Pro-Palestine or anti-Israel? The basic difference between AWL and the conventional Left on the Middle East (2004)

Submitted by Anon on 17 June, 2004 - 5:32 Author: Sean Matgamna

Dave Osler's letter (Solidarity 3/51) offers an opportunity to restate our position on the Jewish-Arab conflict.

If Dave Osler thinks - and it seems he does - that any of us approach this question as Israeli nationalists, an outline of our position is sorely needed.

Osler puts his finger on it when he asks the question: "What would be the AWL's logical objection to the... proposition that 'on one level, of course, the Palestinians are entitled to defend themselves against those who send helicopter gunships to their refugee camps, and the leaders of Israel are therefore legitimate Palestinian targets'?"

Speaking for myself, I'd say, none.

And we do not have to confine ourselves to the hypothetical. When in October 2001, Israeli minister Rehavam Ze'evi was assassinated, I wrote in Solidarity: "The... killing of Ze'evi... is morally not the same thing as the killing of Israeli children on a school bus... Actions like the killing of Ze'evi are inevitably part of the struggle of oppressed peoples..." (Solidarity 2/51).

I didn't see the assassination of the Israeli minister as the equivalent of blowing up a Jewish cafe or school bus. I did not class it as "murder", an irrelevant legal definition, and I did not condemn it as I condemn "blowing up courting couples in a pizza joint". Did that make me a "propagandist outrider for Hamas"?

There is more to say, but what would Dave Osler's objection be to what Solidarity said about the assassination of the Israeli minister? That socialists are in principle against targeting the leaders of nations and governments? Why?

I cannot see why in principle those who control and direct armies are not legitimate targets in war. Talk about what is "legal" or "illegal" here, and about an "instant death penalty without due process", is an appeal to a state of things that does not exist. It is to pretend that a state of war does not exist.

Those on the pseudo-left who are most outraged by the killing of the Hamas leader - I don't necessarily mean Dave Osler - never find in themselves outrage or even mild protest against the killing of Jewish people in a "pizza joint" or kids going to school on a bus. Me, I'll weep for the innocent victims on both sides, and not for the chauvinist leaders on either side.

You might think targeting the leaders ill-advised, but that is a different question.

I can't see that one of the central leaders and active inspirers of Hamas being a "half-blind paraplegic" has anything to do with it. F D Roosevelt was a paraplegic during his 12 years as US President.... Therefore?

On one level, the Palestinians - all Palestinian factions - wage a legitimate war to drive the Israelis out of their areas. In that they are entitled to the support of all socialists and honest democrats who are not consistent pacifists, rejecting all wars, even wars of liberation.

Solidarity has never deplored or condemned attacks on Israeli forces in Palestinian territory. The turn to militarism and the second intifada was in our opinion misconceived - but that is a different question.

If the kitsch left supported the Palestinians from the point of view of consistent democrats and internationalists, and not as vicarious Arab or Islamic chauvinists, for whom the object of war is not the liberation of the Palestinian Arabs but the subjugation of the Israeli Jews and the destruction of Israel, then AWL would have no quarrel with them. Certainly I would not.

What the Palestinians do not have the right to do is send human bombs to deliberately slaughter Israeli civilians.

The Israeli government is habitually indifferent to whom else it kills when it goes after Hamas leaders. Its slaughter of Palestinians in its operations against Hamas and other armed opponents is monstrous. It is, as I wrote in the article Dave Osler responded to, an expression of the chauvinist politics and objectives of the Sharon government. We condemn it unreservedly.

There is, however, a distinction between that indifference and the deliberate targeting of an Israeli school bus or a cafe in Tel Aviv. Isn't there? Condemn, as we must and do, the behaviour of the Israeli army in the Occupied Territories, and those who control that army, it is still not the same as the deliberate targeting of civilians and the choice of the butchering of civilians as a method of warfare.

I can think of no circumstances in which socialists would support such a policy - even by people whose political objectives we completely endorsed.

But Trotskyists did not condemn the Algerians fighting a war of liberation against France who blew up cafés in Paris? They said simply that the French should get out of Algeria?

Here the analogy between the Palestinian war of national liberation and others, like the Algerian, breaks down. The deliberate slaughter of Israeli civilians is one expression of Hamas's basic political position, that the Israeli Jews have no national rights, no right to a state, and - except perhaps as a submissive religious minority - no right to be where they are at all.

Hamas do not proclaim it as the PLO once did, but "driving the Jews into the sea" is their objective. Their human-bomb tactics express that, too.

Others who have followed them into such tactics, like the al-Aqsa Brigade, are affiliates of political formations which are formally, but not always without ambivalence, for a two-states solution, Israel alongside a Palestinian state.

It is not enough to say - as we said about the Algerian-French conflict - "Israel should just get out of the Occupied Territories - that would end the scourge of the human bombs". We do say that, but it is not so simple.

What exactly are the Occupied Territories? Is pre-1967 Israel "occupied territory"? Most of those who target Israeli civilians would answer yes to that, and they would link their attitude to Israeli Jews to that answer.

The general answer of socialists and consistent democrats is that the Occupied Territories are the Palestinian-majority territories. But that too raises difficulties.

Sizeable areas on the West Bank are occupied by Jewish settlements, by roads serving them and by military garrisons protecting them. We have the obscenity of tens of thousands of Palestinian Arabs in Hebron being held hostage on behalf of a few hundred Jewish settlers there.

I don't think we should shout "Jews out of the West Bank", any more than "Palestinians out of Israel". But if the Palestinians are to have a territory, and if the possibility of a Palestinian state alongside Israel is not to disappear as did the Palestinian state stipulated in the 1947 UN partition plan, certain areas in which there is now a Jewish majority will have to be returned to the Palestinians: the Jewish settlements in the West Bank, or most of them, will have to be uprooted.

It is improbable that the division between a Palestinian state and Israel will exactly coincide with the 1967 borders. Where will it be? I have no idea, and I am not competent to have one. "It is in opposition to the practicality of the bourgeoisie that the proletarians advance their principles in the national question" (Lenin).

Over time a just two-states policy would cut much of the ground from under the feet of the incorrigible Palestinian and Islamist revanchists and irredentists. But Israel getting out of the Palestinian-majority territories and dismantling all or most of the post-1967 settlements would not necessarily end the activities of those who want to destroy Israel. Immediately, it would encourage them.

To say that is how things are is not to endorse the Israeli chauvinists who fight a long war with the objective of making a Palestinian state impossible and of expanding in the Palestinian territories as much as is compatible with maintaining a secure and long-term Jewish majority in the state.

It was not as an Israeli nationalist, but as a socialist internationalist, that I wrote what I did about "Israel [being] entitled to defend itself against those who send suicide bombers into the cities of Israel". The fact that I condemn the way Sharon does that, which, as I wrote, "commits the Israeli government to a policy of war and repression against the Palestinians - and as much of it as will be necessary to beat them down", does not change it one iota.

There is no feasible democratic policy but two states. Israel is one of those states. Recognition of two states, in the political conditions on the "left" now, it seems to me, demands recognition and defence of Israel's right to defend itself, even in articles condemning what the Israeli government does.

It is not so long ago that a gigantic demonstration in London marched behind two slogans, "Don't Attack Iraq" and "Freedom for Palestine". Most of the politically conscious socialist marchers on that demonstration understood themselves to be advocating Arab subjugation of the Israeli Jews and elimination of Israel. Certainly that is what the two weird sisters of the SWP and the Muslim Brotherhood (through its front, the MAB), who imposed the slogan "Freedom of Palestine" on the demonstration, understood by it.

That was only one manifestation of the poisoning of our political world by vicarious Arab and Islamic chauvinism. Central to the mindset here is and has been the notion that the Israeli Jews - the pre-1948 Jewish community, or Israel - never had the right to defend themselves.

Dave Osler evidently reads Solidarity. Where, then, does his idea come from that our point of view - or mine, anyway - is that of one-sided Israeli nationalism, and not that of international socialism, advocating the rights of both the Israeli Jewish and Palestinian nations and peace on the basis of mutual recognition?

Why does the statement that Israel has a right to defend itself - in an article condemning what it had just done - suggest to him such a one-sidedness?

From ideas about what is "legal" and "illegal" during a war - and that is what it is between Israel and the Palestinians, a horribly ill-matched war? From the latent pacifism, the one-sided, inconsistent, and incoherent pacifism, that forms part of the subsoil of the left and the pseudo-left?

But isn't it also that Dave Osler has casually picked up the polemical misrepresentation of AWL by people on the left and pseudo-left who themselves are outright Arab and Islamic chauvinists, or who accommodate to the Arab and Islamic chauvinists?

The way this issue is made to appear by the pseudo-left is, if you think about it, very odd indeed. Those who advocate the only possible democratic programme for Palestinian liberation, and the one supported by the PLO itself, are denounced as "outriders for Sharon". Those who dismiss Israeli withdrawal from the Occupied Territories as a hopeless sop, and subordinate Palestinian interests to their own "anti-imperialist" concern with tearing down Israel, claim to be the great champions of freedom.

On one side we have AWL:

  • Advocating Jewish-Arab working-class unity on the basis of consistent democracy.
  • Advocating a Palestinian state alongside Israel, and peace on the basis of democracy and justice for both Arabs and Jews.
  • Dealing as Marxist socialists with the real history of the Middle East in the 20th century.
  • Rejecting Arab chauvinism as well as Israeli chauvinism.
  • Seeing political Islam as a species of clerical fascism.
  • Championing the immediate setting-up of an independent Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza.

On the other you have a "left consensus" with the following elements in it.

  • The replacement of socialist working-class concerns in the Middle East with Arab nationalism and, latterly, with political Islam.
  • Rejection of the idea of Jewish-Arab working-class unity, except on the basis of Jewish workers accepting the destruction of Israel.
  • Rejection of Arab-Jewish peace on the only conceivable basis for it - Arab recognition of national rights for the Israeli Jews and Israeli recognition of the rights of the Palestinian Arabs to set up their own sovereign and independent state.
  • Advocacy of and support for the destruction of the Israeli Jewish nation by way of the forced incorporation of those who would remain after the prerequisite military conquest of the Jews, into an Arab-Islamic state.
  • Advocacy of an Arab or Islamic state in all of pre-1948 Palestine, a new state erected on the principle of denying all national rights to the Israeli Jews.
  • De facto support for war on the Israeli Jews by Arab states and Palestinian armed forces for the purpose of subjugating the Israeli Jews, destroying their state, and forcibly divesting them of all national rights.
  • Denial that the Jewish community in Palestine ever, at any point, had the right to defend themselves - whether against what the Marxist movement, the Trotskyists, at the time described as pogromist movements in 1929 and 1936-7, or against the invading armies of four Arab states in 1948. (The Trotskyists of 1948 either supported Israeli self-defence or declared themselves neutral, but none of them that I know of supported the Arabs).
  • Enthusiastic acceptance and propagation of the old Stalinist Zionophobia, the product of the virulent anti-semitism of the Stalinist states for many decades.
  • Demonisation of "Zionists" - in practice of most Jews alive now, those who, to one extent or another, critically or uncritically, back Israel, as "racists" and mirror-image Nazis.
  • Promotion of Arab and Islamic chauvinist mythology about the events of the 20th century in the Middle East.
  • Opposition to the PLO's demand for a Palestinian state side-by-side with Israel. For example, the Socialist Alliance voted down a proposal from AWL to adopt the slogan "Israel out of the Occupied Territories" and opted instead for the ill-defined demand for "Freedom for Palestine".
  • De facto acceptance of the programme of Arab and Islamic chauvinists and clerical-fascists. Lately we have seen much of the left link up with Arab-Islamist organisations such as the Muslim Brotherhood (MAB) which advocate the creation everywhere of Islamic-theocratic-authoritarian states and the restoration of the "Caliphate", that is, the Sultanate of the old Turkish Empire!
    If the Muslim Brotherhood (MAB) are not formally inside Respect, it is not because the SWP does not want them. For anything like a parallel for this in the history of the left, you have to go back to Stalinists collaborating with the Nazis in the early 1930s (which, unlike the systematic orientation of the SWP to the Islamists, was only a matter of episodes), or the Stalinist collaboration with the Nazis during the Hitler-Stalin pact, August 1939 to June 1941.
  • Adoption as its public face of George Galloway, who not only, on his own admission, took money for his political activities from Pakistani governments, Saudi Arabia, the Emirates, and an Iraqi-linked Jordanian businessman, but also for ten years before the fall of Saddam Hussein acted as a mouthpiece for the fascistic Ba'th regime in Iraq.

It was all these ideas together, and not mere advocacy of a single democratic secular state, that put the pseudo-left on Saddam Hussein's side in the recent war.

Not the least of the political oddities noted above is that the Zionophobe pseudo-left opposes the PLO programme of an immediate Palestinian state side-by-side with Israel! They trade on the strong feelings aroused by the unequal battle between the Israeli state and the Palestinians to whip up support for, not the formal programme of the Palestinians and the PLO, but the programme of Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood, and those who see themselves engaged in a holy war against the infidel Jews!

Like the Arab and Islamic chauvinists and clerical-fascists, they are willing to use the Palestinians as pawns in a wider game. Historically, they join hands with Islamic and Arab chauvinists whose refusal at each stage through most of the 20th century to make peace with the Jews or Israel has played a large part in putting the Palestinians in the position they are in now.

One should beware of falling into a certain mindset - "They're all mad but me and thee!" Even so, I suggest that the account I outline above shows the left to be not far from political and moral lunacy!

Their politics on the Middle East are not socialist, they are not democratic, they are not rational, they are not internationalist. And they are not revolutionary or anti-imperialist in any progressive meanings of those words.

And if that is how things are, then one must say it plainly.

In a political world dominated by crazed hostility to Israel, condemnation of specific actions of Israel will line us up with the people I have just described, unless we insist on restating that Israel has rights, including the normal right of self-defence which, of course, the Palestinians also possess.

The alternative to this approach is illustrated by the shivering, scurrying, intimidated souls gather around Weekly Worker. They say they "agree" with our two-states programme, but they still accept and propagandise for the demonisation of Zionism and Israel. They spend their space polemicising against us, not against the Zionophobes!

Either they don't understand what they have belatedly accepted from us, or they care far more about ingratiating themselves with the "big battalions" of the pseudo-left than for politics (and that, to my mind, amounts to the same thing).

Sean Matgamna

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