Also run on the same day in Leeds. Start: 13:30

Location: Swarthmore Centre, Woodhouse Square.

Click here [1] for reading and discussion points.

Israel, Palestine, and socialism

AWL day school 4 February 2006

Reading: AWL pamphlet Two nations, two states. Socialists and Israel/ Palestine [2]. Supplementary reading: article [3] and
review [4] on political Islam in Workers' Liberty 2/2. Maxime Rodinson, Israel and the Arabs [5].

We won't produce a "crib-sheet" for this school, because a lot of the discussion will be organised round extracting the most important facts on different issues, i.e. creating our own "crib-sheets".

The school will be run like previous ones, i.e. with a short plenary introduction followed by three small-group discussion sessions and a short plenary summing-up.

Small-group discussions one: outline history

Work out a list of six key turning-point dates or periods on this question, between 1881 and 2005. For each date or period, write a sentence saying why it was a key turning-point.

Small-group discussions two: concepts

For each of the five political categories listed below, work out a list of three key periods in its development (each with a sentence explaining why it was a key period) and a list of three distinct variants within the category (e.g. three distinct strands of "Zionism", etc.)

• Arab nationalism

• Palestinian nationalism
• Zionism
• Anti-Zionism
• Political Islam

Small-group discussions three: debates

Each small group to take two or more of the following assertions, made by opne or another of the viewpoints hostile to ours on Israel-Palestine, and write down three key facts or relevant theoretical considerations on it. How should we best debate these various assertions?

• 1. The Israeli Jews are not a nation, but a colonial-settler caste, like the whites in South Africa or the European settlers in colonial Algeria.

• 2. The Palestinian Arabs are not a nation, but just a section of the general Arab nation. There is no reason why the Arab nation should not cede a small part of its territory to the Israeli Jews, and no reason for any special consideration for the Palestinian Arabs: they can just be absorbed by the other Arab states. If you want a Palestinian state, anyway, it already exists in Jordan.
• 3. The creation of the state of Israel was a crime - robbing the Palestinians of their land and driving them out. Redress is necessary.
• 4. Israel has repeatedly offered peace. The real reason why peace has not been possible is the stubborn refusal of most Arab politicians to recognise the state of Israel as a fact and negotiate reasonable terms with it. In the meantime there is no other way to break down that refusal and deal with the suicide-bombers than the policy of the iron fist.
• 5. There is no possibility of any socialist or working-class politics in anything like the present situation. The Palestinians have been pauperised, so scarcely have any economic basis for a working-class movement; the labour movement in Israel is deeply marked by its history as an instrument of Jewish exclusivism ("Jewish labour only", etc). All we can hope for is the USA or the UN to impose a more-or-less workable compromise.
• 6. The answer is the Arab socialist revolution, made by the region-wide Arab working class. That revolution will of course sweep away the exclusivist state of Israel, but, being socialist, it will also give full equal rights to Jews.
• 7. In principle we could concede that the state of Israel can continue. But that would have to be conditional on it abandoning racism, and in the first place recognising the right of return of the five million Palestinian refugees.
• 8. The whole idea of a Jewish state is sectarian and bigoted. There's no way we can support the right of Israel to exist any more than we could support the idea of a separate "Catholic state" or "white state" being carved out on some other territory.