Accepting 'Israel' Means Accepting Globalism
free arab voice | 13.01.2004 22:07 | Globalisation | London
To our friends in the Anti-Globalist Movement:
ACCEPTING "ISRAEL" MEANS ACCEPTING GLOBALISM
by Muhammad Abu Nasr/ FAV
endorsed by the FAV editorial board
Since the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Arab and Islamic worlds have been the target of the most concentrated and ferocious campaign by global capitalism spearheaded by the imperialist United States. Globalism, the hegemony of the world's ruling exploitative class, claims victims throughout the world on a daily basis. But its most vicious and brutal assault is underway today in what was once called the "crescent of crisis." This focus is natural given the crucial importance of the region in terms of its natural resources and its strategic location. Control of this region is vital for global hegemony.
Given this geographical focus, the globalist threat represents an outgrowth both of older forms of imperialism and of Zionism, the racist movement aimed at creating a Jewish state in the midst of the Arab homeland, thereby denying self-determination to the Arabs, occupying and usurping the Palestinians' homeland, and permanently obstructing the geographical and political unity of the Arab Nation. The struggle against Zionism is one of the most important fronts in the battle against globalism.
Since 1948 Zionism has been not merely a reactionary theory or a racist movement. It has also been embodied in the Zionist Jewish colony that calls itself "Israel," established on Palestinian soil with brute force and the connivance of the imperial powers. The phrase "occupied Palestine" refers not to those territories seized by the Zionist entity in 1967 or in later years; it refers to the land stolen by the Zionists on which they proclaimed their "state" in 1948 as well as any other Palestinian territory that they appropriated later on.
The Zionist Jewish colony that calls itself "Israel" is the poisoned fruit of the racist Zionist movement. The Zionist Entity and Zionism in general constitute an integral and crucial part of the globalist onslaught. There can be no rejection of globalism that accepts the Zionist entity, any more than there can be a rejection of globalism that accepts other instances of colonial rule.
Ever since the imposition of the Jewish Zionist entity in Palestine, the Arab people have taken a firm stand against any suggestion of normalization with the colonial presence. Opposition to normalization with the Zionist movement and its colonists began long before 1948, in fact. Normalization is a recognition, an acceptance of the colonial status of Palestine and the dependent status of the Arab Nation. The racist colonial-settler movement of Zionism set itself the aim of replacing Arab Palestine with a colony of Jewish aliens. Thus, the term "normalization" does not only refer to dealings with the Zionist "government," but with any individuals or institutions associated with the Zionist movement or with the Zionist colony in Palestine.
To this day, hundreds of individuals, groups, parties, and grass roots organizations throughout the Arab Nation issue a constant stream of denunciations of normalization and its perpetrators on a daily basis. Opposition to normalization is so intense that there are even people who criticize the term normalization. They point out that there is nothing "normal" at all about accepting a colonial occupation of one's country, or meeting with people whose political identity signifies a usurpation and denial of your own identity and rights.
Of course Palestinians who have clung to their homeland despite the brutal racist occupation (whether in 1948 or 1967) have no choice but to deal with the Zionists and their institutions just in order to survive - to get jobs, driver's licenses, travel documents, etc. But this is not a matter of their choice. The issue of normalization within Palestine, therefore, is mainly a matter of POLITICAL dealings with the Zionists, i.e., participation in their parliament or other institutions. Such actions are not a necessary part of daily survival but a type of service that helps to reinforce and stabilize the Zionist colonial presence.
People outside of occupied Palestine, however, have no such daily need to deal with the Zionist entity or with Zionist colonists. Those Arabs who nevertheless establish trade or other types of relations with them are effectively normalizing relations with the Zionist colonial entity and are rightly denounced as normalizers.
Globalism presses on relentlessly using every possible means to impose occupation, division, and dependency upon the Arab Nation. Every method - from armed force and economic subjugation, to advertising, public relations and ideological poison - is employed. Just two months after US imperialist troops blasted and bribed their way into Baghdad, the Davos Forum staged an "extraordinary meeting" in Amman, Jordan, bringing together Zionist and Arab compradore representatives to discuss their "visions for a shared future" in the "Middle East." As if to underline the way that globalized economics are served by Arab political surrender and normalization with the Zionist entity, the US government allotted time at the conference to hold political talks with its allies to further the so-called "Road Map" that provides for the establishment of Palestinian Bantustans as a "solution for the Palestine problem."
Meanwhile (as Husam Tammam and Patrick Haenni report in the September 2003 issue of Le Monde Diplomatique) the international ruling class is pursuing its aims on the ideological front by fostering its own globalist version of Islam, complete with Muslim televangelists preaching a free-market, compradore version of "Islam" to go along with their compradore politics and economics.
There is nothing surprising in the fact that the imperialists, Zionists, and their compradores in the Arab countries would push normalization. The Zionist entity and the imperialists have pushed for Arab recognition of their occupation since 1948. Naturally indeed: for what criminal does not want to "get away" with his crime? Normalization with the Zionist entity in effect grants the racist Jewish colony absolution for all the crimes of murder, ethnic cleansing, aggressive warfare, occupation, theft of property, expropriation of land, and the trampling of the Palestinian and Arab right to national self-determination - all of which crimes have been committed without respite since the first Zionist colonists arrived one hundred years ago.
What is genuinely disturbing, however, is the fact that calls for normalization are now being heard not only from the ranks of the open enemies of the Arab people, not only from the Zionist entity and the US imperialists. Today there are organizations such as the Alternative Information Center that ostensibly support Palestinian rights but which are pushing locally and internationally for normalization with Zionist colonists in Palestine. The stated justification for this outrageous approach is that Palestinians are thereby able to coordinate their strategies and tactics with "progressive 'Israeli' public opinion."
Yet just as there is no "progressive colonialism" and no "progressive imperialism," so there is no "progressive 'Israeli' opinion." "Israel" has been a colonial state from its inception and every inch of "its" territory is Palestinian. Every "Israeli" Jew lives on occupied Palestinian land. Every "Israeli" Jew, regardless of his or her subjective ideas, is a part of the colonialist occupation of Palestine. And they serve it, furthermore, both men and women, as soldiers on active and/or reservist service to racist Zionist colonialism.
An attempt at a dialogue with so-called "Israeli" "progressives" is tantamount to an acceptance of the Zionist colony and the Zionist colonial project as just another state in the Arab region. Pseudo "humanistic" or "leftist" rhetoric is used to conceal the very essence of the conflict in the region which is not a battle for border revisions between two peoples with equal title to the land, but a struggle for the very existence of the Palestinian people and for the integrity and self-determination of the Arab Nation from Morocco to the Arabian Gulf.
It is strange indeed that the globalist imperialist and Zionist forces' military, economic, and even "spiritual" drive for normalization with the colonial Zionist entity in Palestine, should find an echo within the anti-globalist movement itself. Intentionally or unwittingly, the effort to push Palestinians into joint work with elements from the Zionist colony is opening yet another front FOR globalism, right in the middle of the anti-globalists themselves.
Unfortunately a pattern of such fifth-column activity has begun to emerge in many sectors of the anti-globalist movement. In the run-up to the American invasion of Iraq earlier this year, the American liberal Z-Magazine published a petition that ostensibly opposed the impending war, but in reality backed the US imperialist and Zionist approaches. (See: "On bogus petitions against the war on Iraq," in the Free Arab Voice, 27 January 2003.)
Like many similar petitions that circulated in the west on the eve of the US aggression, this petition came out against war, yet it endorsed the Bush Administrations chief war aim of "regime change" in Iraq. Signed largely by Jewish Americans, the "anti-war" petition chimed in with Bush in denouncing the Baghdad government as a "threat to its neighbors" which could only mean "a threat to 'Israel'" since Iraq in the spring of 2003 posed no threat to any of the US-occupied states on its borders. The petition also coincided with the lines of official US and Zionist ruling circles by branding Palestinian resistance fighters "terrorists." Meanwhile it called for "self-determination" for "Israeli" Jews, despite the fact that Jews are members of a religious group and therefore not entitled to national self-determination insofar as they are Jewish; and despite the fact that "Israel" is a colonial entity with as much right to "self-determination" as French settlers had in Algeria or Dutch settlers had in southern Africa.
Couched in left-liberal and pacifist language, the petition in fact reproduced the key demands of the militarist Bush administration, and helped divert progressive American opinion from practical opposition to the war into channels that ultimately legitimized the US strategy of conquest of Iraq, Zionist occupation of Palestine, and subversion of the rest of the Arab world.
Thus, leading figures in the very heart of the anti-globalist, anti-war movement in the United States underwrote an approach that worked in tandem with the White House and the Pentagon. Today, activists within the ranks of the anti-globalist movement are pushing normalization with the Zionist entity and are objectively working in tandem with the most aggressive globalist forces on earth.
It has been reported that progressive Lebanese musician Marcel Khalife, who has refused for decades to participate in any event that also hosted Zionist colonialists, has now been inveigled to take part in a "peace" activity together with them. Needless to say, making "peace" with the Zionist entity means acceptance and recognition of its colonial existence on Palestinian Arab soil. The force that finally pushed him into the camp of normalizers was a nominally "anti-globalist" organization. Such is the sinister role being played by proponents of normalization who masquerade as opponents of globalism and undermine that movement from within.
Sixty years ago, Europe was locked in a bitter and bloody struggle against fascism. Yet there were no voices raised in the anti-fascist camp demanding that the Greek Resistance or the Russian or Yugoslav Partisans hold dialogues and coordinate strategy with "progressive Nazi" occupiers. Only a traitor would have dared to suggest that peoples of occupied Russia, for example, should coordinate with "progressive" members of the Nazi party and accept fascist seizure of three-fourths of their country in exchange for a patchwork of reservations surrounded by walls, barbed wire, and occupation troops.
The struggle against Zionism and the Zionist occupation of Palestine is not a struggle for Arab civil rights in a Jewish state. It is an anti-colonial struggle for the total liberation of Palestine from every last vestige of Zionist occupation, for the complete self-determination of the Palestinian and Arab people. Genuine progressives around the world have consistently supported the anti-colonial national liberation movements of Asian, African, and Latin American peoples. They have not fallen for imperialist games of promising "limited self rule," Bantustans, or "enlightened" colonial administrators.
Normalization in any form with the Zionist entity and its colonial residents constitutes recognition of colonialism, an acceptance of occupation, a renunciation of the right of self-determination. With the guns of imperialism all trained on the Arab world, normalization with the Zionists amounts to collaboration to the most aggressive spearhead of globalism. This issue is today the touchstone by which organizations, movements, and persons can - and will - be judged. Those who accept normalization, regardless of any claims they make to be against globalization, are in fact serving in its front ranks
www.freearabvoice.org
ACCEPTING "ISRAEL" MEANS ACCEPTING GLOBALISM
by Muhammad Abu Nasr/ FAV
endorsed by the FAV editorial board
Since the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Arab and Islamic worlds have been the target of the most concentrated and ferocious campaign by global capitalism spearheaded by the imperialist United States. Globalism, the hegemony of the world's ruling exploitative class, claims victims throughout the world on a daily basis. But its most vicious and brutal assault is underway today in what was once called the "crescent of crisis." This focus is natural given the crucial importance of the region in terms of its natural resources and its strategic location. Control of this region is vital for global hegemony.
Given this geographical focus, the globalist threat represents an outgrowth both of older forms of imperialism and of Zionism, the racist movement aimed at creating a Jewish state in the midst of the Arab homeland, thereby denying self-determination to the Arabs, occupying and usurping the Palestinians' homeland, and permanently obstructing the geographical and political unity of the Arab Nation. The struggle against Zionism is one of the most important fronts in the battle against globalism.
Since 1948 Zionism has been not merely a reactionary theory or a racist movement. It has also been embodied in the Zionist Jewish colony that calls itself "Israel," established on Palestinian soil with brute force and the connivance of the imperial powers. The phrase "occupied Palestine" refers not to those territories seized by the Zionist entity in 1967 or in later years; it refers to the land stolen by the Zionists on which they proclaimed their "state" in 1948 as well as any other Palestinian territory that they appropriated later on.
The Zionist Jewish colony that calls itself "Israel" is the poisoned fruit of the racist Zionist movement. The Zionist Entity and Zionism in general constitute an integral and crucial part of the globalist onslaught. There can be no rejection of globalism that accepts the Zionist entity, any more than there can be a rejection of globalism that accepts other instances of colonial rule.
Ever since the imposition of the Jewish Zionist entity in Palestine, the Arab people have taken a firm stand against any suggestion of normalization with the colonial presence. Opposition to normalization with the Zionist movement and its colonists began long before 1948, in fact. Normalization is a recognition, an acceptance of the colonial status of Palestine and the dependent status of the Arab Nation. The racist colonial-settler movement of Zionism set itself the aim of replacing Arab Palestine with a colony of Jewish aliens. Thus, the term "normalization" does not only refer to dealings with the Zionist "government," but with any individuals or institutions associated with the Zionist movement or with the Zionist colony in Palestine.
To this day, hundreds of individuals, groups, parties, and grass roots organizations throughout the Arab Nation issue a constant stream of denunciations of normalization and its perpetrators on a daily basis. Opposition to normalization is so intense that there are even people who criticize the term normalization. They point out that there is nothing "normal" at all about accepting a colonial occupation of one's country, or meeting with people whose political identity signifies a usurpation and denial of your own identity and rights.
Of course Palestinians who have clung to their homeland despite the brutal racist occupation (whether in 1948 or 1967) have no choice but to deal with the Zionists and their institutions just in order to survive - to get jobs, driver's licenses, travel documents, etc. But this is not a matter of their choice. The issue of normalization within Palestine, therefore, is mainly a matter of POLITICAL dealings with the Zionists, i.e., participation in their parliament or other institutions. Such actions are not a necessary part of daily survival but a type of service that helps to reinforce and stabilize the Zionist colonial presence.
People outside of occupied Palestine, however, have no such daily need to deal with the Zionist entity or with Zionist colonists. Those Arabs who nevertheless establish trade or other types of relations with them are effectively normalizing relations with the Zionist colonial entity and are rightly denounced as normalizers.
Globalism presses on relentlessly using every possible means to impose occupation, division, and dependency upon the Arab Nation. Every method - from armed force and economic subjugation, to advertising, public relations and ideological poison - is employed. Just two months after US imperialist troops blasted and bribed their way into Baghdad, the Davos Forum staged an "extraordinary meeting" in Amman, Jordan, bringing together Zionist and Arab compradore representatives to discuss their "visions for a shared future" in the "Middle East." As if to underline the way that globalized economics are served by Arab political surrender and normalization with the Zionist entity, the US government allotted time at the conference to hold political talks with its allies to further the so-called "Road Map" that provides for the establishment of Palestinian Bantustans as a "solution for the Palestine problem."
Meanwhile (as Husam Tammam and Patrick Haenni report in the September 2003 issue of Le Monde Diplomatique) the international ruling class is pursuing its aims on the ideological front by fostering its own globalist version of Islam, complete with Muslim televangelists preaching a free-market, compradore version of "Islam" to go along with their compradore politics and economics.
There is nothing surprising in the fact that the imperialists, Zionists, and their compradores in the Arab countries would push normalization. The Zionist entity and the imperialists have pushed for Arab recognition of their occupation since 1948. Naturally indeed: for what criminal does not want to "get away" with his crime? Normalization with the Zionist entity in effect grants the racist Jewish colony absolution for all the crimes of murder, ethnic cleansing, aggressive warfare, occupation, theft of property, expropriation of land, and the trampling of the Palestinian and Arab right to national self-determination - all of which crimes have been committed without respite since the first Zionist colonists arrived one hundred years ago.
What is genuinely disturbing, however, is the fact that calls for normalization are now being heard not only from the ranks of the open enemies of the Arab people, not only from the Zionist entity and the US imperialists. Today there are organizations such as the Alternative Information Center that ostensibly support Palestinian rights but which are pushing locally and internationally for normalization with Zionist colonists in Palestine. The stated justification for this outrageous approach is that Palestinians are thereby able to coordinate their strategies and tactics with "progressive 'Israeli' public opinion."
Yet just as there is no "progressive colonialism" and no "progressive imperialism," so there is no "progressive 'Israeli' opinion." "Israel" has been a colonial state from its inception and every inch of "its" territory is Palestinian. Every "Israeli" Jew lives on occupied Palestinian land. Every "Israeli" Jew, regardless of his or her subjective ideas, is a part of the colonialist occupation of Palestine. And they serve it, furthermore, both men and women, as soldiers on active and/or reservist service to racist Zionist colonialism.
An attempt at a dialogue with so-called "Israeli" "progressives" is tantamount to an acceptance of the Zionist colony and the Zionist colonial project as just another state in the Arab region. Pseudo "humanistic" or "leftist" rhetoric is used to conceal the very essence of the conflict in the region which is not a battle for border revisions between two peoples with equal title to the land, but a struggle for the very existence of the Palestinian people and for the integrity and self-determination of the Arab Nation from Morocco to the Arabian Gulf.
It is strange indeed that the globalist imperialist and Zionist forces' military, economic, and even "spiritual" drive for normalization with the colonial Zionist entity in Palestine, should find an echo within the anti-globalist movement itself. Intentionally or unwittingly, the effort to push Palestinians into joint work with elements from the Zionist colony is opening yet another front FOR globalism, right in the middle of the anti-globalists themselves.
Unfortunately a pattern of such fifth-column activity has begun to emerge in many sectors of the anti-globalist movement. In the run-up to the American invasion of Iraq earlier this year, the American liberal Z-Magazine published a petition that ostensibly opposed the impending war, but in reality backed the US imperialist and Zionist approaches. (See: "On bogus petitions against the war on Iraq," in the Free Arab Voice, 27 January 2003.)
Like many similar petitions that circulated in the west on the eve of the US aggression, this petition came out against war, yet it endorsed the Bush Administrations chief war aim of "regime change" in Iraq. Signed largely by Jewish Americans, the "anti-war" petition chimed in with Bush in denouncing the Baghdad government as a "threat to its neighbors" which could only mean "a threat to 'Israel'" since Iraq in the spring of 2003 posed no threat to any of the US-occupied states on its borders. The petition also coincided with the lines of official US and Zionist ruling circles by branding Palestinian resistance fighters "terrorists." Meanwhile it called for "self-determination" for "Israeli" Jews, despite the fact that Jews are members of a religious group and therefore not entitled to national self-determination insofar as they are Jewish; and despite the fact that "Israel" is a colonial entity with as much right to "self-determination" as French settlers had in Algeria or Dutch settlers had in southern Africa.
Couched in left-liberal and pacifist language, the petition in fact reproduced the key demands of the militarist Bush administration, and helped divert progressive American opinion from practical opposition to the war into channels that ultimately legitimized the US strategy of conquest of Iraq, Zionist occupation of Palestine, and subversion of the rest of the Arab world.
Thus, leading figures in the very heart of the anti-globalist, anti-war movement in the United States underwrote an approach that worked in tandem with the White House and the Pentagon. Today, activists within the ranks of the anti-globalist movement are pushing normalization with the Zionist entity and are objectively working in tandem with the most aggressive globalist forces on earth.
It has been reported that progressive Lebanese musician Marcel Khalife, who has refused for decades to participate in any event that also hosted Zionist colonialists, has now been inveigled to take part in a "peace" activity together with them. Needless to say, making "peace" with the Zionist entity means acceptance and recognition of its colonial existence on Palestinian Arab soil. The force that finally pushed him into the camp of normalizers was a nominally "anti-globalist" organization. Such is the sinister role being played by proponents of normalization who masquerade as opponents of globalism and undermine that movement from within.
Sixty years ago, Europe was locked in a bitter and bloody struggle against fascism. Yet there were no voices raised in the anti-fascist camp demanding that the Greek Resistance or the Russian or Yugoslav Partisans hold dialogues and coordinate strategy with "progressive Nazi" occupiers. Only a traitor would have dared to suggest that peoples of occupied Russia, for example, should coordinate with "progressive" members of the Nazi party and accept fascist seizure of three-fourths of their country in exchange for a patchwork of reservations surrounded by walls, barbed wire, and occupation troops.
The struggle against Zionism and the Zionist occupation of Palestine is not a struggle for Arab civil rights in a Jewish state. It is an anti-colonial struggle for the total liberation of Palestine from every last vestige of Zionist occupation, for the complete self-determination of the Palestinian and Arab people. Genuine progressives around the world have consistently supported the anti-colonial national liberation movements of Asian, African, and Latin American peoples. They have not fallen for imperialist games of promising "limited self rule," Bantustans, or "enlightened" colonial administrators.
Normalization in any form with the Zionist entity and its colonial residents constitutes recognition of colonialism, an acceptance of occupation, a renunciation of the right of self-determination. With the guns of imperialism all trained on the Arab world, normalization with the Zionists amounts to collaboration to the most aggressive spearhead of globalism. This issue is today the touchstone by which organizations, movements, and persons can - and will - be judged. Those who accept normalization, regardless of any claims they make to be against globalization, are in fact serving in its front ranks
www.freearabvoice.org
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Comments
Hide the following 4 comments
Racist terrorist trash
13.01.2004 23:06
There are 1 million arabs in Israel. Bet your last penny he's only talking about Israeli Jews.
Xanthe
Disgusting filth!!!
13.01.2004 23:13
Just wondering how long it'll be before its taken down, if at all.
Jamie
Zionist commentators cannot tolerate articulate arab viewpoints
14.01.2004 00:52
Here is another analysis of the Palestine question:
THESES ON PALESTINE
8 March 2001
1. Jewish immigration to Palestine in the last century was an operation of a colonial character. The constitution of Israel was the birth of a colonial state of a “settler” type: based, that is, on the expulsion of the indigenous population to make room for the “colonists” brought by massive immigration, rather than on its superexploitation by the colonial power and a narrow colonial “elite” (a phenomenon analogous to that of the English colonies of North America, Ulster, the original Boer colonies of the South Africa, etc.). In no way, therefore, can the constitution of the state of Israel be seen as a legitimate expression of “self-determination of the Jewish people”. It happened with the oppression of the Palestinian Arab people, dispossessed and driven from their land.
This was in full accord with the dominant imperialist powers in the region, first British and then North American. From its debut Zionism was supported by imperialism. It was an essential instrument in the work of dividing the Arab people after the First World War and repressing their struggles for liberation from imperialist dominion. The brief period of conflict between Zionism and British imperialism (from 1939 to 1948, but particularly from 1943) doesn’t contradict this. In fact, it was caused by the desire of British imperialism to distance itself some from Zionism to avoid a major crisis of its rule in the Middle East (particularly after the great Arab revolt in Palestine in 1936-39). Zionism immediately shifted its alliance, linking itself with the imperialism that emerged definitively dominant from the Second World War, that is, US imperialism (and also using the foolish counterrevolutionary policy of the Stalinist bureaucracy of the USSR). Therefore, Israel’s role as a direct outpost of imperialism in the Middle East must not be considered a phenomenon of degeneration that broke with the original character of Zionism, but as a logical development of the Zionist enterprise as such.
The tragedy of the monstrous genocide against the Jewish people by Nazism and its allies in the Second World War cannot be taken in some way to justify Zionism and the constitution of the state of Israel. Zionism was born well before the Holocaust, and the just struggle for the liberation of the Jewish people from the violence, massacres and oppression of which they were already victim before the triumph of fascism cannot justify violence, massacres and oppression against another people (in no way responsible for the oppression of the Jews) in conjunction with imperialist colonialism. The frontal struggle against the anti-Semitism expressed not only by forces openly of the right, but also by some sectors of the “left” (for example, some Stalinist or so-called “autonomous” tendencies), cannot be separated from the struggle against Zionism and its oppression of the Palestinian people, without becoming unilateral and, ultimately, hypocritical.
2. The fight of the Arab people of Palestine against Israeli oppression and for the real right of national liberation and self-determination constitutes, therefore, a legitimate struggle which Marxists should support unconditionally. The Palestinian struggle should be framed in the more general struggle for the national liberation of the Arab people. This nation, united by language, traditions and culture, is artificially divided by the imperialist powers for their own interests of dominion. It is enough to look at the borders of the various Arab states. In most cases they are entirely artificial, consisting of straight lines drawn with a ruler on maps in Paris or London to determine the spheres of colonial rule of the great powers. This was particularly evident at the end of the First World War, when the clear desire for unity of the Arab people emerging from Turkish dominion was shamelessly betrayed by the victorious powers. The borders of Palestine are in reality largely artificial, having been determined only in 1921 (with the constitution by Great Britain of the Hashemite emirate of Transjordan, the current kingdom of Jordan). Nevertheless, the reality of the region and historical development were such that, in the course of decades, in the first half of the last century, a feeling of particular community was constituted among the Arabs of Palestine, also cemented by the struggle against Zionist oppression. Thus it is possible to speak of the Palestinian people, not distinct and counterposed to, but a component with specificities of, the Arab people in general. The struggle for the national rights and liberation of the Palestinian people is not counterposed to the national unity and liberation of the Arab people in general, which revolutionary Marxists must support.
3. Revolutionary Marxists must struggle to develop the perspective of liberation of the Palestinian people and the Arab people in general on the basis of the strategy of the permanent revolution. As affirmed in the Theses on the Permanent Revolution elaborated by Trotsky in 1929: “With regard to countries with a belated bourgeois development, especially the colonial and semicolonial countries, the theory of the permanent revolution signifies that the complete and genuine solution of their tasks of achieving democracy and national emancipation is conceivable only through the dictatorship of the proletariat as the leader of the subjugated nation, above all of its peasant masses... This in turn means that the victory of the democratic revolution is conceivable only through the dictatorship of the proletariat which bases itself upon the alliance with the peasantry and solves first of all the tasks of the democratic revolution.”
Revolutionary Marxists must, therefore, reject any illusory conception of revolution by stages, and indicate to the masses the perspective of proletarian power and socialist revolution. They must build revolutionary Marxist parties based firstly on the working class, develop the political hegemony of the latter in the process of revolutionary struggle, and win the masses from the influence of bourgeois and petty-bourgeois nationalism and Islamic fundamentalism. In vast sectors of the Arab masses a vague feeling has existed for many decades that links them in the struggle for national and social emancipation. These feelings have been exploited and then brutally betrayed by “left” bourgeois and petty-bourgeois nationalist leaders (from Nasser to the Baath, from the Algerian FLN to Qaddafi). Even the development of Islamic fundamentalism, a variegated movement whose reactionary character must be denounced and fought without simulation, is linked to the failure of and disillusionment with the false national-bourgeois “Arab socialism”.
Unifying the struggle for democratic and national demands with the struggle for social demands, in opposition to all the current leaderships -- whether openly reactionary or “progressive” -- Trotskyists must build their own parties, win the leadership of the proletariat and all the oppressed masses, and lead them to the socialist revolution.
4. These are the theoretical positions supported in the 1930s and 1940s by the Fourth International and its Palestinian section. Not only against Zionism in general and against the Zionist left (the Labour Party and the Histradut trade union) supported by a majority of the Jewish colonists, but also against the Zionist far left (the Poale Zion left and the Hashomer Hatzair/Socialist League) linked with the so-called London Bureau (that is, the international coordinating structure of the “centrist” forces in the 1930s) and supporting (at least until 1947) the project of a binational Palestine. In a polemic against the positions of the latter, during a meeting in 1939 (at the end of the great Arab revolt of 1936-39) of representatives of Arab and Jewish parties on the basis of a document by the London Bureau, the Palestinian Trotskyists affirmed their basic positions in a text published in the press of the Fourth International, declaring “their full solidarity with the Arab nationalist movement and their unconditional support for the immediate demands of the Arabs: a) cessation of Jewish emigration, b) prohibition of new land acquisitions by Jews, and c) an Arab national government.”
These positions were reaffirmed, in their essence, in 1947-48 at the time of the division of Palestine and the birth of Israel, adapted to a situation partially modified on the basis of the changed attitude of British imperialism, which, in a difficult situation in the Middle East, passed to mainly basing its action on the Arab feudal-bourgeois regimes, in first place the Hashemite monarchy. The evaluation of the International was that imperialism had, in effect, succeeded in diverting the struggle for the emancipation of the Arab people against imperialism, transforming the 1948-49 war into a war among agents of imperialism (agents of American imperialism in the rising state of Israel, and of British imperialism in the Arab countries) for the division among them of the territory of Palestine at the expense of the Palestinian Arab people.
The November-December 1947 number of Quatriéme Internationale, organ of the International Executive Committee, summarized the position of the International: “The position of the Fourth International on the Palestinian problem remains clear and sharp as in past. It will be in the vanguard of the struggle against partition, for a united, independent Palestine, in which the masses will with sovereignty determine their fate through the election of a constituent assembly. Against the effendis and the imperialist agents, against the maneuvers of the Egyptian and Syrian bourgeoisie, which is trying to divert the struggle for the emancipation of the masses into a struggle against the Jews. It will launch an appeal for the agrarian revolution and for the anticapitalist and anti-imperialist struggle, the essential engine of the Arab revolution. But it cannot conduct this struggle with any possibility of success without taking an unequivocal stand against the partition of the country and against the constitution of a Jewish State.”
In January 1948 the Palestinian Trotskyist group concluded its theses affirming: “We have to patiently explain to the most advanced layers of the Arab proletariat and the intellectuals that military actions of a racist character only deepen the gulf between Jews and Arabs and contribute in practice to the political division, that the fundamental factor and the principal cause of the partition is imperialism, that the current war doesn’t do anything but strengthen imperialism, that thanks to the bourgeois and feudal leadership of the Arab countries -- agents of imperialism -- we have been beaten in a stage of the struggle against imperialism, and that we must prepare for victory in a later phase, that is, for the unification of Palestine and the Arab East in general -- creating the only force that can reach these goals: the unified revolutionary proletarian party of the Arab East.”
And the Second World Congress of the Fourth International, meeting in April 1948, summarized the general position of our movement in these terms: “In the Arab states of the Middle and Near East and in North Africa the sections and groups of the Fourth International favor the unification of the Arab countries in federations of free Arab republics. These sections fight for the elimination of imperialism -- British and French -- against the imperialist intervention of the US, against the landowners complicit with the imperialists, against their tool, the Arab League, for the constituent assembly, and for the widest democracy.
“In what concerns particularly Palestine, the Fourth International rejects as utopian and reactionary the ‘Zionist’ solution to the Jewish question. It declares that the total repudiation of Zionism is the condition sine quo non for a fusion of the struggles of the Jewish workers with the emancipatory social and national struggles of the Arab workers. It declares that it is deeply reactionary to demand a Jewish emigration to Palestine, as it is reactionary to appeal for the immigration of oppressors to the colonial countries in general. It maintains that the matter of immigration and the relationships among Jews and Arabs cannot suitably be decided until after the expulsion of imperialism by a freely elected constituent assembly with full rights for Jews as a national minority.”
This affirmed the cornerstone of a revolutionary perspective as the struggle for Palestinian liberation in the more general framework of the liberation struggle against imperialism and its local agents. It pointed to the constituent assembly of Palestine as the instrument of the anti-imperialist unification of the masses and the concrete realization of the “Arab national government” demanded in the 1939 resolution (as can be understood, considering that the Arab population constituted around 70 percent of the inhabitants of Palestine and that the texts speak of the rights of the Jewish population as a “national minority”). It proposed the rejection of Jewish immigration under any pretext (at the same time, the Trotskyists fought for the opening of the US borders, particularly to Jewish refugees) and of the constitution of the state of Israel.
5. The fundamental and programmatic elements of the general positions expressed by the Trotskyist movement at the moment of the development and the birth of the Zionist state remain fully valid. It is necessary to reaffirm and develop them in light of the historical process of the last 50 years and the reality of the current situation.
This implies that the positions of revolutionary Marxists on the Intifada and the Palestinian question in general are the following:
a. Trotskyists express their full and unconditional support for the revolt of the Arab people of Palestine and are for its development “by any means necessary” (with the exception of indiscriminate terrorism against the civilian population of Israel).
b. The struggle for the self-determination and liberation of the Palestinian people from the oppression of Zionism and imperialism and for the constitution of an independent Arab state of Palestine (the central demand of the present revolt) is historically fully legitimate and progressive. In this framework Trotskyists support the full and total right of all the Palestinian refuges to return to historical Palestine (whether in the borders of pre-1967 Israel or in the occupied territories) from which they or their descendents were driven out by the Zionist offensive, and the recovery of their abandoned property (or financial compensation where that is impossible) and adequate economic support for the return at the expense of Zionism and imperialism.
c. Trotskyists reject the perspective of the Oslo accords, the “Clinton Plan”, or other analogous projects, that is, the creation of a kind of “Palestinian Bantustan” formed on a small part of historical Palestine from territories substantially under Israeli military control, with its borders controlled by the Zionist armed forces in name of the “national security” of Israel, without any economic viability, and subject to an unacceptable series of external, internal, military, and political restrictions. This would be a state only formally independent, an “Indian reservation” of a low-paid workforce for Israeli capitalism.
d. Trotskyists also reject the whole perspective of the construction of a Palestinian mini-state in just the territories occupied by Israel in 1967, which today is the goal of the Arafat leadership. The constitution of such a state on less than a quarter of the territory of historical Palestine would not represent the true realization of the desire for national liberation of the Palestinian Arab people. Particularly, it would make meaningless the perspective of the return of the refugees.
e. The perspective of the liberation of the Palestinian people and the constitution of their independent state implies the destruction of the Zionist state of Israel, an artificial creation which by its nature oppresses the Palestinian Arab people and is an imperialist bridgehead in the whole region of the Middle East and beyond. This destruction doesn’t mean denying the democratic rights of the Jewish people who live in Palestine. Their presence is by now historically consolidated and must be recognized and respected. Nevertheless, the national rights of the Jewish people in Palestine must be subordinated to the priority rights of the oppressed Arab Palestinian people to self-determination and the constitution of their independent state.
f. The struggle for the liberation of the Palestinian people cannot be won in isolation. It has to find the support and backing of the Arab masses. The revolutionary mobilization of the Arab people must be based on the perspective not only of solidarity with the Palestinian people but also of the anti-imperialist liberation of the Arab nation.
g. But a perspective such as the full and final liberation of the Palestinian people makes no sense in the framework of capitalism. The only realistic solution is that delineated by the permanent revolution. The destruction of the Zionist state, like the unification of the Arab nation, is in fact inconceivable without a socialist revolution. The perspective can only be that of a socialist Palestine within the Arab nation unified on a socialist basis.
h. This revolutionary process, in turn, can and must involve the whole of the Middle East and the North Africa, bringing into being a political and economic entity strong enough to confront the imperialist reaction. The perspective must, therefore, be a Socialist Federation of the Middle East and North Africa that unifies on a voluntary basis the various peoples of this region, including those today oppressed by Arab regimes, such as the Berbers and the Kurds.
To realize this program it is necessary to build a new leadership of the mass movement. A leadership that fights for the overthrow not only of the Israeli regime, but also of the bourgeois, feudal-bourgeois, clerical-bourgeois, and petty-bourgeois regimes of the Arab countries and of the other states of the region. These are direct agents of imperialist rule or only demagogically and accidentally “anti-imperialist”, reactionaries and oppressors of the masses, guarantors of the exploitation of the proletariat and the semiproletariat of their own countries.
For this it is necessary to build revolutionary Marxist parties, united in a refounded Fourth International, parties which are built firstly in the proletariat of each country, which fight for working-class hegemony in the mass anti-imperialist movement, contrasting themselves with all the current leaderships, “reactionary” (such as the Islamic fundamentalists) or bourgeois or petty-bourgeois “progressive” (such as the Arafat leadership), and which, dialectically unifying national and democratic demands with social demands, lead the revolution to victory and transcendence, without loss of continuity, into socialist revolution (“The dictatorship of the proletariat which has risen to power as the leader of the democratic revolution is inevitably and, very quickly confronted with tasks, the fulfillment of which is bound up with deep inroads into the rights of bourgeois property. The democratic revolution grows over directly into the socialist revolution and thereby becomes a permanent revolution.” Trotsky, Theses on the Permanent Revolution).
6. A complex aspect of the problem of the national-liberation struggle of the Palestinian people concerns the concrete modality of the realization of national self-determination and the construction of the independent Palestinian state, particularly given the presence of the Jewish population in the territory of historical Palestine. The position of the Fourth International in the 1940s, in continuity with that of the 1930s, rightly centered the solution of this matter on the demand for a Constituent Assembly of Palestine. The national composition of the population of Palestine at the time (around 70 percent Arab, 30 percent Jewish) made this demand logical as the expression of the self-determination of the Arab people of Palestine (not by chance, as seen in the texts of the period, which speak of the rights of the Jewish people as a “national minority”).
The situation has been profoundly modified by the subsequent historical development, with the consolidation of Israel as an oppressor of the Palestinian people and the attending demographic changes (today in the territory of historical Palestine there are around 5 million Jews and 4 million Arabs, including the refugees living in the West Bank and Gaza; another 3 million Palestinian refugees live elsewhere in the Middle East, but it is unlikely that all will want to return to their families’ land of origin).
The political answers given to the problem, particularly by the forces that identify with Trotskyism, are multiple and contradictory. One extreme is expressed by the Committee for a Workers International (CWI, in the past also known as “Militant” from the name of the newspaper of its principal organization, that of Britain) and of its section in Israel, which speak of the perspective of a “socialist Palestine” alongside a “socialist Israel”. This position constitutes a “socialist” version of the perspective of a mini-state, expresses concretely an adaptation to the Zionist state, and therefore should be rejected.
At the opposite extreme is the position of the current of “Morenoist” origin. In its declaration of 13 October 2000 the International Workers League (LIT) put forward a strong criticism to the Arafat leadership, denouncing its abandonment of the Palestinian National Charter (of 1964, modified in 1968-69). The text affirms: “This Charter correctly started from the position of no recognition of state of Israel and approved the defense of a secular, democratic and non-racist Palestine, a Palestine where Arabs and Jews would live together, with the destruction of state of Israel, and the expulsion of Zionists. Jews who wanted to live there, for religious reasons, could peacefully remain in this secular Palestinian state.”
Clearly, the Jews who would want to stay in Palestine exclusively for “religious reasons” are only a small minority of the Jewish population. In fact, in apparent continuity with previous positions, the LIT seems to propose the expulsion of the majority of the Jewish people from Palestine. This is (with some ambiguities and with different positions from the various PLO organizations) the historical position of the Palestinian National Charter, which in particular considers “Palestinian” only Jews who “had normally resided in Palestine until the beginning of the Zionist invasion” (and presumably their descendants, since this beginning was at the time of the 1917 Balfour Declaration). But this doesn’t automatically make it a correct position.
Naturally, we don’t confuse this hypothesis with a perspective of massacre, and we know that there have been examples in which a colonial population has been expelled without this having involved an historical tragedy (for example, the “pieds noirs” in Algeria after 1962). We can also suppose that this can be linked with the perspective of opening the US borders to those expelled. A part of the Jewish population, particularly the recent immigrants from Russia, would probably be ready to voluntarily emigrate, if given the conditions to do so.
With all this in mind, revolutionary Marxists should strongly reject such positions. They express, for the Trotskyists who adopt them, an uncritical adaptation to the (past) positions of petty-bourgeois nationalism. They also make obviously impossible any hypothesis of the involvement of a part of the Jewish proletariat and youth in a perspective of anticapitalist and anti-imperialist struggle, which is a necessity for the perspective of socialist revolution. The constitution of a Jewish presence in Palestine is an historical fact, which it is not the task of the revolutionary Marxists or the Palestinian Arab people to reverse (different, naturally, is the case of specifically reactionary sectors, open racists and fascists who obviously should be expelled not only from the West Bank and Gaza but also from Palestine as such).
Positions favoring the expulsion of the majority of the Jewish population from Palestine break entirely with the traditional positions of Trotskyism described above, which, while condemning Zionism, opposing the birth of Israel, and favoring the blocking of Jewish immigration to Palestine, recognized that the Jewish immigrant population already there (Zionist or not) had the right to stay “with full rights as a national minority”. If this were valid (and it was) more than fifty years ago, it makes absolutely no sense to modify the position today, when a large part of the Jewish population of Israel has firmer roots in Palestinian territory.
Some other formations that identify with Trotskyism (the “Spartacists” and the “League for a Revolutionary Communist International”, known also as “Workers Power” from the name of its British section) demand as a solution a “binational workers’ state”. This repeats the proposal, indicated above, of the Zionist far left before the birth of Israel and, in fact, despite the “revolutionary” rhetoric, constitutes an adaptation to Zionism. It is frontally opposes the slogans and goals of the Palestinian revolt, which demands, legitimately, the birth of an independent Palestinian state, not a “binational” solution, even a “workers” or “socialist” one.
The position of the comrades of the group “Militants for the Fourth International”, which works in Israel and supports the “Movement for the Refoundation of the Fourth International”, in which our tendency participates, has a certain analogy with the position just indicated. Without well clarifying the class character of the new state, they appeal for a “constituent assembly of Palestine” in terms (logically, seeing the historical development of the situation) that appear to be a “binational” solution, therefore, with the negatives indicated.
A position from the “Lambertist” tradition, taken up again on some recent occasions, seeks to resolve the matter of a vital general orientation with the slogan of a “constituent assembly”, referring not only to Palestine but also to Jordan. If this territorial framework had political plausibility, we might find ourselves confronting an orientation analogous to that of the Fourth International in the 1940s. Unfortunately, this is not the case. As we indicated in point 2, history has created a specifically Palestinian people, inserted generally in the Arab people. But today a united and distinct Palestine-Jordan entity doesn’t exist. Palestine and Jordan were united, under British dominion, only from 1918 to 1921. It is not by chance that the historical positions and slogans of the Fourth International always referred only to the 1921-47 British mandate Palestine and denounced the secret accord between the Jordanian monarchy and Zionism for the division of Palestine. What really happened after the war of 1948-49, when Jordan annexed the West Bank, was the creation of a new, though different, oppression of the Palestinians and their national and democratic rights, an oppression not forgotten today. Therefore, this last perspective is also contrary to the demands and feelings of the Intifada, which aims at, let us repeat, the realization of the right of self-determination and the creation of a real state of the Palestinian Arab people and not of others.
In reality, as the ITO, we maintain that it would be wrong today, facing the complexity of the situation, to indicate a precise solution. We maintain that, in terms of slogans and perspectives, it would be to depart from the principles we have indicated in point 5 and from the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination, with the sole limit of respecting the right of the Jewish people of Palestine to stay, with full rights democrats. We cannot know today the precise course and timing of the realization of an independent, socialist Palestine, and therefore the exact conditions that will determine the modality of the realization of the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination. The oppressed population will have the right to decide the precise relationship to maintain with the Jewish population (after all, the position of the Fourth International in 1948 indicated that the specific form of the relationships among Arabs and Jews had to be decided by a constituent assembly, after the driving out of imperialism).
It is possible that the development of the socialist revolution, the expulsion of the openly reactionary and racist sectors of the Jewish population, and demographic changes will create conditions in which the Palestinian people consider the framework of a unitary state the realization of their aspiration for an independent Arab Palestine and in this framework grant democrat rights as a national minority to the Jewish population.
It is also possible that the framework of the Arab revolution creates conditions in which the various specificities of the Arab nation are presented in different forms and on different territorial bases than today, permitting the realization of a broader territorial framework (Jordanian-Palestinian or other) than we first hypothesized.
It is possible, on the contrary, that the Palestinian people will decide that the constitution an independent state implies a state distinct from the Jewish population and that, therefore, Palestine is divided into two entities: one, in the larger part of the territory, predominantly Arab, the other, in a smaller part, predominantly Jewish. This (taking up the original experience of the USSR) in the form of an autonomous region or republic within a unified Arab socialist republic, or as a federated state in the more general framework of a Socialist Federation of the Middle East and North Africa.
Finally, it is possible, even if unlikely, that the struggle for socialist revolution creates feelings of such unity between the Palestinian proletariat and masses and the Jewish proletariat that the Palestinian people choose the solution of a binational unitary state (also here with various possible links with a united Arab socialist republic and a Socialist Federation of the Middle East and North Africa).
History will loosen this central knot. Trotskyists struggle to lead the masses toward the socialist revolution. On this ground they indicate the necessary strategy and tactics. But they don’t pretend to impose their specific solutions to all problems. In Palestine, at the moment of revolutionary victory, the Palestinian people -- with their free self-determination and respect for the rights of the Jewish people -- will decide.
For the defeat of Zionism and imperialism
No rotten compromises. Revolution until victory
For the mobilization of the Arab masses against Israel and imperialism
No confidence in the bankrupt bourgeois, feudal-bourgeois, or petty-bourgeois regimes of the Arab countries. For their revolutionary overthrow
For the demolition of the Zionist state of Israel. For the full democratic rights of the Jewish people in Palestine as a national minority, in the framework of the unity of the Middle East
For a free, secular, socialist Palestine in the framework of Arab socialist unity
For a Socialist Federation of the Middle East and North Africa
Jill
Have a look at these maps which show Zionist colonistaion of Palestine
14.01.2004 00:59
Matt