29.08.2024

Fascism threatens ‘democracy’

If Israel is not yet a fascist state, it is teetering on the brink, says Steve Freeman of the Republican Labour Education Forum. The comrade restates his case for a federal republic

A week ago Ehud Barak - former Israeli prime minister and leader of the Labor Party - issued a ‘revolutionary’ call to action. He warned:

Under cover of the war, a governmental and constitutional putsch is now taking place in Israel without a shot being fired. If this putsch isn’t stopped, it will turn Israel into a de facto dictatorship within weeks. Prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his government are assassinating democracy.¹

He does not use the word ‘fascism’, but makes reference to past experience, saying, “Over the last century, entire societies have been dragged into the abyss in this way. We must not let this happen to us”. Israeli society is in a life and death struggle between fascism and liberal democracy, according to Yair Golan, former Israel Defence Forces general turned politician, who declared he was “not sure Israel is a democracy any more”.² Israel is in a full-blown ‘crisis of democracy’. If it is not yet a fascist state it is teetering on the brink.

Liberal democracy and the rule of law provide restraint on executive power. Barak says:

Remove that constraint, and you’re living in a dictatorship in which nothing is guaranteed - not individual freedom and individual rights, not minorities’ freedom and minority rights, not the government’s commitment to its citizens, not the existence of free elections and not the moral authority to send soldiers into battle.³

He demands that the attorney general orders the Shin Bet security force and the justice ministry to investigate “the fact that some 13,000 guns have been handed out in violation of the law. As an interim preventive measure, she should also order all these guns to be collected. Otherwise, they will also be used to shoot Israelis”. He forgets, or does not care, that Israeli fascists are using these guns to kill Palestinians in the West Bank.

The present policy of the Israel government is permanent war - with military dictatorship, ethnic cleansing and genocide in a war extended to Lebanon, Yemen and Iran, etc. There is no Chinese wall between a ‘fascist’ foreign policy outside Israel’s borders and ‘domestic’ policy. The blowback infects the whole of Israeli society, as currently constituted. The laws and institutions of Zionist ‘democracy’ are no defence against the fury of fascism with its pogroms and mass murder.

Barak declares: “These aren’t normal times, but an emergency - a clear and present danger to Israel’s very existence as a democracy.” Therefore Israelis must “take off the gloves and work with all their might to stop this criminal putsch”. He appeals to “the spirit of the [Zionist] Declaration of Independence” - perhaps unaware that the source of the current crisis of democracy can be traced back to the constitutional foundations of the Israeli state.

Barak calls for revolutionary action, mass action on the streets and direct action within the state apparatus. He says: “The only way to prevent a dictatorship at such a late stage is by shutting down the country through large-scale, non-violent civil disobedience, 24/7, until this government falls”. He adds it is vital that a section of the Israeli state acts to defend Israeli ‘democracy’.

There are two responses to Barak in Haaretz. ‘JL’ says: “Mr Barak, you may find the civil conflict will come up short against Israel’s now dominant anti-democratic forces.” He adds: “Your choice will be to enlist the active support of the Palestinian people (perhaps beginning with Palestinian citizens of Israel) to preserve and expand Israeli democracy.” Second, ‘Haim’ writes: “The only possible solution is for the Jewish population to reach out to the repressed Palestinian population in order to overcome fascism. It’s not coexistence we need to work for, but co-resistance”.⁴

These comments go to the heart of the matter. Zionist ‘democracy’ cannot be saved from Israeli fascism without winning the support of Arab Israelis and Palestinians in a joint struggle for democratic rights and civil liberties.

Programme

Communists and social democrats must address the crisis of democracy in Israel with a democratic programme - independent of wealthy, liberal Zionists such as Barak, and connected to the struggle of Arab Israelis and the Palestinian people for democracy against fascism. Looking at this crisis ‘from afar’ does not absolve us of the responsibility of debating the kind of democratic programme that can unite the working class. This is a role that the Weekly Worker can provide and the purpose of this reply to Jack Conrad and Mike Macnair.

There is some common ground. There is no national solution to the problems facing the working class in the Middle East - not least because of the role of US imperialism in supporting local ruling classes. This does not mean ignoring the class struggle for democracy in the various states and nations. On the contrary, the struggle of the working class for democracy in Israel, Iran and Egypt, for example, can bring victories, which lead towards regional and international solutions.

Democratic demands are in minimum conditions proposed by Moshé Machover and put forward by Jack Conrad. Jack himself has demanded that “any consistently democratic programme must be squarely based on contemporary realities - crucially human facts on the ground”.⁵ He continues: “Abolition of Zionist Israel, legal equality for all, secularism, halting expansionism and withdrawing from the occupied territories are basic (minimal) programmatic demands.” These demands constitute a democratic secular republic in all but name.

The demand for a democratic, secular, federal republic of Israel-Palestine (DSFR) is a revolutionary democratic demand. That this is a democratic demand should be more than obvious: ‘Israel’ here is a democratic Israel, not a Zionist Israel. It is a revolutionary demand because of the minimum condition that the existing Zionist republic and constitution must be abolished. More than this, it is the recognition of two nations and a rejection of the imperialist policy of a two-state solution.

There is no reason why the CPGB could not support the demand for an Israel-Palestine DSFR. If this were a debate with the Socialist Workers Party or the Socialist Party in England and Wales, this demand would contradict their general, economistic version of Marxism. This is not the case with the CPGB, where this demand slots neatly into place like a missing piece in the party’s political jigsaw of the world. The CPGB already calls for a federal republic of England, Scotland and Wales, and a federal, secular republic of Israel-Palestine is a horse from the same stable. Hence trying to construct a case against it is like opposing your own ‘natural’ political self.

Hence Jack Conrad and Mike Macnair have given themselves the impossible task of defeating the case they know makes sense. Jack says: “The ‘secular federal republic’ advocated by Steve Freeman … now a little England republican socialist - is no more than a variation on the theme”. Leaving aside the question of ‘little England’ versus ‘greater England’, the “secular federal republic” is no more than a variation on a CPGB theme.

Jack tries to claim that the federal republic is economism (ie, reformism and ultra-leftism). He says a federal republic is on a par with those economists who clutch at “protests, such as the anti-judicial reform movement and common economic struggles in Israel”. This is like claiming the demand for a united Irish republic is equivalent to trade union demands for higher wages and civil rights or that Lenin’s social democratic ‘tribune of the people’ is on a par with a trade union branch secretary.

This false equivalence allows Jack to connect the federal republic with “the likes of the AWL, CPB … and various Labour left odds and sods” who “clutch at protests”. Strikes and protests within the Zionist constitution are one thing, and not to be dismissed or sneered at. But a reformed Jewish republic and a democratic, secular Israel is like comparing chalk and cheese.

There is a second string to Jack’s bow in the claim that a DSFR is impossible because the Zionist majority is conservative as a result of its material benefits. War puts people in the grip of fear and militaristic fascism. But it also upsets the apple cart or heightens the contradictions in society that make change almost inevitable.

Jack says: “In Israel-Palestine there is no overwhelming oppressed national majority. There is no threat of a revolutionary explosion. The odds are completely stacked in Israel’s favour.” There is, of course, the overwhelming oppressed nation of Palestine and an oppressed minority of Arab Israelis and a section of liberal Israelis seeing their future in Israel threatened by fascism and ultra-orthodox Jews being forced into the IDF. There is plenty of explosive alienation. Yet it is true that “The odds are completely stacked in Israel’s favour” - or, more precisely, the Zionist state and its reactionary nationalist supporters. Jack’s “odds stacked” against the oppressed does not mean impossible, but rather the need for a working class party to change the odds.

Jack objects to my statement that Zionism is “building up its own gravedigger in the Israeli-Palestinian working class” as a delusion.⁶ This is no delusion, but simply a misunderstanding of what I was arguing. Israel-Palestine is a very different economic space today than it was in 1950. Capitalism, technology and population have expanded and so have the Israeli-Palestinian working class. There is a much larger working class organised in some cases under advanced forms of capital. There are many millions more gravediggers in China and in Israel-Palestine today, with mechanical diggers instead of spades and shovels. This does not mean these workers will start digging, because, as Jack says, “in fact Zionism remains committed to keeping workers inside Israel structurally divided”.

Ireland

Mike Macnair takes up cudgels against “the democratic federal republic of Israel and Palestine - one state and two nations” - by drawing a direct parallel between Israel-Palestine and the partition of Ireland between the Irish republic and Northern Ireland. He says: “We have to ask whether comrade Freeman would equally urge on the Irish … ‘a federal republic of Loyalist and Nationalist - one state and two nations’.”⁷ He delivers his coup de grâce by saying, “I rather doubt it; and if comrade Freeman is prepared to avow this policy for Ireland, I hope that it would serve to discredit his views”.

Sorry to disappoint Mike here. The first point is that every national democratic question has specific features that do not mean we have to automatically transpose one ‘solution’ onto another nation. That said, working class democratic politics has some principles that guide us. I have always been in favour of British withdrawal from Ireland and thus an end to the British union.

Two nations

We can recognise two nations in Israel and Palestine, but not two nations in Ireland. A united Irish republic could take the form of a federal republic not because there are two nations, but as a means of bringing people from two parts of the Irish nation with different cultural traditions into one state. Hence the case for a united Irish federal republic is not predicated on the continuing existence of two nations, but on a political case for a peaceful unification of the Irish people in a transitional constitutional settlement.

There is an Irish nation, but not a Northern Irish nation. A section of those living in the north identify with the British nation. Loyalists have a British identity as being loyal to the British crown. British identity in Ireland is real enough, but contingent on the existence of the British state. A political decision by the British crown to withdraw from Ireland, Scotland or Wales would dissolve the British nation. Hence Mike’s very idea of a federal republic of loyalists and nationalists makes no sense at all since, loyalism ends with the political act of British withdrawal.

As Marx and Lenin argued, a democratically centralised republic would be the best form for the working class majority to maximise its political influence. But a federal republic is better in some circumstances, because it can provide a means of bringing together a politically divided working class peacefully, with the minimum of communal violence, into one state.

In summary, there is a deep crisis of democracy and the threat of fascism in Israel and its practice in Palestine. The working class in both nations needs to unite in the fight for democracy against fascism and war. A democratic programme is necessary, as Moshé and Jack have recognised, for the majority of the two nations to unite against fascism.

The CPGB’s long-standing recognition of the demand for a federal republic of England, Scotland and Wales must now be applied to this political crisis and the objections against it are not valid.

1. Haaretz August 14.↩︎

2. Haaretz August 12.↩︎

3. Haaretz August 14.↩︎

4. Ibid.↩︎

5. ‘Searching for solutions’ Weekly Worker July 4: weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1498/searching-for-solutions.↩︎

6. ‘Marching towards what solution?’ Weekly Worker May 16: weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1491/marching-towards-what-solution.↩︎

7. ‘Minimum programme again’ Weekly Worker June 27: weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1497/minimum-programme-again.↩︎