17.02.2022
BDS: for or against?
Israeli settler-colonialism and the appropriate solidarity movement with the Palestinians were debated at the February 13 Online Communist Forum. Daniel Lazare argued that the BDS campaign is a cross-class popular front which therefore should be shunned. Mike Macnair stressed the US alliance with Israel, attempts to outlaw BDS and the ongoing witch-hunt against anti-Zionists in the Labour Party
A Hamas popular front
I believe this question of boycott, divestment and sanctions against Israel can be broken down into four parts. Those parts are, first, what is BDS? Secondly, what are its goals? Thirdly, the question of a popular front versus a united front of the working class. And, finally, the question of the Israeli proletariat in general, especially in the context of the broader Middle East.
So let us begin with the first question: what is BDS? The campaign is based in Ramallah on the West Bank. Its nominal governing body is called the Palestinian BDS National Committee, which consists of a couple of dozen Palestinian organisations, one of which is the Palestinian Council of National and Islamic Forces, which includes Hamas. So, as Hamas is part of the governing structure, I think it is worthwhile looking at what it stands for.
As we know, Hamas is a fiercely rightwing and anti-Semitic organisation, whose founding charter, which has never been rescinded, quotes the al-Bukhari hadith, calling on Muslims to kill the Jews when the day of judgment arrives.
The charter cites the Protocols of the Elders of Zion as one of its sources and refers to Jewish immigration to Palestine as a Tartar Invasion. It claims that Jews with all their money control the world media. They have stirred revolutions in various parts of the world, including the French and Russian revolutions, but they were also able to control imperialistic states, driving them to colonise many countries in order to exploit their resources and spread corruption.
All this is well known and Eddie Ford in a recent Weekly Worker article wrote that revolutionaries should point out that Hamas is an Islamist organisation that has a thoroughly reactionary agenda, both within Palestine and the wider region, and that the victims of this agenda would be women, gays, democrats, atheists, trade unionists, socialists, communists, religious minorities, etc.1
Ford also wrote that Hamas does nothing to divide the Israeli population along class lines, but - quite the opposite - helps to consolidate that population behind the Zionist state and its own ruling class. He went on to say that, if the Socialist Workers Party, which had called Hamas a “revolutionary organisation”, does not think it is anti-Semitic, they have a big problem. True, BDS laudably goes out of its way to condemn anti-Semitism, but at the same time it has on its governing board a fiercely anti-Semitic organisation.
I might also point out that when protests against unemployment, poverty and corruption erupted in the Gaza Strip, led by a group calling itself the We Want to Live movement, Hamas security forces crushed the demonstrations rapidly. In other words, Hamas is not only a rightwing, anti-Semitic organisation, but one dedicated to the repression of the Palestinian labour movement.
The Weekly Worker condemns the SWP for not acknowledging the problematic nature of Hamas, but in supporting BDS essentially does the same thing by failing to mention this problem. So not only does the SWP have a big problem: the Weekly Worker and the CPGB do as well.
The next question is, what are BDS’s goals? In his article last month Mike Macnair chose to zero in on the boycott plank alone. Mike defended boycotts against Israel, but drew no distinction between consumer and labour boycotts. When the BDS campaign talks about boycotts, it seems to mean the former, although it is not always entirely clear. But Marxists, while not necessarily opposing either, still see them very differently.
While consumers belong to all classes, labour boycotts, strikes and secondary actions, such as preventing the supply of weapons destined for Israel, are very different things. They are an expression of the working class movement and the Marxist attitude towards them is very different.
The second letter in BDS stands for ‘divestment’: and that rests on appeals to the international bourgeoisie to withdraw investment from Israel - and therefore to disemploy Israeli workers - and the third letter stands for ‘sanctions’, which are appeals to bourgeois governments, including western imperialists and the Gulf states, to impose an economic blockade on Israel - not unlike the economic blockade the US has imposed on Iran, Syria, Cuba and literally dozens of other nations.
BDS also opposes what it calls the normalisation of relations between Israeli Jews and Arabs and Palestinians. For example, it calls for a boycott of all Israeli cultural activity, unless “the Israeli party in the project recognises the comprehensive Palestinian rights under international law” and the product or event is one of “co-resistance” rather than co-existence.
The BDS website goes on to say:
any engagement with Israeli individuals or institutions that is not within the resistance framework outlined above serves to underline the normality of Israeli occupation, colonialism and apartheid in the lives of the people in the Arab world. It is therefore imperative that people in the Arab world shun all relations with Israelis unless based on co-resistance.
Therefore BDS has called on foreign labour unions to sever links with Histadrut, the Israeli union, and for individual Palestinians to withdraw from it. And BDS supporters have gone so far as to interrupt performances by Israeli music groups by engaging in group heckling. Hecklers interrupted a performance by the Jerusalem Quartet in London that was being broadcast by BBC radio.
I would argue that, just like appealing to the international bourgeoisie to disinvest in Israel or to impose a bourgeois economic blockade, these methods are completely at variance with socialism, in that they are class-collaborationist. They do not rely on working class solidarity and in fact are violative of working class solidarity.
If all relations with Israelis are forbidden unless those concerned have pre-committed to a policy of co-resistance, that means that any normal relations between Israelis and Palestinians are impossible. It means that any attempt to persuade Israelis of the wrongness of Zionism and the true nature of the Palestinian plight is cut short as well, because there is no basis for persuasion or personal interaction. This is also completely counter to socialist methodology.
The question is therefore, if Marxists reject subordinating working class forces to bourgeois political forces in a popular front, how can they possibly support doing the same thing with regard to the thoroughly bourgeois forces that are behind BDS?
There is also the call for an academic boycott. I really have no idea how this actually works. Are Israeli scholars to be barred from international conferences or international academic journals? What happens when Israeli scholars make a discovery or breakthrough? Are those to be ignored? And what about Israeli Arab academics? Do different rules apply to them and, if so, how is that not discriminatory?
The reason why Hamas is part of the BDS governing structure is because BDS sees itself as a reflection of Palestinian civil society. But that means a reflection of all Palestinian society - bourgeois as well as working class - and therefore it is inevitable that it would include a major political party like Hamas.
But this is not the way that socialists approach civil society. Socialists believe in polarising politics, so that labour is counterposed to capitalism. So, when the Weekly Worker repeatedly denounces popular frontism, I am not really sure how it can defend the same kind of popular frontism in Palestine and why it does not recognise that the working class should have its own policy rather than relying on bourgeois forces to dictate it.
Finally, the fourth question is that of the Israeli proletariat in the broader Middle East. The attitude towards Israeli workers evinced in the Weekly Worker seems to be all over the map. We have Moshé Machover assuring us that BDS’s impact on Israeli workers will be negligible and it is a purely symbolic campaign, whose goal is to “win a moral battle in progressive public opinion”.
We have Tony Greenstein saying just about the exact opposite, when he argues that the Israeli working class is no ally of socialists and that socialists therefore should be unconcerned if BDS causes real, tangible harm to Israeli workers.
And then we have Jack Conrad. A few weeks ago, during one of these Sunday sessions, I asked him if he would support an economic strike by Israeli workers. Thankfully he answered in the affirmative. But from his attitude - maybe I am reading too much into this - he seemed to think the question was secondary or peripheral.
But I would submit that the Israeli working class is not peripheral at all. Rather it is a central part of a highly diverse Middle East proletariat that includes Palestinian workers in the occupied territories and in Israel proper, south Asian workers in the Gulf states, workers in Syria, Iraq, Iran and Egypt, with their long history of militancy, etc.
The Israeli proletariat is itself diverse in that it includes not just Jews, but Arabs, Russians, Thai and Filipino guest workers, etc, and any socialist movement must not penalise Israeli workers per se, but, on the contrary, should welcome Israeli-Palestinian workers as comrades in a common struggle against wage cuts, unemployment, imperialist aggression and so on.
And the same goes for cultural and national concerns. Jews are now a minority in both greater Israel - ie, the territory ‘from the river to the sea’ - and in the larger Middle East. Their fears, concerns and legitimate cultural and national aspirations deserve to be recognised no more and no less than those of other minorities throughout the region. Minority rights are trampled throughout the Middle East and this must be a primary concern of all socialists.
Tony Greenstein recently wrote that Histadrut was never a trade union, but rather a great colonising agency, which at first refused admission to Arab workers and after that kept them in a separate section. This is not true. The infant Palestine Communist Party enjoyed considerable success in organising Jewish and Arab railroad workers, who were in a union that was part of the federation. The PCP did not leave Histadrut voluntarily: rather it was expelled by nationalists, who were all too aware of the damage it could do to Zionism. The PCP perspective was one of remaining inside Histadrut, not boycotting it, as Tony calls for.
There has been a great deal of talk about how the Israeli working class - presumably meaning the Jewish section - has somehow removed itself from the international proletariat by virtue of its subordination to its own bourgeoisie and the Zionist project of settler-colonialism, etc. To this American socialist what is strange about this is that the AFL-CIO, the main labour confederation in the USA, is really very little different. It is so thoroughly integrated into the US war machine that it has been dubbed the ‘AFL-CIA’.
And there is a rich history of racism in the US labour movement. Eugene V Debs called on rail unions to admit black workers, for example, but was voted down. Nonetheless, he still led the Pullman rail strike - one of the most tumultuous in US history.
The colour bar was widespread throughout American labour until communists went on the offensive against it. This occurred roughly around the same time as the PCP was trying to organise inside Histadrut. And I might add the drive by the Communist Party of the USA was highly successful - indeed so successful that the CPUSA in the American south was widely known as, excuse the expression, “the nigger party” - and to this day blacks are more likely to belong to US labour unions than the population as a whole.
But our socialist policy was not to boycott the AFL-CIO as consequence, but to work within it in order to counter racism from within. If I might quote Lenin in ‘Leftwing’ communism:
If you want to help the ‘masses’ and win the sympathy and support of the ‘masses’, you should not fear difficulties, or pinpricks, chicanery, insults and persecution from the ‘leaders’ … but must absolutely work wherever the masses are to be found.
And to me that includes Histadrut or, to quote Mike Macnair in his recent article: “Our interest in the class movement is not in the idea of a perfect purified workers’ movement, but of the actual warts-and-all movement, which very imperfectly points to the possibility of a cooperative future.”2
Just to take up one issue with Mike. He said that to pursue a purity politics of rejecting outright support for the BDS campaign is unavoidably in practice to solidarise with the witch-hunters, who deploy closely related arguments in the US and UK. I assume from that statement that Mike is saying that criticising BDS amounts to support for the Labour Party leaders who are trying to drive anti-Zionists out of the party.
But I am left puzzled by this argument, because I do not see how it is any different from arguments that Trotsky was effectively solidarising with the Third Reich in “pursuing a purity politics” against the Stalinist regime in Moscow.
Just to sum up, I think it is crucially important to criticise BDS, which I see as a classic popular-front enterprise that has brought the working class into collaboration with some very nasty political forces, which nonetheless have a certain following in Palestinian civil society. We must not be afraid to criticise BDS, even though it may sound similar to certain criticisms emanating in bourgeois circles. These things are inevitable and it is wrong to try to shut down criticism of it on this basis.
I know that that the CPGB is deeply committed to BDS as part of its work against the Keir Starmer regime, but I think that it is has worked itself into a very bad anti-labour, popular front position.
Daniel Lazare
Building opposition to main enemy
I am going to start in a different place from comrade Lazare, but we will see how far our ideas intersect.
I begin with the idea of defeatism and the point that in wars we take the view that ‘the main enemy is at home’; and even in peacetime we stand, as Wilhelm Liebknecht and August Bebel did and the German Social Democratic Party did until its 1914 collapse, for ‘not one penny, not one man, for this regime’. We are not concerned with the merits or demerits of the other side; and this holds true whether the enemy is Louis Bonaparte in 1870, or the kaiser, the tsar, or the horrors of the British empire, in 1914.
The point can be illustrated by mistakes about it. In 1914 the leftist Parvus, famous on the left as a contributor to the idea of permanent revolution, became an advocate of ‘victory to the kaiser’: initially on the basis of the Turks’ rights to self-determination against imperialist control of their state, then on the basis of Ukrainian self-determination against the tsar. Karl Kautsky moved from his initial position of saying that the workers’ movement should support only defensive war aims into pacificism; During 1917, however, he became a publicist for the self-determination of ‘plucky little Serbia’ and ‘bleeding Belgium’. This amounted to support for Entente powers, Britain, France and Russia. That position led Kautsky in October 1917 to denounce the Bolshevik revolution as a coup. When he said Bolshevism was anti-democratic what he really meant was that it was anti-Entente.
Behind our commitment to defeatism lies the proposition that we are in the business of the overthrow of this constitutional order “to set free the elements of the new society with which old collapsing bourgeois society itself is pregnant”3 (as Karl Marx put it in 1871) - like the English oppositionists who collaborated with a Scots invasion of England in 1640, or who called for a Dutch invasion in 1688, or the American revolutionaries who allied with the old enemy France in 1778. All these responses tended to set free the new social order. Conversely, the preservation of the old state order produces the stifling and even reversal of trends towards the new social order - as in the 17th-18th century France studied by David Parker, and on a larger scale in Ming dynasty China’s retreat from merchant capitalism.
That has the consequence that, when our state is involved in war, our primary responsibility is not to give advice of one sort or another to our comrades in the targeted regime, but to carry on a defeatist agitation. The point is not ‘victory to the other side’. It is to use the war as a chance to undermine our own state. In other words, it is not that we are for the victory of Hamas - we denounce the line of the Socialist Workers Party that ‘We are all Hamas’. It’s not we would have called for the victory of the kaiser in 1914. And, as Lenin put it in 1915:
For the ‘discerning reader’: This [defeatism] does not at all mean to ‘blow up bridges’, organise unsuccessful strikes in the war industries, and, in general, helping the government to defeat the revolutionaries.4
Rather, the task is to recognise that the war has become central to politics and to conduct an anti-war agitation which stretches as widely as possible - even into the armed forces. What we are concerned with therefore is how to conduct such an agitation.
It is in this context that it is actually misleading to say that there is a difference between a consumer boycott and workers’ action in the form of a labour boycott. What we are concerned with is not strike action - we are not proposing a syndicalist version of blowing up bridges. We are proposing to get the widest possible understanding in the society as a whole. And in this context symbolic initiatives are as important as direct-action initiatives. The boycott campaign in this sense is a campaign of symbolic initiatives.
We may compare, as an analogy not too far distant, the British workers’ campaign of solidarity with the Union side in the American Civil War in 1862-65. The Union side was a bourgeois movement led by capitalists. But when British textile employers set out to campaign through a series of public meetings for British intervention on the Confederate side, to use the British navy to break the Union’s naval blockade of the Confederacy, the workers’ movement organised counter-meetings - no more than symbolic initiatives, but enough to undermine the pro-Confederate campaign.
Our state’s war
The Israeli state is no more autonomous from the US state than the 17th-19th century East India Company was from the British state. Obviously that was not true originally (Israel was created under the British and backed against the British by the French in the 1930s and by the USSR in the later 1940s), but the Kennedy administration in the early 1960s initiated what later came to be described as the settled policy of the United States - that Israel should have a qualitative military edge over its neighbours.
The military operations of the Israeli state are operations which the US state can turn off at will. It is not necessarily the case that it starts them or pre-approves them, any more than the British state started or pre-approved the military operations of the East India Company. Nonetheless the United States can turn these operations off at will and it does turn them off when it suits its diplomatic agenda.
This is a colonial war carried out by an agency of the US, which is the Israeli state. It is a profound illusion of many liberals and quite a good many labour movement opponents of US support for Israel that this reflects Israeli interests and the success of Israeli lobby in the US. On the contrary, it reflects simply the US interest in holding veto power over the state politics in the Middle East to preclude the possibility of alliances which could affect US geopolitical power.
US military operations depend on the use of petrol, diesel and aviation fuel. It is not that the US itself needs the petrol, diesel and aviation fuel of the Middle East: it is that America is insistent that it should be able to turn off the supply of petrol, diesel and aviation fuel to France, Germany, China, etc - all countries which are potential or real rivals.
Previously Britain, France and indeed Germany were allowed a substantial degree of political autonomy in their dealings with Arab countries. That was because of the historical colonial relationships between Britain and France in particular and several post-colonial Arab countries - and also actually Britain and Saudi Arabia, which had never been formally colonised. although the Saudi royal family was sponsored by the British state in the interwar period.
The failure of France and Germany to support the invasion of Iraq in 2003, and the extensive opposition to the war within the ‘establishment’ in Britain, led the US to determine that the autonomy of the European countries in dealings with Arab states, and therefore their right to explicitly denounce Israeli state actions, as they had done from time to time, should end. The means of overcoming the autonomy of the European countries in their relationships with Arab states was the creation of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance ‘definition’ of anti-Semitism. That led to the campaigns which began in Germany around this question and were sharply expanded in Britain after Jeremy Corbyn unexpectedly won the leadership of the Labour Party.
The consequence was that Britain became a party to US war operations through its client regime in Israel and we are now in a situation where - rather than being on the sidelines, with the British state manoeuvring diplomatically between support for the Israeli state and endorsement of Arab states - we the UK have become a party to the US’s colonial war in Israel-Palestine.
Unique
Truth is the first casualty of war and in this context that takes two central forms, one of which is to say that Israel is by no means unique. It is true that Israel is not the only country to violently repress a part of its population. But as comrade Moshé Machover has argued, Israel is unique in that it is a settler-colonial regime, which actually still continues to take land for the benefit of settlers coming from elsewhere - unlike the many countries where settler-colonialism is done and dusted.
Israel is unique secondly because it is the immediate client of the US in a way in which no other colonial regime is. It is the immediate client in the sense of being given a ‘qualitative military edge’ over its neighbours.
The single exception to this ‘qualitative military edge’ uniqueness, as I said in my recent article,5 is South Korea, in relation to which the view of the US continues to be that there is a war on the Korean peninsula and that North Korea is an illegitimate rebel regime, which needs to be overthrown. For that reason the US continues to arm the South Korean regime for war purposes.
The whole argument against the boycott, divestment and sanctions campaign as (allegedly) giving support to Hamas, and treating Israel inappropriately as a special target, and so on, is misconceived and false because of the character of the relationship between the US and Israel. Following the US turn in the wake of Iraq in order to recover control and prevent any repetition of what happened then by using the IHRA, that affects Britain as well. Iraq was a war which our state chose to make itself a party to.
The second argument over BDS is about solidarity with the Israeli working class, which comrade Lazare has made more explicit in his letter to the latest Weekly Worker (February 10) and in his speech at this meeting. It is solidarity, I should say, particularly with the Israeli Jewish working class because of concern about legitimate national and cultural aspirations.
There are two fundamental mistakes involved in this argument. Suppose that we were in a Palestinian socialist organisation or indeed one in Egypt or Syria, etc. We would then be in a situation we needed a strategic orientation to make class unity across the borders, and a strategy to separate Israeli Jewish workers from the Israeli Jewish bourgeoisie would be a plausible and in some respects desirable option.
But to suppose that this is the only strategic option is misconceived, because it presupposes that either the global hegemony of the US will never be overthrown, or that the there can never be a sufficient shift in military technology (away from oil power) that the US aspiration to keep a stranglehold on the Middle East oil taps will be removed.
In either of those cases the foundation of US imperialist support for Israel would go away. And reducing imperialist support for Israel is actually more likely to produce a degree of separation of the Israeli Jewish working class from the Israeli Jewish boss class, as we can see in fact with the real decline of loyalism in the Six Counties following the very partial withdrawal of British state support.
Syndicalism
The second issue is the conception of the nature of class movements and, underlying it, the nature of the working class. Why should we suppose that the Israeli working class, as comrade Lazare writes in his latest letter, is central in the larger Middle East because it is an Israeli and Arab-Palestinian proletariat composed not just of Arabs and Jews, but of Russians, Thai and Filipino guest workers and so on? Why is that central? Why is it that a country of about ten million is central to the class movement of over the whole Arab-speaking population of the Middle East, not far short of 500 million?
The underlying assumption is that this group is to take a leading role because it is a minority which is employed in industry - just as the assumption that the working class is defined by employment in industry creates a radical separation between labour boycotts and consumer boycotts, and says labour boycotts are a working class tactic, while consumer boycotts are not. In reality that assumption is syndicalist.
The underlying assumption is that the working class can take power because it is employed in industry, while unemployed workers and those who are otherwise dependent on the social wage cease to be part of the strategic orientation of the working class.
This derives from the history of American Trotskyism - it is in the fundamental conceptions of James P Cannon in the 1946 Theses on the American revolution. There is a messianic role attributed to the American working class because of the centrality and preponderance of industry in the US.6
Comrade Lazare is entirely correct to say that the Communist Party of the USA built mass movements against the colour bar and in favour of black organisation. The Socialist Workers Party USA and its descendants among the Spartacists and so on had delusions that, because they had led some strike actions and because they came from the nativist wing of the Communist Party, their own little organisation of a couple of thousand had overtaken the CPUSA and that they were the natural leaders of the world revolution. This delusion has seemed to affected all the tendencies which grew out of that tradition.
Similarly there is a false conception in relation to mobilising the Israeli working class and its centrality to the Middle Eastern working class. There is a false conception in relation to the idea of the overthrow of Zionism inevitably taking the form of class differentiation between the Israeli Jewish working class and the Israeli Jewish bosses.
Let me flag just one thing in my January 20 article - it is a piece of bad writing on my part. The article stated that:
for the US, and in today’s circumstances also for the UK, to pursue a purity-politics argument for rejecting outright support for the BDS campaign is unavoidably in practice to solidarise with the witch-hunters, who deploy closely related arguments.
In this quotation “rejecting outright support” is ambiguous. What I meant by “rejecting outright support” is “rejecting support altogether”, not to demand that we must give “outright support” meaning uncritical support. I did not mean that we have to tailend whatever BDS argues for because the self-appointed leaders of the campaign are “the representatives of the oppressed”. Criticism of the campaign is perfectly legitimate. But to argue for no support at all for BDS on the grounds of the character of the leadership, or that it is a popular front, and so on is actually using the arguments of the witch-hunters.
Mike Macnair
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‘Thin end of the wedge’ Weekly Worker December 2 2021: weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1374/thin-end-of-the-wedge.↩︎
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‘No change of line’ Weekly Worker January 20: weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1379/no-change-of-line.↩︎
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www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1871/civil-war-france/ch05.htm.↩︎
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‘The defeat of one’s own government in the imperialist war’, VI Lenin CW Vol 21, p275.↩︎
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‘No change of line’ Weekly Worker January 20: weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1379/no-change-of-line.↩︎