13.05.2009
The debate on Israel-Palestine assessed
Comrades on the left have been given an object lesson in how important political differences should be handled, says Jack Conrad
Since the appearance of my two-part discussion article on the Israel-Palestine question - ‘Beyond Zionism’ and ‘Arab agency and a Marx-Engels analogy’, published in the November 20 and 27 2008 issues of the Weekly Worker - this paper has carried a variety of responses and viewpoints.
Besides a string of contributions in the letters pages ranging from the overtly pro-Zionist to the implicitly pro-Hamas, the Weekly Worker has featured a more restricted set of authors: Tony Greenstein, ‘Beyond Zionism or continuing Zionism?’ (December 11 2008); Jack Conrad, ‘Zionist imperatives and the Arab solution’ (January 22 2009); Moshé Machover, ‘Breaking the chains of Zionist oppression’ (February 19 2009); Peter Manson, ‘Two nations and the Arab solution’ (March 5 2009); James Turley, ‘Carrot and stick’ (March 5 2009); Stan Keable, ‘Nations and rights’ (March 12 2009); Yassamine Mather, ‘Dead and buried’ (March 19 2009); Mike Macnair, ‘Strategic lines and tactical slogans’ (April 16 2009).
Why the narrowing of debate when it comes to the substantive articles? Why have we not sought out and commissioned other, more distant, voices? The answer is straightforward and reflects our general approach. We are first and foremost interested in promoting the fight for a mass Communist Party. Of necessity, that means continuously drawing lines of demarcation.
Frankly, the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty, Harry’s Place, David Aaronovitch, Norman Geras, Nick Cohen, the Euston Manifesto and their ilk are poison when it comes to building a working class alternative to capitalism. Descendants of Eduard Bernstein, Henry Hyndman, James Burnham, George Orwell and MI6 socialism.
Not that the positions of the Socialist Workers Party, International Socialist Group, Andrew Murray, Sami Ramadani, George Galloway and Yvonne Ridley are any less problematic. The doctrine of ‘My enemy’s enemy is my friend’ predisposes them to support Islamic reaction, bogus anti-imperialism and class-collaboration.
Our intention from the beginning was to reassert basic Marxist principles, sharpen polemical weapons, promote strategic thinking, and thus bring added clarity to the ranks of those who not only consider themselves militantly anti-Zionist, but militantly secular and democratic too.
In part at least, this must include a process of rediscovery. A delving back into the past in order to reach forward. Hence, in my original article, the stress on the long-standing idea of an Arab revolution, and the illuminating lessons contained in the writings of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, crucially on German unification, national self-determination and Ireland.
It can usefully be pointed out that my November 2008 two-part article was adapted from earlier material published in the Weekly Worker - some of it worked up in the books Europe: meeting the challenge of continental unity (2002), Remaking Europe (2004) and Fantastic reality (2007). In other words, suggestions that I am trying to sneakily engineer a sudden about-turn in political approach by the CPGB are either mistaken or simply malign. There has been change and development. Also an unmistakable line of continuity, though.
Another introductory point. Whatever country they happen to originate from, all writers of substantive articles in our Israel-Palestine debate are British-based communists. Indeed most are proud to be members of the CPGB. Naturally, despite our areas of disagreement, all of us hope that comrades outside Britain, especially those ‘on the ground’ in the Middle East, will be stimulated, encouraged and drawn towards engaging with us because of what we have to say. As is well known, the Weekly Worker already has a large and organisationally well placed readership internationally.
That said, no-one in this debate, certainly not myself, is claiming that the proletarian vanguard in Israel and Palestine, or for that matter in the wider Arab world, is holding its collective breath awaiting our conclusions, as if we are about to issue a set of theses or some binding resolution in the manner of the 1919-43 Communist International.
Sad to say, its Lilliputian imitators still do - United Secretariat of the Fourth International, International Committee of the Fourth International, League for the Fifth International, Committee for a Workers’ International, International Socialist Tendency, Maoist International Movement, etc, etc. None of us have such pretensions or illusions. Oil-slick internationals are a parody of genuine proletarian internationalism.
As indicated above, our debate was initiated in order to bring additional clarity within the ranks of communists in Britain. Hence we are engaged in what might be called a training exercise. The educators are educating themselves. That much must be obvious from Peter Manson’s extended report of our CPGB members’ aggregate (Weekly Worker March 5 2009). But we are doing so surely, with the common conviction that, in order to become a ruling class, the working class must first master high politics - ie, the politics of all classes.
By definition that must encompass international politics. And on this plane no-one can deny the hugely disproportionate importance exercised by the Israel-Palestine question - the combined Jewish and Arab population of Israel is tiny at just over 7.25 million.
On the one hand, especially since the Yom Kippur war of October 1973, Israel has acted as what Noam Chomsky calls the “Middle East’s Sparta” in service of US imperialism.1 A region that possesses around half of the world’s easily accessible reserves of oil and gas. According to the US Energy Information Administration, 56% of the global total.
On the other hand, the Palestinian cause serves as a potent symbol of defiance and resistance. The savage pummelling of Gaza meted out by the tanks and planes of the Israeli Defence Force in the winter of 2008-09 triggered a series of impressive set-piece demonstrations organised by the Stop the War Coalition. The largest rallied some 100,000 people in London. A rash of spontaneous occupations by university students then followed. Worn as a scarf, the Palestinian black and white chequered kaffiyeh is nowadays a familiar sight on British campuses and streets. Radical youth in particular want to identify with the Palestinians.
A final introductory remark. The CPGB does not regard public disagreements as a prelude to a split. Nothing of the sort. Of course, that would almost certainly be the case with the myriad confessional sects that unfortunately still dominate the left. Amongst them a rigid public conformity of thought is a sine qua non of continued membership. Hence the stifling, repulsive and self-destructive bureaucratic centralist regimes. Supposed to guarantee unity, in fact they brilliantly succeed in engendering split after split.
Open argument, the existence of minorities and the elaboration of alternative approaches are for us signs of vigour, health and strength. Certainly the best means of combating opportunist tendencies and surely the only way of achieving meaningful, effective and lasting revolutionary unity.
If we are going to build the mass Communist Party required for a socialist transition, then it is inevitable that there will be all manner of heated disputes amongst the membership. Ours will necessarily have to be a party that is millions-strong and have the active support of many millions more. The main thing with us, therefore, is unity around accepting the programme as the basis of agreed actions. Practice must be the main criterion of membership. Not belief. The first produces convergence; the other endless fragmentation.
So this article assessing the Israel-Palestine debate is not designed to close things off, to end the open airing of disagreements. No, my intention is to promote further thought and discussion and thus strengthen the cause of unity.
Use-value
Articles featured in the Weekly Worker on Israel-Palestine have in general been of a high standard. We have certainly provided a model that ought to be emulated across the whole left in terms of open debate. Comrades have for the most part honestly engaged with what has actually been said, or at least they have tried to do their best in that direction. That is how polemics ought to be conducted.
Putting transparently false arguments into the mouths of opponents, twisting intended meanings, dishonest quote-chopping, refusing to deal with substantive propositions, playing silly nit-picking games - all these might bring the quickly passing pleasure of making opponents look stupid in the mind’s eye of the author. However, that approach, far too common on the left, wastes the reader’s time, calls forth needless corrective articles, damages the cause of openness, sets back communist unity and is a sure sign of a feeble, sinking or totally busted argument. Such polemics lack use-value.
Comrade Greenstein’s article, ‘Beyond Zionism or continuing Zionism’, therefore stands out rather like the proverbial sore thumb. A pity. His contributions to the Weekly Worker are usually well informed and thoughtful. But he is determined to uphold the British left’s one-state shibboleth - the dogma that the only acceptable solution to the Israel-Palestine question is a single state in which Jews have religious but not national rights. A barely concealed code for reversing the poles of oppression and a recipe for continued failure.
In his own words, comrade Greenstein’s strategy for realising his one-state ‘solution’ rests on projections for when “the oil runs out”. When this happens, imperialism will supposedly callously abandon its Israeli “strategic asset” to its fate. Evidently this is not well founded analysis of future international relations. Rather a sign of desperation and loss of bearings. A giving up on positive outcomes in the here and now and an exasperated flight into fancy. To say the least, there is a glaring false premise.
As oil production in the Middle East peaks, plateaus out and then slowly begins to decline - the International Energy Agency predicts this will begin to happen in 2030 - the contention is that the US would lose interest in Israel and presumably the Middle East as a whole. Hardly convincing. Oil would in fact become ever harder and more expensive to extract. Hence an ever more valuable commodity. Market prices would spiral upwards. Control over oil fields would become more and more vital strategically. The elementary laws of supply and demand tell us that.
No, in all likelihood the US would continue to fund, protect and use its Sparta under declining oil conditions in order to police, intimidate and when necessary punish neighbouring countries. Not least those with significant oil reserves. Because the Israeli-Jewish population is ever fearful of the internal and external Arab threat - military, economic, political, demographic, etc - it means that the alliance with the US has a solid democratic mandate. In no small measure this is what gives the Zionist regime a stability that is so clearly absent in Jordan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Syria, etc.
Anyway, we have just dealt with the strongest plank in comrade Greenstein’s argument. In comparative terms the rest is far weaker. He feels compelled to rubbish the CPGB and mock my supposed inability to grasp and report elementary facts. In so doing, however, he repeatedly shoots himself in the foot and calls into question his trustworthiness as a writer.
To support his one-state ‘solution’ comrade Greenstein paints me as “closely aligned with the AWL”. Tell that to Sean Matgamna. Indeed, he insists that disputes between the CPGB and the social-imperialist AWL are mere “spats”. What, like whether to excuse or to condemn an Israeli nuclear strike on Iran? Troops out of Iraq and Afghanistan now? In that same manner he wants the reader to believe that Jack Conrad shares the “perspective” of the Israeli colonial settlers, is indifferent to the “horrors suffered by the Palestinians”, has an “imperialist mentality” and supposedly is so pig-ignorant about the subject at hand that he does not even know that there are 1.3 million Arabs living in Israel. Etc, etc.
Laughable, yes; sad, yes; dishonest, maybe. Have a look back over past issues of the Weekly Worker: the front pages featuring Israel-Palestine, the demands Hopi makes for stopping Israeli aggression, the role of Communist Students in the university occupations in solidarity with Gaza. Then there is the very article of mine comrade Greenstein was criticising for being ignorant of the Palestinian Arabs. I write of “Israel’s remaining 1.5 million Palestinian Arabs” who are “treated as second-class citizens”.2
No need to quibble over the difference between 1.3 and 1.5 million Palestinian Arabs. I shall not accuse the comrade of underestimating their numbers. The point has been made. I know that Arabs live in Israel and I take their side against Zionist oppression. But throwing any charge that comes to hand will do for comrade Greenstein. As a result, however, he inadvertently contradicts himself time and again. Howlers litter every column of text.
For example, comrade Greenstein contemptuously dismisses my statement that “Conventionally, in Britain at least, what passes for the mainstream left damns Zionism as almost akin to fascism” and this routinely goes hand in hand with calls for the “destruction of Israel”.3
“Not true,” bellows the comrade in full-blown protest mode. Then, in an attempt to give substance to his lamentable attack, he declares: “I know no-one on the left who considers Israel a fascist country”.4 Of course, I did not write that the left in Britain “considers Israel fascist”. To repeat, I said Zionism is treated as “almost akin to fascism”. No big argument here, but not the same thing.
Leave aside comrade Greenstein’s sloppy, not to say annoying, mangling of my words. Is there any substance to the charge I made? Well, reading the letters pages of this paper a few years back we discover a reasonably well known member of the left in Britain who proudly announces: “Yes, I want the state of Israel destroyed.”5 His name? Tony Greenstein. No momentary slip. Surely the comrade’s consistent and often stated opinion. Until, that is, it comes to slagging off the CPGB.
What of the left damning Zionism as “almost akin to fascism”? The numerous motions which equated Zionism and fascism during the 1980s were utmost in my mind. On that basis various leftwing groups actually fought to no-platform Zionism in the National Union of Students. Comrade Greenstein stands squarely in that tradition. Even in his December 11 2008 contribution, ‘Beyond Zionism or continuing Zionism’, there is reference to the “Nazi-style racism of the Israelis” and claims that Histadrut, Israel’s trade union federation, redefined class in a way “not dissimilar to the ‘socialism’ of the Nazi Party”. Charge proven beyond reasonable doubt, I think.
After finishing his article, comrade Greenstein really ought to have done the reader a favour and gone over his 3,500 words. Not only for the sake of spelling and grammar, but consistency of argument. Perhaps, though, he was having a bad day or had time pressures that made that difficult or impossible. If that was the case, better to have waited a week or two before clicking the ‘send’ button. There was no rush. No deadline to meet.
Are the Jews a nation?
All comrades in our Israel-Palestine debate are agreed: the Jewish people as a whole do not constitute a nation. Zionist mythology. There is a not unfounded suggestion that the Jewish Shtetl in medieval Poland had nation-like features. Yet these semi-autonomous micro-states were long ago swept away by a combination of feudal decay and capitalist development. Equally to the point, they never included any more than a small minority of the world’s Jewish people within their pinched borders.
Nation-states typically emerge from the womb of feudalism and are based on the existence of a common territory, language, economy, etc. There are between 12 and 20 million Jews worldwide today (that includes secular Jews, of course). Living on every inhabited continent, they speak a giddy range of native tongues. English, Russian, Spanish, Arabic, Turkic. Jews as a whole therefore constitute not a nation, but a people-religion. Another people-religion being the Sikhs.
Hence Jewishness might once have referred to holding a common faith and, in some parts of the world, a common, legally sanctioned caste position or economic function. Following in the footsteps of Karl Marx and Karl Kautsky, the Belgian revolutionary communist Abram Leon famously described the Jews of feudal Europe as a “people-class” in his influential book The Jewish question (1946). Nowadays, however, being Jewish is more about imagined ancestry, cultural practices and habits and how one is seen by others. Economics has little or nothing to do with it.
Are the Israeli Jews a nation?
What of the Jews in Israel? I have shown that they are an exception and do constitute a nation. Israeli Jews speak the same language, inhabit the same territory, have the same culture and sense of identity. Millions of Jews have “migrated to Israel, learnt Hebrew, intermarried, had children, assimilated and made and remade the Israeli-Jewish nation.” Naturally many new migrants, such as those from the ex-Soviet Union, are a partial exception when it comes to language. However, their children speak Hebrew at school and are becoming assimilated or are already unmistakably Israeli. Comrade Machover calls them the Hebrew nation and I have often used the same designation. Either way, the Hebrew-speaking Jews of Israel are the sole Jewish nation in the world today.
This recent development has to be categorically distinguished from the much older and much wider Jewish people-religion. Yes, nations can be formed very quickly in historical terms. It does not take hundreds or thousands of years, as nationalist historians pretend. Anyway, as a result of this process of making and remaking, the Israeli-Jewish nation “alone inhabits the territory of Israel and uses Hebrew as its everyday language”.6
Comrade Greenstein makes a complete hash of dealing with the above set of propositions. Maybe it was the way things were formulated. Not so, I fear. As the reader will appreciate, I am trying my best to be generous. Strangely, the comrade maintains that the above line of argument “demonstrates that Jack Conrad simply is ignorant of the distinguishing features of the Israeli state and Zionism.” This is how comrade Greenstein proceeds to reason: “If millions of Jews had migrated to Israel and intermarried, then Israel would indeed be a society capable of transformation. Since Israel is one of the few states in the world where there is no civil marriage it is difficult to see how millions of Jews can have intermarried!”7
Well, Jews have migrated to Israel from many different countries. Over a million from the former Soviet Union since 1990. A heterogeneous mixture of the cruelly duped, the genuinely desperate, secular dreamers, religious fanatics and cheap adventurers still trickle into the promised land. True, they, as Israeli citizens, have to undergo religious ceremonies - Jewish, Christian, Muslim or Druze - if they wish to legally marry under Israeli law. There is no recognised civil marriage within Israel. A cause of bitter complaint amongst non-orthodox and secular Israeli Jews (the majority).
Nonetheless, Jews who originated from the US do marry Jews who originated from Europe; Jews who originated from Russia do marry Jews who originated from Iraq; etc, etc. It can only be called intermarriage. Why does comrade Greenstein dispute it? These couples then have children who in turn marry. Ditto, they use Hebrew as an everyday language (elsewhere amongst Jews Hebrew is a sacred or liturgical language, used like Latin once was by the Catholic church).
My above statement that the Israeli-Jewish nation “alone inhabits the territory of Israel” is the source of comrade Greenstein’s daft claim that I am unaware of Israel’s 1.5 million Palestinian Arabs. Just to put the record straight, to leave not a shadow of doubt, here I was distinguishing between the Israeli-Jewish nation and those Jews who are members of other nations.
I am sure, in this case at least, that comrade Greenstein simply misunderstood what I wrote. He should not have. Presumably he was thinking of Jews marrying Christians and Jews marrying Muslims. Very rare. However, my intended meaning was clear as day. But determination to make me appear woefully ignorant, rubbishing the CPGB and upholding the one-state shibboleth presumably blinded him to what was there in black and white.
While communists recognise that a definite Israeli-Jewish nation has come into existence, we insist that the Zionist state of Israel must go. That is a basic democratic demand, because Zionism is inextricably bound up with territorial expansionism, an ongoing colonial-settler project and therefore Palestinian oppression. Do we single out Israel for special treatment? No, not in particular. The demand for the abolition of the Zionist state fully accords with our attitude towards all existing states: the parliamentary-monarchist regimes of Great Britain, Sweden, Spain and Holland, the presidential republics of France, the United States and Venezuela, the naked dictatorships of China, North Korea, Burma and Sudan. All must go. Everywhere we fight for republican democracy and putting the working class into power.
However, to demand the abolition of the Israeli-Jewish nation - not the Zionist regime - is utterly reactionary. Such a perspective is either naive or genocidal. Islamists, for example, dream of sending the post-1948 Israeli Jews “back to where they came from” (a sentiment echoed by Weyman Bennett of the Socialist Workers Party’s central committee). The Israeli Jewish nation is historically constituted and any democratic solution to the Israel-Palestine must gain its consent.
Incidentally, the position of Rhodesian or South African whites is in no way analogous to that of the Israeli Jews. Nevertheless, a standard claim made by comrade Greenstein. They never, nor could they, form a nation. Nowhere in meaningful territorial terms did they form a historically constituted majority. Eg, every ‘white’ area in apartheid South Africa - where they spoke Afrikaans or English - was also permanently inhabited by numerous house servants and relied upon a small army of incoming workers who commuted daily from the surrounding townships. The same cannot be said of Israeli Jews. In central Israel, especially along the Tel Aviv-Haifa coastal strip, they form a clear and stable majority.
Comrade Greenstein leaps upon mention of Galilee in my original article. He says that here the majority of the population are non-Jewish and quotes a leaked Israeli state document outlining a programme for the “Judaisation of Galilee”. This memorandum was published by the Mapan newspaper Al Hamishmar in April 1976.
Once again, perhaps it was the way I formulated things that caused the problem. I was simply backing up the argument that the Israeli-Jewish population has a real common territory. What of Galilee? Here comrade Greenstein has a telling point at last. A slim majority officially consists of so-called “minorities”, while 46.9% of the population are Israeli-Jews.8 Nevertheless, my proposition that Israeli Jews constitute a nation, forming a clear, 80% majority in central Israel, remains.
A non-Zionist Israel
Comrade Mather accepts the fact that there is a Hebrew nation, but appears unwilling to follow this through to the point of self-determination. She repeats time and again that religion and nation ought not to be conflated. Quite right. There exists no Muslim, Christian or Hindu nation. Nor a Jewish nation either. “Marxists,” she says, “can only define the current Israeli state as a religious/racist state.” Yes, the national chauvinist ideology of the Zionist regime is beyond dispute. I readily concur.
However, she goes on to say that a “non-Zionist state for ‘Israeli Jews’ is meaningless”.9 The quote marks put around ‘Israel Jews’ are comrade Mather’s. And yet, contradictorily, she writes about the rights of the Hebrew nation. Does this nation, whatever name we choose to call it by, have the right to self-determination up to and including the right to establish an independent “non-Zionist state”? We are not told. But if it does, then even by default we immediately move away from the stagnant waters of a single-state solution in terms of what we would allow - albeit, in my programme, within the overall context of a working class-led Arab revolution.
Claims by one-state dogmatists that recognising the Hebrew nation’s right to self-determination is nothing but a revamping of the Camp David agreement, the Oslo accord, etc are so obviously wrong and, let me say, politically jaundiced, that they hardly warrant a reply. And the fact that some Palestinian leaders are now prepared to sue for a loser’s peace within a one-state greater Israel (ie, incorporating Gaza and the West Bank) only serves for me to underline the failure of the ‘one Palestinian state’ solution.
Arab revolution
Comrade Mather quotes me saying that “Israel is allied to the most powerful nation on the earth and is a regional superpower in its own right”. Here I was reinforcing the point that the Palestinians, by their own efforts in isolation, cannot possibly establish a single state over the whole of pre-1947 Palestine in which the Hebrew-speaking Jews have religious but not national rights. They simply lack the military muscle and international connections. Added to which, of course, the Palestinians are debilitatingly split territorially between Hamas in Gaza and Fatah on the West Bank and therefore cannot achieve anything beyond abject surrender or hopeless resistance.
I was also highlighting the vital question of agency and the determining relationship between means and ends - agency and solution forming a dialectical unity. Hence the perspective of the Arab revolution.
Comrade Mather draws a rather different conclusion. Or rather she has me drawing a rather different, not to say bizarre, “logical conclusion”. “Surely,” she says, “if we take this argument to its logical conclusion we should compromise with US allies throughout the world. Should we support Mubarak in Egypt or King Abdullah in Jordan because the US is their powerful ally?”
But there was no “argument” in that sense. It is a simple statement of fact that the US is the most powerful nation on earth and that Israel is a Middle Eastern superpower. And the conclusion I drew - my real conclusion - was certainly not to support Mubarak in Egypt or King Abdullah in Jordan.
On the contrary, my “logical conclusion” was that Mubarak and Abdullah must be overthrown by the revolutionary actions of the popular masses below. Along with the corrupt regimes in Syria, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, the Gulf, Libya, Morocco, Tunisia, etc. Armed with such a perspective, our comrades in the Middle East can seriously envisage abolishing Zionist Israel and ending the national oppression of the Palestinians.
Incidentally, the call for an Arab revolution is a matter of strategy - not tactics, as comrade Macnair suggests. How things are presented in terms of propaganda and agitation is, of course, tactical. But the Arab revolution is in its own way on a par with Polish, Italian or German unification in 19th-century Europe. An historic task still awaiting fulfilment.
Comrade Mather rightly informs us that there have been various Arab unity projects in recent times. Eg, Nasser’s United Arab Republic and the attempts at Ba’athist unity (Iraq and Syria). All failed. Not only did they involve conflict with other countries in the region such as Iran. The continued oppression of national minorities was inbuilt into them too. The Kurds, Berbers, Armenians, etc were to be permanently subordinated to the Arabs.
Comrade Mather says we should not try to turn back the clock and revive Arab nationalism. I wholeheartedly agree. Despite that, she seems to toy with the idea of a greater Syria (which, if it were under the leadership of the present regime, would certainly involve all manner of oppressions). In Ottoman times the province of Syria covered an area that included not only today’s Syria, but also Lebanon, Israel-Palestine and Jordan. First popularised by the Syrian Social Nationalist Party - founded in the mid-1930s on the model of the Nazi Party - this programme has been colonised by the ruling Ba’ath party under Bashar Assad. A greater Syria also has attractions for comrade Macnair.
However, no-one who has been writing in the Weekly Worker, certainly not me, is advocating some rerun of either Nasserism or Ba’athism. Nor is anyone proposing a new version of the two-state solution proposed by US imperialism, for that matter. Anyway, the Arab revolution, comrade Mather tells us, ended in failure, led to the rise of political Islam and “never gained support amongst the working class”.
True, the ‘official communist’ parties were not enthusiasts for the Arab revolution. Their version of socialism came straight from Moscow and began in strategic terms with an alliance with the ‘progressive’ national bourgeoisie. It was always firmly within the existing national frame and basically implied one-party dictatorship and universal nationalisation. But what we are looking forward to is working class leadership within Egypt, Syria, Jordan, etc under the banner of wider Arab unity. Doubtless the idea of Arab unification is more popular in Egypt than Morocco. The task of communists, however, is not to carry out opinion polls and act according to their results. We must chart a route map for world revolution. The demand for Arab unification is a democratic one and the working class has every interest in making it their cause.
Comrade Machover shares this perspective. Not, I think, merely in order to “get us to think outside the box”. Rather because there are compelling objective and subjective factors that allow for such an outcome. The Arab revolution has to be seen as bound up with other struggles, including the one to put the European Union under working class rule.
Workers in the Arab world must be won away from the politics that subordinates them to petty bourgeois, Islamic and military socialisms. Hugely damaging to the point of being suicidal. Arab unification must be realised under independent working class leadership.
Does this mean perpetuating national oppression? Obviously no, not at all. Where national questions exist there should be measures introduced to ensure full equality. That must include the right to self-determination up to and including the right to form a separate state. A non-Zionist Israel should be offered associate status by an Arab Union of States. Ditto Kurdish or Berber states if they happen to come into existence. However, we seek to maximise unity, in the first place the unity of the working class. We certainly want national self-determination exercised in favour of unity. So, if the communists were successful, there would be national, religious and linguistic minorities living alongside the Arab majority as equals.
Comrade Machover envisages a federal Arab Union. I have no problem with that as a transitional arrangement. Surely though we should wherever possible seek centralised unity. The most effective, the most democratic, the most powerful form of working class rule.
This was the programme of that part of the working class in Germany that acted under the guidance of the Marx-Engels team and the Neue Rheinische Zeitung in the revolutionary year of 1848. Doubtless the demand for German unification was stronger in this or that petty state, compared with some other petty state. There were dozens of them. But communists in Germany did not bow to backward narrow-mindedness and local fears and prejudices. No, they fought for a single republic and indivisible unity. That did not make them nationalists. Prussian Germany was to be broken up. German Poland was to be separated off and reunited with Austrian and Russian Poland. Marx was insistent on that. A two-state solution, if you like. Revolutionary Germany and a unified Poland would then team up against Russian tsarism and look for allies in the west in a great struggle for democracy across the whole of Europe.
The working class could only realistically aspire to come to power in the wide space of a united Germany. Why? Because it needed the unified market and capitalist development that would come with it in order to become the majority class in the nation. And, of course, there were other candidates who wished to unite Germany, both in their interests and their image. Besides the cowardly, dithering and decidedly unheroic bourgeoisie, there were the Hohenzollerns and the Habsburgs. Marx, it hardly needs saying, did not urge the working class to trail behind the bourgeoisie, let alone the dynastic ambitions of Prussia or Austria.
Comrade Greenstein objects to my use of Germany as an analogy to help us get historic focus on the uncompleted democratic task of uniting the Arab world. “Another absurdity,” he snorts. “Germany rapidly became one of the major industrial powers in the world once it had a unified market. The Arab lands are dominated by imperialism.” Well, I do know that, comrade Greenstein. But we hardly take Otto Bismarck as our historical model. The reason why we can usefully look back to Germany in 1848 is that the working class could have taken the lead in the fight for unification.
Self-determination
Marxists do not deny the right of the Israeli Jewish nation to self-determination, on the basis of some half-baked or perverted reading of classic texts. The right to self-determination is not a communist blessing exclusively bestowed upon the oppressed. It is fundamentally a demand for equality. All nations must have the equal right to determine their own fate - as long as that does not involve the oppression of another people. Hence communists recognise that the US, German and French nations have self-determination. Today that is generally unproblematic. We simply desire to see that right extended to all nations.
Comrade Turley takes a very, very long journey to arrive at that conclusion. I think the reply penned by Stan Keable was a useful corrective. But at least comrade Turley admits the political advantages of raising the demand for Hebrew national self-determination. It builds trust between Arabs and Jews, lessens fears and helps build a fifth column inside Israel.
Comrade Greenstein cannot countenance any such perspective. An Israel-Jewish state, a Hebrew state, by definition is equated with oppression. Going off on one of his tangents, he tells me that the partition of states under imperialism is always reactionary. He cites Ireland, Cyprus and India. But he clearly realises that he is walking on thin ice, and retreats. There is Czechoslovakia’s ‘velvet’ divorce, he owns up. He could have mentioned Norway and Sweden too. There can be the “free and voluntary separation of peoples”, even under the conditions of capitalism. At last comrade Greenstein is spot on.
Notes
1. N Chomsky The fateful triangle London 1983, p21.
2. Weekly Worker November 20 2008.
3. Ibid.
4. Weekly Worker December 11 2008
5. Weekly Worker July 20 2006.
6. Weekly Worker November 20 2008.
7. Weekly Worker December 11 2008.
8. www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3481768,00.html
9. Weekly Worker March 19 2009.