Letters

Anti-Zionism

Last week we carried a letter from John Davidson, who describes himself as a “secular Jewish, left-leaning Zionist immigrant to Israel, who is appalled - nay, devastated - by the way things have turned out in Israel” (November 10).

He gives a reasonably accurate description of many Zionists’ justification for the alleged need for a separate ‘Jewish state’ by illustrating how many Jews felt, when faced with the rampant hatred they experienced from anti-Semites: “… life with ‘these people’ is impossible. They are horrible. We cannot beat them, we cannot change them, we have to get away from them or we will die.”

I personally know about historic anti-Semitism from what happened to members of my own family. My grandmother fled Russia at the turn of the 20th century in order to escape the anti-Jewish pogroms. My mother, growing up in Liverpool in the 1930s, actually changed her name to try and disguise the fact she was Jewish - such was the support generated by groups such as the British Union of Fascists.

But there was a much more effective and rational response to the widespread anti-Semitism experienced than the one quoted above, expressed best of all by those on the radical left: ‘Whatever our ethnicity or religion, we are all one people.’ The role of the working class, when faced with the repression suffered by a particular minority, is to stress our own common interests: Jews and non-Jews alike, we must unite to combat such repression. It is only through unity that the oppressors can be defeated, and that is why in principle we oppose separatism, including in its Zionist form.

Peter Manson
London

Hornet’s nest

The full page of letters objecting to my premise that Zionists are racist invaders and should not be considered as true Jews seems to have stirred up a hornet’s nest (November 10). I think most of what has been written reflects the laxity our rulers give the Zionists in allowing them to write their own rulebook.

The right to repel invaders is pretty much hard-wired into our DNA. The problem we face in Palestine is that we are dealing with Zionists, who claim that, as Jews, it is their land, that is has always been theirs - and so they can therefore claim (astonishingly!) that it is the Palestinians who are the invaders. Our UK and US leaders tend to accept this claim. It suits them, of course, to accept this case, because they see the Zionists as their partners in the Middle East.

Andrew Northall misinterprets my position - even Hamas has moved from its founding charter and accepts that Zionists are established in Palestine. I have never advocated casting them into the sea. We at the Campaign Against Bogus Antisemitism yearn for a single-state solution, where all citizens are equal.

What I was saying in the letter that has fired up Andrew, Gerry Downing and John Davidson so much is that Zionists must accept they have no god-given right to the land. As Jews, they will claim they have. If they were descendants from the ancient tribes of Israel, they might argue to have some claim. But, as I pointed out in my last letter (November 3), genetically, they do not - these people have neither a religious nor an ethnic claim to the land they claim is theirs.

Andrew Northall thinks genetic differences amongst humans should be irrelevant and he is correct, but claiming citizenship of any country commonly demands a blood tie - that your parent is of that country - which is where DNA comes in. Every country confers statehood upon those whom it accepts. Every nation exercises this right.

But, when looking at Israel, we are considering a racist state, which prides itself on rejecting intermarriage with Palestinians; it is preoccupied with a peculiar version of racial purity - a white ‘Jewish’ Israeli can marry a black ‘Jewish’ Israeli - but not an Arab Israeli. So, whilst race does not matter to us, it matters to the Zionists: it is upon their self-proclaimed racial profiling that they make the claim of being the descendants of the ancient tribes of Israel, when they are not the descendants at all; ergo their claim on the land is nonsense. That we let them get away with this proclamation of bogus Jewry is to the detriment of the Palestinians, who are the true indigenous people of the region.

Gerry Downing too disputes my claim that Zionists are not related to the Jews of ancient times, and therefore have no claim to the land. But Gerry himself, being Irish, should surely know that getting an Irish passport involves proving that at the very least you have an Irish grandparent. Like it or not, all states play the genetic game. But in the case of Israel, the game is a pernicious one - because it is an apartheid state, where the Israeli government adopts a racist approach to Arabs/Palestinians living under its rule. So questions of race are fundamental to the Zionists, yet we let them claim the mantle of Jewry at the expense of the Palestinians - for, by accepting their claim to be such, we are accepting their connection to the land.

Yes, Andrew is correct in noting that we humans are in a state of constant migration. Those of us who are descended from Vikings are, of course, not guests in the UK, but part of the rich fabric of our nation, because everyone knows the Vikings happily interbred with the locals. The difference with the Zionists is that they, practising apartheid, prevent intermarrying with the people who were there before them, because they regard them as lesser beings. They do this in the same way that whites in the USA frowned on those marrying native Americans; the Zionists got their ideas on racial purity from the Europeans, of course.

I posit that it is only at the point where apartheid invaders give up their superior attitudes and recognise their position as the ‘guests’ of those they are colonising that such two peoples can begin to approach equality. Because, as guests, they will then have to accept the norms and values of those they previously sought to dominate.

Gerry wants Israel to be replaced by a workers’ state, granting equal opportunities to all ethnicities, but what do the Palestinians themselves want? For us to declare the nature of the state they should end up with smacks to me of colonialism, of imposing Marxism on a people who already have their own way of managing their societies. Arabs have had Ba’athist parties supporting socialist economics and public ownership in Syria and Iraq, but this choice should be up to the Palestinians, not us.

John Davidson, our Israeli who benefits from the Zionist apartheid state by having emigrated there, complains that I have not addressed Marxism and capitalism and therefore shouldn’t be getting my letters into the Weekly Worker. So here goes. Marx cited colonialism as a form of capitalism, imposing exploitation and social variation. And I’m fascinated by Britain’s colonial enterprises and the fight native peoples undertook to shake off our rule - including Palestinians in Israel - so that’s why I’m submitting letters about it.

Davidson thinks me dishonest, but I fear I got lost after he accuses me of avoiding “one of the great truths underlying Zionism” - that life with “these people” is horrible. I presume he means that we Christians were so anti-Semitic that the Jews had to get away from us by invading Palestine. The fact that Zionism was originally a Christian ideology surprised me, as did the demonstrable anti-Semitism of its adherents. Nonetheless, it was later picked up by a small minority of Jews and, especially after World War II, attracted many Jews of widely disparate values. It then grew and evolved into the settler-colonial-state ideology we know today.

Now, contrary to John Davidson’s view, I do not particularly set out to destroy Israel through arguing purely on genetics. I set out to destroy the state of Israel through a range of arguments, but primarily because, like any racist state, it has no right to exist. I am at one with both of the speakers on the British tour I am setting up on this, who share my view that Israel is not the Jewish state - and is in fact an abomination in the eyes of Orthodox Jews. I’m not sure why John gets so upset that I failed to say that rabbi Weiss was of the Neturei Karta (NK); their views on Israel are similar to other Orthodox Jews, but the NK get my vote because they also consider that the Palestinians are the legitimate rulers of the land, and their law must be the law of the land from the river to the sea. “This must be so until god says otherwise.”

The NK devote much of their time to fighting for Palestine and certainly do not deserve the sneering criticism of both John Davidson and, sadly, Tony Greenstein, too, who condemns them in much the same way that he condemns me (Tony really enjoys putting the boot into fellow travellers and, in so doing, he unwittingly does the Zionists’ dirty work).

Now to our Zionist Mr Davidson’s questions:

1. Why are the Neturei Karta “acceptable returnees” but Mr Davidson is not? Well, dear John, the NK have not emigrated as ‘Übermenschen’ to a racist colony, unlike your good self. They are not going to be Holy Land returnees until a messiah comes that brings world peace - which won’t be any time soon. You, on the other hand, have forsaken the teachings of the Torah and by your own admission have no heritable connection to Palestine, so, of course, you are an unacceptable returnee.
2. Why am I reaching out to the NK (“weirdo fanatics”, as you call them)? Well, John, I was baptised by a Benedictine monk - an order that practices many similar rituals to that of the NK, topped by an embargo on sex - so I do not find their ways as weird as you. I can only suggest that you get out more and start speaking to religious people yourself. They say Christ was a communist, after all.
3. What target audience do I think will be influenced by the views of a rabbi from the NK? John, that rabbi, Dr Tamimi, and myself will be reaching out to those in the UK who, up till now, have not been very prominent in the battle to free Palestine. I am not thinking of the intellectual leftie southern English Jews, such as currently dominate the discourse. Nor am I thinking of the white honkies such as you or I, who share one thing - that we are both appalled at the way “things have turned out in Israel”. No, dear John, our target market is Muslims. There are over two million Muslims in the UK and every single one supports Palestine, largely because you and your Zionist pals insult Muslims on a daily basis, partly through the actions of your Israel occupation force. We hope that Muslims in the UK will join hands with us campaigners for Palestine.
4. Who is funding this “18-location tour” of the UK (it’s actually just 16 cities)? Well, John, you know that Edinburgh council agreed with me that we must help Gaza? Anyway, they have given me £10,000 to spend on what I wish, and I choose to spend it on the tour.

Please, John, give up on Israel and come back to the UK - then you can enjoy the tour yourself; we are inviting the Friends of Israel groups too, so you won’t be the only Zionist in the room. Book your seat at www.bogusantisemitism.org.

Pete Gregson
Campaign Against Bogus Antisemitism

More elephants!

The letters page of last week’s Weekly Worker was a nice reminder of how full of shit the left generally are - what, with their distortions of other people’s positions, their lazy criticisms of things they have not bothered to even half engage with, and their ‘Let’s proceed from “concrete” conditions’ claptrap.

I could have addressed the distorted attacks on Peter Gregson, I could have addressed that wretched, vulgar progressivist, David Douglass, the ‘Who cares about the tipping points - just say yes to fossil fuels’ climate sceptic. He seems to expect the Just Stop Oil protestors to turn up naked to their protests - anything else would apparently undermine their whole manifesto, which Douglass clearly hasn’t even bothered to engage with, beyond its slogans.

But I decided to address the ‘Let’s proceed from “concrete” reality’ schtick that we see endlessly from the left. My view is: let’s not! When an organisation sets out their vision statements and puts their values into their glossy publications, they proceed from these and go all out to achieve them. Usually the vision is to make as much profit and grab as much market share as possible, but from this vision they mostly proceed, no matter what the market conditions are at the time!

So let us follow their shining example and proceed from our vision, our values. Now, of course, those visions and values are affected by events and things that happen out in the ‘real world’. But often events in the ‘real world’ are simply a reminder of the desirability of our values and the urgent need for them to be made concrete. By proceeding from the concrete, however, we proceed from the rules, vision and values of our enemies, whose vision and values are, from what I can see, rotten to the core. To proceed from the concrete can only, in my opinion, lead to bourgeois solutions and trap us within their limited horizons.

If we had taken the concrete position during the pandemic, we would have said there is only one way out: drop all the restrictions and let people shop! Indeed, this wasn’t just the opinion of the business owners on the right (and the bourgeois parties), but also a good portion of the left. But these are the moments - at times of crisis - where a vision, an argument, for a completely new way of living is most required.

So my advice to the communist movement is to work on the vision and work on the values, and then go all-out to present those as the alternative to concrete conditions. I mean, what else can we do?

Steve Cousins
email

Conciliators

The Morning Star of October 31 carried a polemic by the Marx Memorial Library entitled ‘What is it with Trotsky and Trotskyism?’ A few days later Jack Conrad defended the democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry and sought to rubbish Trotsky’s Lessons of October in his three-part series of articles in the Weekly Worker beginning on November 3. Both argue along the same political lines.

Lars T Lih, Conrad’s ally in this enterprise, proposes the truly ridiculous notion that Kautsky bequeathed to the Bolsheviks the ideology and politics that achieved the October revolution. In his ‘Karl Kautsky as architect of the October Revolution’, he proposes the stupid theory that “Lenin remained true to the tactical guidelines of Karl Kautsky after the latter had abandoned them”. Lih and Conrad hope that there are few serious critical theoretical readers who will take the trouble to study Lenin’s The renegade Kautsky and Trotsky’s Terrorism and communism and Social democracy and wars of intervention in Russia, 1918-1921. These two central leaders of the Russian Revolution totally agreed on Kautsky’s reactionary legacy - not only in these texts, but in countless comments after the great betrayal of the international working class by the German Social Democrats on August 4 1914, when they voted for the war credits to the kaiser.

Conrad has denounced these works by the central leaders of the revolution in the hope that most readers will accept his and Lih’s unfounded assurances and have not read and will not read these profound theoretical works. I wrote four letters to Weekly Worker, available on our Socialist Fight blog, Falsifier of the history of the Russian Revolution: Lars T Lih, detailing Lih’s false and lying history of the controversy over the democratic dictatorship of the workers and peasantry.

But comrades need not take Trotsky’s account in his Lessons of October as the last word. Go to volume 24 of Lenin’s Collected works and read first his ‘Letters on tactics’, written in April 1917 (pp42-54). This was published in 1949 under Stalin and shows Lenin on the warpath against Kamenev in particular:

“The person who now speaks only of a ‘revolutionary democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry’ is behind the times. Consequently, he has in effect gone over to the petty bourgeoisie against the proletarian class struggle; that person should be consigned to the archive of ‘Bolshevik’ pre-revolutionary antiques (it may be called the archive of ‘old Bolsheviks’).”

And he continues:

“The revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry has already been realised, but in a highly original manner, and with a number of extremely important modifications ... it is essential to grasp the incontestable truth that a Marxist must take cognisance of real life, of the true facts of reality, and not cling to a theory of yesterday, which, like all theories, at best only outlines the main and the general, only comes near to embracing life in all its complexity. Theory, my friend, is grey, but green is the eternal tree of life.”

Of course, the targets here are not only Kamenev, but also Zinoviev and Stalin, who were likewise defensive of the Provisional government. Kamenev, Stalin and Muranov had ousted the editors of Pravda, Molotov and Shlyapnikov, who had a strong anti-war position against the Provisional Government, and turned their position sharply to the right. Kamenev’s first editorial on April 15 said: “What purpose would it serve to speed things up, when things were already taking place at such a rapid pace? … When army faces army, it would be the most insane policy to suggest to one of those armies to lay down its arms and go home. This would not be a policy of peace, but a policy of slavery, which would be rejected with disgust by a free people … While there is no peace the people must remain steadfastly at their posts, answering bullet with bullet and shell with shell.” On March 16 Stalin wrote: “… the slogan, ‘Down with the war’, is useless.”

That was outright political capitulation on the most crucial question of all for revolutionary Marxists; what attitude to take to our own imperialist bourgeoisie in war?

Lenin’s first ‘Letter from afar’ was published on April 15, but was crucially censored to delete the section which said: “Those who advocate that the workers’ support the new government in the interests of the struggle against tsarist reaction … are traitors to the workers, traitors to the cause of the proletariat, [and] the cause of freedom.” His targets here were also Kamenev, Zinoviev and Stalin.

Here is Lenin against Kamenev in his ‘Letters on tactics’:

“Indeed, reality shows us both the passing of power into the hands of the bourgeoisie (a ‘completed’ bourgeois-democratic revolution of the usual type) and, side by side with the real government, the existence of a parallel government which represents the ‘revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry’. This ‘second government’ has itself ceded the power to the bourgeoisie, has chained itself to the bourgeois government. Is this reality covered by comrade Kamenev’s old-Bolshevik formula, which says that ‘the bourgeois-democratic revolution is not completed’? It is not. The formula is obsolete. It is no good at all. It is dead. And it is no use trying to revive it. As is well known.”

Lastly let us note that volume 24 was first published by Stalin in 1949, but, of course, by then no-one would make any criticism of his role before Lenin returned in April 1917. Jack Conrad repeatedly refers to “the conciliators”, as Lenin dubbed them, as “the Bolsheviks”, as if there was not an absolutely irreconcilable difference between Lenin’s line and those of these “conciliators”. Footnote 13 of ‘Letters on tactics’ says:

“‘No tsar, but a workers’ government’ was an anti-Bolshevik slogan put forward in 1905 by Parvus and Trotsky. This slogan of a revolution without the peasantry, which became one of the basic postulates of counterrevolutionary Trotskyism, was sharply criticised by Lenin.”

That slogan summed up the essence of Lenin’s April theses. But who would be foolhardy enough to invite a bullet in the back of the head by making this obvious point then?

Gerry Downing
Socialist Fight

Corrupt duopoly

Five prime ministers, three proxy wars and one failed economy - welcome to Great Britain in the 21st century! The state of the United Kingdom is in a complete mess.

From the trappings of British empire, through two world wars and one cold war, Britain has emerged not ruling the waves, but ruing the day the sun finally set on the empire. The dis-United Kingdom appears to be on the brink of dissolution. Through the process of regional devolution the wheels appear to be coming off the tracks - the bus has no driver and the boat has no rudder. A succession of failed policies and failed politicians has driven Britain into an economic wilderness, to the abyss of unemployment, with innumerable homeless and needless unnecessary deaths. Let us pause, reflect and digest how this came to pass.

Today’s current economic woes started long before some of these compromised political leaders were even born. The trickledown politics of Thatcher and Reagan and the economic terrorists of the Chicago school of economics have placed the free market and the unfettered, free flow of capital in the holy grail of economic policy. The wholesale privatisation of nationalised industries has taken the wealth of the nation from the people and given it to bankers, investors, shareholders and indeed external actors from other sovereign nations, who bought into the railways and electricity infrastructure in the UK and use the profits made there to subsidise their own nationalised companies. Taxpayers in the United kingdom are subsidising public transport in France.

It’s shambolic, it’s immoral and it proves the political classes running the country do so to increase the profits of unregulated financial interests, big business and corporations. While the government pursues poor people for benefit fraud, it ignores the billions of pounds not paid by big business in tax avoidance, which could alleviate the national debt overnight.

The failed neoliberal economic model of austerity and privatisation has led us to where we are today. From New Labour under Blair to Building Back Better under the Tories, it is now obvious we no longer live in a democracy, but in a duopoly. The left and right spectrum in British politics has coalesced into a neoliberal collage of centrist and rightwing politics, to include war hawks, lobbyists, big pharma and big business. This combined manifestation of class interests has led Britain to become a haven for the wealthy and a prison for the poor.

While the UK government pours billions of pounds into promoting a continued conflict in the Donbas and Crimea, in a proxy war with Russia via Ukraine, while it continues to arm Saudi Arabia in its proxy war with Iran via Yemen and further destabilises Syria, the people of Britain are facing a cold, harsh winter of strikes, discontent, increased poverty and a continued shrinking of the economy, while the government tells us we are ‘all in this together’.

Rishi Sunak and his wife are reputed to be worth over £730 million and he is reported to be the richest prime minister Britain has ever had. Why is he even in politics, if not to protect his own wealth, the wealth of his family, friends and class? What has he in common with a young, married couple with one child and a baby on the way, living on a minimum wage and working two jobs to pay the ever-increasing food inflation bills, the spiralling cost of energy, fuel, mortgage rates and housing rents? In fact he has nothing in common with the people whom his policies are directly and indirectly affecting the most.

Cameron, May, Johnson, Truss and now Sunak. If we look at Johnson, he was partying in Downing Street with staff members, while families were only allowed 10 people at their loved one’s funeral during the Covid pandemic. Truss showed emphatically how the Conservative Party is only interested in protecting and increasing wealth for the already superrich with her budget - borrowing money on the international banking circuit to indebt future generations of British taxpayers, while simultaneously giving tax concessions to the rich.

Sunak may very well unify the Conservative parliamentary party, but as a man of colour he may face a racist backlash at the polls come 2024. It’s brilliant that the UK has elected both female prime ministers and now a non-white premier, but all these people to date have been from the same party, protecting the same class and perpetuating poverty, discrimination and inequality in life opportunities and in society.

As I said, Britain is a duopoly of two parties, protecting one class: the rich. Britain has never had a Roman Catholic as prime minister. It has a discriminatory history of anti-Irish, anti-Catholic racism that continues to this day - that’s how ‘democratic’ the British establishment is. A government of billionaires, lords and ladies, with a corrupt monarchy overseeing the continuation of the feudal system into the 22nd century.

Fra Hughes
Belfast