04.09.2025

Say it loud, say it proud

Why does Jeremy Corbyn refuse to say he is anti-Zionist? Jack Conrad urges Your Party to draw a clear red line. Israel is an expansionist project, a racist project, a genocidal project

Recently, Ani Says, a pugnacious pro-Palestine activist and long-time supporter of Jeremy Corbyn, asked him if he would follow Zarah Sultana’s lead and openly declare himself an anti-Zionist. He is filmed umming and ahing. When she pressed him, Ani was edged aside by Oly Durose, Corbyn’s communications and media officer. She then talks with Laura Alvarez, Corbyn’s wife. She too is filmed umming and ahing, this time on his behalf.¹

Doubtless, the reason for this umming and ahing is fear. Team Corbyn dreads a rerun of 2015-20. Pursuing the chimera of the “election of a socialist government in Britain, or at least of the election of socialists to government”, and facing an unremitting ‘anti-Zionism equals anti-Semitism’ smear campaign, Corbyn made one shameful concession after another.²

His official spokesperson insisted he opposed a “comprehensive or blanket boycott” of Israel: “He doesn’t support BDS.”³ Corbyn himself wrote that it is wrong to say that “Zionism is racism”.⁴ After offering token resistance, he caved over demands that Labour adopt the IHRA so-called ‘definition’ of anti-Semitism. Corbyn cited the “importance” of party unity and the need for “solidarity with the Jewish community”.⁵ Worse, proclaiming his commitment to “rooting out anti-Semitism”, he threw friends, allies and supporters to the wolves. Hundreds, thousands, were expelled, or driven out of the Labour Party, on transparently false charges.

Of course, the December 2019 general election saw a humiliating defeat, Corbyn falling on his sword and the swift succession of Sir Keir Starmer. Obviously then, despite the cynical calculations of advisors - special and ordinary - conciliation did not work. And the idea that it will work with the Jeremy Corbyn Party (otherwise known as Your Party) is simply risible. Why we in the CPGB say, establish a “firm line against those who favour, or who are soft on, Zionism”.⁶

Comrade Sultana appears to have learnt the lesson of 2015-20: “The smears won’t work this time,” she defiantly declares. “I say it loudly and proudly: I’m an anti-Zionist.”⁷ But not, it would seem, comrade Corbyn. So, let us spell out, not least for his benefit, what Zionism is, how we can fight it and how we can beat it.

Expansionism

Zionism is inverted anti-Semitism. It too considers Jews a race, a race of outsiders who, as such, will always face persecution from those who they lived amongst. Hence the disdain for assimilation and the dogma of eternal anti-Semitism. Instead of fighting anti-Semitism and demanding equality, it should be accepted as a fact of nature, a norm, a perfectly understandable reaction to the presence of the “Jewish parasite” in their midst. Only when the Jews ‘return to Zion’ will the Jews become a ‘normal people’.

Naturally, nowadays, Zionism claims to be the “national liberation movement of the Jewish people”.⁸ However, in its origins, Zionism was perfectly candid. The aim was a Jewish state for the Jewish people, something, which, of course, could only be achieved through colonialism and displacing the indigenous population.

Migration to Palestine began in the 1890s as a trickle and rapidly increased in the 1930s. Zionism finally arriving at state form in May 1948. Between 750,000 and a million Palestinians were expelled. The first Nakba. In 1967 Israel defeated the neighbouring Arab states and established military control over the Golan Heights, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Half a million Palestinians were driven out. The second Nakba.

Today Israel is still bent on territorial expansion: 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 Golan Heights ‘buffer zone’ (annexed in 1981).

However, when it comes to the West Bank and Gaza, the main drive is ideological, not military. Zionism, as an ongoing settler-colonial project, is at the very least committed to incorporating the whole of Mandate Palestine. On the West Bank, Israel has already planted well over 500,000 settlers. Some 40,000 Palestinians have been displaced and another 1,000 killed since October 7 2023 alone. Meanwhile, Gaza stands on the threshold of Zionism’s final solution (ethnic cleansing or genocide). A third Nakba.

Sickeningly, the Trump administration, and its GREAT Trust international business partners, have been number-crunching proposals to build a “Riviera of the Middle East” on the rubble of Gaza. The dream is of AI-powered smart cities, sparkling high-rises and magnificent sea-views. Each Palestinian would receive a cash payment of $5,000 if they agree to be “temporarily relocated”.⁹ Libya, Ethiopia, South Sudan, Indonesia and Somaliland are all considered potential options. If they go, there will, of course, be no right of return.

Bizarrely, left panglossians doggedly maintain that Israel “cannot win” in Gaza, that Israel is “unequivocally losing” its war in Gaza, or that Israel has already “lost in Gaza”.¹⁰ 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 Benjamin 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. Certainly the 50 remaining war captives (dead and alive) 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 have been an absolute priority. And destroying Hamas and negotiating with Hamas are, to put it mildly, mutually incompatible. No, the real aims of Netanyahu and his cabinet are to uproot the indigenous population in Gaza and take yet another step towards realising the goal of a Greater Israel.

Zionism maintains that Jews have a right to the whole of the land 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 of urgently needed new settlers.¹¹

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.¹² 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 with. Mass expulsion is simply not feasible.

Organised racism

Working class politics in Israel - that is, Israeli-Jewish working class politics - barely exists now 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.¹³ 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 distinguish between various forms of colonies: plantation colonies, exploitation colonies, colonies properly so-called, etc. Broadly the colonisation of the India, Congo, South Africa type saw the colonisers live off the backs of the native workforce, including peasant farmers, through all manner of dodges and barely concealed robbery. That went hand-in-hand with staffing an army officer corps, running a bureaucracy, managing railroads, docks, etc. The colonisers therefore constituted a relatively narrow caste who often maintained close ties with the imperial homeland (to which the most successful returned, having made their fortunes).

Israel is what Karl Kautsky called a “work colony”,¹⁴ or what Moshé Machover prefers to call an “exclusion colony”.¹⁵ Other examples being USA, Canada, Australia. Instead of constituting themselves a narrow, often highly privileged, caste and exploiting native labour, the colonisers make up the full spectrum of classes: bourgeoisie, petty bourgeoisie, small farmers, workers, unemployed workers, etc. The indigenous population become foreigners in their own land and are either marginalised or driven to the point of extinction - typically justified using an organising form of racism.

Hence, whatever the socialistic pretentions of Nahman Syrkin and Ber Borochov, from its inception, Zionism actually adopted the Blut und Boden (blood and soil) racism of late 19th century European reaction. 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.¹⁶

For understandable ideological reasons, Zionism latched onto Palestine (the biblical Jewish homeland). But what marked the Zionists 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, unlike ‘normal’ colonists, they exercised “no coercive power over the indigenous population”.¹⁷

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. So, gaining the backing of an imperial sponsor was absolutely fundamental. To begin with this was Britain. It was a quid pro quo relationship. Britain agreed the Balfour declaration in November 1917 in the expectation of “forming for England ‘a little loyal Jewish Ulster’ in a sea of potentially hostile Arabism”.¹⁸ 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.

Friends of Israel

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, Arab backwardness and Nazi-tainted Arab politics.

Nye Bevan, Edward Short, Jennie Lee, Michael Foot and Corbyn’s “inspiration”, Tony Benn, were also counted amongst the Labour Friends of Israel.¹⁹ The lot of them 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”.²⁰

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 consider themselves as being 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, and 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).²¹

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. Take the already mentioned AWL, the Morning Star’s CPB ... and the Bonapartist leader of Your Party. Essentially their two-state ‘solution’ echoes the Palestine Liberation Organisation, 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, before Trump, US administrations promoted this touching picture of the wolf lying down with the lamb. But, out of a naked self-interest in dominating the Middle East, the US has backed Israeli aggression to the hilt. For all the crocodile tears, the same goes for its Nato allies, such as the UK, Germany and Italy ... because of their subordination to the US hegemon. So there has been 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, therefore, 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 Palestinian Authority is reduced to impotent verbal gestures, pathetic diplomatic pleading and effective collaboration with the Israeli occupiers. Recognising this, the likes of the AWL and the CPB clutch at anti-democratic liberal Zionist protests - that and common economic struggles, 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, stagist, reasoning. Note, trade union politics - ie, struggles over wages and conditions - always finds itself cut short by the high politics of war, security, national privilege, etc. There have been no Histadrut strikes demanding equal civil rights for Israeli-Palestinians, the decolonisation of the West Bank and an end to the genocidal Gaza war. Nor should any such development be expected within the narrow confines of today’s circumstances.

Tailing Hamas

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”.²²

The SWP has long ago given up trying to seriously think through what is and what is not a viable strategy in Israel-Palestine.²³ What it is primarily interested in nowadays - especially post-October 7 2023 - 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.”²⁴ 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 and neighbouring 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.

The call for a single Palestinian state “may seem completely utopian”, once owned up Alex Callinicos, the SWP’s top intellectual. 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.”²⁵ Right again.

Hence, we are obliged to ask exactly who is going to establish his 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 - Lebanon’s Hezbollah, Hamas, Yemen’s Houthis … and the Islamic Republic of Iran? But today, especially after the 12-Day War, a busted flush.

In the wilder reaches of the SWP imagination, the Axis of Resistance could, perhaps, be renewed and reinvigorated with Muslim Brotherhood governments in Egypt, Syria and Jordan. Not completely impossible. But any such combination - leave aside national rivalries and Sunni/Shia contradictions - would be an Axis of Reaction.

Yes, conceivably, Israel could be defeated, as the Outremer, crusader, kingdom of Jerusalem was defeated by Saladin’s forces 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 their inevitable resistance. The poles of national oppression would, thereby, and in no uncertain terms, be reversed.

Though it is 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 simply coining a contranym, whereby words become their opposite. Democracy is divorced from basic democratic rights - it becomes a denial of basic democratic rights.

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). Nevertheless, Israeli Jews, the Hebrew-speaking population, 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 in 1948.

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.²⁶ Hence, the Israeli-Jewish nation not only inhabits a common territory and shares a common language: it is historically constituted.

Arab nation

No democratic solution for the Israel-Palestine conflict can be achieved in isolation. Objective circumstances simply do not permit any such outcome. 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 hopeless resistance or abject surrender. There is, however, a way to cut through the Gordian knot: widen the strategic front. There are nearly 300 million Arabs inhabiting 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.

Communists are, therefore, surely, obliged 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 the “just and lasting settlement” between Hebrews and Palestinians that Jeremy Corbyn rightly seeks to bring about?²⁷ That can only happen in the context of sweeping away Iran’s theocracy, the Hashemite kingdom of Jordan, Lebanon’s sectarian plutocracy, Egypt’s military-bureaucratic regime, the House of Saud, the petty Gulf sheikdoms - and the establishment of a Socialist Republic of Arabia. Israel could be offered federal status, with the confident expectation that such an invitation would receive a positive response from below.²⁸

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 Riyadh.²⁹

1. www.thecanary.co/trending/2025/08/28/jeremy-corbyn-zionist.↩︎

2. Andrew Murray, an entryist from the Morning Star’s CPB and also on secondment from Unite, served as Corbyn’s special political advisor alongside Seumus Milne and Steve Howell (all former Straight Leftists). Comrade Murray called the “election of a socialist government in Britain, or at least of the election of socialists to government, a realistic possibility” (‘Why the left came back’ Tribune October 22 2019). For comrade Murray’s extended argument see The fall and rise of the British left (London 2019); and for his disappointed assessment of the “best chance of electing a socialist government in my lifetime” see Is socialism possible? (London 2022). His latest thoughts on the JCP can be read in Sidecar (interview with Oliver Eagleton: ‘Force of opposition’, August 6 2025 - newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/force-of-opposition).↩︎

3. The Guardian December 17 2017.↩︎

4. The Guardian August 2 2018.↩︎

5. The Guardian September 4 2018.↩︎

6. Resolution, CPGB aggregate - Weekly Worker August 28 2025.↩︎

7. www.facebook.com/ZarahSultanaMP/posts/the-smears-wont-work-this-timei-say-it-loudly-and-proudly-im-an-anti-zionist-pri/1352791306408259.↩︎

8. www.webelieveinisrael.org.uk/zionism_what_it_is_what_it_isn_t.↩︎

9. The Washington Post August 31 2025.↩︎

10. 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.↩︎

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

12. “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, Rephaites, Amorites, Canaanites, Girgashites and the Jebusites’” (Genesis xv, 18-1).↩︎

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

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

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

16. L Brenner Zionism in the age of dictators: a reappraisal London 2004, p31.↩︎

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

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

19. www.facebook.com/JeremyCorbynMP/posts/tony-benn-would-have-turned-100-todaya-rare-courageous-and-continuous-voice-for-/1222968332528032.↩︎

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

21. See T Greenstein ‘Distracting from genocide’ Weekly Worker May 2 2024.↩︎

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

23. 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” catchphrases. 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.↩︎

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

25. Socialist Worker August 5 2006.↩︎

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

27. hansard.parliament.uk/commons/2017-07-05/debates/7F795C5C-3E77-479E-949D-22EA6599F419/IsraelAndPalestinianTalks.↩︎

28. 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.↩︎

29. 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, p4).↩︎