A new terminology for Israel-Palestine

Submitted by AWL on 25 May, 2022 - 4:35 Author: Martin Thomas
Haifa

Socialist Worker has adopted new terminology for Israel-Palestine. In SW of 18 May, Haifa is no longer Haifa. It is “the occupied city of Haifa”.

Israel is not Israel. It is “48 Palestine”, or just “48”. Israeli Jews are not people who live there because they were born there, mostly in families which arrived there as refugees. They are “Israeli settlers”: the article refers to “sustained moves by Israeli settlers to marginalise Arabs in 48 Palestine”, making it clear that it is referring to Israelis in Israel, not to the settlers and the military in the West Bank.

Socialist Worker used to propose a “democratic secular state” covering all British-Mandate Palestine. That term disappeared from its everyday agitation years ago — it hardly fits with SW’s support for the anti-secular Hamas — but was not replaced.

The new terminology comes with no spelled-out new policy, but the implications are clear. The Israeli Jews are “settlers”, and should be driven out or marginalised. Although Haifa had a Jewish majority before 1948, the Jews there are analogous to the Israeli settlers planted in the West Bank since 1967.

Socialist Worker says “it was all Palestine before Israel’s creation in 1948”, “it” presumably being Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza.

In fact, Socialist Worker doesn’t want a return to before 1948. SW does not want a return of the British rule (1918-48) which defined a specific territory for “Palestine” (previously a loose term covering a wider area); or of Ottoman rule (for centuries before that).

It wants an independent Palestinian state. Rightly so: over the 20th century a distinct Palestinian nation has developed and been denied rights.

Workers’ Liberty shares the view of many (perhaps most) secular Palestinian nationalists, and of most Israeli democrats, that, since the Israel-Jewish nation has been consolidated, Palestinian self-determination will emerge as the creation of an independent Palestinian state, alongside and with the same rights as Israel, in a territory formed where Palestinians are the majority: West Bank, Gaza, East Jerusalem (with provision to make it contiguous).

SW’s terminology points a different way: an independent Palestinian state to be all British-Mandate Palestine, with “Israeli settlers” pushed out or marginalised. The 18 May article refers to the (real, and encouraging) increase of Palestinian mobilisation within Israel; but is pointedly silent about the part of that which is a rise of joint Jewish-Arab mobilisation, through groups like Standing Together, the 2018 protests against the Nation-State Law, or the protests against evictions in Sheikh Jarrah.

Palestinian resistance, in alliance with democratic-minded Israeli Jews and with international solidarity, can force Israel to withdraw from the West Bank and concede an independent Palestinian state. The horrible shift of both Israeli Jewish politics and Palestinian politics to the right in recent decades means only that the necessary shift of politics to the left to win progress is a harder and longer job.

Palestinian self-assertion can force Israel to concede substantive civic equality to its Palestinian citizens.

But overrunning Israel? Re-running the 1948 war with an opposite outcome? That could be done only by a very unlikely firm alliance of the Arab states (or by a nuclear-armed Iran). Possibly not even then. In any case the attempt would be bloody and ruinous; and “victory” would bring no good outcome among the ruins to the Palestinians, who have been treated even worse by the Arab states to which many fled in the 1947-8 war than by Israel.

Socialist Worker supporters, if pushed, usually square the circles by saying that their answers depend on a socialist revolution throughout the Middle East. But that socialist revolution presupposes at least some working-class unity embracing the best-organised working class of the region, in Israel, and so a programme capable of uniting workers across national divisions and of inspiring battles for democratic redress now without waiting for full revolution.

And anyway there is little of that “revolution throughout the region” talk in SW’s recent coverage. The new terminology suggests a further turn down the political blind alley in which SW has trapped itself since 1967 and especially since 1986-87.

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