Letters

Weaponry

We in Palestine Action pulled alongside Elbit UAV Engines in Shenstone in a large van on November 27. Activists leapt from inside the vehicle to begin spraying the building’s outer bricks with indelible ink, while the driver locked on to the vehicle itself to hold the space for as long as possible and facilitate the action. Police forced the site’s security guards, behaving aggressively and unprofessionally, to retreat from the area.

Equipped with paint, one of the activists was able to secure a position on the roof of the van and use it as a platform to display an anti-arms-trade banner, set off green and red flares, and importantly raise the Palestinian flag for a considerable length of time.

Shortly after, in a separate action, others struck the property agents of UAV Engines Ltd, Fisher German. The activists sprayed the Stafford branch with blood-red paint and proceeded to smash the windows.

The double action comes after an eruption of Israeli colonial violence against the indigenous Palestinian population. Elbit has also recently unveiled its new suicide ‘Lanius’ drone (which translates as ‘the butcher’) - an autonomous mothership carrying several micro-bombs, designed to fly up staircases and inside homes before self-detonating. In retaliation, today’s activists have sought to amplify the popular Palestinian resistance, concentrating their efforts on disrupting the manufacture of Israeli weapons on British soil.

UAV Engines in Shenstone is owned by Elbit Systems - Israel’s largest arms company. It specialises in making engines for combat drones, which the company openly market as ‘battle-tested’ on the Palestinian population. The Hermes 450 aircraft has been used to surveil and attack the people of Gaza for over a decade, decimating thousands of lives. This October, they were used to strike the heart of Nablus, terrorising an entire city. Only recently has the Israeli military fully admitted that its Hermes are indeed, armed - Israel’s worst-kept secret, says Israeli TV Channel i24 News.

As long as the Israelis continue to shatter Palestinian communities, we’ll continue to knock down the factories that perpetuate these crimes. Elbit has recently spent thousands reinforcing its premises to keep Palestine Action out, but all their new razor wire, CCTV surveillance equipment and fortified fencing has failed yet again. We will continue to seek all routes in and out of the factory until Elbit is permanently disabled. The resistance will not stop until we are victorious and the company is forced to retreat from British soil for good.

Palestine Action
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Holocaust denial

John Davidson (November 10) noted that Rabbi Yisroel Dovid Weiss is a creature of the remote fringe. Pete Gregson (November 3) noted that Rabbi Weiss spoke at “the 2006 Holocaust Review conference in Tehran”.

He means, of course, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s tragicomic holocaust-denial ‘academic conference’, at which Rabbi Weiss spoke - alongside nearly every major figure in holocaust denial (and the chief US Klansman as well). Rabbi Weiss cynically let himself be deployed as token-Jew window dressing at the most important holocaust-denial promotional event of the last 20 years. It’s telling that Gregson seems to think it reflects well on him. Instead it shows the rabbi once again renting himself out as an all-purpose fig leaf for anti-Semites - one of several occasions when Ahmadinejad dropped a penny in his slot and received in return exactly the fig leaf his penny paid for.

We already know that holocaust denial is not something Pete Gregson considers a moral deal-breaker. Here he demonstrates it again. It must be said that, for someone so unhealthily obsessed on every level with Jews, Pete Gregson seems almost supernaturally unencumbered by knowledge of actual Jewish life, theology, history or culture. He now says he has stirred up a hornet’s nest. Yes, a belch of raw anti-Semitism will do that, won’t it?

Sven Golly
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Genocide

You recently carried a letter from John Davidson, who describes himself as a “secular Jewish, left-leaning Zionist immigrant to Israel”.

Speaking as the chairman of Interfaith for Palestine, a group of moderate Jews and gentiles speaking out against the genocide of the Palestinians, I must point out that genocide is the context of any discussion on Palestine today. Jews from the Judenstaat are ‘genociding’ Palestinians - a genocide supported by Jews worldwide.

There are no liberal Zionists, just as there were no liberal Nazis. Palestinians are daily faced with rampant hatred from Jews. We Irish are familiar with genocide because, we are the ‘wrong religion’. The anti-Catholic pro-Israel Orange Order is one legacy.

‘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: we must unite to combat the genocide of the Palestinians by Jews from the Judenstaat.

No genocidal regime - Nazi or Zionist - has the ‘right to exist’. Ideally the Judenstaat will be peacefully dismantled, like apartheid South Africa was. Many white Jews have stayed on there and prospered - I understand there are some 10 synagogues attended by whites today in Johannesburg.

We are delighted to see that Palestine is ‘still the issue’ in your socialist paper. We pray that this genocide will soon be ended, and Palestine restored to its people, with equal rights for all religions. We pay tribute to the ‘righteous Jews’ like Israel Shahak, Hajo Meyer, Israel Zohar and Gilad Atzmon - among other Jews - who condemn genocide, including when carried out by Jews.

Dr Joseph O’Neill
Interfaith for Palestine

No ‘dictatorship’

Gerry Downing’s criticism of the Communist Party of Britain and the CPGB for reviewing Trotskyism misses the point completely (Letters, November 24). It is an amazing fact that since the collapse of communist rule in eastern Europe, followed by the collapse of Communist Party rule in the former Soviet Union, after Gorbachev’s failed attempt to democratise Soviet society, most communists have failed to re-examine the foundations on which Marx won over the communist movement.

At the heart of the Stalin versus Trotsky debate is the question of socialist democracy. And this issue doesn’t begin with Stalin or Trotsky, but with Marx.

Karl Marx didn’t do the communist movement any favours by describing working class rule as a dictatorship. The apologists for Marx’s mistake on this question will argue that for Marx the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ is simply another term for working class rule. This may be true to some extent, but the term is nowhere to be found in the Communist manifesto, and was used to appease the firebrand, Blanqui, who wanted a dictatorship and wanted to appear more leftwing than Marx and the First International (which the Blanquists refused to join because they regarded it as too moderate).

Marx rejected Blanqui’s understanding of the term ‘dictatorship’, which the former associated with class rule, while for the Blanquists it referred to the rule of a revolutionary clique, like the Committee of Public Safety in the French revolution. However, Marx nevertheless gave ammunition to the right wing in socialism to attack communism.

The first thing communist intellectuals must do is to recognise Marx’s mistake on this question and stop describing working class rule and socialism as a dictatorship. This latter term is dangerous, because it opens the door to the abuse of political power under socialism. We should be speaking about democratic socialism, rather than proletarian dictatorship, and stop giving the opponents of communism a stick to beat us over the heads with. Dictatorship should be limited to an emergency measure, like Marshall Law, as in the case of the Roman Republic when necessary. Unlike Marx, we no longer have to protect our left from the allurements of Blanquism.

Tony Clark
For Democratic Socialism

Next dog run?

Although far away from England and therefore not noticed in the news much, the West Indian island of Haiti may well be in the headlines soon.

Fearing massive migration to the US, it appears the US is agitating for other countries to send in forces to ‘stabilise’ the country. Joe Biden does not want to send in US forces. Why? Well, money for Ukraine comes to mind, and the new Republican-led House of Representatives would probably block anything Biden wanted to do.

The situation in Haiti over the past few years has been dire. Civil unrest, hurricanes, assassinations and other disasters have wracked the island. Over a third of the population lacks access to clean water and two-thirds have limited or no sanitation service. More than a third of Haitians - 4.4 million - do not know where their next meal is coming from, international agencies report, and 217,000 children suffer moderate to severe malnutrition. Haiti is the poorest country in Latin America and the Caribbean and one of the poorest in the world.

The current problem results from a deadly conflict going on between gangs taking over chunks of the island. When the president limited fuel supplies, the gangs blockaded petrol stations and for six weeks economic activity ceased. The blockade was finally lifted by the gang leaders, but there are areas where the police won’t leave their vehicles. Meanwhile, the number of kidnappings and confrontations with the police has increased, even as cholera is raging through the island.

So far, no country has signed up to invade Haiti. The United Nations security council has discussed the situation, but no action was decided on. But watch this space. The American poodles may yet decide that Haiti is their next dog run.

Gaby Rubin
London

Censors

On November 16, Moshe Zuckermann, an Israeli critic of Zionism (or ‘leftwing anti-Semite’ and ‘self-hating Jew’!), who is a sociologist and professor emeritus of history and philosophy at Tel Aviv University, was due to give a talk in Germany organised by the Communist Organisation (KO). But it was cancelled by Jena University.

Initially the rationale offered by the university management was that “the term ‘apartheid regime’ in the announcement suggests the event will be used to spread anti-Semitic ideas”. When it was pointed out that even Amnesty International uses that term, the censors changed their tune: it was “not acceptable that groups use the premises of public institutions that they defame as German imperialism and want to smash as part of the bourgeois state”, they now said.

That’s better! In general, it would be preferable if censors cut to the chase straight away and spared us all the bullshit about the ‘safety’ of students - whose feelings might get hurt when people criticise reactionary political entities.

Maciej Zurowski
Italy