WeeklyWorker

Letters

War wish fulfilled

In its September 2 2012 issue, the Weekly Worker published my article, ‘Netanyahu’s war wish’, in which I explained the real strategic motives impelling the Israeli regime to wage war against Iran. The present brief note is an update to that article, in view of the US-Israeli onslaught launched on February 28 (I make no attempt to comment on Trump’s motives, which are less readily amenable to rational analysis).

Most major Israeli actions - even those triggered by apparently unexpected events - are best understood in terms of two strategic aims laid down by the leaders of the Zionist project of colonisation in its early days. Zionism has been extremely consistent and exceptionally successful in pursuing these aims.

The first strategic aim is to get possession of as much as possible of the ‘Promised Land’. This is preferably to be vacant possession, with the native Palestinians and other Arabs ethnically cleansed. The second strategic aim is to win, exercise and secure regional hegemony, so as to make the Zionist state a useful, fierce attack dog, serving the global hegemon - and nourished by it. In pursuit of this strategic aim, Israel seeks to weaken, subdue and fragment its neighbours.

Evidently, this second strategic aim has motivated Israel to attack Iran, the major regional state that has avoided subordination to US-Israeli hegemony. In this connection, the alleged actual or potential nuclear threat posed by Iran is a propaganda fraud, as I explained in detail in my 2012 article. In fact, Benjamin Netanyahu was so worried that the 2015 Iran nuclear deal (the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action) would remove this fictional threat, that he made every effort to get the US to kill the deal. He finally succeeded in 2018, when Trump withdrew from the JCPA. It remained to secure US active participation in a major attack on Iran - a task that Israel was unable to perform on its own. Successive US administrations, including Trump’s first, resisted falling into this trap: they feared another Afghanistan or Iraq. But finally Netanyahu has got lucky with Trump 2.0, who has made lawless aggression his trademark.

Israel’s wars also serve the first strategic aim: grabbing more land, of course; but also perpetrating ethnic cleansing, which is easier to get away with under the fog of war. The present war will, no doubt, see intensification of these activities: continuation of the genocide and tightening military control in Gaza, and escalation of the wave of pogroms committed by settlers and soldiers in the West Bank. Repression and intimidation of Israel’s Palestinian citizens will also be stepped up.

At the time of writing it is impossible to predict how long this war will last and the shape of Iran in its aftermath. Israel’s dream scenario is, of course, the fragmentation of Iran and its final elimination as an obstacle to the Zionist regime’s regional hegemony. But, even if this were to materialise, it will not secure Israel’s hegemony against new threats. A new challenge is in fact looming, albeit underreported by the established commentariat: the challenger is Turkey.

Turkey straddles Europe and the Middle East. For decades, its geopolitical sights were directed westward. A key member of Nato since 1952, it made a strong bid to join the EU, but long negotiations ended in failure for a variety of reasons. Its European efforts rebuffed, Turkey’s geopolitical ambitions pivoted in the 2010s to the Middle East. It has rediscovered its long roots in this region, which, for several centuries, was part of the Ottoman Turkish Empire.

Turkey’s Middle-East assertiveness has been apparent, for example, in the decisive role it played in the overthrow of the Assad regime and installing its own protégé in Damascus. And Turkey is not another Iran: it is a formidable military state (its armed forces are the second-largest in Nato), treated favourably by the world hegemon. It is not going to bow the knee to the Zionist state, but will pose a serious challenge to its regional dominance.

Watch this space.

Moshé Machover
email

Trump vs Iran

In the interesting and important discussion on the Trump attack on Iran at the March 1 Online Communist Forum, there was an important aspect which I think could do with more attention: that is, the sheer size and relative invulnerability of the US military.

Dwight D Eisenhower famously warned about the ‘military-industrial complex’ and, of course, things have got a lot worse since then. Congress - which Eisenhower apparently included in his ‘complex’, but withdrew for ‘constitutional’ reasons - wants to give the Pentagon an extra $500 billion this year. Allegedly, the Pentagon doesn’t know what to do with all this money - though I’m sure they’ll think of something.

Comrades may remember, a few decades ago, the Pentagon passing on some stuff to the US police forces: armoured vehicles, rifles, bulletproof vests … I remember reading an interview with, I think, a small town sheriff.

Drug busts used to entail a couple of police with a search warrant knocking on the door. But, now the police have SWAT teams, they have to use them. So, surround the place, kick the door in, get the inmates on the floor (maybe accidentally shoot an innocent or two). This is ubiquitous now, and a popular TV and film scene or two. But small beer for the manufacturers.

We get tables in the press, mainstream as well as left, showing the expenditure on ‘defence’ (sorry, it’s ‘war’ now, isn’t it?) by the US, compared with everyone else. The US spends more than the next 10-12 countries combined.

What to do with all this military equipment? There’s nothing better than war to empty the warehouses and keep the production lines going. It doesn’t necessarily matter whose war it is - Israel and Ukraine will do, if the US hasn’t got its own (though normally it can launch one).

We can do no worse than look at Tom Lehrer’s words: “Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down? That’s not my department! says Wernher von Braun.”

So we have a massive military, with aircraft carriers, planes, bombs, missiles - what to do with them? They can circle round the South China Sea, poodle around in the Caribbean or, they can go to Iran - and then what? Apparently, senior military folk thought there might be some sort of plan. But Trump wanted to get on with things: after all he’s a ‘man of peace’ - bomb them into obedience and then we’ll have that peace.

But it’s not just Trump and it’s not just Iran. In general, if the US has gone in, allegedly to ‘make peace’, then they’ve made things a lot worse. The north and east of Africa provide many continuing examples. And now we have a US president of enormous ego and reckless narcissism, and the world becomes an even more dangerous place.

And why Iran? For Israel? For the Middle East and its oil? Long-term rancour over the 1979 embassy siege? For Trump, any or all of these. We can only be certain that he has no concern whatsoever for the Iranians who die for his adventure.

We need organised mass parties of the working class all over the world to get rid of these bastards.

Jim Nelson
email

Iran solidarity

Grassroots Left vehemently condemns the unprovoked imperialist attack on Iran, coordinated jointly by the US and Israel - and in the middle of negotiations with the Iranian regime. In a direct hit on a school, dozens of children have been killed. Hundreds, if not thousands, more innocent people will be killed.

The US and Britain are backing Israel’s genocide in Gaza to the hilt. They have no standing to claim that they are supporting democracy in Iran or anywhere else in the Middle East. Trump claims he wants ‘regime change’. But the liberation of Iran from the reactionary regime of the Islamic Republic is the task of the Iranian people and the Iranian working class. Our solidarity is with them.

Every bomb, every aggression and every economic sanction directed by US imperialism against Iran is a blow against the Iranian people, not the regime. That regime draws succour from all attempts at foreign imperialist interference, posing as representatives of the unity of the nation.

The British and American butchers of Baghdad, those enablers of Israel, must get out of the Middle East. Grassroots Left calls on Your Party and the whole British labour and trade union movement to oppose this new imperialist adventure: to oppose Starmer’s intention to increase military spending by billions and to demand that Britain gets out of Nato now.

Sign up to show your support here: grassrootsleft.org.

Grassroots Left
email

Still possible

The triumphant declarations of supporters of The Many would have people believing that they have some sort of majority support among the members of Your Party. The actual first-preference votes, however, indicate that The Many do not have that much support.

For the regional central executive committee votes (that is, not the public office votes) candidates aligned with The Many won only 38.4% of the vote - not that much more than the 30.2% of the Grassroots Left-aligned candidates (this is considering Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi, Elizabeth Bailey and Niall Christie as de facto GL, and considering Jim Monaghan and Sam Gorst as de facto TM).

31.2% of voters cast their first-preference ballot for a candidate not aligned with Grassroots Left or The Many, yet these voters don’t have any representation on the CEC. Those of us who are part of the Grassroots Left must convince our voters to stay as members of Your Party - we can campaign for democratisation of the voting system, which granted The Many 65% of the CEC with only 38% of first-preference votes. That gives the 992 voters of the North East region the same representation as the 4,574 voters from London and twice the representation of the 1,463 voters from Wales.

We can bring the unaligned voters to our side when we campaign for democracy. The majority that voted against the views of Corbyn at conference still exists, even if it didn’t vote entirely for the Grassroots Left slate. I’m not saying this process won’t be difficult - it is going to require a lot of campaigning and convincing people. However, it is possible - much more possible than people seem to think.

 

 

Dovah
Oxfordshire

YP nats

Republican Your Party welcomes the election of Niall Christie to represent YP Scotland on the CEC. We congratulate Niall on winning his majority and commend all who voted for him.

RYP endorsed both him and Rob Rooney (South West) as CEC candidates. We did so on clear political criteria, not met by any other candidates. We endorsed Rob Rooney after he was expelled. He was already on the ballot paper, having secured more than 75 endorsements. His expulsion was a violation of democracy. We did not and do not accept it is legitimate.

While The Many won a majority with 14 seats and Grassroots Left (GL) has seven, three independents - Niall Christie, Sam Gorst and Naomi Wimborne Idrissi - won the remaining seats. We will seek discussions with Niall and the other CEC independents about how we can cooperate.

RYP has argued that Your Party has no future without a programme and unless it breaks from the ideology and programme of social monarchism and unionism. We stood on the following platform:

RYP opposed The Many and the Grassroots Left platforms. Both reflect programmes that fail to respond to the ‘crisis of democracy’ facing the people of England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales.

In the first round of the election campaign YP members (Chris Williamson, Dave Nellist and April Ashley, etc) were barred from standing. In the second round, Rob Rooney (South West), having secured more than the necessary 75 endorsements, was expelled. We opposed and condemned all these exclusions.

Chris Williamson stood on the Republic YP platform. He is a dual member of YP. There was no legitimate democratic reason to remove his rights as a member to stand for office. This was a direct attack on the RYP campaign.

RYP wrote to Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana in defence of these members unjustly barred or expelled. We received no response to our Open Letter. Given the threat posed to members’ democratic rights, we launched a petition calling on the two leaders to respond to our letter and take appropriate action.

The non-response to our open letter and the boycott of our petition by TM and GL and their supporters implies political arrogance, and looks like a failure of leadership. It also looks like a continuation of sectarian and opportunist politics, which is the very thing we need to expunge if we are to build a credible alternative to the Labour Party and Reform UK. It appears that TM and GL are opposed to the programme of RYP (as is their right). But they are conducting their opposition not by open debate, but by bureaucratic action and the well-known ‘tactic’ of refusing to recognise that RYP exists.

The main responsibility for the action against RYP rests with Jeremy Corbyn and his organisers. However, the action of GL is more disappointing, because they have presented themselves as defenders of members’ rights. They simply sat on the fence and turned a blind eye to our open letter and petition.

Our grievances against the former YP provisional joint leadership and their actions against Republic YP remain unresolved. We do not accept the CEC elections have been free and fair. Nevertheless, we accept the view of a majority of members that the newly elected TM-GL leadership should be given the opportunity to lead. However, we must be ready for a continuation of the same modus operandi.

We will continue to highlight the absence of programme and oppose the TM-GL leadership on the grounds that social monarchism and unionism provided no democratic future for the people of England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales. We will challenge the apparent sectarianism and opportunism of TM-GL as inimical to the interests of the working class.

Republic YP
email

All petty?

So Hannah Spencer is now the newly-elected Green MP for Gorton and Denton constituency. She faced a dirty and negative campaign from New Labour. The Greens were accused of wanting to turn people’s daughters into legal prostitutes, and wanting to give schoolkids heroin and crack cocaine. But it didn’t work.

All over the constituency posters heralded “Hannah, the plumber”. The campaign reminds me of those of Militant Labour candidates Dave Nellist, Terry Fields and Pat Wall, who became Labour MPs in the 1987 general election. The only difference between Hannah and Militant Labour candidates is that the latter campaigned on the slogan, “For a worker’s MP on a worker’s wage”.

The Green Party campaign compared Hannah in her plumber’s van to Reform’s Matt Goodwin in his expensive sports car. At Hannah’s college bench, students put up a sign saying, “Ministry of Plumbing and Plastering - Hannah Spencer MP”.

The sad fact is that the Weekly Worker called for a vote for New Labour’s middle class candidate on the basis that Marxists cannot support a Green working class candidate because, in the words of Jack Conrad, the Greens are a petty bourgeois party. Yet Jack conveniently forgets that all parties are petty bourgeois, including the Bolshevik Party, the Labour Party, and sects such as SPEW, the SWP and the RCP.

It is clear that, if Andy Burnham had been New Labour’s candidate, it would have won. The victory of ‘Hannah, the plumber’ has hastened the day that Sir Keir Starmer will be replaced. Yet New Labour, just like the Democrats in the USA, has no policies. All Starmer can say is that Hannah and the Greens are leftwing extremists.

Now that Morgan McSweeney has departed as Sir Keir Starmer’s closest advisor, perhaps New Labour can stop trying to out-Reform Reform, and move to the left by introducing wealth taxes on the rich and super-rich. As Hannah Spencer said in her victory speech, “Working class people are being bled dry by the billionaires”.

McSweeney, just like his mentor, Peter Mandelson, thinks that New Labour voters have nowhere else to go. But the Gorton and Denton by-election showed that New Labour voters will turn to the Greens as a means of fighting the hate and division policies of Reform UK.

John Smithee
Cambridgeshire

Navigation

In the CPGB Draft programme, great emphasis is placed on learning Marx and even taking time off to do it.

Leftwing papers (mostly) are meant to give a Marxist interpretation of current events, often with the odd quote or two from Marx or Lenin, but it never goes beyond that. The smatterings of Marxist sayings on the left isn’t good enough if it wants to build a generation of Marxist revolutionaries dedicated to the overthrow of capitalism. One side of a page in the Weekly Worker should be dedicated to providing the education that’s needed. After all, there is enough material to choose from. There shouldn’t be a conflict with weekly news, as theory puts in proportion the capitalist world and sums up events from a Marxist point of view.

From my own experience of reading Marx, like most theories it’s like navigating in the dark corridor, bumping into the odd cobweb or two until a lightbulb effect begins, where you start putting two and two together and start getting it - even though you may not articulate it in a letter in a paper.

I think this is a missed opportunity for a paper like the Weekly Worker, which is miles ahead of other leftwing papers like Socialist Worker and The Socialist, which are dull and patronise readers as obedient dolts!

Frank Kavanagh
email

Icemen cometh

Yes, ICE in the US is appalling and we need to keep it out of Britain, Robert Jenrick notwithstanding. As a dual national, I find it difficult to even think about travelling, even though I have two perfectly valid passports. But the EU seems to be trying to go one better - aided and abetted by Germany.

Anyone who follows the Electric Intifada will have read about/seen the interview with Huseyin Dogru, which fills in the details. Dogru is a German journalist, who was born and lived all his life in Germany. At one time he had Turkish citizenship too, but now only German. He writes about Gaza, but does not follow the ‘official’ line of the EU or Germany. What chutzpah!

The ministry of foreign affairs in Germany doesn’t like what he writes and has made that clear by sanctioning him. As the minister said, “Those who abuse [freedom of opinion and the press] must be aware that this entails costs and what they can expect as a consequence.” Mark those words: “abuse freedom of opinion and the press”!

This sanctioning is a little different from arresting people who carry signs. Ali Abunimah, the co-founder and host of Electric Intifada, interviewed Dogru on February 19 to gather the details (all my quotes are from the Electric Intifada under the heading, ‘Rights and accountability’).

Because of the sanctions, Dogru has no access to his own money - his bank will not allow it. Abunimah offered to send Dogru groceries and pay for them himself, but Dogru is not allowed to accept any financial or material support, notwithstanding that he already had a child and now a newly born set of twins. He is officially allowed $600 a month from his own account, but his bank refuses to allow him even this. The EU directive calls for up to five years in prison for anyone who violates the sanctions, including Dogru.

Dogru is not allowed to leave the country either. He can’t pay his rent, his lawyers or accept any food, water or medicine from third parties. Technically, as Abunimah makes clear, this includes his wife. The sanctions now also apply to his family - his children, including the newly born twins. Up until recently, his wife was allowed to accept food, money, etc, but Germany chomped down on that.

(Others who have been sanctioned in this way cannot go back to their homes because the sanctions do not allow them to fly over EU territory to get to, say, Switzerland.)

These sanctions were adopted by all EU foreign ministers - without allowing any way for those sanctioned to defend themselves - and are binding on all EU states. What are these sanctions supposed to do? Brussels says that they are “not punitive [sic] and instead seek to bring about a change in the policy of those targeted, with a view to promoting the objectives of the EU’s Common Foreign and Security Policy”.

In other words, sanctions for publishing opinions not in line with Brussels’ policies is now a punishment for non-illegal behaviour - and the writers need to change their opinions sharpish or shut up altogether.

Dogru is the first person in the EU to be sanctioned for covering Germany’s role in the genocide in Gaza (others have been sanctioned for “pro-Russian” statements). However, he is also being sanctioned on the grounds that he is not really German, but actually a Turkish citizen and therefore not covered by EU legal rights.

In other words, his German citizenship is being denied because of his ethnicity. Now where have we seen this before? In the last century maybe? In Germany? The message being sent to people in Germany (and the EU?) whose ancestors come from other countries is certainly clear. But then in Britain we know the outcome of these kind of laws - I remember a young woman named Shamima Begum, still imprisoned in a camp in Syria.

Dogru is, of course, challenging this in the high courts. But this could take years, and what is he and his family to do in the meantime? However, he is determined, because, as he says, once they “set a precedent, they will come after all non-pro-Palestinian voices as well”.

How about this? “First they came for the communists, and I did not speak out, because I was not communist ... then they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out because I was not a socialist … then they came for me. And there was no-one left to speak for me …”

Gaby Rubin
London