Israel, the West bank and Gaza are a tiny areas of the eastern Mediterranean with a population about one sixth that of the UK.
Why is this Middle East conflict such a big issue, not only in the mainstream press, but in the discussions of socialists too?
There are two distinct peoples in the area, the Palestinian Arabs and the Israeli Jews. The Israelis have a secure, economically advanced state and First World living standards; the Palestinians on the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem, living under Israeli occupation, have no state and the living standards of a Third World country.
Israel, which was created after the Second World War as a haven for Jewish people after the horrors of the Holocaust, has repeatedly come into conflict with the Arab states which surround it. Following the Arab-Israeli war of 1967, Israel occupied the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Gaza strip - all areas with a Palestinian majority - and has stayed there ever since.
The conflict in Israel-Palestine has claimed thousands of lives and had political repercussions across the world - but particularly in the Muslim world, where many see the oppression of the Palestinians as a symbol for the treatment of underdeveloped Muslim countries by the developed West.
Socialists everywhere have quite rightly felt sympathy for the Palestinians' struggle. But socialists are divided on how the conflict can and should be settled.
Like the Arab states, the Palestinian nationalist movement which came into existence after 1967 refused to acknowledge that the Israel had the right to exist. The Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO) called for the creation of a single state in the whole of Palestine, where, they claimed, Jews and Arabs would live in equality.
Although this sounds good in theory, it could only have been created through forcibly subduing the Israeli Jews.
In 1987, when the Palestinian people launched a mass uprising against the occupation (the intifada), the PLO changed its demand to the creation of an independent Palestinian state alongside Israel.
Two states - meaning that the Palestinian Arabs and Israeli Jews would recognise each others' right to exist in seperate states - is the only basis on which Jewish and Arab workers in the region will ever become united enough to fight for socialism.
But, bizarrely, much of the left in Britain has continued to cling to the Palestinians' old demand of a single state in the whole of Palestine.
All too often, British socialists descend into demonisation of "the Zionists" (i.e Jews) and a sort of borrowed Arab nationalism. They view things not in terms of the compromise and mutual recognition which are integral to a democratic solution, but in terms of 'good' and 'bad' people (good Palestinians and bad Israelis).
This attitude has nothing in common with the socialist approach - what Lenin called 'consistent democracy'.
Workers' Liberty and Bolshy are almost alone among socialist groups in Britain in supporting the PLO's policy - a two state solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict.
In campaigning for such a solution, we hope not only to re-educate the British left, but to make some small contribution to helping Jewish and Arab workers in Palestine unite in the struggle for socialism.
