Workers' Liberty

A group of around one hundred Israeli academics and peace activists have initiated an appeal against military action by Israel against Iran. This the text of the appeal:

In Solidarity 3/136 we published a back-page article on Iran, Israel, and nuclear weapons, and an inside-page “discussion article” by Sean Matgamna on the same question. The article said that “an [Israeli] attack on Iran will most likely lead to great carnage… strengthen the Iranian regime… throw Iraq back into the worst chaos”. “Socialists should not want and cannot support… Israel [making] a precipitate strike at Iranian nuclear capacity”.

This lying cover of the fatuous gossip-sheet Weekly Worker [showing a nuclear-bomb mushroom-cloud, with the headline: "AWL's Sean Matgamna: excusing a nuclear attack on Iran"!] is only the tip of a small iceberg of hysterical lying about Sean Matgamna, a writer for Solidarity, that they have set afloat over the last two weeks.

The issues involved here are to-be-or-not-to-be for rational politics. The downright irrationality of the outcry is clear from the assessment that Israel has "good reason" was preceded by a paragraph warning of the region-wide evil consequences of an Israeli attack and by the political judgement "We do not advocate an Israeli attack on Iran, nor will we endorse it or take political responsibility for it."

The discussion piece in the last Solidarity (3/136), "What if Israel bombs Iran?" provoked an explosion of website hysteria from a coalition of self-righteous people who, most of them, themselves support the Iranian mullahs having nuclear bombs, and who deny Israel's right to exist.

1) TO CONDEMN OR NOT CONDEMN?
2) THE "BURNING, IMMEDIATE QUESTION".
3) BACK TO THE CHESS BOARD
4) THE ISSUE IS AGENCY

The prize for the most hysterical response to Sean’s article on Israel, Iran and nuclear weapons goes inevitably to the CPGB (Weekly Worker, 31 July).

• See also: "For Reason in Politics! Reply to the uproar

• See also: "The Left Must Say No To the Mullahs' Bomb"!

• See also: For Reason in Politics!2 Reply to the uproar

We can’t be sure; but the odds must be that George W Bush’s administration will not launch a bomb attack on Iran in its last few months in office.

Even if such an attack went neatly as planned, it couldn’t bring any triumph that would boost the standing of the administration or of its favoured candidate in the November presidential election, John McCain.

This is the speech I gave proposing the resolution on Solidarity With Israeli And Palestinian Workers at RMT's Annual General Meeting 2008 - followed by my reply to points made in the debate.

The 2008 Annual General Meeting of the RMT transport union voted by a more than two-thirds majority for a two-states, pro-solidarity, anti-boycott, anti-Hamas position on Israel/Palestine, overturning

An Israeli socialist believes that the Olmert government should be defended against the attacks of the right

An Israeli socialist examines the crisis in the Communist Party of Israel

May 2008. Sixty years after the declaration of the state of Israel in compliance with the November 1947 resolution of the UN. The conflict with the Palestinians and the Arabs which at the Jewish state’s birth led to Arab invasion, war and the elimination of the Palestinian state stipulated in the UN resolution (almost all its territory went to Jordan and Egypt) is, perhaps, further from being resolved now than it was sixty years ago. The 41 year occupation of territory captured in the June 1967 war continues to poison Isreali-Palestinian and Israeli-Arab relations.

Review of two new books The Saladin Murders and the Bethlehem Murders by Matt Rees.

In her reply to David Kirk’s criticism of the Solidarity 3/128 editorial on Israel/Palestine, Cathy Nugent comments on the idea that we should not put demands on bourgeois governments:

The mobilization of Israeli peace activists, following the atrocities committed by Israel in Gaza (among other crimes, the planned starvation of the people of Gaza), left a very deep impact on the Israeli public sphere.

The class struggle in Israel becomes sharper on a daily basis; people are talking with fear of austerity policies whilst many believe that a serious wave of inflation is about to arrive.

The editorial on the crisis in Gaza in Solidarity 3-128 seemed to have some faith in the Israeli government’s ability to bring about a two state settlement to the Israel-Palestinian conflict. It appealed to the Israeli government to use a proportionate response to attacks and to live up to its democratic ideals. It also talks of a limited level of military response to Hamas’s rocket attacks as being unobjectionable self defence.

Gaza is “the world’ s largest concentration camp”, something to be compared to “the Warsaw Ghetto under the Nazis.” The position of the Palestinians in the Occupied Territories “resembles that of Jews who once lived in the ghettoes of Eastern Europe before the Holocaust.”

On 21 February, around 100 students from the University of Nottingham and the local area took to the campus grounds in a demonstration demanding their basic democratic right to free speech.

The demonstration followed a number of recent protests at the University where this right had been denied. One of these involved the arrest of a member of the Palestinian Society for “breach of the peace”. The University authorities had called the police while he was protesting peacefully against the abuse of human rights in Palestine.

The catastrophic escalation [of the Israeli army in Gaza] comes after a long period of struggling between Israel’s military and Hamas. Due to its commitment to the US imperialism and its loyalty to the Bush administration which carries forward the Road Map plan, Israel refused to acknowledge the Islamic rule in Gaza strip and accept the Hamas proposal for Hudna, ceasefire, which meant recognition of Hamas rule.

At midnight on Thursday 28/Friday 29 February, Israeli F16 jets fired three heavy rockets which demolished completely the Palestinian General Federation of Trade Union's "Folk House" in Gaza City.

That Israel should want to stop the clerical-fascist Hamas regime in Gaza lobbing rockets into Israel is understandable and unobjectionable. That is has a right to defend itself will be denied only by those who share Hamas's belief that Israel itself has no right to exist, and the Jewish Israelis no right to be where they are, except as a vulnerable, stateless, disarmed religious minority within an Arab state.

"The Palestinians and Israelis should go out to the streets under the slogan of ceasefire now. They must force the leaderships to stop the war now. The bloodshed must be ended immediately..."