WeeklyWorker

15.01.2026
According to the AWL, this is probably yet another example of anti-Semitism

Drawing a clear red line

Zionism is an inverted form of racism. Pro-Zionists should not be in an explicitly anti-Zionist organisation. Jack Conrad urged the Socialist Unity Platform to stand by its agreed principles

Recently, at the January 10 meeting, Matt Cooper pulled out of the Socialist Unity Platform on behalf of the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty. Good. The SUP is an organisation uniting comrades on the basis of anti-capitalist, anti-racist, anti-imperialist principles - not least, we want Your Party to be “explicitly and uncompromisingly anti-Zionist”.1 And here’s the rub. The AWL is notoriously a pro-Zionist, social-imperialist organisation.

In no small part, the AWL believes that socialism will be achieved by supporting what is “progressive” in imperialism. So, after the forces of George W Bush and Tony Blair predictably routed Saddam Hussein’s Ba’athist state, AWL leaders declared that the “right side had won”. The big idea being that the United States was acting as the “globocop” and would reorder the entire Middle East and, albeit inadvertently, bring about a situation where trade unions and workers’ organisations could flourish as never before.2

Antecedents

True, the AWL opposes, criticises and even condemns certain features of imperialism, but not imperialism per se. An approach with long antecedents. Eduard Bernstein, for example, thought that capitalist social relations had to be spread across the world as a precondition for socialism. Towards that end, he refused to oppose colonial projects by peoples of a “higher culture”, as long as they treated the native peoples well. His revisionist wing of the Social Democratic Party in Germany called this “civilising mission” a “positive colonial policy”. In reality it amounted to underwriting the German empire’s brutal conquest of South West Africa, which, far from paternalistically bringing enlightenment to the indigenous population, proceeded to ruthlessly oppress, exploit and kill them. Bernstein, needless to say, was morally affronted by the Herero and Namaqua genocide of 1904-08.

Bernstein and his co-thinkers were forthrightly opposed by the likes of Karl Kautsky, Rosa Luxemburg, August Bebel, Wilhelm Liebknecht, Vladimir Lenin and Ernest Balfort Bax. Quite rightly. During the Second International’s colonial policy debates, Bernstein wrote this:

Races who are hostile to or incapable of civilisation cannot claim our sympathy ... We will condemn and oppose certain methods of subjugating savages. But we will not condemn the idea that savages must be subjugated and made to conform to the rules of higher civilisation.3

Those who know the AWL will recognise that, while the language has changed (sanitised, to suit modern sensibilities), the narrative is exactly the same. Here, for example, is the AWL’s Clive Bradley: “The ‘resistance’ to US/UK occupation [of Iraq] is reactionary. As things stand, the occupation cannot accurately be called ‘colonial’. The conflict is more one between the [‘civilised’ - JC] globocop of the empire of capital and local mafias and gangs.” Understandably then, unlike the vast bulk of the left, the AWL refused to call for US and UK troops to withdraw. Apparently they protected the nascent Iraqi labour movement from the “savages”. A laughable proposition.

When it came to Syria, another senior AWLer, Mark Osborn, wrote: “If the US destroys the bases used by Syria’s military to massacre its own citizens, you will not find the AWL on the streets protesting. The main enemy is Assad, not America.”4 And on Libya, AWLer Sacha Ismail wailed: “… nothing was going to save the Libyan revolution except outside intervention.”5 He was just repeating the words of his master, Sean Matgamna, the AWL’s patriarch, who had already written his ‘Why we should not denounce intervention in Libya’, where he claimed that Nato would “likely … produce desirable results”.6

There were, too, the staggeringly stupid. Martyn Hudson took the biscuit. He declared that the “pro-tyrant left” downplayed and branded the Benghazi uprising as reactionary, when “it is clear that the rebels form a genuine citizens’ army”, whose aim is to create “an open civil society” with a “multi-party government”. He concluded by comparing Libya’s Transitional National Council to the Petrograd Soviet in 1919 - “free Libya fights for its very existence”.7 Please!

We heard the same sort of crap and nonsense, when it came to Northern Ireland, Yugoslavia, Afghanistan and, of course, Ukraine. Despite splitting from the Ukraine Solidarity Campaign over its active promotion of far-right Azov politics, the AWL is still to be counted in the ‘Arm, arm, arm Ukraine’ camp, alongside Paul Mason, Chris Ford, John McDonnell ... and mainstream bourgeois liberal opinion.

The words used to justify imperialist conquests, interventions and proxies are always noble. Who but a hopeless dogmatist could oppose spreading civilisation to the ‘lower races’? Who could oppose bringing democracy to those crushed under the iron heel of dictatorship? Who could oppose the only force capable of preventing mass slaughter? Who could not but side with those resisting a revanchist foreign invasion? But it amounts to the same thing: social-imperialism.

However, it is over Israel that the AWL particularly distinguishes itself. With some considerable justification, it can claim to have been amongst the first to use ‘left anti-Semitism’ as a weapon to smear or silence critics of Israel and Zionism. The warped logic goes like this: ‘Almost all Jews are Zionists and almost all Zionists are Jews. Therefore to be anti-Zionist is anti-Semitic’.8 What are diametrically opposed political viewpoints - ie, Zionism and anti-Zionism - are thereby transmogrified into racial categories. Exactly the same logic could be applied to pre-June 1991 South Africa: ‘Almost all white South Africans support apartheid and almost all supporters of apartheid are white South Africans. Therefore to oppose apartheid is racist.’

Ammunition

Inevitably then, in the name of upholding Israel’s “right to exist and the right to defend itself”, the AWL opposes the BDS campaign, denies the right of Palestinian refugees to return to their historic homeland and supported the Labour NEC in “adopting the IHRA” so-called definition of anti-Semitism. 9 Effectively the AWL egged on the witch-hunt in the Labour Party and provided ammunition wherever it could. Eg, Labour Against the Witchhunt’s agreed aims sum “up the core elements of left anti-Semitism”.10 Why? Because LAW defended those anti-Zionists who were falsely accused by the Labour Party bureaucracy of being anti-Semites: eg, Ken Livingstone, Moshé Machover, Tony Greenstein, Jackie Walker, Stan Keable, Marc Wadsworth and hundreds of others besides.

Anyway, the question remains, how and why did Mr Cooper attend Socialist Unity Platform meetings? It ought to have been a problem for the AWL - it certainly ought to have been a problem for the SUP. Hence this CPGB motion:

1. Rightly amongst the founding principles of the Socialist Unity Platform has been a clear commitment to oppose Zionism. We are proudly anti-Zionist.

2. Zionism is a racist ideology with origins in a misguided reaction to the blood-and-soil nationalism of late 19th century European reaction. Zionism agreed with the proposition that European Jews were foreigners in their own land. Zionism wanted a Jewish settler-colony in Palestine. In the state form of Israel, Zionism predictably established an apartheid state with a political economy that seeks to exclude the indigenous Palestinian population. In practice that means ethnic cleaning and ultimately genocide.

3. The Alliance for Workers’ Liberty is a pro-imperialist, pro-Zionist organisation. In terms of providing ideas, it was in the forefront of the ‘anti-Zionism equals anti-Semitism’ witch-hunt in the Labour Party.

4. Though the AWL is not officially listed as an affiliate, one of its members has been attending SUP meetings.

5. This needs to end forthwith.

6. The SUP hereby withdraws any invitation to attend and completely disassociates itself from the AWL.

We did not get to debate the motion, let alone vote on it. There was a vote on whether to debate it: that easily won. However, Mr Cooper chose the coward’s way out. He refused to debate. He obviously feared humiliation. So, after I declined to withdraw the motion, he ran.

It should be noted that the Spartacist League’s Eibhlin McColgan, in absentia, urged that political differences with the AWL “should be addressed through political debate, not through exclusion or other organisational measures”.11 A thoroughly liberal ‘live-and-let-live’ formulation utterly alien to our approach. We recognise the necessity of drawing sharp lines of demarcation: eg, in LAW we successfully excluded genuine anti-Semites. Without making clear what is acceptable and what is unacceptable we have nothing more than a politically useless melange.

What goes for a political platform actually goes for almost any and every voluntary organisation imaginable. Football clubs, chat forums, tenants’ associations, religious cults, producer cooperatives, debating societies, campaign groups - all have their written (and unwritten) rules and regulations which distinguish between insiders and outsiders. Certainly, an “explicitly and uncompromisingly anti-Zionist” organisation that includes pro-Zionists has no future. Either anti-Zionism matters or it matters not … so, in the absence of an SUP debate, let us present our case, not only against Zionism and its apologists, but for a revolutionary solution in Israel-Palestine.12

Colonialism

Zionism is inverted anti-Semitism. It too considers Jews a race - a race of outsiders, who, as such, would always face persecution from those they live amongst. Hence the disdain for assimilation and the dogma of eternal anti-Semitism. Instead of demanding equality and fighting anti-Semitism, it should be accepted as a fact of nature, a norm, a perfectly understandable reaction to the presence of Jewish “strangers”.13 Only when the Jews ‘return to Zion’ will they become a ‘normal people’.

Naturally, nowadays, Zionism claims to be the “national liberation movement of the Jewish people”.14 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 obtained 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 achieved 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 over 1,000 killed since October 7 2023 alone. Meanwhile, despite the US-brokered ceasefire, Gaza stands on the threshold of Zionism’s ‘final solution’ - ethnic cleansing or genocide. A third Nakba.

Bizarrely, left panglossians doggedly maintained that Israel “cannot win” in Gaza, that Israel is “unequivocally losing”, or that the Israel has already “lost in Gaza”.15 All true … if Israel’s war aim was really about totally “crushing” Hamas.16 That was, though, never Benjamin Netanyahu’s intention. Its social roots are deep … and enduring.

No, the real aim of Netanyahu and his war cabinet was to destroy the infrastructure of Gaza, impose famine and uproot enough people in order to take yet another step towards the goal of realising Greater Israel. The evidence is overwhelming.

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.17

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.18 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 and far right, in an attempt to preserve sectional privileges - the Jewish-Israeli working class being a labour aristocracy that has seen its social power substantially eroded by years of neoliberalism.19 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 being 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 and 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 forms of robbery. That went hand-in-hand with staffing an army, running a bureaucracy, managing railways, 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 classified as a “work colony”,20 or what Moshé Machover prefers to call an “exclusion colony”21 (other examples being the USA, Canada and 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 simply 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.22

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”.23

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: 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”.24 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.

Zionist friends

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 Jeremy Corbyn’s “inspiration”, Tony Benn, were also counted amongst the Labour Friends of Israel.25 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”.26

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 AWL being the most notable example nowadays. Not that we should forget the Communist Party of Britain’s resident Zionist, Mary Davis, and her grotesque ‘Anti-Semitism awareness courses’ (as if the CPB has an anti-Semitism problem, when, in actual fact, it has a pro-Zionism problem).27

Essentially their two-state ‘solution’ echoes the Palestine Liberation Organisation, Fatah, Hadash ‘official communism’, the Israeli Labor Party and the international liberal consensus. It amounts to economistic Zionism. A little Israel - an Israel returned to pre-1967 borders - is expected to live peacefully alongside a West Bank-Gaza Strip Palestine. Except, of course, it won’t. Even a Bantustan is unacceptable for Israel: “There will not be a Palestinian state. It’s very simple: it will not be established,” Netanyahu emphatically insists.28

For appearance’s sake - before, that is, Donald Trump tore up the pretence of international law - US administrations promoted the 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 will be no repetition of 1991, when apartheid was smoothly 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. No threat, therefore, of a successful revolutionary explosion. The odds are completely stacked in Israel’s favour. Hence, while Hamas resorts to desperate suicide missions and martyrdom, 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 within Israel - 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 on to 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 so-called 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 approach 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 or an end to the Gaza genocide. Nor should any such development be expected within the narrow confines of today’s circumstances.

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 this or that Arab country, then throughout the Arab world. A Communist Party of Arabia (a section of a reforged Communist International).

What of the “just and lasting settlement” between Hebrews and Palestinians that Jeremy Corbyn ineffectually harps on about?29 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.30

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.31

  1. docs.google.com/document/d/1C7J-x4TN3uDTU4ILwpDRLpZ7D4KAf6ZfVMewkBO935s/edit.↩︎

  2. For the fullest presentation of the argument, see Workers’ Liberty Nos 2-3, December 2002 - in particular the articles by Martin Thomas and Colin Foste.↩︎

  3. Neue Zeit October 14 1896, quoted by P Smith in ‘Those who side with imperialism’ Weekly Worker October 23 2014 (weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1031/those-who-side-with-imperialism).↩︎

  4. Solidarity June 13 2012.↩︎

  5. www.workersliberty.org/story/2011/09/07/libyan-revolution-issues-marxists.↩︎

  6. Solidarity March 23 2011.↩︎

  7. Solidarity May 4 2011.↩︎

  8. The argument of leading AWLer Mark Osborn, testifying before an employment tribunal in November 2012. Further-education lecturer and founding director of the Academic Friends of Israel, Ronnie Fraser, had brought an action against the University and College Union, claiming that its policy of supporting the BDS campaign, as agreed at its annual conference, was “anti-Semitic” and therefore constituted “harassment” of himself as a Jewish member. Osborn testified on behalf of Fraser against the union. His case was dismissed - see www.scribd.com/document/235400428/Mark-Osborn-Cross-Examination. Unusually the UCU claimed its £600,000 costs. There was a final out-of-court settlement in January 2015 - see Times Higher Education January 22 2015.↩︎

  9. K Road ‘Anti-IHRA lobby is defence of left antisemitism’ August 28 2018 - www.workersliberty.org/story/2018-08-29/anti-ihra-lobby-defence-left-antisemitism.↩︎

  10. D Street ‘No way to fight the witch hunt’ Solidarity January 16 2019.↩︎

  11. Email, January 10 2026.↩︎

  12. What follows is a shortened, but suitably edited, version of my article, ‘Say it loud, say it proud’ Weekly Worker September 4 2025 (weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1551/say-it-loud-say-it-proud).↩︎

  13. T Hertzl The Jewish state (1896): www.almendron.com/blog/wp-content/images/2016/11/The-Jewish-State.pdf.↩︎

  14. nationbuilder.com/webelieveinisrael/pages/5169/attachments/original/1746803990/WBIIStopTheHateUk_Booklet.↩︎

  15. 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.↩︎

  16. Note, the AWL’s Martin Thomas calls for exactly that, but, citing the best interests of Israel, does not think Benjamin Netanyahu’s war cabinet is going about it in an effective manner: “We want Hamas crushed (but Israel's onslaught won’t do that, and it is doing vast harm to the civilian population of Gaza). We don’t want Israel crushed” (M Thomas, January 9 2024 - www.workersliberty.org/story/2024-01-09/letter-reply-critics).↩︎

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

  18. “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).↩︎

  19. 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.↩︎

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  27. See T Greenstein ‘Distracting from genocide’ Weekly Worker May 2 2024: weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1489/distracting-from-genocide.↩︎

  28. The Times of Israel January 13 2026.↩︎

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

  30. 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.↩︎

  31. 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).↩︎