31.07.2014
AWL: Giving advice to warmongers
Charles Gradnitzer examines how the social imperialists have responded to the latest Israeli assault on Gaza
Another war, another bizarre article from the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty patriarch, Sean Matgamna.1 This latest stream-of-consciousness tract on the AWL website is half initiation rite for new members of the group, half appeal to the conscience of Zionists to stop bombing Gaza.
In his article Matgamna asserts the right of nations to self-defence, but concedes that Israel’s current assault on Gaza cannot be justified in those terms because of Israel’s superior military capabilities and the comparative weakness of Hamas. However, this formulation conceives of all states as politically equal entities, differing only in military strength and governed only by axiomatic rights. It ignores the fact that Israel is a settler-colonial state and one that yearns for further bouts of ethnic cleansing. And, naturally, Matgamna also fails to explain why it should even cross the mind of any real ‘revolutionary socialist’ to even consider upholding the rights of such an oppressor state to ‘defend’ itself against those it oppresses. While it continues its project of displacing the indigenous population and denying them their national rights, the Israeli state provokes the very violence that it claims to be acting to prevent.
Even if it were the case that Gaza and Israel were rival bourgeois powers with comparative military and economic strength - a hypothetical scenario which presumably Matgamna imagines would then afford Israel the right to take such ‘defensive’ actions as shelling Palestinian hospitals and schools - he should perhaps learn the lesson of the collapse of the Second International into chauvinism, with each section supporting its own bourgeoisie in the inter-imperialist conflict of 1914-18. In a battle between two reactionary states Marxists do not ask who attacked first - we ask what is in the interests of the working masses.
Matgamna goes on to repeat the Israeli propaganda line that “it was Hamas that refused to continue” ceasefire agreements. However, “That would only justify what Israel is doing to civilian Palestinians if, to repeat, Israel was responding to a serious threat of slaughter to Israeli citizens, or was engaged in a war that involved a threat to its existence.” So if such a threat existed, according to Matgamna, that would “justify what Israel is doing to civilian Palestinians”. In reality the ceasefire was proposed by Egypt, whose government would like to see a permanently pacified Palestinian population in that hell-hole known as the Gaza strip.
Of course, this is not the only piece of Israeli propaganda Matgamna repeats. Claims that “Hamas deliberately places its rocket launchers in built-up civilian areas” also make an appearance. Once again, the implication is that Israel would be justified in inflicting such catastrophic damage and huge loss of life in “built-up civilian areas” if there were “a serious threat of slaughter to Israeli citizens”.
None of this is to prettify Hamas: it is simply to state that Israel is putting out such propaganda in order to justify its expansionist, colonial war against the Palestinians. Rather than acknowledging that no nation can be free so long as it subjugates another and seeking to convince the Israeli working class that the defeat of its government would be a good thing, Matgamna’s article instead tries to convince Zionists that the Israeli assault on Gaza is unjustifiable under current circumstances.
Litigation
While Matgamna’s article is characteristically dire, another that features on the AWL website - Dan Randall’s piece on the anti-Semitism of a minority in the Palestinian solidarity movement - is better.2
In his closing paragraphs he notes that there are no “trigger warnings on demonstrations, or on life,” and concludes that socialists ought to work to win hegemony for a political culture where racism and anti-Semitism are stamped out, implying that ideas should be debated and agreed democratically within the movement. Though agreeable, the conclusion of Randall’s article is at odds with the manner in which the AWL has tried to win support for its own politics on the Israel-Palestine conflict in the labour movement.
At the end of 2012, AWL executive committee member Mark Osborne testified before an employment tribunal, where lecturer Ronnie Fraser had brought an action against the University and College Union. Fraser claimed that the UCU policy, as agreed at its annual conference, to support a campaign of boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) against Israel was “anti-Semitic” and therefore constituted “harassment” of himself as a Jewish member.
While discussing internally whether it was right that an AWL member should testify on behalf of Fraser against a labour movement organisation, the AWL agreed with Osborne that Leon Trotsky had “set a precedent” on the matter by his willingness to give evidence against the Communist Party before the House Committee on Un-American Activities in 1939.3 This ignores the fact that Trotsky planned to use his appearance to call for world revolution - something Mark Osborne was very unlikely to do, given that he cannot even bring himself to utter the word ‘socialism’, “if he can get away with it”.4
Though there was some opposition to the idea of testifying against the union from two members of the AWL UCU fraction, the majority backed Osborne. One comrade stated that if it was a choice between “Courts out of the labour movement” and “Anti-Semitism [meaning the BDS campaign] out of the labour movement”, then the second was the “key principle”.5
In April 2012 the AWL’s national committee endorsed Osborne’s planned appearance in court by a vote of 10 for and none against, with six abstentions. When introducing the debate, Martin Thomas said:
We agree that Mark Osborne should submit evidence, the effect of which will be to help Ronnie Fraser’s case. In some situations, we might avoid giving evidence, not for reasons of principle, but because we calculate that the harm of giving evidence in terms of antagonising union members exceeds the benefit ... In this case, giving evidence will antagonise some UCU members (on the SWP wavelength), but much more because of the substance of the evidence than the procedure.6
Osborne appeared before the tribunal on November 2 2012. When asked whether he could tell the difference between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism, he claimed that “Almost all Jews are Zionists and almost all Zionists are Jews.”7
Defending his decision to testify against a trade union, he wrote on the AWL’s internal email list: “Yes, an AWL member is giving evidence. Why? Because we oppose the demonisation of Israel and Zionism in the British unions …”8 We also find some familiar logic in his email: just as the AWL ‘neither supports nor opposes’ western military intervention in Iraq, Iran and Libya, it is “not in favour of bringing the courts into the labour movement”. However, “It was not our decision to use the courts. The only choice we had was whether or not to give evidence.”
In the end, the tribunal case - which cost an estimated £500,000 - was laughed out of court. It was described by the judge as “an impermissible attempt to achieve a political end by litigious means”, which showed “a worrying disregard for pluralism, tolerance and freedom of expression”.9
The AWL’s behaviour in this case was deeply reactionary. A trade union conference is supposed to be a sovereign body. For a tribunal to intervene in order to overturn a democratic decision would have set a disastrous precedent. The AWL’s support for Fraser’s action demonstrates that its commitment to the democracy and debate that Randall calls for is only skin-deep.
Notes
1. www.workersliberty.org/story/2014/07/20/israel-stop-bombing-palestinians-lift-blockade-withdraw-west-bank-and-gaza.
2. www.workersliberty.org/node/23455.
3. www.scribd.com/doc/235399331/Awl-ec-Emails-2012.
4. See ‘Economism and frontist illusions’ Weekly Worker June 27 2013.
5. www.scribd.com/doc/235400387/UCU-Fraction-Minutes-2012.
6. www.scribd.com/doc/235400150/AWL-NC-Minutes-2012.
7. www.scribd.com/doc/235400428/Mark-Osborn-Cross-Examination.
8. www.scribd.com/doc/235400464/AWL-C-Emails-2012.
9. www.judiciary.gov.uk/wp-content/uploads/JCO/Documents/Judgments/eemployment-trib-fraser-v-uni-college-union-judgment.pdf.