WeeklyWorker

13.03.2025
Shrinking Palestine ... will it disappear entirely in 2025?

Trump greenlights ethnic cleansing

As Zionists triumphantly talk of Palestine being on the ‘threshold of the gates of hell’ and ‘absolute victory’, Jack Conrad presents the communist strategy for winning the Israeli-Jewish working class

Israel appears set on territorial expansion on four fronts: Lebanon, Syria, the West Bank and Gaza. In Lebanon and Syria the pattern follows the classic ‘defensive imperialism’ of ‘buffer zones’. In the case of southern Syria the new ‘buffer zone’ is there to defend the already annexed Golan Heights ‘buffer zone’ (seized in 1967).

However, when it comes to the West Bank and Gaza, the main drive is ideological, not military. Zionism as a settler-colonial project is at the very least committed to incorporating, in its entirety, mandate Palestine. On the West Bank, Israel has already displaced around 40,000 and killed around 1,000 Palestinians during the still ongoing Operation Iron Wall. Meantime, Gaza stands on the edge of genocide - what with supplies of food, water, medicine and electricity repeatedly being cut off - and/or ethnic cleansing, ie, a second nakba.

Bezalel Smotrich, finance minister and leader of the far-right Religious Zionism Party, triumphantly describes the situation as being the “threshold of the gates of hell”. “Now”, he expectantly adds, “we need to open those gates as quickly and lethally as possible on the cruel enemy, until absolute victory.”1 No wonder there have been calls for the International Criminal Court to issue an arrest warrant on him too … along with the one already in place on Benjamin Netanyahu.

Strangely, given the 64,000 death toll2 and the comprehensive devastation of Gaza, there are those panglossians who claim that Israel “cannot win” in Gaza, that Israel is “unequivocally losing” its war in Gaza, or that Israel has already “lost in Gaza”.3 All true … if Israel’s war aims were really about destroying Hamas militarily and bringing home all war captives (dead and alive). However, that was never the intention.

Netanyahu is many things, but he is no fool. His war aims were never about destroying Hamas, not even militarily. Its social roots are far too deep for that. Certainly the war captives are little more than a nuisance for Netanyahu, when it comes to Israeli domestic politics. He knows it and so do the tens of thousands of relatives, friends and supporters, who have time and again demonstrated in Tel Aviv’s Hostage Square.

If you really want the war captives back from the tunnels, tents and bomb shelters of Gaza, then direct negotiations with Hamas would be an absolute priority. And destroying Hamas and negotiating with Hamas are, to put it mildly, mutually incompatible.

No, the real war aim of Netanyahu, his war cabinet and his Likud-led coalition is to uproot the entire Palestinian population in Gaza in what is yet another carefully calculated step towards realising the Zionist dream of a Greater Israel. When the opportunity arises, that means expelling as many Palestinians as possible - a second nakba - the obvious route being a forced exodus into Egypt’s Sinai. Israel, of course, still controls the Philadelphi Corridor … otherwise known, in Israel, as the Philadelphi Route.

And, whereas Joe Biden and his administration was unwilling to give Israel the green light - because of Arab-American voters, because of the fear of destabilising the Egyptian and Jordanian regimes, because of worldwide democratic opinion - Donald Trump is gung-ho.

His ‘Riviera plan’, unveiled at a White House press conference on February 4, alongside a beaming Netanyahu, proposes that the US would “take over” and “own” Gaza. There has been some confusion about whether or not US troops might be involved. The same goes for US tax dollars. But what is crystal-clear is that the Gazan population would be removed in its entirety before redevelopment work begins … and they will never return, because, in Trump’s words, “they’re going to have much better housing ... a permanent place for them”.4

Bizarrely, Trump shared an AI-generated video on his Truth Social page, showing a ghastly, glitzy, garish ‘Trump Gaza’, featuring Dubai-style skyscrapers, golden Trump statues, bearded belly dancers, and Trump himself lounging in the sun alongside Netanyahu. All set to upbeat music and these lyrics: “Donald’s coming to set you free, bringing the light for all to see. No more tunnels, no more fear: Trump Gaza’s finally here.”

Trump’s plan has been warmly welcomed across the board by Zionist opinion in Israel, especially by the right and far right. Why? Because it has nothing, absolutely nothing, to do with the US stationing troops, nothing to do with a US “takeover”. No, what is being welcomed is the green light to the forcible removal of the 2.1 million Gazan population … and an Israeli “takeover”. What applies to Gaza applies to the West Bank too. Isreal wants to push, drive, stampede its 3.4 million Palestinian population over the other side of the Jordan river.

Seen in this light, while it is true that Israel has not achieved it real war aims yet, it stands on the “threshold” of achieving them. A joint Israeli-US strike against Iran’s nuclear sites would provide the perfect cover (a “likely” prospect “this year”, according to The Telegraph5).

True, a second nakba risks the collapse of the Egyptian and Jordanian regimes: their peace treaties with Israel would certainly be “thrown into the abyss”.6 But Israel cares little about that. Perhaps the same goes for the Trump administration … we shall see.

October 7

The part-desperate, part-audacious Operation al-Aqsa Flood prison break on October 7 2023, carried out by Hamas and other sections of the Joint Room resistance movement, caught the Israeli high command altogether unprepared. A “complete failure” now openly acknowledged by its military.7

Not surprisingly there has been speculation that Netanyahu and his cronies were in some way “deliberately” complicit in allowing the whole thing to happen.8 It was, after all, a year in preparation. Yet warnings were consistently ignored. Hamas military commanders were themselves surprised by the ability of their al-Qassam fighters to go way beyond what had been originally planned as a suicide operation. Expectations were of something like an 80% casualty rate. Military targets, Israel Defence Forces outposts, police stations, etc thereby gave way to what Hamas itself calls “some faults” in the operation: the totally pointless killing of innocent civilians … and baseless stories of beheading babies and mass rapes.9

October 7 did, though, provide the political excuse needed for the IDF to pulverise its way into Gaza (and upping settler terrorism in the West Bank). True, Israeli public opinion has subsequently become deeply divided between what we might call the ‘peace party’ and the ‘war party’. Nonetheless, the war party commands a Knesset majority and Netanyahu himself has every reason to keep the war going on and on … after all, not only does he want to keep his coalition together and stay out of jail. He wants a Greater Israel.

Zionists typically claim that Jews have a right to the whole of mandate Palestine either because of the approval of the Balfour declaration by the League of Nations in July 1922 or Yahweh’s promise to Abraham in Genesis. True, there are profound differences over the constitutional set-up in this Greater Israel. Liberal, or General, Zionism says it is committed to market capitalism, secularism, democratic values and the rule of law (which can, of course, see unelected judges overrule Knesset votes). However, there are those - ie, the religious Zionists - who envisage Greater Israel as a theocracy. Fringe elements even want Jerusalem’s al-Aqsa mosque demolished and replaced by a Third Temple - the prelude for the second coming of Jesus for messianic Christians. While secular Jews are viewed as heretics, there is a call for non-Jews, the Children of Noah (Bnei Noach), to observe god’s laws and support his chosen people - perhaps a future source for urgently needed new settlers.10

Some religious Zionists even hanker after a greater Greater Israel - based on various biblical passages: Genesis, Numbers, Ezekiel. At its largest extent their Eretz Israel stretches from the Nile to the Euphrates.11 Of course, any such Israel would come with a poisoned chalice: an oppressed Arab supermajority. The Zionist conquistadors would have to permanently deny them elementary rights. The newly acquired Arab population would be far too big to do much else.

Either way, Israel results from and is predicated on expansion. The aliyah (Hebrew for ‘ascent’ - or migration to Israel) constitutes a fundamental part of the Zionist project and is enshrined in Israel’s ‘law of return’ (enacted by the Knesset in July 1950). Any Jew, no matter where they live, no matter how dubious their Jewish antecedence, has the legal right to assisted settlement in Israel, as well as automatic citizenship.

A heterogeneous mixture of the genuinely desperate, the cruelly duped, secular dreamers, religious fanatics and cheap adventurers have come to the promised land over the years. Between 1948 and 1992 Israel took in 2,242,500 Jewish migrants. The bulk were from eastern Europe - displaced by World War II - and the centres of Jewry in the Arab world and the Soviet Union. Some 85% of Ethiopia’s 170,000 Jewish population, the Falasha or Habashim, have gone to Israel under the law of return too. Before October 7, however, the flow of migrants had been reduced to a mere trickle. With October 7 that inward trickle became a 470,000 outward flood … but, predictably, all but a few soon returned.12

Israel needs people. Or, put more accurately, Israel needs Jewish people. Even a little Israel relies on long-term net Jewish immigration … net Jewish emigration, if it were sustained, would indeed mean that the “collapse of Israel has become foreseeable”.13

Today Israel has a record population of just over 10 million.14 However, some 20% of them are Palestinian Arabs. They are, of course, treated as second-class citizens in what is rightly regarded as an apartheid state. Officially, after all, Israel was founded as and continues to be a Jewish state for Jewish people. Meanwhile, there are some 5.9 million UN-registered Palestinian refugees - in Gaza, the West Bank, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon.15 There is also a Palestinian diaspora living in Saudi Arabia, the Gulf states, the US, Britain, Germany, Chile, Argentina and many other countries besides.

Nation-in-arms

Following the 1967 Six Day War, Israel’s main arms supplier has been the US (before that it was France). Not that there was an instant love affair between the two countries. George Marshall, president Harry S Truman’s secretary of state, was more than cool about recognising Israel in May 1948. Nor was John Foster Dulles, Dwight Eisenhower’s secretary of state, pro-Israel. It was the rise of Arab nationalism, and the turn towards the Soviet Union instigated by Egypt’s Gamal Abdul Nasser, that led to a US shift. From 1958 the US-Israel alliance slowly expanded in scope and took its present form after the Yom Kippur War of 1973.16 Noam Chomsky, it should be noted, dates US support for the Greater Israel position to 1970, when Henry Kissinger succeeded in “taking over Middle East affairs”.17

By any measure, US economic and military aid to Israel has been considerable. In the 1946-2024 period it amounted to well over $310 billion (in constant 2022 dollars). Today Washington’s largesse mainly goes to support the Zionist state’s already potent military machine: Israel is on a short list of “major non-Nato allies” and has privileged access to the most advanced US military platforms and technologies. There is an agreement to supply it with a military package worth some $3.8 billion annually till 2028.18 In return for imperial sponsorship, Israel acts as a US “strategic asset” in the Middle East (a region which, it just so happens, possesses something like 50% of the world’s readily accessible oil reserves).19

There were those on the left who foolishly welcomed the election of Barack Obama in 2008 - the Morning Star’s Communist Party of Britain, George Galloway, Stop the War Coalition - because they hoped he would chart a fundamentally different, peaceful, more even-handed course in the Middle East. As we predicted at the time, they were bound to be “sadly disappointed”.20 Whatever the skin colour of the president, America is in relative decline and that means that big-power antagonisms become ever more acute. Indeed, Obama and his secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, undertook the “pivot to Asia” in 2016: the main aim clearly being to block the rise of China - a policy seamlessly continued by the Biden and Trump administrations.21

As for Israel, there has, of course, been no change: unwavering US support is combined with a prolonged economic and diplomatic campaign to reduce, to hem in Iran and stop it acquiring nuclear weapons. This makes Israel the regional superpower in the Middle East. Even without the ‘special relationship’ with the US, Israel has repeatedly fought, invaded and defeated its Arab neighbours: 1948, 1956 and 1967. After that there followed the 1973 war with Egypt and Syria and the four wars in Lebanon (1978, 1982, 2006 and 2023).

Israel’s armed forces are vastly superior, compared with any Arab country or any conceivable combination of them. It is not a matter of total numbers under arms or the percentage of GDP spent on arms. Israel’s armed forces are better led, better trained and better equipped, that is for sure. Moreover, culturally Israel is a highly militarised society. It is a “nation-in-arms” (Ben-Gurion). Military service - for both sexes - starts in the late-teenage years and goes on, in the reserves, well into adulthood (40 for regular soldiers, 45 for officers). That now includes those from the million-strong Haredi community - after a supreme court decision revoking their exemption. Even before being conscripted, there is, from the age of 14, the Gadna (youth brigades). This prepares young people not only in the handling of weapons, but psychologically too … for wars of aggression.

Haim Bresheeth-Žabner calls the IDF “an army like no other”.22 The IDF constitutes the spinal cord of Israel’s national identity. Not country of origin, not religious sect, not political affiliation. The IDF forged the “new Jew” envisaged by Theodor Herzl from the “base elements” coming from middle Europe, the Soviet Union, the Arab countries, Ethiopia and America. Israel has thereby become a modern-day Sparta. Not surprisingly, armchair generals rank the country as militarily amongst the most powerful states on the face of the planet. Underlying the point, Israel reportedly possesses between 90 and 400 nuclear warheads … and certainly has the means of delivering them from land, sea and sky.

Divide and rule

Territorially, economically and politically Palestine is cleaved between Hamas in a shattered Gaza and Fatah on the diced and sliced West Bank - two statelets for one people. Uncompromisingly, the 1988 Hamas charter demands an end to the Zionist state of Israel and its replacement by a single Islamic state of Palestine. True, Hamas doggedly refuses to recognise Israel, yet it has offered a “long-term truce” in return for Israel withdrawing from all territories it has occupied since 1967: in effect a two-state ‘solution’.

Though Israel encouraged the formation and growth of Hamas from the mid-1980s onwards in order to weaken Fatah, after its landslide victory in the January 2006 elections and the Fatah June coup in the West Bank, Israel imposed its asphyxiating blockade on Gaza. That said, since 2018 Netanyahu’s government allowed Hamas to receive “infusions” of Qatari cash and granted tens of thousands of work permits to Gazan residents. The idea was to keep the Palestinians divided and thereby render any Israel-Palestine two-state ‘solution’ practically inoperable. Hence the Palestinian Authority on the West Bank was treated as a “burden”, while Hamas in Gaza was treated as an “asset”.23 That is, until October 7 2023 - what has been called Israel’s Pearl Harbour.

Leaders of the Palestine Liberation Organisation - dominated by Fatah - preside over a series of disconnected Arab reservations on the West Bank, euphemistically called the Palestinian Authority. Its president, Mahmoud Abbas, pleas for a two-state ‘solution’ and roundly condemns Israel’s invasion of Gaza. He is, however, to all intents and purposes a creature of Israel, a collaborator, a quisling. To put it mildly, he is widely hated.

The PLO’s present line dates back to 1988, when the demand for a return to the status quo ante 1948 was formally abandoned. Fatah had been steadily moving in this direction since the mid-70s; however, the final turning point was the US-brokered Oslo accord, signed in August 1993 by PLO chair Yasser Arafat and Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin. The PLO effectively conceded Israeli hegemony over the whole of mandate Palestine in return for local self-government in Gaza and the West Bank: abject surrender. The vital questions of Jewish settlements on the West Bank and the right of Palestinians to return to their lands were put aside: a diplomatic triumph for the US and Israel.

Fragmented

Israeli politics are notoriously fragmented. At least a dozen blocs - many with multiple components - are represented in the Knesset. But virtually the entire Israeli-Jewish political spectrum unitedly opposes any kind of democratic settlement with the Palestinians. The nationalist and religious hard right, including Likud, has absolutely no truck with Palestinian statehood. General Zionists merely talk the talk. Only the left, which relies on Israeli-Arab votes, is serious about a two-state ‘solution’: and that means Palestinians settling for the West Bank and Gaza, and nothing more.

Working class politics in Israel - that is, Israeli-Jewish working class politics - hardly exists, at least at this moment in time, as an effective collectivity. Historically there has been a remorseless shift from voting for the Labor Party to parties of the right in an attempt to preserve national privileges - the Jewish-Israeli working class being a labour aristocracy that has seen its social power substantially eroded by years of neoliberalism.24 In 1983 membership of the trade union federation, Histadrut, stood at 1.6 million; today it is around 570,000. Histadrut, note, once the spearhead of Zionist colonisation, has also been shorn of its role in health and banking, and as a very substantial employer in its own right.

Histadrut needs to be put into the context of colonisation. Marxists have distinguished between various types of colonies: plantation colonies, exploitation colonies, colonies properly so-called, etc. Broadly the colonisation of the India, Congo, South Africa type saw the exploiters enslave people, gaining a fat profit from the native workforce, including peasant farmers, through all manner of barely concealed forms of robbery, cheating and double dealing. That went hand-in-hand with staffing an army officer corps, running a bureaucracy and managing railroads, docks, etc. The colonisers therefore constituted a relatively narrow caste who often maintained close ties with the imperial homeland (to which they often returned, having made their fortunes).

Nonetheless, it must be understood that in terms of political economy Israel is what Karl Kautsky called a “work colony”25 or what Moshé Machover prefers to call an “exclusion colony”.26 Instead of the colonisers constituting themselves as a narrow, often highly privileged, caste, the colonisers make up the full spectrum of classes: bourgeoisie, petty bourgeoisie, small farmers, workers, unemployed reserve workers, etc. Instead of relying on the labour of the indigenous population, it is either replaced, marginalised or driven to the point of extinction. Examples: USA, Canada, Australia.

Israel is definitely an exclusion colony. Despite present-day claims, Zionism was never a national liberation movement. It was always, as it first presented itself - crucially in Theodor Herzl’s foundational Der Judenstaat (1896) - a colonial-settler project that would rely on Jewish labour playing the vanguard role: “The poorest will go first to cultivate the soil. In accordance with a preconceived plan, they will construct roads, bridges, railways and telegraph installations; regulate rivers; and build their own dwellings; their labour will create trade, trade will create markets and markets will attract new settlers.”27 Hence, whatever the socialistic pretentions of Labor Zionism, from the beginning Israel owed far more to the Blut und Boden (blood and soil) ideology of late 19th century European reaction, than anything remotely progressive.

Lenni Brenner makes the point:

Enthusiasm for Blut und Boden were part of Zionism before the first modern Zionist ever left Europe. Race Zionism was a curious offshoot of racial anti-Semitism. True, these Zionists argued, the Jews were a pure race, certainly purer than, say, the Germans who, as even the pan-Germanics conceded, had a huge admixture of Slavic blood. But to these Zionists, even their racial purity could not overcome the one flaw in Jewish existence: they did not have their own Jewish Boden. If the Teutonic racists could see themselves as Übermenschen (supermen), these Hebrew racists did not see the Jews in that light; rather, it was the reverse. They believed that because they lacked their own Boden the Jews were Untermenschen and therefore, for their “hosts”, little more than leeches: the world pest.28

To get themselves the soil necessary for national salvation, the Zionists, for good ideological reasons, latched upon Palestine. What marked them out, when they went there, was not that to begin with they were a minority of the population in Ottoman and then mandate Palestine. No, the Zionist project relied on propertyless migrants coming from all manner of different countries, while exercising “no coercive power over the indigenous population”.29

That began to change with the formation of the Haganah militia, but it was poorly armed and could only manage defensive operations till the 1940s. At first the Zionists were substantially dependent on external sources of capital too. After all they had to purchase land from wealthy native owners and most certainly relied on the good will of an imperial sponsor (to begin with Britain, which agreed the Balfour declaration in November 1917 in the expectation of carving out for itself a “Jewish Ulster” in the midst of a hostile Middle East).

Histadrut played a determining role. It organised Jewish workers and forced the Jewish capitalist class to grant all manner of concessions - not least barring indigenous, cheaper, Arab labour from whole sectors of the economy (relaxed somewhat after statehood). Histadrut also provided Labor Zionism with the money, the votes and the organisation needed to make it the dominant force politically from the mid-1930s till the late 1970s. So it was far removed from being a trade union federation of the type normally seen in the so-called west.

British left

Historically, loyally reflecting British imperial interests, mainstream Labourism has maintained a sympathetic attitude towards Zionism. Poale Zion - now the Jewish Labour Movement - affiliated to the Labour Party in 1920. Successive Labour conferences voted in favour of establishing a Jewish state in Palestine. Labour considered the Israeli Labor Party a fraternal organisation and maintained close contacts. From the early 1960s the TUC was giving Histadrut financial aid for its Afro-Asian Institute - a wonderful means for Israel to spread its diplomatic influence. Trade union tops regularly spoke out against Arab feudalism, backwardness and Nazi ideas.

As for the ‘official’ CPGB, in the late 1940s it temporarily abandoned its historic hostility to Zionism. The CPGB formed a National Jewish Committee, which supported Jewish migration into Palestine and land purchases. Stalin, myopically, saw nothing more than a chance to weaken British influence in the Middle East by supporting Zionism … including with the supply of Czech arms.

Hence, disgracefully, in 1948, the ‘official’ CPGB wholeheartedly welcomed the establishment of Israel, greeting the state’s foundation as “a big step toward fulfilment of self-determination of the peoples of Palestine” and “a great sign of the times”.30 After 2,000 years of supposed uninterrupted persecution the Jewish people had liberated themselves at last. In parliament its MPs, Willie Gallacher and Phil Piratin, sponsored an early day motion condemning the Arab states for their 1948 intervention in Palestine, urging the Labour government to recognise Israel and demanding an immediate end to military aid to Arab states.

On the Labour left Edward Short, Jennie Lee and Tony Benn were proud to be counted amongst the Labour Friends of Israel. They routinely cited the kibbutzim as a brave socialist experiment. Eric Heffer even defended Israel’s continued occupation of the West Banks and Gaza after 1967 on the grounds that Israel was “the only genuine democratic and socialist-oriented state in the Middle East”.31

Next to nothing of that now remains on the left. Today Israel counts amongst those countries dominated by the hard right and is therefore regarded as an abomination by those who regard themselves in the least bit progressive. True, there is still a pro-Zionist ‘left’. But it is, thankfully, marginal and widely despised: the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty comes to mind, so does the CPB’s resident Zionist, Mary Davis, and her grotesque ‘Anti-Semitism awareness courses’ (as if the Morning Star’s CPB has an anti-Semitism problem, when, in actual fact, it has a pro-Zionism problem).

Does this mean that the left has lighted upon a correct programmatic orientation? Hardly - instead we are presented with a range of positions, all of which are far from adequate.

We have already mentioned the AWL and the Morning Star’s CPB. Essentially their two-state ‘solution’ echoes the PLO, Fatah, the Israeli Labor Party … and the international bourgeois consensus. It amounts to economistic Zionism. A little Israel - an Israel returned to its pre-1967 borders - is expected to live peacefully alongside a West Bank and Gaza Strip Palestine. Except, of course, it will not.

For appearances sake, till Trump, US administrations paid lip service to this touching picture of the wolf lying down with the lamb. But, in practice, the US backed Israeli aggression to the hilt. The same goes for its allies, such as the UK, Germany and Italy. So there was no repetition of the early 1990s, when apartheid in South Africa was negotiated away in a US-sponsored deal, which gave black citizens the vote in return for the African National Congress leaving capitalist big business intact.

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. That is why Hamas resorts to desperate suicide missions and the PLO and Fatah are reduced to impotent verbal gestures and pathetic diplomatic pleading. Recognising this, the likes of the AWL, CPB … and various Labour left odds and sods clutch at business-sponsored anti-democratic liberal protests and peaceniks such as Standing Together - that and common economic struggles in Israel, which are supposed to weld together Hebrew and Arab workers into a lever for social change.

In fact Zionism acts to keep workers inside Israel structurally divided. That means legal, political and material privileges for Israeli-Jewish workers - privileges they will hang onto for dear life … unless there is something much better on offer (Israeli-Jewish workers, especially those at the bottom end of the labour market, have no wish to compete with Arab-Israeli/Palestinian worst paid labour as equals, that is for sure).

As a justification for the two-state/federal-state ‘solution’, we are assured that an Israel-Palestine rapprochement would provide the solid, democratic foundations, from where alone the struggle for socialism can begin. In other words, their two-state/federal-state ‘solution’ is based on a combination of naive wishful thinking and mechanical, stagist reasoning. Note, trade union politics - ie, struggles over wages and conditions - always find themselves cut short by the high politics of war, security, national privilege, etc. There have been no Histadrut strikes demanding equal civil rights for Palestinians, ending the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, and calling for the right of return. Nor should any such development be expected within the narrow confines of today’s circumstances.

The Socialist Party in England and Wales offers a ‘socialist’ version of the two-state ‘solution’. It calls for a ‘socialist’ Israel alongside a ‘socialist’ West Bank-Gaza Strip Palestine. Israel, it should be noted, is treated as a ‘normal’ country: the idea of it remaining a “settler state” is dismissed out of hand.32 That despite the ongoing ethnic cleansing and the relentless announcements of yet more Jewish settler ‘outposts’ on the West Bank and the Golan Heights - there are already 720,000 settlers in the occupied territories (including east Jerusalem).

Anyway, why on earth two such socialist states would remain separate, especially given the substantial population crossover, is something of a mystery. More to the point, the means of achieving such an outcome once again relies almost entirely on trade union politics, which by its very nature is sectional and confined to the relationship between sellers and buyers of the labour-power commodity. Hence trade union politics as trade union politics do little more than reproduce the division of the working class: on the one side, nationally privileged labour aristocrats and, on the other, a nationally oppressed underclass.

Then there is the left version of the old PLO single-Palestine ‘solution’: the Socialist Workers Party being the quintessential example. Ignoring the history, power, connections and wishes of the Israeli-Jewish population, there is the call for the abolition, the dismantling of Israel and in its place “one secular, democratic [capitalist - JC] state built on the principle of equal rights for all citizens, including Israeli Jews”.33

The SWP has long ago given up trying to seriously think through what is and what is not a viable strategy in Israel-Palestine.34 What it is primarily interested in nowadays - especially post-October 7 - is posturing. The SWP strives might and main to present itself to the mass pro-Palestine demonstrations, not least its Muslim contingents, as the most militant, most implacable opponents of everything Israeli - and thereby sell a few more papers and gain a few more fleeting recruits. Politically though, the result amounts to tailing Hamas.

Needless to say then, the Israeli-Jewish working class is deemed to be entirely incapable of playing any positive role. Israeli Jews, most of whom consider themselves secular, will paradoxically be allowed individual religious freedom, but not collective national rights under the SWP’s single-Palestine ‘solution’. Israeli Jews are often defined away as a non-nation, but even when it is admitted that they do constitute a nation, they are classified as an oppressive, counterrevolutionary one, which should thereby be denied the right to self-determination presumably in perpetuity.

That this would transform the Israeli-Jewish population into an opposed nationality never seems to occur to left advocates of a single capitalist Palestine. So, for example, in a secular, capitalist Palestine, Israeli-Jews would have “language rights, freedom of worship and the right to their own culture, but political rights? No.”35 Of course, a nation threatened with a denial of political and national rights is likely to fight tooth and claw against any such outcome.

Objectively, though, the balance of forces are violently against a single-capitalist-state ‘solution’. There are some 7.2 million Israeli-Jews (settlements included); and 10‑11 million Palestinians worldwide; but only 6-7 million of them live in Israel, the occupied territories, Syria, Jordan and Lebanon. It is fair to say, then, that any projected single Palestinian state would include roughly equivalent numbers of Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs. Assuming, that is, no forcible movement of peoples; no attempt to drive the Israeli Jews into the sea; no closure of refugee camps and dumping of Palestinians over to the west side of the Jordan river; no round-up and expulsion of Palestinian workers in Saudi Arabia, etc. Therefore what is being proposed is a ‘unity’ where one half of the population gets no say in the matter - impractical and in strategic terms really dumb.

After all, the Israeli-Jewish working class has everything to lose and nothing to gain from such a single-capitalist-state ‘solution’ that is more or less guaranteed to be neither secular nor democratic. They are, therefore, more than likely to resist any such outcome with all their strength. The whole of the 20th century since 1933, but especially the 1943-45 holocaust, tells us that. Without military conquest - a highly unlikely and in and of itself an unwelcome outcome - the immediate demand for a single-state ‘solution’ is entirely illusory. Translated into the ‘Palestine shall be free from the river to the sea’ slogan, it goes down well on street demonstrations, but offers zilch in terms of bringing about a rapprochement between the two peoples in Israel-Palestine and advancing common working class interests.

The call for a single Palestinian state “may seem completely utopian”, the SWP’s Alex Callinicos once owned up. He also correctly stated that there is “very clear evidence that the two-state solution cannot work”. There exists, he says, the “massive imbalance of power between the two sides. Israel is one of the greatest military powers in the world, backed and subsidised by the US”.36 Right again.

Hence, it is pertinent to ask exactly who is going to establish the single Palestinian state. After all, according to comrade Callinicos himself, the Palestinians are incapable of achieving any kind of viable state alongside Israel by their efforts alone. How then can we expect them to establish a single state against the wishes of the global US hegemon and the vast mass of 7.2 million Israeli-Jews? Perhaps what the SWP therefore envisages as its agent of change is the Axis of Resistance - what is today a thoroughly deflated, but always symbolic combination of Iran, Lebanon’s Hezbollah, Hamas and Yemen’s Houthis. In the imagination the Axis could reasonably be joined by Muslim Brotherhood governments in Egypt, Syria and Jordan.

An anti-working class agency, if ever there was one. However, such a pan-Islamic alliance (leave aside the Shia and Sunni divisions) could, conceivably, defeat Israel, as Saladin’s forces defeated the outremer, crusader, kingdom of Jerusalem in 1187. But that would, though, hardly produce a secular Palestinian state. Nor would it produce a democratic Palestinian state. True, if such an unlikely combination were to come together - and, just as unlikely, achieve military victory over Israel - it might lead to a mass exodus of Jews (to who knows where). But if that did not happen, the Jewish-Israeli population would have to be subject to extraordinarily harsh measures to crush the inevitable resistance. The poles of national oppression would, yes, thereby be reversed. But, we are told, what does that matter? It would, be ‘national liberation’ via the destruction of the settler-colony ... and from the (nuclear?) ashes, hopefully some kind of ‘socialism’ would arise. Not something any genuine Marxist would care to countenance.

Though it might be an inconvenient truth, no democratic solution can be won without the consent of Israeli Jews - that is, a clearly expressed majority of them. Those Humpty Dumpties who claim otherwise are coining a contranym, whereby words become their opposite. Democracy is divorced from basic democratic rights - it becomes a denial of basic democratic rights.

Yet the fact is, despite the warnings, pained outrage and courage of Israeli-Jewish socialists, anti-Zionists and pacifists, the Israeli-Jewish population at large consistently, often overwhelmingly, supports the wars of their elected politicians, generals and capitalist masters, irrespective of the hatred of Israel that this inevitably engenders. Why? Israel is a colonial-settler state and all such states face a fundamental problem. What to do with the people whose land has been stolen? During the wars of 1947-49 and 1967 well over a million Palestinians fled or were forcibly driven out. Palestinians in Israel, Gaza and the West Bank are therefore ‘unfinished business’.

Both the Palestinian enemy within and the Palestinian enemy without engender a permanent state of insecurity. Israeli Jews know they are resented, know they are hated. When it comes to worst-paid labour, the Palestinians willingly undercut them. Then there are the Hamas rockets, suicide bombers and the October 7 spectacular. Understandably, the Israeli-Jewish population feels under constant threat and therefore - frightened, vengeful, maddened - willingly supports, urges on Israeli aggression, oppression and even genocide. The hope is to crush or finally remove the Palestinians - an oppressor’s peace.

Does it follow that Israelis cannot make a democratic peace with Palestinians? That any Israeli settlement with the Palestinians is bound to be a sham? There can certainly be no democratic peace with Israel as a Zionist state - any more than there can be with an Islamic Palestine.

Zionism is, arguably, a nationalism sui generis. While it now boasts a homeland, Zionism claims purchase over the loyalty of all Jews, even though the majority of the people-religion are not Israeli and do not speak Hebrew (around 40% of the world’s Jewish population lives in the US, roughly the same as in Israel). No less to the point, the Zionist state is committed to expansion and denying elementary rights to a good portion of the population it rules over (ie, the Palestinians in Israel and the occupied territories).

Nevertheless, the Israeli-Jewish people, the Hebrew-speaking nation, is a real, living entity and cannot be dismissed or discounted just because Israel began as and continues to be a settler colonial state. Israel emerged out of the last phase of the British empire, in the midst of a terroristic civil war and unforgivable crimes that no-one should forget. That said, there is no reason for refusing to recognise the definite, historically constituted Hebrew nation which took state form with the May 14 1948 declaration of Israeli independence.

And since then millions of Jews have migrated to Israel, learnt Hebrew, intermarried, had children, assimilated, and made and remade the Israeli-Jewish nation. Today some 80% are sabras - Israeli born - and mostly second or third generation.37 Hence, the Israeli-Jewish nation not only inhabits a common territory and shares a common language: it is historically constituted.

Of course, most, if not all, of the world’s states came into existence by way of terrible oppression. But, while fully taking into account history, any consistently democratic programme must be squarely based on contemporary realities - crucially human facts on the ground. Abolition of Zionist Israel, legal equality for all, secularism, halting expansionism and withdrawing from the occupied territories are basic (minimal) programmatic demands. None of that, however, should be taken as synonymous with an eviscerating reconstruction of the pre-1948 situation. One might just as well call for the abolition of the US, Canada, Australia, etc, and a return of lands to the enfeebled remnants of the aboriginal populations.

The only realistic, progressive and humane programme must be based on a mutual recognition by both Palestinians and Israeli Jews of each other’s national rights. Needless to say, it would be an excellent thing if both nations chose to happily live side by side or, even better, to slowly merge together into a single nation. No rational human being would want to oppose either such outcome. The question is, though, how to arrive at such a happy outcome? Given where we are situated today, our discussion must necessarily return to the question of agency.

Arab nation

No democratic solution for the Israel/Palestine conflict can be achieved in isolation. Objective circumstances simply do not permit it. That is as certain as anything can be certain in this uncertain world.

By themselves the Palestinians - debilitatingly split between Hamas and Fatah - palpably lack the ability to achieve anything beyond abject surrender or hopeless resistance. Certainly not a single Palestinian state, where Israeli Jews have ‘full’ religious rights, but no national rights. There is, however, a way to cut through the Gordian knot: widen the strategic front. There are nearly 300 million Arabs in a contiguous territory that stretches from the Atlantic Ocean, across north Africa, down the Nile to north Sudan, and all the way to the Persian Gulf and up to the Caspian Sea.

Though studded here and there with national minorities - Kurds, Assyrians, Turks, Armenians, Berbers, etc - there is a definite Arab or Arabised community. Despite being separated into 25 different states and divided by religion and religious sect - Sunni, Shi’ite, Alaouite, Ismaili, Druze, Orthodox Christian, Catholic Christian, Maronite, Nestorian, etc - they share a living bond of pan-Arab consciousness, born not only of common language, but a closely related history.

Arabs are binational. There are Moroccans, Yemenis, Egyptians, Jordanians, etc. But there is also a wider Arab identity, which has its origins going back to the Muslim conquests of the 7th and 8th centuries. The most well-known candidate for Arab unifier was Nasser. This uncrowned Bonaparte led the Free Officers’ revolution in 1952, which overthrew the pro-British monarchy of Farouk I. Nasser then oversaw a radical agrarian reform programme, nationalised the Suez canal, allied Egypt with the Soviet Union and put his country on the course of state-capitalist development. This went hand-in-hand with crushing both the Muslim Brotherhood and the working class movement.

Nasser called it ‘Arab socialism’. Especially with his success in the 1956 crisis - an Israeli invasion followed by a pre-planned joint French and British intervention and then an unexpected American veto - Nasser’s popularity soared throughout the Arab world. Pro-Nasser Arab socialist parties, groups and conspiracies were sponsored or established themselves. His name became almost synonymous with pan-Arabism.

Nasser demanded that natural resources be used for the benefit of all Arabs - hugely popular with those below. Everyone knew he meant oil. Of course, the house of Saud instantly became an implacable enemy. Yet because of mass pressure the Ba’athist authorities in Syria sought a merger. Despite the repression suffered by their co-thinkers in Egypt, the ‘official communists’ and the Syrian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood likewise favoured unity.

The United Arab Republic was formed on February 1 1958. Nasser was appointed president and Cairo became the capital. Yet the UAR proved momentary. Syrian capitalists did not gain access to Egyptian markets and Egyptian administrative personnel were painted by Syrian officers, bureaucrats and top politicians as acting like colonial officials. The union ignominiously collapsed in 1961. Opposition came from the Damascus street. However, from then onwards the UAR became a hollow pretence. It united no other country apart from Egypt.

The 1967 Six Day War with Israel proved to be the final straw for Nasserism. Israel’s blitzkrieg destroyed the airforces of Egypt, Syria and Jordan on the ground and by the end of the hostilities Israel occupied the Sinai, the West Bank and the Golan Heights. Nasser was humiliated and died soon afterwards a broken man.

Evidently, Arab reunification remains a burning, but unfulfilled, task. The fact that Nasser’s short-lived UAR saw the light of day is testimony to mass support for Arab unity. No less to the point, what was a potent sentiment in the 1950s and well into the 1970s needs to be revived in the 21st century and given a new democratic and class content.

So we are not talking about reviving Nasserism. Nor are we talking about something akin to the pan-Slavism of Ľudovít Štúr which excused so many of the wars and intrigues of the late Russian empire. No, communists need to take the lead in the fight for pan-Arab unity - as Marx and Engels and their comrades in the Communist League did in the fight for German unity. Such a fight, is, of course, inseparable from the task of building a mass Communist Party - first in each Arab country and then throughout the Arab world. A Communist Party of Arabia.

What of reconciliation between Hebrews and the Palestinians? This can only happen in the context of sweeping away the Hashemite kingdom of Jordan, Lebanon’s sectarian warlord plutocracy, Egypt’s military bureaucratic regime, the House of Saud and the establishment of working class rule in a socialist republic of Arabia.

Only from such a wide salient, even if it is in the process of realisation, can the Israeli-Jewish working class be prised away from the clutches of Zionism and formed into a positivity. Even if it is initially confined to the Mashriq, an Arab socialist republic could offer Israel federal status, with the confident expectation that such an invitation would receive a positive response from below.38

Hence, the road to a united working class in Israel-Palestine passes through Amman, it passes through Beirut, it passes through Cairo and it passes through Riyadh.39

  1. www.middleeastmonitor.com/20250302-israels-smotrich-calls-for-opening-gates-of-hell-on-gaza-after-halt-of-humanitarian-aid.↩︎

  2. Z Jamaladdine et al ‘Traumatic injury mortality in the Gaza Strip from Oct 7 2023 to June 30 2024: a capture-recapture analysis’ The Lancet February 8.↩︎

  3. In order: Sophie Squire ‘Six months of slaughter, six months of resistance’ Socialist Worker April 3 2024; Ofer Cassif of the ‘official communist’ Hadash party in Israel; and US ‘realist’, John Mearsheimer Al Jazeera January 24.↩︎

  4. www.ajc.org/news/what-is-trumps-proposal-for-gaza.↩︎

  5. The Daily Telegraph February 25.↩︎

  6. www.chathamhouse.org/2025/02/negotiating-tactic-or-not-trumps-gaza-plan-has-already-done-irreparable-damage.↩︎

  7. www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/2/28/what-has-the-report-into-israeli-military-failures-on-october-7-said.↩︎

  8. www.eurasiareview.com/15022024-did-israel-deliberately-ignore-warnings-of-an-attack-by-hamas-to-enable-them-to-destroy-gaza-oped.↩︎

  9. Hamas Our narrative … Operation al‑Aqsa Flood p8.↩︎

  10. See R Feldman Messianic Zionism in the digital age: Jews, Noahides and the Third Temple imaginary New Brunswick NJ 2024.↩︎

  11. “On that day the Lord made a covenant with Abram, saying, ‘To your descendants I give this land, from the river of Egypt to the great river, the Euphrates, the land of the Kenites, Kenizzites, Kadmonites, the Kadomites, the Hittites, Perizzites, Rephaims, Amorites, Canaanites, Girgashites and the Jebusites” (Genesis xv, 18-1).↩︎

  12. www.jpr.org.uk/insights/israels-jewish-demography-changing-and-it-so-diasporas.↩︎

  13. I Pappé ‘The collapse of Zionism’ New Left Review June 21 2024.↩︎

  14. The Jewish Chronicle January 6 2025.↩︎

  15. www.unrwa.org/palestine-refugees.↩︎

  16. See A Ben-Zvi Decade of transition: Eisenhower, Kennedy and the origins of the American-Israeli alliance New York NY 1998.↩︎

  17. N Chomsky The fateful triangle: the United States, Israel and the Palestinians London 1983, p43.↩︎

  18. www.cfr.org/article/us-aid-israel-four-charts.↩︎

  19. www.washingtoninstitute.org/policy-analysis/israel-strategic-asset-united-states-0.↩︎

  20. J Conrad ‘Zionist imperatives and the Arab solution’ Weekly Worker January 22 2009: weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/753/zionist-imperatives-and-the-arab-solution.↩︎

  21. H Clinton ‘America’s Pacific century’ Foreign Policy November 2011.↩︎

  22. H Bresheeth-Žabner An army like no other: how the Israeli Defence Force made a nation London 2020, p13.↩︎

  23. The Times of Israel October 8 2023.↩︎

  24. The thesis of the Jewish-Israel working class being a labour aristocracy is closely associated with Maxime Rodinson. See his Israel: a colonial settler state? New York NY 1973.↩︎

  25. See M Macnair (intro) Karl Kautsky: on colonialism London 2013.↩︎

  26. M Machover ‘Colonialism and the natives’ Weekly Worker December 17 2015: weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1087/colonialism-and-the-natives.↩︎

  27. www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/25282/pg25282-images.html.↩︎

  28. www.marxists.org/history/etol/document/mideast/agedict/ch02.htm.↩︎

  29. M Shalev The labour movement in Israel: ideology and political economy Westview CO 1996, p1.↩︎

  30. Daily Worker May 15 1948.↩︎

  31. E Heffer ‘Why Labour should support Israel’ Labour looks at Israel: 1967-1971 London 1971, p31.↩︎

  32. J Horton Socialism Today February 2 2024.↩︎

  33. SWP pamphlet Palestine, resistance, revolution and the struggle for freedom London 2023, p28.↩︎

  34. Eg, the SWP’s co-thinker in Germany, Ramsis Kilani, comes out with the bog standard “strikes and mass mobilisations” and “workers developing their own capability for revolutionary self-governance” catch phrases. But, though he denounces “Stalinist conceptions of a revolution by ‘stages’”, that is actually what he advocates (R Kilani ‘Strategies for liberation: old and new arguments in the Palestinian left’ International Socialism No183, Summer 2024). Incidentally, Die Linke, Germany’s so-called ‘left’ party, disgracefully expelled the comrade on entirely bogus charges of “anti-Semitism” in December 2024. Anne Alexander, the SWP’s Middle East expert, confirms the stagism when she writes of her perspectives for Palestine having “two aspects”: “The first would be a [an altogether improbable - JC] revolution inside Palestine, led by Palestinians, for a single democratic and secular state, achieved through the dismantling of the whole social and political system of apartheid by a movement from below.” The second aspect being “a revolutionary process outside Palestine” (A Alexander ‘Palestine: between permanent war and permanent revolution’ International Socialism No181, Winter 2023). Nowhere does she mention ‘socialism’, ‘working class state power’ or ‘social revolution’ ... or even words to that effect.↩︎

  35. Tony Greenstein, Letters Weekly Worker June 27 2024.↩︎

  36. Socialist Worker August 5 2006.↩︎

  37. www.cbs.gov.il/he/mediarelease/DocLib/2024/141/11_24_141e.pdf.↩︎

  38. A perspective advanced by Jabra Nicola and Moshé Machover in June 1969. See M Machover Israelis and Palestinians: conflict and resolution Chicago IL 2012, pp15-25.↩︎

  39. To paraphrase George Habash, first PFLP general secretary, and before him Ahmad Shukeiri, first PLO chair (see JT Buck The decline of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine Hampshire College MA, 2013, pp3-4).↩︎