Daniel Randall’s article in Solidarity 3/119 was extremely useful for the information it collected on working-class movements and groups in Israel and Palestine.
It seemed to me, though, that it lacked a dimension. The working-class movements among the Palestinians and the Israelis represent our fundamental hopes, and they deserve support as workers’ movements whatever their exact policies.
But the working-class movements can effect fundamental political change only when they have the policies to do so.
For example, the Workers’ Advice Centre, which gets more column-inches in Daniel’s article than any other group, certainly deserves support in its worker-organising efforts. Politically, however, it is run by the ODA, a hard-Stalinist split-off from the Israeli Communist Party. Though vehemently opposed to Hamas and political Islam, it is also vehemently against “two states”. (Exactly how it thinks the national conflict can be resolved I can’t make out).
In Northern Ireland, where the trade union movement has remained united, and indeed united with the union movement of the Irish Republic, throughout nearly 40 years of the Troubles, it is important to support those unions as unions. We have, for example, opposed those leftists who on would-be Irish-nationalist grounds argued for disrupting the Irish union movement by campaigning for British-based unions to “get out of Ireland”.
But we also argued against those who suggested that the unions, just by being unions, could resolve the national and communal conflicts - for example the Militant group, forerunner of the Socialist Party, who used to propound “a trade-union defence force” as a cure-all.
The same principle goes for Israel-Palestine.
