It is excellent to see the trade unions taking up highly political, international issues such as Palestine. It has been a long time in coming.

But there is a lot wrong with this resolution. It equates the violence of the oppressor - the Israeli state - with the reactive violence of the people it oppresses, the Palestinians. It’s like equating the violence of the apartheid South African state with the violent resistance of the ANC, which included guerilla attacks which sometimes killed civilians. They don’t need lectures from the West on how to reconcile their differences, as if they are two groups that have fallen out over something not very important. There is an historical injustice here and it was committed atainst the palestinians by Israel driving people out of their homes, occupying their land, setting up land grabbing settlements and discriminating against palestinians in every walk of life.

It is fake to equate the scale of the two: f16’s and tanks of one of the most tooled up, oppressive states on the planet are equated with teenagers who, out of desperation and hopelessness created by this oppression, take their own life in the hope of taking some Israelis with them, in the false hope this will do something. On this point, the resolution echoes the one-sided analysis found in the mainstream press of the Western countries.

And the following is a betrayal of the Palestinian people:

"We for a generous Israeli settlement with Palestinian refugees — a mutually agreed compromise between the two peoples.
We are against a view common on the British left which attempts to present a "reasonable" case for the destruction of Israel — by the creation of a single
(Arab) "democratic secular state". Such a state could only be created by the forcible subjugation of the Israeli Jews."

No one on the left as far as I know calls for a single "Arab" state but rather a single state for both peoples – the only fair, democratic solution. so this accusation is simply false.

More importantly, this two state solution is completely undemocratic. It denies the Palestinian refugees from 1948 and 1967 the right to go back to their homes in present day Israel, creating a false Jewish majority. The law of return which bars them from coming back, though millions live on the borders of Israel waiting to return, is racist. And It is racist to support this law.
7
Here’s an example of where this leads to. Workers Liberty,a socialist organisation with a very similar position to this resolution, has just written a pamphlet on Israel, arguing this position:
"The real equivalent would be if many tens of millions of people, almost as many as the existing population of Britain, just across the channel, were claiming a collective right to "repossess" Britain. " (AWL pamphlet p.16)

The racism in this, at a time when there is a tabloid hysteria about the sangatte (sp?) camp in france near the chunnel and against all refugees, is there for all to see. It is a disgusting attempt to evoke xenophobic national feelings in British workers here in order to create sympathy with the Israelis position – and against the Palestinians. A despicable thing for any "socialist" to do. It shows how racist Israel’s law of return is, when it takes home-grown racist arguments to argue support for it.

If the "British" had forcibly dispossessed and expelled "tens of millions" 50 years ago, and they were living in refugee camps just across the channel in permanent rebellion, then revolutionary socialists emphatically would support their right to return, and if that meant that this island could no longer describe itself as a "british" state we wouldn’t care.

We recognise that Jews around the world have in their minds the horror of the holocaust and centuries of persecution. However an exclusively Jewish state built on stolen Palestinian land is a recipe for perpetual war. Isrealis who want peace will have to break from Zionism and struggle alongside the Palestinians and against the Israeli state. The crucial demand for this is the right of return.

All trade unionists who are for a state of equality for both peoples, get in touch. We need to fight this refusal to solidarise fully with the palestinians and this willingness to barter away their rights.

Victory to the Intifada!

The Agitator.
Bulletin of the ntework of the anti-capitalist trade unionists
www.workerspower.com

Firstly, thanks for the presumably unwitting advert for our (not that new, actually) pamphlet on
Israel-Palestine, called "two nations, two states".

The line of the PLO, in fact, since 1988.

Unfortunately I have to go to work now and can't sit around in front of a computer (at home):
instead, I have some "anti-captalist trade union networking" to do: that is as I said, going to
work...!

Instead some links to recent articles on our website related to this.
Anyone who wants to read the pamphlet implicitly described as "xenophobic" and "racist" -
which it isn't - can contact us and we'll send one to you. If you can, send us 1 pound 44p as a
cheque or stamps to the Alliance for Workers' Liberty, PO Box 823, London SE15 4NA,
England which would help as we've not got very much money.

(sorry for advertising, but if something is attacked like that there should be a chance to
respond, the best way is to read it yourself and I don't think it's available on the web yet).

Is Sharon Hitler?

A short train journey away, a man who thinks the slaughter of six million Jews in World War
Two was a “detail of history” has come second in a presidential election....On the 13 April
Palestine demonstration, some banners read “this is the real Holocaust”, meaning the fate
now of the Palestinians, not the Holocaust of the Jews. Everywhere you looked you saw
slogans which linked Israel to the Nazis: “Sharon = Hitler”, the Star of
David = the swastika, as well as occasional outright Holocaust denial.... read more at
 http://www.workersliberty.org.uk/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=72



Other articles on Israel-Palestine

Socialism versus chauvinism on Israel-Palestine: some events (and as of yet, 1 comment)
 http://www.workersliberty.org.uk/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=62


Solidarity with the Palestians, yes! But not behind the fundamentalists!
A report of the London demonstration on 13 April.
 http://www.workersliberty.org.uk/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=71


An open letter to John Rees (of the SWP). Why does the SWP oppose "Israel out of the
occupied territories"?
 http://www.workersliberty.org.uk/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=73

 http://www.workersliberty.org/leftcols/2000/20001017.html
LEFT COLUMN: 17.10.2000

What we think

Israel and Palestine

Two nations, two states

For Israeli withdrawal and self-determination for the Palestinians!

The key reason for the outbreak of violence in Israel and Palestine has been the increasing frustration of
Palestinians with the painfully slow progress of the "peace process".


The responsibility for the violence lies with the Israeli state

From the outset socialists could not believe that diplomatic manoeuvres by the US and other big powers
would bring justice. We believed that solid peace could come only through Arab and Jewish workers
uniting on the basis of a common democratic affirmation of national rights. We warned that the deal's
failure to address the Palestinian people's right to a state of their own would undermine peace and build
support for the Islamic fundamentalists who lead the most rabid opposition to peace with Israel in the
Palestinian areas and the Arab world.

After seven years of the peace process, and despite some movement, the real issues have still not been
dealt with. The Palestinians still do not have a state of their own. Very little has been offered by Israel or
the big powers as compensation to the Palestinians impoverished by decades of occupation and
oppression. Israel remains the real master in the territories under the Palestinian authority.

For most Palestinians little has materially changed, and the Arab citizens of Israel suffer systematic
discrimination as second-class citizens.

The only democratic solution is the immediate withdrawal of Israel and armed Israeli
settlements from the occupied territories, the creation of a Palestinian state, and
massive financial aid to help Palestinians establish a real future and to compensate for
the decades of poverty and oppression.

Israel was founded in 1948 by a combination of long-standing Jewish settlements in British-controlled
Palestine and Jewish survivors escaping Hitler's death camps. It was founded in a war with the
surrounding Arab monarchies that tried and failed to strangle the Jewish state at birth. Hundreds of
thousands of Palestinian Arabs were driven out of or fled the new Israel during the war, and were then
banned from returning; over the following years much of the Jewish population of the Arab states was
driven out from them to seek refuge in Israel.

In the 1950s the old Arab regimes fell to a wave of Arab nationalism. While the new wave was a
progressive force against the old monarchies and Western control of the region, it also reinvigorated
hostility to Israel, leading to an Arab-Israeli war in 1967.

The Arab states lost the war in just six days and Israel occupied the West Bank and Gaza, inhabited
mainly by refugees from the 1948 war. The Palestinians, previously relegated politically to the role of
passive pawns of the Arab states, began to develop an autonomous movement through the Palestine
Liberation Organisation.

The PLO distanced itself from the Arab states' old line of "drive the Jews into the sea"', in favour of
calling for a "secular democratic state" in all Palestine where Jews could also live. Left-wing socialists who
before 1967 had generally argued for self-determination for the Israeli Jews within a Socialist United States
of the Middle East now tended to swing behind the new PLO line.

But the "secular democratic state" formula was at best a utopian fantasy. Given the history of war in the
Middle East and of genocide in Europe the Israeli Jews would not submit to being ruled by a Arab
majority, nor would the Palestinian Arabs happily be a minority in a Jewish-majority state. Neither nation
would want to be forcibly amalgamated with the other. Working-class unity across the divide, the
essential for any advance, could only be secured by the freedom to be separate.

In reality the "secular democratic state" formula functioned as an alias for a program of the crushing of the
Israeli-Jewish nation by an Arab war of conquest, adding only that thereafter the Jews should have
individual and religious rights.

The AWL argued instead that solidarity with the oppressed Palestinians needed to be combined with a
political programme of two states for the two nations as a means to working-class unity and peace
between Arabs and Jews.

In 1988 the PLO shifted to a "two states" programme, recognising the right of Israel to exist. That,
combined with the impact of the intifada, an uprising of the Palestinian youth in the occupied territories
with stones against the occupying Israeli army, and shifts in international politics, resulted in the first
peace negotiations between Israel and the PLO.

Sadly, many on the left still cling to the idea of Arab revolt destroying Israel. In their "good people, bad
people" political world, the Israeli Jews are a "bad people" who do not deserve a nation state. But
consistent democracy for all peoples and against all national oppression should be our programme.




WL on-line: www.workersliberty.org  webadmin@workersliberty.org