Workers' Liberty

By Hal Draper
The Fourth International,
The Revolutionary Communist League of Palestine,
Max Shachtman.
Debate: Albert Glotzer and Ernest Mandel

Most “Trotskyists” today are, everywhere, agitators and propagandists against the Jewish state of Israel. Not agitators for the view that Israel should change its relationship with the Palestinians, or that it should help set up an independent Palestinian state alongside Israel. No. The agitation and propaganda centres on the “demand” that Israel should cease to exist.

These Draft Theses were produced by the International Secretariat of the Fourth International in January 1947, and probably written by Ernest Mandel. The first part summarises the historical analyses of Jewry and anti-semitism developed by Abram Leon in his book The Jewish Question, and assesses Zionism and anti-semitism in 1946-7.

The statement printed here was an editorial in the Hebrew language publication Kol Ham’amad (Voice of the Class) of the Revolutionary Communist League of Palestine, a section of the Fourth International.

The British line was consistently directed toward fomenting the Pan-Arab reaction against the partition.

The following document was issued by the Palestinian Trotskyists in 1948. When the left today writes or speaks about the 1948 Israeli-Arab war, it is a story of anti-Arab atrocities by the Jews, and no more the clear implication is that the Arab side deserved support, whatever the faults of its leadership.

The Jewish question since World War Two
By Ernest Mandel (“Germain”)

[The following article is the concluding chapter written by Mandel for the book The Materialist Conception of the Jewish Question, by A Leon. This book was completed in December 1942. A Leon, the author, was the national secretary of the Belgian Trotskyist party. The Gestapo arrested him in June 1944 and he died a martyr's death in the Nazi concentration camp at Auschwitz.]

The Jewish Problem after Hitler

"What is obvious is not always known,
And what is known is not always present."
SAMUEL JOHNSON.

The reaction of the official Fourth Internationalist organizations to the Jewish question and the problem of Palestine in the new situation produced by Hitlerism and the war is a measure of their Incapacity to free themselves from outlived theories and political positions. This results in a dreary reaffirmation of old ideas and programs accompanied by the repetitious explanation that "there is no reason to change our position" since "there is nothing new in the situation." Thus it is the same with the Russian question, the national question and the Jewish question. For the most part, these organizations, most notably the Socialist Workers Party in the United States, have remained virtually silent on the Jewish question. The silence is not wholly accidental; it is a reflection of policy. Real and concrete new probIems of the day are approached with extreme caution and conservatism.

In 1936 the Communist Party of the USA sent the editor, Malech Epstein, of its Yiddish language paper, Freiheit, to Palestine to report on the Arab-Jewish conflict there. When Epstein broke with the Communist Party a couple of years later, he published an account of his experience in Palestine. He found that the Communist Party of Palestine supported, and sent some of it's members, Jewish as well as Arab, to participate in terrorist attacks on Jews. This summary of his report appeared in the paper of the SWP USA, Socialist Appeal, in june 1939. It was unsigned, but was most likely written by either the editor of the Appeal, Max Shachtman or Felix Morrow. SM

This article expressed the response of the American Trotskyists to the historic turn of the Stalinist Comintern to a new type of “anti-Zionism”. It was the beginning of a new departure whose consequences are today most noticeable in the ostensible Trotskyist movement. The Communist League of America regarded itself as an expelled faction of the Communist Party of America. Shachtman’s “solidarity” with the party and efforts to influence its members and sympathisers lead him to take a too even-handed “balancing” approach to the conflict between the Stalinist Jewish paper Frieheit and the social-democratic Jewish daily Forward. Some of the anti-semitic cartoons published in the Freiheit can be found in the AWL’s pamphlet Two Nations Two States. What is important here is the attitudes such as support for free Jewish immigration to Palestine.