05.08.2009

The Israel-Palestine question once again

Jack Conrad responds to Tony Greenstein and critiques third-worldist economism

Besides working as secretary of Brighton and Hove TUC Unemployed Workers Centre, Tony Greenstein is a leftish member of the Alliance for Green Socialism. For example, while the AGS agreed �by a very small margin�¹ to critically participate in the red-brown No2EU bloc for the June 4 European elections,² comrade Greenstein is on record as forthrightly opposing a fortress Britain and all immigration controls as a matter of elementary principle.³ Good on him. Same cannot be said of AGS leader Mike Davis.⁴

Above all though, comrade Greenstein is a pugnacious anti-Zionist blogger, writer and activist.⁵ He takes great pride in having been a member of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign since its foundation in 1982. I am glad to say the comrade is also a contributor to this publication. His review articles are often pleasingly edgy and always well informed. Anyway, in his role as a pugnacious anti-Zionist blogger, writer and activist the comrade unhesitatingly leapt straight into our debate on the Israel-Palestine question. A debate which we began in late 2008 with my two-part article, �Beyond Zionism� and �Arab agency and a Marx-Engels analogy�.⁶

Alongside a string of letters, ranging from the overtly pro-Zionist to the implicitly pro-Hamas, the Weekly Worker featured the following tranche of authors, listed here according to date: Tony Greenstein, �Beyond Zionism or continuing Zionism?� (December 11 2008); Jack Conrad, �Zionist imperatives and the Arab solution� (January 22 2009); Mosh� 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); and Mike Macnair, �Strategic lines and tactical slogans� (April 16 2009).

All were surveyed in my last contribution - �The debate on Israel-Palestine assessed� (Weekly Worker May 14 2009). Substantive areas of agreement and disagreement between myself and other comrades were located and briefly explored; and in the name of clarity, political hygiene and taking the debate forward, I disposed of various obvious misconceptions and false lines of argument. Naturally, in the process, I took the opportunity to reiterate and further bolster my three-pronged central thesis:

• No democratic solution to the Israel-Palestine question is possible within the narrow frame of 1947, pre-partition, Palestine. The balance of forces is completely stacked against the Palestinians.
• Communists in the region are undoubtedly right when they base their programmatic strategy on securing working class leadership over the uncompleted struggle for Arab national unification.
• There exists an historically established Israeli-Jewish, or Hebrew, nation. Within the context of a communist strategy for an Arab revolution Israeli Jews must be guaranteed full national rights. By definition that includes the right to a separate, non-Zionist, Hebrew state. Such a right has as much to do with the present as it does the future. Communists have every interest in maximising the anti-Zionist section of the Hebrew population.

As is his wont, comrade Greenstein fired off another swift rejoinder. He does constitute something of a one-man instant response unit. However, his latest article, �Self-determination is not an abstract principle�, like his first, is a disappointment. Most of what comrade Greenstein writes is a complete muddle. Nevertheless, while the comrade introduces not a few original pieces of muddle into the debate, the fact of the matter is that mostly he faithfully reproduces the muddle of what I shall call third-worldist economism.

Third-worldist economism is characterised by a loss of faith in the working class of the advanced capitalist countries as a revolutionary class, a substitutionist reliance on national struggles in the so-called third world and a casual or even contemptuous attitude to democracy. A giddy, widespread and pernicious phenomenon which manifests itself not only with the devotees of the latest Bonapartist messiah - today Hugo Ch�vez - but amongst the Labour left, �official communism�, Maoism, post-Trotsky Trotskyism, etc.

Hence it is worth discussing a few of comrade Greenstein�s numerous political errors on Israel-Palestine, though this will try the patience of some, and though it will mean repeating elementary truths which most supporters of the Weekly Worker learned and understood many years back.

Debate

Let us begin with comrade Greenstein�s very own muddle. In his first contribution he luridly painted the CPGB as �closely aligned� with the social-imperialist Alliance for Workers� Liberty. Our differences were mere �spats�. On top of that, Jack Conrad was absurdly accused of sharing the �perspective� of Israeli colonial settlers. Even being �indifferent� to the �suffering of the Palestinians�.⁷

Now, doing a somersault, comrade Greenstein says: �I do not consider the CPGB and the AWL to be politically similar.�⁸ Just that he fears the CPGB is in danger of going the �way� of the AWL. It is not �unknown for revolutionary groups� to move to the right and adapt to existing circumstances, he touchingly informs us (as if he was unassociated with the pro-No2EU AGS). Nor, comrade, is it �unknown� for semi-detached members of amorphous right-centrist groups to move further to the right and adapt to existing circumstances. Both statements are, of course, banal truisms.

Instead of indulging unfounded fears or engaging in dishonest invention, let us squarely look at the facts. The AWL refused to call for the immediate - ie, unconditional - withdrawal of British troops from Iraq. Not the CPGB. The AWL cannot countenance the demand that Palestinian refugees must have the right to return to their ancestral homeland. The CPGB is for the free movement of all individuals. The AWL�s patriarch, Sean Matgamna, brazenly describes himself as a �Zionist�. The CPGB is militantly anti-Zionist. The AWL�s leadership is quite prepared to excuse an Israeli bunker buster strike on Iran�s nuclear facilities. The CPGB launched a hard-hitting campaign to expose the AWL. Israel is not seriously threatened by Iran. Israel is the threat. No need to go on.

�Less speed, more thought� ought to be the motto when approaching orthodox Marxist positions and fully considered political proposals. However, because of the shallowness of his theory and eagerness to dash off a reply, the comrade trips over the heels of his own argument time and again. As with his first attempt back in December 2008, this produces a polemic with far less use-value than might otherwise have been the case with a little more time given over to critical reflection and due consideration.

For example, he actually declares that �states and nations usually correspond�. Clearly a blunder; and therefore it is a complete waste of time discussing comrade Greenstein�s tortured defence of this statement. Ditto, his refusal to recognise that at various times Marx and Engels advocated a two-state solution in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. That is, the complete separation of Britain and Ireland. The comrade instinctively, almost childishly, rejects the term �two-state solution�, though there was a unified state that constitutionally joined Britain and Ireland from 1801 to 1921. During that time Ireland was no �normal� colony. For example, Irish MPs sat in the House of Commons. Not the case with Australia, Nigeria, Egypt or India. Note, Marx and Engels also envisaged a reorganised, republican, unity when the Chartist movement rode high and a federal Britain-Ireland arrangement in the latter part of the 19th century.

Some have rather unkindly remarked that comrade Greenstein hits the �send� button on his computer before going through the trouble to think through what he has written. Obviously untrue. Nevertheless, one can see why the charge is made.

Comrade Greenstein begins his latest remarks by sillily claiming to be �slightly bemused� as to why I chose to reply to his article six months after it was first published. But, comrade, you should not be bemused. Not even slightly. There is no mystery. The answer is bleeding obvious.

• Firstly, the Israel-Palestine question, in terms of population numbers, size, natural resources, etc, is of vastly disproportionate geo-political importance. Certainly due to abundant US military support Israel is a regional superpower. Meanwhile Palestine serves as an ever potent symbol of resistance internationally. Especially amongst radicalised youth. Demonstrations in solidarity with Gaza brought many thousands out onto the streets in late 2008 and early 2009 and there followed a rash of university occupations. So interest in the subject is keen, widespread and ongoing.
• Secondly, the left in Britain, including the AGS, continues to peddle the stale, �one Palestinian state� dogma of third-worldist economism. Israel is illegitimate and ought to be wiped from the face of the map. Replacing it, there must be a single Palestine �from the river to the sea� (both an Islamist and a �leftwing� slogan).
• Thirdly, and more to the immediate point at issue, my last article on the subject, �The debate on Israel-Palestine assessed�, appeared under a self-explanatory title. It was a commentary on an open-ended debate which at the time of publication had been going on for roughly six months. Naturally, comrade, that included dealing with your article.

Comrade Greenstein is fully aware of the huge political importance of the Israel-Palestine question. Of that there can be no doubt. But is he unaware of the debate we have carried in this paper? Surely not. He is a regular reader and can frequently be found expressing a case-hardened opinion on Israel-Palestine in our letters pages.

Comrade Greenstein�s �Beyond Zionism or continuing Zionism� may have been the first response to my two-part opening article.⁹ However, as shown by the list provided above, his reply was one of many. Incidentally, I commented that our ongoing debate provides a model for the left in Britain. The CPGB can contain within its ranks many opinions on the Palestine-Israel question and we experience no problem whatsoever in publishing them for everyone to read.

Fascism

Another muddle. But this time, thankfully, we move into territory where we begin to tackle the problems of third-worldist economism in general and not just comrade Greenstein. Not that we can get there straightaway.

In my opening contribution I wrote: �Conventionally, in Britain at least, what passes for the mainstream left damns Zionism as almost akin to fascism.� That, I added, goes hand in hand with calls for the �destruction of Israel�. Surely an uncontroversial statement of fact.

Comrade Greenstein was determined to disagree. He, after all, is an expert with many years of experience in the Palestine solidarity movement.¹⁰ I am just some parvenu and would-be guru in his book and therefore, by implication, in need of a good slapping down. Anyway, comrade Greenstein bluntly declares: �Not true.� He continues by maintaining: �I know no-one on the left who considers Israel a fascist country.�

Actually I did not write that the left in Britain, or elsewhere, �considers Israel a fascist country� (though, as I will show, not a few do). I said that it is common to treat Israel as �almost akin� to fascism. Either way, the expert is clearly wrong on this despite all his years in the Palestine solidarity movement.

Go to any Stop the War Coalition demonstration. Take a look at the banners, badges, placards and T-shirts. Discuss with people on leftwing stalls. Read their papers. Afterwards visit their websites. And funnily enough amongst those you will find treating Israel as �almost akin� to fascism is comrade Greenstein himself.

He repeatedly draws parallels between Nazi Germany and Israel both in his first and second replies to me � and in countless other articles, blogs and letters besides. He lambastes the �Nazi-style racism of the Israelis� and rounds on Histadrut, Israel�s trade union federation, for redefining class in a way �not dissimilar to the �socialism� of the Nazi Party�.¹¹ Marriage laws, citizenship criteria, etc, are cited in exactly the same manner.

To underline the �akin to fascism� point let me sketch out the relevant history. Tony Cliff, the SWP�s founder, recalls how in the 1930s the Zionist terror organisation led by Avraham Tehomi, the Irgun, �used the Hitler salute and wore the brown shirts�.¹² Though never a mass organisation, the Irgun was unmistakably fascistic in spirit and fascistic in practice. Menachem Begin became its leader in 1943. There were numerous anti-Arab provocations, attacks and outrages. The Irgun savagely massacred over a hundred Palestinian men, women and children in the village of Deir Yassin on April 9 1948. A notorious incident that gained worldwide publicity. In a personal message Begin fulsomely praised the cold-blooded ruthlessness of his gallant fighters. Understandably, Albert Einstein, Hannah Arendt, Sidney Hook and other Jewish intellectuals recoiled in disgust and worriedly denounced Begin as the �latest manifestation of fascism� in a collective letter published in the New York Times in December 1948.¹³

Nor can there be any denying the inspiration provided by Benito Mussolini�s corporate state for the Zionist revisionists around Vladimir Jabotinsky (1880-1940), whose spiritual heirs established Likud in 1973. Its first chair was Begin, who - breaking Labour�s three decades of domination - became prime minister of a rightwing coalition four years later on May 17 1977. That did not, however, mean that Israel had gone fascist.

Leon Trotsky, let us recall, defined fascism as being a particular form of counterrevolution under conditions of decaying capitalism. The role of fascism was to smash the �organisations of the working class� in �service of capital�.¹⁴ But what marked it out from classic Bonapartism was the use of the enraged petty bourgeoisie and non-state fighting formations as a social battering ram. That said, in power, fascism loses its distinct features, becomes bureaucratised and evolves into something pretty much indistinguishable from rightwing authoritarianism. I consider Trotsky our best starting point when it comes to discussing fascism.

Likud was founded as a right-populist Zionist party. A party of the constitution. A party of law and order. There were no Likud non-state fighting formations. The enemy that must be beaten is not the organised working class. It is the Palestinians � and today the Israeli Defence Force have them by the throat. The IDF dates from 1948, of course, and the formal transformation of the Haganah into a state body and the absorption of the Irgun and other such terrorist organisations.

Likud�s attitude towards the Palestinians is nakedly malevolent, prejudiced and imperialistic. In particular an intransigent image over the West Bank and the settlements is upheld. Turning this into a winning formula electorally, Likud champions the �war on terrorism�, endorses religious sentiments and rides on the back of a make-believe common Jewish history. Showing the abnormal nature of Israeli politics, Likud�s popular base is found primarily amongst the poorer, lower status working class Sephardi Jews. Israeli elections mainly revolve around territory, security and peace. Not economics, welfare and class.

Inevitably, given the theoretical decay of the opportunist left, with the electoral shifts in Israel further and further to the right, we find that the term �fascism� is increasingly used nowadays as a throwaway insult, an expression of moral outrage or simply a way of heatedly conveying what is politically objectionable: ie, foreign military adventures, hatred of migrants or police repression.

Of course, words are nothing but words, and people will use them as they see fit. However, in the course of a debate, Marxists must insist upon precise definitions. That we fail to get from comrade Greenstein and third-worldist economism.

The present Israeli cabinet under Likud prime minister Binyamin �Bibi� Netanyahu contains ultra-right hawks such as Daniel Hershkowitz, and most notoriously Avigdor Lieberman, foreign minister and one of four deputy prime ministers. Many on the left brand him a fascist or even a Nazi because of his rabble-rousing anti-Arab rhetoric. Comrade Greenstein included. Hence the commonly heard term �Zionazi�.

Using exactly the same slipshod method, Ali Abunimah, co-founder of Electronic Intifada in the US, argues on ZNet, that �Israel today is lurching into open fascism.�¹⁵ Similarly, James Petras, the US sociologist, Marcyite, Ch�vez fan and contributor to journals such as Monthly Review, New Left Review and Le Monde Diplomatique, writes in Zionism, militarism and the decline of US power (2008) of the �transition from Zionism to Zion-fascism�.

Others have no time for namby-pamby subtitles like �transition� or even �lurching�. The paper of the Revolutionary Communist Group insists: �Zionism is a form of fascism�.¹⁶ Arthur Scargill, leader of the Socialist Labour Party, similarly condemns �the fascist state of Israel�.¹⁷ That was certainly the shrill refrain coming from the Kremlin back in the days of the Soviet Union and it found many an echo in the �official communist� media. Moscow Radio talked of the �common essential features of fascism and Zionism�.¹⁸ Ditto, the Syrian Communist Party�s Ammar Bagdache, a member of its political bureau: �Zionism is one of the most hideous manifestations of contemporary fascism .� Zionism is Jewish fascism, just as Nazism was German fascism in the 20th century.� Darkly, ominously, Bagdache blames �concealed Zionist elements� for sabotaging the Soviet Union and the �socialist community� and turning �official communist� parties into instruments of capital.¹⁹

I am genuinely shocked that comrade Greenstein, an expert on Israel-Palestine, who boasts of his many years of experience in the Palestine solidarity movement, apparently has such a poor memory about what he himself has committed to print so recently. If he is being serious. I am equally shocked that he claims no knowledge of those who so clearly agree with him. Surely not a sad case of premature dementia, though. Rather a hopelessly flawed polemical method and a threadbare political programme.

Let me round off on the subject of Israel being akin to fascism. I referred in passing to leftwing student activists voting for resolutions to that effect. Comrade Greenstein questioned this, saying that, as a student member of the International Marxist Group in the 1980s and a delegate to 13 conferences of the National Union of Students, �I do not remember one such motion. When various individuals, usually unattached to any group, sought to apply the no-platform tactic to Zionist groups, I and the rest of the far left opposed them.�²⁰ At least he remembers that.

Well, from what I can reliably discover, in April 1974 the NUS passed a motion no-platforming �openly racist and fascist organisations�. Members of these organisations were to be prevented from �speaking in colleges by any means necessary (including the disruption of the meeting)�.²¹ Subsequently, on the basis that Zionism equals racism, that was extended to include Zionists by Salford, Essex, York and Lancaster universities.

I am more than prepared to accept that comrade Greenstein opposed such motions � but it is quite clear that they did exist. Otherwise, after all, he could not have opposed them, could he?

Anti-Semitism

At its worst, the �Zionism/Israel equals fascism� line blurs over into anti-Semitism (by which I refer to Judeophobia, not bigotry directed against other Semitic peoples, such as the Phoenicians, Nabataeans, Bedouins, Qahtanites, Assyrians, etc). �Official communism� often demonised prominent Jews using Zionism as a code word. So did the Workers Revolutionary Party under Gerry Healy (1913-89).

As I have previously documented, the WRP�s very own private oil slick international, the International Committee of the Fourth International, reported in 1986 that News Line and other such WRP literature had �strongly anti-Semitic undertones, as no distinction is made between Jews and Zionists and the term �Zionist� could actually include every Jew in a leading position�.²²

Comrade Greenstein tries to brush aside my reference to the WRP. Supposedly it is �not part of the labour movement�. The problem is, of course, that despite its vile record the WRP was and still is �part of the labour movement�. The WRP had thousands of members, some real roots in the trade unions and well placed allies on the Labour left - eg, Ken Livingstone and Ted Knight. Nowadays, not only is there the sorry rump led by Frank Sweeny: we all know individuals such as Ken Loach, Richard Price, Simon Pirani, Dot Gibson, Charlie Pottins, Gerry Downing, Bob Pitt, Savas Matsas, etc, and small groups such as Workers Action and the Socialist Equality Party which politically survived the explosion that ripped apart the WRP in 1985. Whatever my differences, I happily address them as �comrade�.

In fact, there has long been a strand within the workers� movement which equates Jews with money and therefore Jews with capitalism. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries various trade unions refused to admit Jewish workers as members in the name of the class struggle. The TUC actually passed resolutions in 1892, 1894 and 1895 demanding immigration controls to halt the influx of Jews.

Not only British trade unionists. Mikhail Bakunin (1814-76) justified his nasty, disruptive and thoroughly dishonest battle within the First International against the leadership of Karl Marx on the basis of a well established anti-Semitism. According to Bakunin, �The whole Jewish world constitutes one exploiting sect, one people of leeches, one single, devouring parasite closely and intimately bound together, not only across national boundaries, but also across all divergences of political opinion.�

Indeed, Bakunin�s anarchism was explicitly premised on a Jewish conspiracy theory. Supposedly both communism and capitalism were controlled by Jews. Hence: �This Jewish world today stands in large part at the disposal of Marx on the one hand and of Rothschild on the other. This may seem strange. What common ground can there be between communism and the big bank? Oh! but the communism of Marx wants a powerful governmental centralisation and where this exists there must inevitably be a central state bank and where such a bank exists the parasitic Jewish nation, which speculates in the labour of the people will always find means to exist�.²³

Bakunin�s anti-Semitism was directly inherited from earlier anti-capitalist radicals, utopian socialists and anarchists. At the time, the word �Jew� and money-making, usury and huckstering were virtually synonymous throughout Europe.²⁴ A young Marx could hardly avoid drawing on that universal terminology in his essay �On the Jewish question� (1843). Marx, however, demanded immediate political equality for Jews. Part of his general programme for universal human liberation. But Bakunin�s mentor, the father of anarchism, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809-65), took a rather different approach. His notebooks contain a stomach-churning passage, in which he calls for the �expulsion of the Jews from Europe or their extermination�.²⁵

What about comrade Greenstein and the destruction of Israel? A few years back - in the letters pages of this paper - we find comrade Greenstein belligerently crowing: �Yes, I want the state of Israel destroyed.� ²⁶ Now, he evasively maintains that there is a �world of difference� between calling for the destruction of Israel and the destruction of the state of Israel. Ostensibly, the first refers to the destruction of the people of Israel, the second to the destruction of the Zionist apparatus of repression.

Yet another muddled, unnecessary and diversionary argument. Within the parameters of comrade Greenstein�s third-worldist economism there can be no operative distinction whatsoever between the destruction of Israel and the destruction of the state of Israel. I want the overthrow of the Zionist regime in Israel, but am quite prepared to countenance a non-Zionist, albeit smaller, Israeli state. Not comrade Greenstein.

He, like many others of the left. is wedded to a single Palestinian state solution. No compromise can be brooked. A Palestinian state that incorporates not only Gaza and the West Bank, but the whole of present-day Israel, must surely mean the end of Israel. Except in the fading memory Israel would cease to exist. It would be erased, obliterated, destroyed. Therefore Israel is to be abolished as Poland was abolished in the 19th century. Note, I am not suggesting for one moment that comrade Greenstein consciously seeks, or would excuse the expulsion, let alone the extermination, of Israel�s Jewish population.

Into the sea

Comrade Greenstein has a terrible habit of trying to divert, muddy or close down debate by citing his expert �knowledge�. A device which produces ever diminishing returns. Mostly he succeeds in making himself appear rather ridiculous and thereby brings discredit to what he writes elsewhere.

For example, citing his expert �knowledge� of the Palestine solidarity movement and years of anti-Zionist work, he takes me to task for not dismissing out of hand, for even daring to use, the phrase, �drive the Jews into the sea�. Once again he tells us that �no-one argues in favour� of such an attempt. �I have simply never heard it,� he repeats with supreme confidence. Despite that, he grudgingly concedes that �some feudal Arab reactionary might be found who did indeed say this�, but it has �never been part of any Palestinian group�s programme�.²⁷

The phrase is, he explains, Zionist propaganda of the same stripe as the racist South African fable that if blacks were to come to power all whites and their children would be murdered in their beds. So comrade Greenstein has, by his own admission, �heard it� before and has a definite view on how to assess and deal with it.

The phrase, �drive the Jews into the sea�, is almost certainly apocryphal. Variously it has been attributed to Mohammad Amin al-Husayni, grand mufti of Jerusalem from 1921 to 1948, Egypt�s Gamal Abdel Nasser and the PLO�s Yasser Arafat. But if you google �drive the Jews into the sea�, alongside its alleged originators you find not accurate, and therefore fully referenced, citations: rather Zionist slander, nightmares and prejudice. All packaged as hard fact.

If the phrase has a specific parent it could quite possibly be David Ben Gurion (1886-1973). Addressing the knesset in October 1961, the Israeli prime minister retrospectively painted a totally fanciful picture of Arabs voluntarily exiting Palestine following the Israeli declaration of independence and the first Arab-Israeli war. Ben Gurion swore that fleeing Palestinians were acting �under the assumption� that invading Arab armies �will destroy the Jewish state and push all the Jews into the sea, dead or alive�.²⁸

As an aside, let me deal with comrade Greenstein�s charge that I am unconcerned for the Palestinians and �oblivious� to the slogan �Death to the Arabs� shouted by members of Israel�s far-right parties such as Yisrael Beiteinu. No, comrade, I am not unconcerned about the Palestinian population. Nor am I �oblivious� to the threats, oppression and killings. Indeed, I have repeatedly referred to the fact that in the wars of 1947-49 and 1967, and the associated resistance struggles, many thousands of Palestinians have died and around a million were forcibly driven out. More, I have warned that not only Lieberman and his grubby party, but the internal logic of Zionism itself, engenders expansionism and repeated attempts to expel the original Palestinian inhabitants.

Why? Israel is a colonial-settler state and all such states face a fundamental problem. What to do with the people whose land has been stolen? Zionism cannot permit the more biologically fertile Palestinians to grow into a majority within Israel, that is for sure.

Back to the main thread. Let me remind the reader of the context in which I employed the �drive the Jews into the sea� phrase. In �Beyond Zionism� I criticised those on the left who envisage a single Palestinian state in which Hebrews, most of whom consider themselves secular, are to be granted religious, not national rights. A proposition which I regard as fundamentally undemocratic, an attempt to reverse the poles of oppression and potentially genocidal.

There are some 5.5 million Israeli Jews. About 10-11 million Palestinians worldwide; but only 6-7 million of them live in the occupied territories of Gaza and the West Bank, Israel proper and the near abroad of Syria, Jordan and Lebanon. It is fair to say then that the projected single Palestinian state would include roughly equivalent numbers of Hebrews and Arabs.

I wrote: �Presuming, that is, there is no forcible movement of peoples. No attempt to drive the Jews into the sea. No closure of refugee camps and dumping of Palestinians over the other side of the border by Lebanon (where they suffer discrimination and are barely tolerated). No rescinding of citizenship rights and mass deportation from Jordan (where Palestinians are highly integrated). No round-up and expulsion of Palestinian workers in Saudi Arabia, etc.�²⁹

Leave aside the removal of Palestinians from Lebanon, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, etc, which, though far from impossible, is clearly there for the sake of furthering the argument: ie, that without forced population movements there would be roughly the same number of Hebrews and Palestinians in Palestine.

Hence, whatever its exact antecedents, let us further pursue the phrase, �drive the Jews into the sea�; it has certainly taken on a life of its own. Conjuring up images of the holocaust, it is daily invoked by the ideologues of Zionism in order to justify the militarily aggressive policies of Israel, as well as hectoring demands that neighbouring Arab states recognise Israel �as a Jewish state�.

However, and this is surely the moot point, it is believed on the streets of Tel Aviv, west Jerusalem, Haifa, etc. And for those of us who appreciate the necessity of winning the biggest possible number of Israeli Jews away from Zionism this very much matters.

Comrades in the Middle East have every reason to include in their programmes specific aims, pledges and assurances which go towards overcoming or at least diminishing Hebrew fears and phobias and thereby help generate a less toxic atmosphere between Hebrews and Palestinians and the wider Arab nation.

Quite frankly, not a few of the formulations contained in the programmes, general literature and spoken pronouncements of Palestinian nationalism and the third-worldist, economistic left do the exact opposite. Zionist slander, nightmares and prejudice find confirmation. Not refutation.

Sadly, that is true of the 1968 Palestine National Covenant (or PLO charter). Here is a Palestinian group and programme par excellence. Irreconcilably it maintains that Palestine is the �homeland� of the �Palestinian Arab people�, who are an �integral part of the Arab nation� (article one). Palestine is defined as having the boundaries of the pre-1947 British mandate territory (article two). The only Jews considered legitimate Palestinians are those �who had normally resided in Palestine until the beginning of the Zionist invasion� (article five).³⁰

The beginning of the �Zionist invasion� dates back, I presume, to the 1880s, when the first European Jewish colonists trickled into the Ottoman-controlled Holy Land. So what is to happen to those Jews whose ancestors arrived in Palestine with the �Zionist invasion�? Even if we shift the invasion date considerably forwards, that still amounts to the majority of Israeli Jews. In 1948, some 65% of them originated from elsewhere. Today Israel still remains a country of migrants. Only 34.6% of Israeli Jews are �native-born� (ie, their parents were born in the country).

Though many of the formulations contained in the 1968 Palestine National Covenant have since been disowned by the PLO, they are to all intents and purposes still upheld by the third-worldist left (comrade Greenstein included). As noted above, some are generously prepared to grant Jews religious rights within their proposed single Palestinian state. They are not, however, to be allowed national rights. That, after all, in the Marxist tradition at least, would generally mean conceding the right of Hebrews to form their own separate state.

Recognising the danger presented by a 5.5-million enemy within - a militarily defeated, oppressed and, one would guess, a bitterly resentful population - others in the third-worldist economistic left demand that all post-invasion Jews should be expelled from Palestine.

I remember squeezing through the narrow gates of Hyde Park in order to join one of those huge Gaza solidarity demonstrations and encountering Weyman Bennett, a member of the Socialist Workers Party�s central committee. He was noisily megaphoning: �Jews out of Israel � send them back to where they come from � New York � or wherever.� I was appalled. True, not sparklingly eloquent. But the anti-Semitic message was all too clear. And he is far from unique.

A classic example would be Nahuel Moreno (1924-87), the Argentinean Trotskyite leader. He was equally strident. Writing in his journal Correo Internacional, Moreno declared that �there is no other way to destroy the Zionist state than throwing out the Zionists� (September 1982). And in case anyone thought there might be �non-Zionist Jewish residents�, he made his position quite explicit: �those imaginary inhabitants do not exist�. The destruction of the Zionist state, he continued, �necessarily implies the removal of the present inhabitants�. Otherwise this would mean �accepting the accomplished fact of the Jewish occupation of Israel�.³¹

Opposing demands for the removal of the entire Jewish population does not mean sliding into Zionist apologetics. Those leftwingers such as Max Shachtman, Hal Draper and Al Glotzer, who in the name of Israeli-Jewish self-determination, defended Israel in 1948 were quite clearly wrong. A horrible caricature of Marxism. Most Jews arrived in Palestine from Europe explicitly or implicitly determined to displace the Palestinian natives. Contrary to Zionist myth, the territory was not an empty space lacking permanent inhabitants.

Israel was planned to be what Karl Kautsky categorised as a �work colony�. Not an �exploitation colony�.³² That was the Zionist project - labour, revisionist and religious. Palestinians were therefore not economically required to serve as cheap labour by the conquerors - as in South Africa, Kenya and Rhodesia. They were surplus to requirement. An obstacle that one way or another would have to be defeated, uprooted and disposed of - as in the United States and Australia. Colonists would provide all the classes in the Zionist utopia.

Hence not only did one people�s self-determination violently clash with another people�s self-determination, because what was at issue was the same piece of land. But as Israel was to be a work colony its formation was bound up with the dispossession of the Palestinians.

Maybe in the 1930s and 40s it would have been legitimate to argue that recent Jewish migrants should head back to, throw in their lot with, and bank on victory in Europe. However, a moment�s reflection shows why not. The abject failure of the working class movement to prevent the Nazi coup wholly militates against that approach. Jews were quite justified when they fled Europe and demanded that Britain, US, etc fling open their doors. Without that there was only Palestine and the Zionist alternative. True, many on the left feared that Palestine itself was a death-trap for escaping Jews. And, of course, it was always right to have fought with every ounce of available strength for the defeat of Nazi barbarism and working class rule in Europe. Nevertheless, between 1933 and 1945 returning Jews to Europe would have been to make oneself complicit in mass murder. We certainly know that now.

So on balance, at least in terms of the region, it would have been better for the Arab and Jewish left to have unitedly campaigned for the immediate withdrawal of the British and French occupying powers, the termination of the 1922 League of Nations mandates and re-establishing a greater Syria - roughly along the old Ottoman borders and therefore incorporating most of what is today Syria, Jordan, Israel-Palestine and Lebanon. A first step towards pan-Arab unity under working class leadership. Deprived of an imperial sponsor, European Jewish migrants could then be encouraged to develop their culture, contribute their talents and democratically assimilate.

That does not to rule out the possibility of a Jewish autonomous area or even a state. Trotsky speculated about such a scenario in the late 1930s: �Once socialism has become master of our planet or at least of its most important sections,� he argued, �it will have unimaginable resources in all domains.� That could encompass �great migrations�. Not �compulsory displacements� and the creation of new ghettos, Trotsky stressed. Rather mass migrations �freely consented to, or rather demanded by certain nationalities or parts of nationalities�. In particular Trotsky had in mind the �dispersed Jews� who might want to be �reassembled in the same community�. They would, he promised, find �a sufficiently extensive and rich spot under the sun�.³³

The ever growing Nazi menace and the imminent prospect that war would bring the extermination of European Jews haunted Trotsky. Clearly the prospect of future mass migrations was held out in the absence of the ability to do anything decisive in the way of stopping Hitler. The bloody shadow of the swastika already hung over much of Europe.

As an aside, in my opinion, socialism will in all likelihood not witness mass migrations. Surely both in terms of the past and present a tell-tale symptom of social decay, persecution and desperation. Getting to the desired destination is often very costly and risky for the migrant. Many are ripped off. Not a few die. Life thereafter is often precarious, hard and deeply alienating.

Socialism would do away with all that. Through the mass transfer of wealth and technique from the advanced countries to the rest of the world, the standard of living will be quickly evened up everywhere. Doubtless people will travel far and wide for all manner of reasons. Nonetheless, I suspect that mostly they will be more than content to return to their homeland, where their families, friends and familiar cultural surroundings are. Far from socialism ushering in another age of mass migrations, it will put an end to them. Global citizens will have rich, deep and enduring local connections.

Either way, while Trotsky remained convinced that the socialist revolution is the only �realistic solution� to the �Jewish question�, in June 1940 he was willing to concede that if �Jewish workers and peasants asked for an independent state�, which they were not being given by Britain in mandate Palestine, �if they want it, the proletariat will give it�.³⁴

Not that we should completely rule out population movements in the meantime. Under present circumstances a good case can be made for the orderly transfer of Israeli settlers away from the West Bank. They could be relocated in Israel in perfect safety and without too much personal trauma. Yes, I say that Israeli troops, watch towers, checkpoints, special roads, exclusive settlements � and citizens must go - and substantial reparations be paid over to the Palestinians.

Certainly, if Israeli settlements are allowed to asphyxiatingly grow and spread across the face of the West Bank, a Palestinian state will sooner of later become an impossible dream. But it is far from being too late � yet.

Moreover, because of the practical need for a contiguous Palestinian state, if that state is to be viable, I also favour incorporating more or less the whole of the sparsely populated southern Negev so as to join Gaza and the West Bank. Here, in this largely barren land, I believe that the non-military Jewish population can be allowed to voluntarily leave or stay on as a national minority.³⁵ But such a detail is entirely secondary and, of course, is for others to decide.

The main thrust of my argument is that a rapprochement between the two peoples will require compromises, including compromises over compensation, territory and settler colonists. Hence, rigid programmes calling for the expulsion, the driving out of the Hebrew population from the whole of present-day Israel - whether by sea, land or air is irrelevant - are not only politically counterproductive and a gross violation of elementary democracy. They invite a terrible bloodbath and are therefore objectively reactionary.

Israeli Jews

I have shown that Jews in Israel, or at least the great majority of them, constitute a Hebrew nation. The sole Jewish nation in the world today. And, yes, this is a product of, in relative terms, very recent history. Just like the sudden qualitative shifts involved in climate change, speciesisation with animals, the movement from liquid water to ice and to gas, etc, nations too have their concentrated tipping points. From non-being to being. Israel�s declaration of independence on May 14 1948 can therefore be seen as being more than merely symbolic.

Inevitably, given historical, international, economic, cultural and political circumstances, the birth of the Hebrew nation was quickly followed by its Palestinian alter ego. The Palestinian nation was the negative product of Israel. Palestinian national consciousness defensively hardened in step with Hebrew colonisation, land takeovers, aggression and statehood.

Be that as it may, Israeli Jews speak the same language, inhabit the same territory, have the same culture and sense of identity.³⁶ Naturally the latest migrants, notably those coming from the former Soviet Union, form a partial exception when it comes to language (note, a good portion of them migrated to Israel on the basis of claiming one Jewish parent or grandparent and were thus granted only the �rights� of Jews under Israel�s law of return).

Those who arrived from the ex-USSR aged over 30 years old often still command little Hebrew. Many cannot follow the news on Israeli TV. Nevertheless, their offspring learn and soon internalise Hebrew at school, later work alongside and socialise with the Hebrew-speaking majority, marry and have children with them, thereby becoming assimilated with and indistinguishable from other Israeli Jews.

True, there remains a hopelessly tangled legal confusion in Israel between being Jewish as a religion and being Jewish as a nationality. For example, Israel�s central statistical bureau classifies the population as Arab and �Jewish and others� (the �others� do not include secular Jews: rather the 0.5% non-Arab Christians and the 4.9% �not classified by religion� - in the main ex-USSR migrants).³⁷

Comrade Greenstein refuses to accept the existence of the Hebrew nation. I am not sure exactly why. He fails to provide reasons in his article. Despite that, the comrade does not dispute the fact that Israeli Jews constitute a clear and stable 80% majority in the central coastal belt and that most of them speak the same Hebrew language. Therefore, Israel is not like white South Africa, he correctly comments, albeit performing another somersault. No clear white majority anywhere - even with Bantustanisation. Not even a common language - whites in South Africa speak Afrikaans or English.

But common language, territory, culture, etc are �irrelevant� for comrade Greenstein because the Hebrew nation is an oppressor nation. He likens them to the American and Australian colonists and, of course, the Nazis. Obviously, I readily agree with the designation of the Hebrews as an oppressor nation. I also know that because of the distorting prism of Zionist ideology the Israeli state paradoxically refuses to recognise the existence of the Hebrew nation.

Jewishness once referred to holding a common faith and in some parts of the world having 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, though, 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.

As I have said, despite fathering a real nation, Zionism obstinately holds onto the absurd notion that there is a worldwide Jewish nation. In Marxist terms an obvious non sequitur. Outside Israel, Jews not only live in countless different countries. They speak countless different mother tongues. And except for special religious, family and cultural occasions none of them use Hebrew. Except in Israel Hebrew is a foreign, archaic or sacred language, fluently spoken only by exiles, scholars and the rabbinical elite.

Zionist dogma results in the Israeli state classifying its own Jewish populations as Jews originating from this or that part of the world. Yet, while we should take full cognisance of this unique nationalist contortion, it does nothing to distract from a recognition of the historically constituted Hebrew nation in Israel.

Self-determination

To demand the immediate abolition of Israel - not the Zionist regime, but the Israeli-Jewish nation - is to wittingly or unwittingly advocate the politics of national oppression, national dispersal or national extermination. Nothing, not a jot, to do with Marxism. The Israeli-Jewish nation is historically constituted and any democratic solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict must gain mutual consent from both sides.

The only realistic, progressive and humane course for Marxists relies on gaining mutual recognition by both Palestinians and Israeli Jews of each other�s national rights. Needless to say, it would be an excellent thing if both nations chose to happily live side by side in a binational secular state or, even better, to merge together in a single, centralised state. Why on earth would any rational human being wish to oppose either such outcome? The question is, though, how to arrive at such a destination?

Marxists have frequently used the analogy of divorce and the relationship between men and women when it comes to national questions. Historically males have been the oppressor sex. Females the oppressed. Only the most extreme, the most embittered, the most revengeful feminist would demand the abolition of marriage and the oppression of men and the rule of women. No, we demand the equality of rights, including the right of both sexes to end the relationship, as the only healthy foundation of what we favour - marriage.

Hence when it comes to nations what we demand is equality and that means the right to divorce as the only sure basis for the voluntary merger of peoples - which is what we seek to bring about. We do not demand the oppression of the oppressors in the name of abolishing oppression - the perverse position adopted by comrade Greenstein and other third-worldist economists.

Of course, nothing serious can come about in Israel-Palestine in splendid isolation. I agree with those who look to the Arab revolution as providing the surest route forward for the programme of communism. The Arab nation has a population of well over 200 million, a contiguous territory stretching from the Atlantic to the Persian Gulf, a common language, culture and history and there is a palpable and widespread desire for unity amongst the masses. Hence the Arab revolution is in its own way a delayed version of Polish, Italian or German unification in 19th century Europe. An historic task still awaiting fulfilment.

Certainly the Arab revolution possesses far more social purchase than the patently abstract calls for a socialist federation of the Middle East that we hear from many on the left.

Fighting for the Arab revolution does not mean waiting in expectation for another Gamal Abdel Nasser and an Arab Bonaparte or Bismarck. The working class in the Arab world will sooner or later stop trailing petty bourgeois nationalist socialism and Islamic reactionary socialism. Always self-defeating and hugely damaging. We can enter into all manner of alliances, but the key question is achieving working class political independence. Hence the cause of Arab unification must be led by the working class.

Does Arab unification mean perpetuating national oppression? Obviously no. Not at all. Where national questions exist, there should be a militant fight 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. So should 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. So, if communists are successful, within an Arab Union of States there will be sizable national, religious and linguistic minorities. As in Europe, we want national self-determination exercised in favour of the widest unity.

What of those who insist upon a single Palestinian state? A few still forlornly look to al Fatah and Palestinian left nationalism. There is an elephant in the room though. The PLO is committed to a US-sponsored, Oslo-type, two-state solution, whereby the Palestinians are to settle for a bifurcated state which would be economically and militarily dominated by Israel. Even if the PLO broke from this capitulationism and returned to the guerrillaism of the 1970s, there is no way the Palestinians could overcome Israel by force of arms.

The Zionist state is closely allied to the US and is in receipt of abundant and highly advanced American weaponry. Armchair generals rate the IDF amongst the top five or six most powerful military machines in the world today. Eg, Israel possesses around 160 nuclear weapons and has three Dolphin-class cruise missile submarines which can deliver armageddon to anywhere the government in Jerusalem so chooses.

Furthermore, the majority of Israeli Jews are fanatically nationalistic. Under present circumstances they would furiously resist, with whatever comes to hand, any attempt to impose a single Palestinian state, within which �minorities� - not least they, the Israeli-Jewish half of the population - are to be given �full� religious but not national rights. The whole of the 20th century, but especially the 1943-45 Nazi holocaust, ensures that. Without military conquest - highly unlikely and in and of itself an unwelcome outcome - the immediate demand for a single Palestinian state is therefore both unhelpful and illusory. While the demand sounds reassuringly militant, it offers precious little in terms of bringing about a rapprochement between the two peoples and advancing working class interests.

Recognising the failure of petty bourgeois nationalism, there are those on the third-worldist, economistic left who bank on Islamism - a combination of Iran�s theocracy, Lebanon�s Hezbollah, Hamas in Palestine and perhaps Muslim Brotherhood governments in Egypt, Syria and Jordan. More realistic militarily, that is for sure. But an anti-working class agency if ever there was one. Such a pan-Islamic alliance would hardly produce a secular Palestinian state. Nor would it produce a democratic Palestinian state.

Not relishing an Islamic outcome, but knowing he lacks a viable strategy, comrade Greenstein resorts to empty moralism. The Hebrew nation cannot have self-determination because �they do not suffer national oppression�, he writes. �To talk about �self-determination� for such a nation makes as much sense as to talk of self-determination of the American, Afrikaner or Russian nations.� Leaving aside the fact that the Afrikaner whites in South Africa are not and never have been a nation, let us examine the argument.

What is national self-determination? It is a basic democratic demand equivalent in its own way to the demand for a republic, universal suffrage, a people�s militia, compulsory education and a heath service free at the point of use. �National self-determination means political independence,� explains Lenin.³⁸ That is, the right of those inhabiting a particular territory to decide upon their own future through a referendum or by electing delegates to a constituent assembly. That does not exclude the corruption of representatives, the rule of the capitalist class or imperialist string-pulling and domination. Nevertheless, self-determination is clearly a concession and intensifies no end the contradiction between capitalism�s denial of democracy and the masses� striving for democracy.

Certainly without conducting such a fight for democratic rights there can be no hope for the socialist revolution. Capitalism cannot be overthrown by perfecting democratic institutions and extending democracy. The banks, insurance companies and big monopolies will have to be taken over and the core sections of the capitalist class expropriated. But without training the working class through the battle for democracy there can be no economic revolution. Workers will have to administer and control production and direct state affairs to the point where the state itself finally withers away. So extreme democracy and the realisation of communism are inextricably linked.

With that in mind, should communists in America or Russia campaign for the ending of their countries as independent states because both Russia and America oppress others? The idea is just too absurd. But that is what comrade Greenstein is effectively saying. One might just as well campaign against a republic, universal suffrage, a people�s militia, compulsory education and a heath service free at the point of use.

Obviously today America and Russia are politically independent countries. They have no problem exercising self-determination; and that is why raising the slogan in respect to them at the moment is utterly irrelevant. We simply desire to see that political independence extended so as to apply to all. Every nation must have the right to determine their own fate - as long as that does not involve the oppression of another people.

Being a third-worldist economist, comrade Greenstein does not treat democracy seriously, especially in the advanced capitalist countries. Indeed he appears to write off the entire populations of these countries as irredeemably pro-imperialist. Easily mistakable for a kind of racism.

According to comrade Greenstein, �the national identity� of people in countries such as the US, Britain and Israel �is bound up with that of oppression�.³⁹ Yossi Schwartz, of the International Socialist League in Israel comes from the exact same stable. Hence he says: �We cannot support the right to self-determination for an imperialist population without lending support for the imperialist bourgeoisie�. To illustrate this absurd political line the comrade cites the �French resistance during the German occupation�. Many of the �same underground� later �fought in Vietnam and Algeria for the French empire�, he reports, as if this were shocking news.⁴⁰

Such an approach is to completely abandon class politics and to replace it with the crudest stereotyping. Nations are divided by class and between a corresponding official and oppositionist identity. The two continually form, reform, clash and contest. A basic Marxist proposition.

For example, were the 1848ers who fought in the 1861-65 second American revolution bound up with oppression? What of the hundreds of thousands of Americans who voted for Eugene Debs in the presidential elections of 1904, 1908 and 1920? The black civil rights and the anti-Vietnam war movements in the 1960s? Were the millions of workers and soldiers who voted for Bolshevik delegates in the soviets of 1917 bound up with oppression? What about Levellers and Chartists in Britain? The workers who in 1918 threatened a TUC general strike over the Jolly George in support of Soviet Russia? The list can be extended ad infinitum � but there is no need. The point has more than amply been made.

France 1940-44 shows beyond doubt that an oppressor nation can suddenly become an oppressed nation with a reverse of military fortunes. Paris and the north were occupied and then brutally administered by the German Reich. The government of Marshall Philippe P�tain sued for peace and thereafter the Vichy south collaborated with the Nazis; including in the rounding up or capture of Jews, resistance fighters, communists and other undesirables.

For a whole swathe of the French bourgeoisie the German invasion was seen as the best way of dealing with the red menace. A working class which beat off the forces of domestic fascist, religious and monarchical reaction in 1934, voted in the popular front government of L�on Blum in 1936 and staged a spontaneous general strike in the same year, which secured huge economic advances and reforms. The traitor bourgeoisie considered the Nazis infinitely preferable to working class power and communism.

To have been indifferent to the German invasion, occupation and the ending of national independence, using the entirely spurious argument that the French people as a whole were oppressors, has nothing to do with Marxism. The working class had every interest in resisting the German invasion through demanding revolutionary measures and a people�s war and fighting to end the horror of occupation using all necessary means.

World War II, let me stress, was no carbon copy of World War I. From September 1914 to July 1918 there was - especially on the western front - indecisive trench warfare, strategic stalemate and the mutual slaughter of conscript troops. World War II saw extraordinarily rapid German advance, national surrender and the construction of a Nazi empire from the Pyrenees to the Vistula. Fundamentally different strategies and tactics were therefore required. Repeating a bowdlerised Lenin would have been worse than useless.

That French imperialism reconstituted itself in 1944-45 and then re-established and tried to maintain its hold over Indo-China and Algeria testifies to the political failure of the working class. Not some innate French national psyche.

Clearly the same can be said of the Jews. In Europe they were an oppressed people-religion. The Nazis exterminated between four and eight million of them. Nevertheless, in mandate Palestine the Jews became oppressors.

Marxists would be crazy to deny the right of what has become the Hebrew nation to self-determination on the basis of a perverted and thoroughly ignorant reading of the classic texts. The right to national self-determination is not a communist blessing exclusively bestowed upon the oppressed. It is fundamentally a demand for equality. Hence communists recognise that the US, Russian, French and Hebrew nations have self-determination. Today that is generally unproblematic. But it hardly follows that we should seek to end the national independence of the US, Russian, French and Hebrew nations.

The Israeli-Jewish people, the Hebrew nation, is a real, living entity and cannot be damned to oblivion just because Israel began and continues as a settler colonial state - albeit not of the standard kind (migrants to Israel originate not mainly from a single home country: they came from Europe, the US, the Middle East, north Africa, Ethiopia, the former Soviet Union, etc). Zionism being, of course, a nationalism sui generis.

Most, if not all, of the world�s states came into existence by way of ghastly oppression. But, while fully taking into account history, any consistently democratic programme must be squarely based on contemporary realities - crucially human facts on the ground - not on abstract, futile or potentially cataclysmic attempts to turn back the clock.

Ending Israel as a Zionist state, terminating the legal privileges granted to Jews, halting expansionism and a mutually agreeable settlement with the Palestinians are basic democratic demands. None of that, however, should be taken as synonymous with an eviscerating reconstruction of the pre-1948 situation. One might just as well call for the abolition of the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, etc, and a return of lands to the remnants of the aboriginal populations.

Showing the severe limitations of his political horizons, comrade Greenstein freely admits he is advocating �a bourgeois national solution�. He cites Angola and South Africa. Presumably for him some kind of model that can be copied in, or applied to, Israel-Palestine. Not a Marxist perspective at all. Needless to say, ours is not a solution to be negotiated or presided over by Kadima and Fatah, Likud and Hamas, Labour and the Palestinian National Initiative.

We seek working class leadership and, through winning the battle for democracy, a revolutionary b