For the 1980s debates, see our pamphlet Arabs, Jews, and Socialism
Rachel, Naomi, Andrew:
I write this way for five main reasons:
All of you are long-ago prominent Jewish members of what is now AWL.
Two of you are vociferous anti-Israelis, who think that you are just anti-Zionists; and in that you are typical of the kitsch-left.
In the early 1980s our paper then, Socialist Organiser, was, I think, disgraceful, perhaps the worst of the "revolutionary" press, on Israel and Zionism. Andrew wrote a lot of that coverage.
I thought then something like I think now, but there were only a few of us who thought that way. That didn't begin to change until I replaced Martin Thomas as joint editor of the paper in June 1983 and the other joint editor, John Lister, soon after departed for a better-paying job.
I won Rachel to wishing for the defeat of Israel in 1967, and helped clinch Naomi in anti-Israeli politics. Andrew, I think, got his politics on the issue from Tony Cliff of IS [today's SWP]. But what Cliff and we all said then was far from what the left said later.
Cliff wrote: "The only possible solution to the needs of the Middle East is the workers’ and peasants’ revolution aimed at the establishment of a socialist republic, with full rights for Jews, Kurds and all national minorities".
Rachel and I wrote: "The precondition for such a change is an end to the exclusively Jewish (Zionist) nature of the State of Israel, bringing to an end the oppression of the Arab minority. Israel must withdraw from the occupied territories and pay for reinstating and compensating all the refugees - from 1967 and 1948".
We thought Cliff was demagogic, imposing "socialism" as an immediate solution where the possibility of socialism did not exist.
There is no easy solution to the Israel-Palestine problem. We say Israel should get out of the West Bank and release its grip on Gaza, and should permit two states side by side, Israel and Palestine.
What puzzles me about your attitude now - that Israel must be destroyed - is this: from what politics, from what principles, from what analysis do you proceed by in relation to Israel and Palestine?
Time has radically changed all the possible meanings of what became the general left slogan after the war of 1967 and in the 1970s: "replace Israel and the occupied territories with a single secular democratic state." That slogan was always deceptive. Its real meaning was the same as the old Arab invasion slogan of 1948 and of the PLO until after the Six Day War of 1967: "drive the Jews into the sea". But it could be thought to mean something different then, in a way it cannot now.
Your basic position is not to get the best possible outcome for the Palestinian Arabs. It is to have Israel not reformed but abolished - to deny self-determination to the Hebrew nation.
That can only be done by external force. Standing for that puts you on the side of some of the most reactionary forces on planet earth, including the Islamic clerical fascists who rule Iran. Making an absolute principle of that, as you do, means solidarising with those who advocate killing as many Jews as "necessary", and with the extreme reactionaries who run Gaza, Hamas, who lob rockets on Israeli civilians when they can. (And whose election victory over Fatah in 2006 was celebrated by your near co-thinker on this question, the SWP. Or did you disagree with them? In the name of logic, why?)
Or do I misunderstand you? For the programme "destroy Israel " to begin to make sense and not to mean plainly "drive out or kill all the Jews", you have to expect Israeli Jews to simply accept, peacefully, the destruction of their state, leaving themselves at the mercy of their enemies of a century and more. They won't do that. No people that had a choice ever did that. It is a preposterous idea.
A "one state" proposal, understood to be an Arab-dominated state, presupposes the conquest of the Israelis to force it on them, if they won't "see reason". Your reason.
You aren't obliged to accept what the PLO accepts - which is two states, as we advocate - nor are you obliged to accept what Hamas says, though you do. But you are obliged to take the Palestinians into account. What you advocate pays no need to them. "Destroy Israel", which you advocate, offers nothing to the Palestinians now or ever but indefinite waiting. It is not workable. And if it were workable, it would be wrong and would come only by way of conquest by an external power like Iran, reducing the whole area to ruins. Now and foreseeably, the "one state" that we are on the way to get in the area is Netanyahu's Jewish supremacist state.
Some of you will recall that my own change of mind on this issue from a period of going along with the "secular democratic state" slogan began with understanding that the slogan was nonsense. It implied either Jewish agreement to dismantle the state or their conquest - invasion and subjugation and forcible destruction of the Israeli Jews as a nation - and that therefore we were talking nonsense when we advocated "secular democratic state" as a "solution" for the Israeli Jews too.
Some believed the seeming promises of the "secular democratic state" to do justice to both Arabs and Jews. Some of you will recall that a lot of people shifted when both groups within the new Workers' Socialist League of the early 1980s, who had the same words, "secular democratic state", divided on the meaning of the common slogan, the Thornett side seeing it as Arab rights and at most as freedom of religion for the Jews. Our side - and we were the truly stupid ones, seeing only what we wanted to see in the slogan - saw equal rights for Jews and Arabs. Half the organisation didn't believe in rights for Jews in the area.
What made us stupid of course was our hostility to Israel's colonialism after the 1967 war combined with our rejection of "drive the Jews into the sea". Except that "secular democratic state" was only a disguised - and therefore more deadly - way of saying "drive the Jews into the sea".
But the refugees? Yes. But why is Israel the exception? Why for Israel alone is mass "return", reversal of decades-old population movements, demanded?
"Exist! Resist! Return!" and "From the river to the sea" have become standard slogans for recent demonstrations in Britain. They mean "return" to the territory of pre-1967 Israel. Not to the Arab-majority occupied-territories area, as our 1967 article, rightly I think, demanded, but to Israel of 1948.
The State of Israel is 75 years old. The refugees from 1948 numbered about 750,000. The descendants still entitled to UNRWA services - and needing them, because the states where they live deny them rights - now number six million. Arab and Islamic propaganda seizes on that figure of six million as if they were all refugees.
Jews driven out of Arab countries to Israel then and in the next several years numbered about 600,000. From Iraq for example, where there had been anti-Jewish riots in 1941 during Rashid Ali's anti-British, pro-Nazi, "anti-imperialist" revolt, almost all the Jewish population left for Israel or were expelled. Maybe a quarter of Baghdad's population had been Jewish. In Israel the descendants of the Jewish refugees from Arab countries now outnumber the descendants of the Jewish population of 1948.
Much of the 20th century, and the 21st too, is a story of forced population movements. We of course disapprove. What concerns me here is: why is Israel the exception in our attitude to the sequels?
Some 800,000 Tamils fled Sri Lanka during and after the communal civil war there, where they were finally defeated in 2009. Some 700,000 Rohingya Muslims were expelled from Myanmar in 2017, and there are now over 900,000 in refugee camps in Bangladesh.
At the end of World War 2, about 13 million Germans were driven west into a ruined Germany, including the population of Pomerania, Silesia, and East Prussia, whose territories became part of Poland or of Russia, and the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia.
The leaders of the great powers agreed, stipulating hypocritically that it be done "humanely". Half a million at least died or were killed by recent victims of the Nazis in the long forced trek to Germany. One in four citizens of present day Germany is said to be a descendant of the expelled of 1945.
And mainly around a Greek-Turkish war in 1919-22, the big majority of over two million Greeks living in what is now Turkey were driven out, or removed in a forcible population exchange.
In Germany some of the expelled supported the Right, and the Communist Party oriented left dubbed them the German revanchists. But for decades there has been no movement, no demand, for the Greeks or Germans and their descendants to "return" en masse.
It is only for Israel that such a thing is suggested. Frame it as the question: why are other refugees, or descendants of refugees, not the subject of such special demands as the Palestinians are?
To reinstate the Germans in Eastern Europe after the mid-1940s would have taken a major war and tremendous upheavals.
For Greece and Turkey too, only war and the migration of millions could have restored anything like the status quo ante.
As time went on, people built new lives. Turning back the clock became unimaginable. Except for Israel...
The Palestinian "six million" remain an issue because the Arab countries refused to allow them to find a place in the Arab countries, refused to allow them to integrate. They were more useful as "refugees", as pawns in the agitation against Israel by the Arab states and by Iran's mullahs (as Muslims).
The idea that Israel alone is responsible for the suffering is one of the biggest lies in the delegitimisation of Israel. Why should socialists go along with it? It is only by falsifying history that Israel is given sole responsibility for and is delegitimised by the plight of the refugees' descendants.
Israel is "different" because of Arab oil power, and Arab and Islamic refusal to let go of the issue and to integrate the descendants and the few remaining refugees; their insistence in effect that that area of the world is pre-designed by God to accept only devotees of Islam.
You are all old enough to remember the change in the mass media here in the aftermath of the 1973 war, where the Arab countries made a surprise attack on Israel and nearly won.
You must know that when you assert the right of "six million" to "return" to where they have never been, it is a mass displacement you are demanding. And Israel now, highly urbanised, has little in common with the Israel most of the millions didn't leave 75 years ago. No-one can "return" to anything like the conditions of 1947. Nor should you pretend that the "six million" can.
You are also aware, you can not but be aware, that at least some of your fellow warriors against Israel are simply old fashioned antisemites who have retooled. No, I don't include you in that category. But you are dangerously close to it, aren't you?
Time passes and changes everything. "Return" to pre-1948 Israel as the solution always was a programme to displace Jews.
"Return" now means something different. There can't be many Arab or Jewish survivors from 75-76 years ago. A few tens of thousands on either side, I suppose.
Why do you say that the descendants have more right in the territory of Israel of 1948 than those born there, whose parents, grandparents, and sometimes great grandparents were born there, and who transformed what it was then to what it is now?
There is only one possible answer you can give. The "six million" have a right bestowed on them by their ancestors. The Arabs who have never been to Israel are legatees of their ancestors, though many of their parents or even grandparents had never been there either.
The descendants of the Arabs of 1947-48 have the "right genes" whereas the Jews who live there don't have the "right genes". A matter of having the right or wrong genes. Well, isn't it?
Your positions comes down to that. And the kitsch left and yourself apply that "hereditary" argument nowhere else. Only to Israel and only to the better-gened Palestinians.
I've always opposed calling "left" anti-Israel people racists for the good enough reason that I didn't think it true. I don't want to say it of you now. Of course, in general you are as opposed to racism as I am. But what do you call an argument for displacing Israeli Jews with people whose genes - whose descent from ancestors who had and can pass on the right to live in 1948 Israel - give a better right to live there than the Jews who were born there? Than they and their descendants can ever have?
For the 1980s debates, see our pamphlet Arabs, Jews, and Socialism
The full names of those this letter is addressed to are; Rachel Lever, Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi, Andrew Hornung