week, I called Dr. Izzeldin Abuelaish, a physician from Gaza who now lives in Canada, to check in on him. During Israel’s 2008-9 war on Gaza, three of his daughters were killed when an Israeli tank struck their home. This time, I had to offer my condolences again, when he told me about the recent deaths of more than 25 members of his extended family in Gaza. Among them, he said, were five babies. In his declaration of war on Gaza on Oct. 7, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel quoted a line from a poem by the Jewish writer Chaim Nachman Bialik. “Revenge for the blood of a little...

Letter: Kent protest not as “practical” as it seems

There has been wide publicity for 150 people, many union activists, blockading a military-component factory in Kent on Thursday 26 October, with implications or statements that the factory is “providing weapons to the Israeli military”. Many people surely took part out of horror at the Israeli government’s collective punishment of Palestinians, and good for them. Only the image of doing something immediate and practical against Israel’s misdeeds in Gaza is not quite right. Elbit Systems UK Ltd, the main target for some years for similar protests by the Palestine Action group, including brave...

Hamas: a “black hole” for the French and international “left”?

Published on Ni patrie ni frontières by Yves Coleman on 26th October 2023 . Pic: Logo of Hamas. As far as Hamas is concerned, it seems to me that there are, roughly speaking, 5 competing interpretations: 1) Those who think that Hamas is an original national liberation movement, with a secondary religious component, and which must be an interlocutor in the negotiations with Israël. The former Trotskyist leader Edwy Plenel (now the director of “ Mediapart ”, an online left-wing “independent newspaper,” with 200,000 subscribers) explains, at the same time 1 , that Hamas is generously financed by...

Against the war, for consistent democracy

The population of Gaza faces an increasingly desperate situation. Blockaded and besieged by Israel, with access to basic utilities and aid having been cut off, a humanitarian crisis mounts. As of 23 October about 5,000 have been killed. Over 10,000 are injured. UN statistics estimate that 25% of homes in Gaza are damaged or destroyed. Israel has instructed 1.1 million people, over half of Gaza’s population, to evacuate the north of the enclave. The instruction is a practical impossibility. Some humanitarian aid has entered Gaza via the Egypt-controlled Rafah crossing. Aid workers say the...

Labour and the right to protest

Activists in Southampton Test Constituency Labour Party have been told that a local motion calling for a ceasefire in Israel-Gaza is out of order. Nine members of the constituency executive in Glasgow Kelvin have resigned their executive positions because “we have been informed by the general secretary and the Scottish general secretary that any motions relating to the situation in Israel and Gaza are out of order for all CLPs”. A number of Labour councillors have resigned from the Labour Party over Keir Starmer’s statements on Israel-Gaza. It looks like these moves reflect local right-wing...

"Listen to Israeli survivors: they don't want revenge": article by Orly Noy, 972 Magazine

This article is reposted from the e-newsletter of 972 Magazine . It can be viewed online here . “Everyone is talking about unity. Guys, unity is terribly beautiful, but in the field there is revenge, and there is cruelty … We will have our whole lives to grieve, and we will grieve. But now, there is only one goal: to take revenge and to be cruel.” These were the words of Israeli reserve soldier Guy Hochman — usually an entertainer and online influencer — in an interview on Channel 12 in the first days of Israel’s assault on the Gaza Strip following the Oct. 7 massacres by Hamas militants. In...

The politics of the last atrocity

It is personally understandable that Eric Lee in Solidarity 686 felt more able to write impressions and thoughts than thought-out analysis after the Hamas attack on Israel (7 Oct), but his column Six thoughts on Gaza and Israel muddled reasonable concerns about the reaction to the Hamas attack with straightforwardly wrong statements. In criticising a left that does not recognise Israel’s right to self-defence he over-corrects into defending and minimising brutal collective punishment by the Israeli state. Eric describes Labour leader Keir Starmer as one of the bright sparks following the...

Why isn’t Hamas like the Algerian FLN?

The Algerian nationalist movement, the Front de Libération Nationale, (FLN), from the beginning of its military campaign (1954-62) launched terrorist attacks on civilian as well as military targets within Algeria, and sometimes also on the French mainland (although there they did not target cafés and so on, as they did in Algeria). Yet Trotskyists supported both the aim of full independence and those fighting for it. The FLN, incidentally, although it had some links with Arab nationalists elsewhere, especially the Egyptian government, was more self-consciously “Islamic” than many other such...

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