WeeklyWorker

19.06.2025
Refueling: Only the US with its GBU-57 bunker-busters and B-2s can destroy Iran’s underground nuclear facilities

Devouring the prey and drinking the blood of the slain

Netanyahu is bent on death, destruction and gore. Donald Trump gave the green light - that much is obvious. Now he has approved attack plans and is demanding ‘unconditional surrender’. Jack Conrad presents the communist alternative to capitalist barbarism and war

We long expected it. Now it has happened. Beginning in the early hours of Friday the 13th of June, Israel launched a full-scale assault on Iran. Operation Rising Lion should not be expected to stop “till it devours the prey and drinks the blood of the slain”.1

Benjamin Netanyahu justified his criminal action with the allegation that Iran lay just weeks away from making nine nuclear weapons - a widely derided lie.2 Doubtless the International Atomic Energy Agency board declared Iran in breach of its obligations under the Non-Proliferation Treaty in what was a highly political 19 to 3 vote (there were 11 abstentions).3 But that hardly amounts to the imminent threat of Israel becoming a “victim of a nuclear holocaust”. Indeed, Iranian negotiators seem to have been under the impression that a deal with the US was within reach in the next round of talks in Oman (due to have taken place on June 15). No less to the point, Rising Lion was “eight months in the making”.4

So why did Israel attack when it did? Netanyahu saw a window of opportunity to achieve two long-held strategic objectives. First, knock out - or at the least thoroughly degrade - a regional rival. Second, use the cover of war to ‘finish the job’ with the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. Mass expulsions would be followed by annexations and the realisation of the Zionist dream of a Greater Israel.

Netanyahu, along with most Zionists, cynically paints Iran as being “singularly hellbent on Israel’s annihilation”.5 Naturally, the Tehran regime pays lip-service to opposing Israel and calls for “a single, democratic Palestinian state” through “holding a referendum of all the original inhabitants”, including Muslims, Jews and Christians.6 Hardly practical - requiring, one presumes, the exodus, or expulsion, of all post-1948 migrants (them and their often mixed offspring and descendants). Anyway, as shown by June 13, Iran is in no position to do much about anything. Israel is militarily strong, Iran pathetically weak. Not that the ayatollahs actually want to help the Palestinians - well, apart, that is, from using them as pawns whenever possible.

If Iran had the technical wherewithal to build, launch and deliver a nuclear warhead that could destroy Tel Aviv or Haifa, it is highly unlikely to embark on any such suicidal course. After all, what would happen immediately afterwards? Total destruction. Israel has at least 140 nuclear warheads. And the Tehran regime is concerned with one thing above all else - survival. That is why, perhaps, it might have calculated on achieving a near-ready nuclear weapon capability, in order to act as a deterrent. It is not gripped by some Islamic death wish - that is for sure. A racist commonplace peddled in the Israeli media.

Of course, what began on June 13 is not a war of conquest. Israel simply lacks the military capacity to do that.7 Iran has a population of around 90 million. An invading Israeli, or American, army, will not be greeted as liberators by the mass of the population. No, on the contrary, they would face determined resistance of the kind seen in Iraq - except on a far bigger and more deadly scale.

Nor can Israel destroy Iran’s nuclear facilities that lie buried deep underground at Natanz and Fordow. It possesses neither the heavy bombers nor the heavy ordnance needed for such a task. Though it would perhaps take several days, the US with its B-2s and 30,000lb GBU-57 bunker busters, might conceivably be able to wreak the necessary destruction. But with what results? Huge amounts of radioactive material possibly released into the atmosphere.

Israel can, however, pound, assassinate and sabotage to the point of triggering economic collapse. Likewise it can decapitate Iran politically and militarily, to the point where Tehran loses effective control over national minority areas such as Kurdistan and Baluchistan and thereby facilitates the country’s break-up. Israel, if it manages to provoke Iran sufficiently - that is, in terms of triggering retaliatory overreach - can also realistically hope get the United States directly involved in the war. Clearly that is Netanyahu’s plan. Whether or not he succeeds is, though, entirely another matter.

Netanyahu claims to be committed to regime change in Iran, yet the very next day he promised that “Tehran will burn”. Leaving that contradictory narrative aside, for regime change to happen there needs to be an alternative regime waiting in the wings. You cannot bring about regime change with bombs and missiles launched from F-14s, F-16s and F-35s. There is certainly no credible ‘great leader’ about to be parachuted in by the US-Israel who will galvanise the Iranian population behind them. Maryam Rajavi and her Mujahadeen-e-Khalq are almost universally regarded as a crazy, weird cult … and it certainly has no mass base in Iran itself. As for the royalists and Reza Pahlavi, though he is heavily financed and promoted by the US and Israel, few serious commentators rate his chances. Some upper class exiles like to imagine his father, Mohammad Reza, as an enlightened despot, but within Iran itself few want to swap the theocracy they know and hate for a return to a monarchy that their parents hated and overthrew.

A Revolutionary Guard or army coup, national breakaways, warlordism and the Somalification of Iran is another matter. They are realistic possibilities and would bring with them all kinds of potentially dreadful unknowns.

In desperation the ayatollah’s regime could conceivably launch waves of drones and missiles against Saudi oil facilities or US bases in the region. Just what Netanyahu is banking on. The same goes with withdrawing from the NPT and going for a nuclear bomb or closing the Strait of Hormuz - the world’s most important “oil transit chokepoint”.8

US involvement would see Iran either suing for peace or reduced to rubble - for America sweet revenge. The overthrow of the shah in 1979 and the ensuing 444 days hostage crisis still rankles with the US state apparatus. Already, however, there are reports of Iran signalling Israel and the US that it wants to de‑escalate, agree a ceasefire and resume talks on its nuclear programme. However, Netanyahu is not in listening mode. Nor is Trump. Indeed, while he says he has no plans to kill supreme leader Ali Khamenei “for now”, he is demanding Iran’s “unconditional surrender”.9 To further spread panic he advises the entire ten million population of Tehran to evacuate the city.

What can be done?

Here in Britain we should certainly keep marching. Solidarity with Palestinians, especially, of course, those in Gaza, is rightly joined with ‘Hands off Iran’ calls. More must be done. Workers at airports and ports can be won to refuse to handle goods, especially arms, headed for Israel. Such agitation would be more than timely. Expecting workers at Rolls Royce, BAE Systems or Leonardo to strike and maybe put themselves out of a much needed job is an altogether bigger ask. Moralistic attacks on ordinary workers should, though, be avoided at all cost. However, despite remaining in the realms of the symbolic, it is quite right to demand that the UK government rescind all export licences for military-related goods going to Israel.

David Lammy sheds crocodile tears and calls for restraint, but will, for example, do nothing to block the delivery of UK-made spares for Israel’s F-35s. He dares not upset Trump and the US. Keeping the recent trade deal with the US matters infinitely more than the lives of countless Palestinians and Iranians.

We must openly declare for the defeat of our ‘own’ side: that is, Israel, its US sponsor and its UK and other such enablers. What that poses is going beyond the ‘strike and street’ politics of protest doggedly pursued by the Socialist Workers Party, Socialist Party in England and Wales, Revolutionary Communist Party and the other confessional sects. We need to embrace the politics of power.

Jeremy Corbyn’s much touted new outfit is worse than useless here. The same goes for George Galloway’s Workers Party of Britain and the Green Party, even if led by the soft left’s latest messiah, the born again Zack Polanski. Such organisations are verbally committed to doing little more than tinkering with the system. They accept the existing constitution, the existing state and the existing capitalist socio-economic order. None of them even so much as question wage slavery. They claim to want a peaceful, just and democratic capitalism. But capitalism is unpeaceful, unjust and undemocratic. So their effective role is to reinforce ideological illusions … and thereby ultimately serve capitalism. No, what is needed is a principled, mass Communist Party. Only such a party, organised on an international scale, can lead the working class to state power and put an end to the global capitalist system of greed, imperialist exploitation … and war.

What about Iran? We have no corresponding wish to see Iran defeated. The Iranian left - within the country and without - must, of course, facilitate, encourage and take full advantage of any loosening of the ayatollah’s grip, through an immediate programme designed to defend the lives and interests of the broad mass of the population.

Demands should certainly be raised for a rigorous and comprehensive rationing system. Everyone must receive according to their needs. The huge black-market rackets run by regime insiders are widely known and there ought to be demands that these criminals suffer confiscation of all ill-gotten gains and receive suitable punishment. Basic necessities must be strictly price-capped. Abandoned apartments allocated to homeless individuals and families. Elected popular committees would ensure everything is fair and above board. Privatized industries such as telecommunications, steel, water and power generation must be brought back under direct state control. Those companies withholding the payment of wages should face confiscation. Banks and insurance companies must be nationalized and the country’s $6.3 billion foreign debt repudiated. A system of sirens needs to be established to provide early warning of air attacks. Clearly marked bomb shelters must be established throughout Tehran’s underground metro system, road tunnels and basements and made available to the general population as a matter of urgency.

Above all, the left needs to organise around a programme of how to make the country worth defending from Israeli (and US) aggression. That can only be done by demanding freedom of speech and assembly, the separation of mosque and state, secularism in all spheres of public life, annulling oppressive laws against women, releasing political prisoners, allowing unrestricted workers’ self-organisation, arming the whole population, abolishing the standing army, the Revolutionary Guards and the basij. Crucially, theocratic rule must be ended.

Elections to a constituent assembly, working class state power and the fullest democracy then become realisable. But more still is needed. Proletarian internationalism is vital. A revolution in Iran must spread to Iraq, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Egypt and come to the rescue of Lebanon, Syria, the West Bank and Gaza.

Expansionism

Israel is not only determined to destroy Iran: it is 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 since October 7 2023. Meanwhile, Gaza stands on the edge of starvation, ethnic cleansing and genocide - facilitated by the so-called Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. A second nakba is being readied.

Bezalel Smotrich, finance minister and leader of the far-right Religious Zionism Party, triumphantly describes the situation in Gaza as being on the “threshold of the gates of hell”.10 He clearly approves and supports a policy of genocide. No wonder there have been moves by 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 huge death toll and the comprehensive devastation of Gaza, there are those panglossians who claimed that Israel “cannot win” in Gaza, that Israel is “unequivocally losing” its war in Gaza, or that the Israel has already “lost in Gaza”.11 All true … if Israel’s war aims were ever about totally destroying Hamas and bringing home all war captives (dead and alive). However, that was never Netanyahu’s intention.

Netanyahu is many things, but he is no fool. His war aims were never about destroying Hamas. Its social roots are far too deep for that. Certainly the war captives are little more than a nuisance for him, 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 wanted the war captives back from the tunnels, tents and bomb shelters of Gaza, then direct negotiations with Hamas would have been an absolute priority. And destroying Hamas and negotiating with Hamas are, to put it mildly, mutually incompatible.

No, the real war aim of Netanyahu and his cabinet is to uproot the indigenous population within mandate Palestine in order to realise their greater Israel: from Gaza they will be driven into Egypt’s Sinai, from the West Bank over into Jordan. And, of course, Trump is gung-ho.

October 7

The part desperate, part audacious Operation al-Aqsa Flood prison break on October 7 2023, carried out by Hamas, along with other sections of the Joint Room resistance movement, caught the Israeli high command altogether unprepared - a “complete failure” now openly acknowledged by its military.12

Not surprisingly, there has been speculation that Netanyahu and his cronies were in some way “deliberately” complicit in allowing the whole thing to happen.13 It was, after all, a year in the preparation. Warnings were consistently ignored. Hamas military commanders were themselves certainly surprised by the ability of their al-Qassam fighters to go way beyond what had been originally planned as a suicide mission. Expectations were of something like an 80% casualty rate. Military targets, IDF outposts, police stations 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.14

October 7 did, though, provide Netanyahu with the political excuse needed for the Israel Defence Forces to pulverise its way into Gaza (and the upping of settler terrorism in the West Bank). True, Israeli public opinion subsequently became deeply divided between what we might call the ‘peace party’ and the ‘war party’. Nonetheless, the war party commands a Knesset majority and has grown into a clear public opinion poll majority with the attack on Iran (83% of Jewish Israeli’s support, only 16% oppose15). Netanyahu himself has every reason to keep the wars in Gaza, Lebanon, Syria and now Iran 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.

Let us revisit this defining background. 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 a Greater Israel as a Jewish 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.16

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.17 Of course, any such Israel would come with a poisoned chalice: an oppressed Arab majority. 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 with.

Either way, Israel, as a project, is predicated on expansionism. 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 antecedents, 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 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 to what is their national home.18

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”.19

Today Israel has a record population of just over 10 million.20 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.21 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 1973.22 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”.23

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 Israel’s already potent military machine: Israel is on a short list of “major non-Nato allies” that gives it privileged access to the most advanced US military platforms and technologies. There is an agreement to supply Israel with a military package worth some $3.8 billion annually till 2028.24 In return for imperial sponsorship, the country 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).25

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”.26 Whatever the skin colour of the president, America is determined to reverse its 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.27

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 IDF is 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).

Haim Bresheeth-Žabner calls the IDF “an army like no other”.28 In fact, 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, military experts rank the country amongst the world’s most powerful states. We have already mentioned the nuclear warheads … and Israel certainly has the means of delivering them from land, sea and sky.

Divide and rule

Territorially, economically and politically Palestine is, of course, cleaved between Hamas in a pulverised Gaza and Fatah in 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 leaders living in the relative safety of Qatar intransigently refuse to recognise Israel. Nonetheless, Hamas 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”.29 That is, until October 7 2023 - what has been called Israel’s Pearl Harbour.

Leaders of the Palestinian 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, pleads 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 despised.

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

What about Israel itself? Its 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 Netanyahu’s Likud, has absolutely no truck with any notion of Palestinian statehood. In 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.30 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, 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”31 or what Moshé Machover prefers to call an “exclusion colony”.32 Instead of 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.”33 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.34

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”.35

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). This in the expectation of “forming for England ‘a little loyal Jewish Ulster’ in a sea of potentially hostile Arabism”.36 The Ottoman empire was about to be carved-up by Anglo-French imperialism and that necessitated finding, or creating, willing collaborators. France promoted the historically established Maronite Christians in mandate Lebanon, the British turned to the incoming Zionist Jews in mandate Palestine.

Histadrut played a determining role in what was to become the political economy of Israel. 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

Obediently reflecting British imperial interests, mainstream Labourism has traditionally 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 the influence of Nazi ideas.

As for the ‘official’ CPGB, in the late 1940s it temporarily abandoned its historic hostility to Zionism. It 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, toadyingly, 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”.37 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 for 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 kibbutz as a brave socialist experiment. Eric Heffer even defended Israel’s continued occupation of the West Bank and Gaza after 1967 on the grounds that Israel was “the only genuine democratic and socialist-oriented state in the Middle East”.38

Next to nothing of that left now remains. Today Israel counts amongst those countries dominated by the hard right and is therefore regarded as an abomination by those who regard themselves as being 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 liberal 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 promoted this touching picture of the wolf lying down with the lamb. But, in practice, the US has 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 resorted to desperate suicide missions and the PLO and Fatah are reduced to impotent verbal gestures, pathetic diplomatic pleading and effective collaboration with the Israeli occupiers. Recognising this, the likes of the AWL, CPB … and various Labour left odds and sods clutch at 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 ‘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 ‘solution’ is based on a combination of naive wishful thinking and mechanical, stageist, 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/or calling for the end of the war with Iran. Nor should any such development be expected within the narrow confines of today’s circumstances.

SPEW 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.39 That despite the starvation imposed on Gaza, the second-class status of Israeli Arabs and the remorseless announcements of yet more Jewish settler ‘outposts’ on the West Bank - 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 a complete mystery. No less to the point, the means of achieving such an outcome 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 does 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 SWP 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”.40

The SWP has long ago given up trying to seriously think through what is and what is not a viable strategy in Israel-Palestine.41 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 by the economistic left, 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 oppressed nationality never seems to occur to economistic 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.”42 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). About 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 the 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 matters - 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”. Crucially, 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.”43 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 envisaged as its agent of change was the Axis of Resistance - which is today a busted flush combination of Lebanon’s Hezbollah, Hamas, Yemen’s Houthis … and the Islamic Republic of Iran. In the SWP imagination the Axis could, not unreasonably, 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 robbed. 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 Knesset votes of ‘official communists’ and Islamists, the Hamas October 7 prisons breakout, the Hezbollah rockets and Iran’s “race” to acquire nuclear bombs. Understandably, the Israeli-Jewish population feels under constant threat and therefore - insecure, frightened, vengeful, maddened - willingly supports, urges on Israeli aggression, oppression and even genocide. The vain hope is to crush or finally remove all such threats and dangers - 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 everyday 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 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.44 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, 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 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 a common language, but of 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 - his 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 the Egyptian market and Egyptian administrative personnel were viewed 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 Gaza Strip, Sinai, the West Bank and the Golan Heights. Nasser was humiliated and died soon afterwards, a broken man.

Evidently, however, 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? That can only happen in the context of sweeping away Iran’s theocracy, the Hashemite kingdom of Jordan, Lebanon’s sectarian warlord plutocracy, Egypt’s military bureaucratic regime, the House of Saud, the petty Gulf sheikdoms - and the establishment of working class rule throughout the Middle East. Israel could be offered federal status, with the confident expectation that such an invitation would receive a positive response from below.45

Hence, the road to a united working class in Palestine passes through Amman, it passes through Tehran, it passes through Beirut, it passes through Cairo and it passes through Riyadh46.

  1. Israel’s military operation takes its name from Numbers xxiii,24. A typically gory passage in what Christians call the Old Testament. In full the verse reads: “Behold, a people! As a lioness it rises up and as a lion it lifts itself; till it devours the prey and drinks the blood of the slain.”↩︎

  2. “As recently as 25 March, Tulsi Gabbard, the US director of national intelligence, told the Senate intelligence committee that the American intelligence community had assessed that Iran was not actively pursuing a nuclear weapon” (The Guardian June 13 2025). See also A England ‘Was Iran really developing nuclear weapons?’ Financial Times June 16 2025; ‘Was Iran really racing for nukes?’ The Economist June 13 2025.↩︎

  3. It should be pointed out that Isreal is a non-signatory to the 1968 Non-Proliferation Treaty, which requires existing “nuclear weapon states” to disarm and commit themselves to the exclusive use of nuclear technology for peaceful purposes (see disarmament.unoda.org/wmd/nuclear/npt). So the United States, Britain, France, Russia and China are definitely in breach of the NPT.↩︎

  4. www.axios.com/2025/06/13/how-israel-executed-strike-iran-nuclear.↩︎

  5. Jewish News June 16 2025.↩︎

  6. www.presstv.ir/Detail/2025/05/24/748493/Iran-Israel-two-state-solution-Palestine-genocide-United-States-talks.↩︎

  7. Special forces operations are a different matter and seem already to have happened on June 13 with Mossad’s drone attacks on air defences launched from within Iran.↩︎

  8. About 25% of the world’s oil trade and a third of liquified natural gas passes through the strait - see en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strait_of_Hormuz.↩︎

  9. The Independent June 17 2025.↩︎

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

  11. 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 2025.↩︎

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

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

  14. Hamas Our narrative … Operation al-Aqsa Flood p8.↩︎

  15. The Jerusalem Post June 17 2025.↩︎

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

  17. “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).↩︎

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

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

  20. The Jewish Chronicle January 6 2025.↩︎

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  29. The Times of Israel October 8 2023.↩︎

  30. 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.↩︎

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

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

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

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

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

  36. R Storrs Orientations London 1937, p405. Sir Ronald Storrs served as British military governor of Jerusalem in 1917.↩︎

  37. Daily Worker May 15 1948.↩︎

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

  39. J Horton Socialism Today February 2 2024.↩︎

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

  41. 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 [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.↩︎

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

  43. Socialist Worker August 5 2006.↩︎

  44. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabra_(person).↩︎

  45. 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.↩︎

  46. To paraphrase George Habash, first general PFLP 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, p4).↩︎