31.01.2002

No to reactionary terror

Last week an attack on a bat mitzvah in the northern Israeli city of Hadera. This week a woman suicide bomber detonates herself in the Jaffa district of Jerusalem. The Sharon government and the Israeli Defence Force continues its relentless oppression of the Palestinian people, with Yasser Arafat under siege in Ramallah. Now there is talk of creating a 'hermetic' security cordon which would effectively seal off west Jerusalem from the mainly Palestinian/Arab east section of the city. Under these grim circumstances, the Stop the War Coalition called a timely, and in the event noisy, picket of the Israeli embassy in Kensington. However, the January 26 demonstration turned out to be something of a damp squib, and not just because of the torrential rain. The turnout was disappointing, even taking the adverse weather conditions into account, and of the 300 or so people who took part in the rally/picket, the overwhelming majority were from the Socialist Workers Party. The rest were composed of comrades from the Alliance for Workers' Liberty, Communist Party of Great Britain, International Socialist Group, Workers Power, Lalkarites (ie, Harpal Brar/Stalin devotees) and so on, plus a smattering of muslims, liberals/pacifists and anarchists. More dispiriting was the general political message from the various speakers. The SWP's Lindsey German (editor of Socialist Review and Stop the War executive member), Jeremy Corbyn MP, and representatives from the Association of Islamic Students, Palestinian Solidarity Campaign and the Campaign for Palestinian Rights (there was once again no official Socialist Alliance speaker) all went into auto-denunciation mode: Israeli terror, an extension of the 'war against terrorism', United States-dominated new world order, Sabra and Chitila massacres, Sharon is a bastard, etc, etc. All true of course, but "¦ On the picket, as with other events like it, there was a submerged political agenda. The programme that dares not speak its name. However, it did briefly bob to the surface when we heard the PSC speaker informing us how some Palestinians feel that they "have no choice but to use themselves as human bombs" as part of the struggle. You got the distinct feeling that this was more a benediction than a neutral statement of fact. Such a comment is reminiscent of those who tried to convince us that the September 11 suicide attackers were somehow compelled by a 'higher force' to hijack planes full of civilian passengers, cut the throats of the air stewardesses and fly directly into multi-storey office blocks killing thousands of workers. As Arthur Scargill put it, "there are groups "¦ which believe they have no choice but to hit back at a superpower that ignores United Nations resolutions and international law" (Socialist News - October-November 2001). This type of view, whether from the mouth of Scargill or a Palestinian rights activist, ignores the reactionary politics behind such suicide attacks. These outrages become merely a mistaken (but quite understandable) means to an otherwise noble end. Whether on September 11 or in Israel/Palestine today, the islamist ideology which motivates the suicide attackers is anti-secular and anti-democratic (and invariably anti-semitic to some degree ). It is not enough just to condemn the violence and terror of the Israeli state. We must too attack the forces of islamist reaction, which drive Israeli workers into the hands of Ariel Sharon (or worse) and actually reinforce the grip of Zionist ideology over the jewish people as a whole. We are false friends of the oppressed Palestinian people if we fail to do this and instead treat them as some sort of undifferentiated mass - collective victims-cum-saints who must be applauded, whatever they say or do. Real solidarity and internationalism comes from telling the truth, not indulging in emotive and vicarious third-worldist liberalism. As a coda, it is worth reporting that one soaked demonstrator sidled up to me and said he was "disappointed" that the CPGB and AWL were becoming "so close". Why? Because the AWL believes in "two states", came the curt response. When I informed the comrade that the CPGB also advocates the 'two states solution', his eyes widened in genuine horror and he started muttering, repeatedly, about how such a demand was "racist" and a call for "an imperialist carve-up". He also told me that the majority of people on the march would "strongly disagree" with the 'two states' slogan. No doubt. Still, incoherent though our 'anti-two-stater' friend was, he lucidly revealed the difficult task we have ahead of us to get the bulk of the left to actually think about the Palestinian/Israeli question - which seems to believe that the Israeli nation can be 'uninvented' and its historically constituted people made into 'honorary' Arabs/Palestinians. This is hardly the politics of consistent or extreme democracy, as espoused by Marx and Lenin. You cannot turn the clock back to 1947-48. Danny Hammill