Daniel Randall’s article in Solidarity 3/119 was extremely useful for the information it collected on working-class movements and groups in Israel and Palestine.
It seemed to me, though, that it lacked a dimension. The working-class movements among the Palestinians and the Israelis represent our fundamental hopes, and they deserve support as workers’ movements whatever their exact policies.
But the working-class movements can effect fundamental political change only when they have the policies to do so.
For example, the Workers’ Advice Centre, which gets more column-inches in Daniel’s article than any other group, certainly deserves support in its worker-organising efforts. Politically, however, it is run by the ODA, a hard-Stalinist split-off from the Israeli Communist Party. Though vehemently opposed to Hamas and political Islam, it is also vehemently against “two states”. (Exactly how it thinks the national conflict can be resolved I can’t make out).
In Northern Ireland, where the trade union movement has remained united, and indeed united with the union movement of the Irish Republic, throughout nearly 40 years of the Troubles, it is important to support those unions as unions. We have, for example, opposed those leftists who on would-be Irish-nationalist grounds argued for disrupting the Irish union movement by campaigning for British-based unions to “get out of Ireland”.
But we also argued against those who suggested that the unions, just by being unions, could resolve the national and communal conflicts - for example the Militant group, forerunner of the Socialist Party, who used to propound “a trade-union defence force” as a cure-all.
The same principle goes for Israel-Palestine.
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In response...
I think this is basically a fair point and a legitimate criticism of my article. I would say, however, that although the General Federation of Iraqi Workers (and before it its predecessor organisation, the Iraqi Federation of Trade Unions) in Iraq are led by people whose politics are as much, if not more, of a dead-end for Iraq than the ODA's Stalinism is for Israel/Palestine, the AWL is right not to constantly pepper our stuff about solidarity with Iraqi unions with criticism of them.
To give another example, the leadership of the PGFTU (also mentioned in the article) is also politically dreadful, tied as it is to a bourgeois nationalist party that's largely discredited amongst most Palestinians. It doesn't come in for the same treatment as the Workers' Advice Centre in Rhodri's letter presumably because of its formal commitment to two-states, but given that everyone from George Bush to sections of Hamas have made such commitments at some time or another this is hardly sufficient evidence for political good-health. Despite this, the AWL has (again rightly in my view) printed and reproduced material about or indeed by senior PGFTU members without ruthelessly bashing their dead-end bourgeois nationalist politics.
Of course we have a responsibility to tell the truth about who leads these organisations, but if we assess them as legitimate working-class formations (which I think we're right to do in the cases of the GFIW, the WAC and the PGFTU) then our first responsibility is to argue for solidarity with them and their members, regardless of the reactionary politics of their leaderships.