Workers' Liberty

A Letter to an Advocate of "Secular Democratic State"

By Sean Matgamna

By Sean Matgamna, from the Workers' Liberty pamphlet Two Nations, Two States

The boycotting of nations and states is a crude, undifferentiating and normally ineffectual weapon.

1881: Wave of pogroms in the Tsarist Empire, followed by a series of laws discriminating against Jews.

Part 1

Thus, the rise of Zionism and of Israel had nothing to do with reflex responses to Nazi or more general anti-semitic persecution. It was a gratuitous act of evil.

In the 1970s the rulers of the USSR launched a sustained 'anti-Zionist' campaign, in fact anti-semitic.

Walking from Westminster to Trafalgar Square one afternoon in May or June 2002, I came upon a small picket-demonstration - a dozen people perhaps - waving Palestinian flags and placards on the pavement across the road from the entrance to the Prime Minister's residence in Downing Street. I saw from a distance, and wondered at it, that half the demonstrators were dressed in the black hats and clothes and the beards that identified them as some sort of especially religious Jews.

The term "Islamic fundamentalism" first became common during the Iranian revolution of 1978-79. The Western-backed Shah (who had been put in power by the CIA) was overthrown by an enormous popular revolt, one element in which, led by the Ayatollah Khomeini, expressed itself through the largest traditional religion in the country, Shi'a Islam.

"The socialist revolution is the only realistic solution of the Jewish question. If the Jewish workers and peasants asked for an independent state, good - but they didn't get it under Great Britain. But if they want it, the proletariat will give it. We are not in favour, but only the victorious working class can give it to them."
Leon Trotsky, 15 June 1940*

The "right of return"
Condemnation of the Israeli law under which Jews throughout the world have the right to come and claim citizenship in Israel is an article of faith among most anti-Zionists. It is outrageous, they say, that people with no direct connection with Palestine should have the right to come to Israel while the Palestinian Arabs do not.

Why a Palestinian Arab state?
The Palestinian Arabs are a defeated people, the main victims of the Jewish-Arab war of 1948.

As World War Two ended, Jewish groups started large-scale guerrilla war against the British, trying to drive them out. Fringe groups had already started such activity during the war. With the oil industry developing, Britain was more than ever concerned to maintain an alliance with the dominant classes in the Arab countries. In November 1947 the United Nations declared for partition of Palestine into a Jewish and an Arab state. Britain effectively abdicated the state power from that point on. Its calculation was that Jewish-Arab war would show that it was essential for Britain to reassert control as a "mediator" and "peacekeeper".

We side politically with the losers so far in the Arab-Jewish conflict, the Palestinian Arabs and their descendants. We support their struggle against intolerable conditions and Israeli occupation of the territories where they are the majority. We support the PLO aspiration to have an independent Palestinian state - where the Palestinian Arabs are a majority.

Israel confronts the Palestinians on the West Bank as a brutal colonialist oppressor. But the Jewish-Arab conflict is also a conflict of right against right - the right of the Palestinians to have an independent state and the right of Israel to exist in security. Here an attempt is made to untangle the issues.

The Israeli-Palestinian peace talks broke down in late 2000 and had ended by February 2001. The Palestinian intifada erupted in late September 2001. A right wing, chauvinist government was installed early in 2001 by an Israeli electorate bitterly disappointed that what they saw as major concessions to the Palestinians in the peace talks had not brought settlement, and alarmed by the intensifying conflict.