Israel-Palestine: for two states and equal rights!

Two peoples, Palestinian Arabs and Israeli Jews, inhabit the territory of Israel-Palestine. Both see it as their homeland. One has a state with a powerful military, a developed economy, and relative democracy. The other is subjugated, occupied, dispossessed.

A just peace requires draining the poison of national oppression. This means an end to the occupation of Palestinian territories, and the establishment of an independent Palestinian state, alongside and with the same rights as Israel. Workers' Liberty summarises this perspective in the slogan Two States, Equal Rights.

Retaining a class perspective is also crucial. Israeli workers do not share the interests of tech billionaires or property developers in the settler movement. Palestinian workers do not share interests with the wealthy leaders of Hamas or corrupt officials.

The situation on the ground has worsened. The current Israeli government declared at its inauguration that it would uphold the "exclusive and inviolable" right to Jewish sovereignty over the entire territory. West Bank settlements aim to bury prospects for a Palestinian state. The genocidal war on Gaza resulted in mass destruction and death. Wars on Lebanon and Iran aim to project Israeli power throughout the region.

Much about Israel-Palestine is simple. A powerful, well-armed state oppresses another national group, denying their right to self-determination. In this basic sense, anti-colonial and internationalist principles require us to side with the Palestinians.

Beyond this, there are complexities. The Israeli Jews are not a minority caste, ruling by exploiting the labour of an indigenous majority, like the whites in South Africa under apartheid. Nor are they a colonial bureaucracy like the British in India. Nor are they a settler layer linked to an imperial metropole like the French in Algeria. They are a nation, with classes, and deep roots in the territory. Jewish settlers in the West Bank can return to the metropole of pre-1967 Israel. The Israeli Jewish national group as a whole has nowhere to go back to.

Founded

Israel was founded through a process of settlement and displacement which Palestinians call the Nakba. The structural inequalities it established persist today. Acknowledgment and redress for these injustices will be key to any peace agreement. But the Israeli Jews are not the first to found a nation-state in part via the displacement of another people. Many contemporary states have their origins in similar processes.

Every nation has the right to self-determination. No nation has the right to deny self-determination to another. Consistent democracy requires a framework in which both peoples, Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs, can self-determine on an equal basis.

Workers' Liberty draws on the body of theory about nationhood developed by Marxists throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. We agree with Lenin and others who argued for the importance of self-determination as a democratic demand. They also stressed the importance of avoiding becoming apologists for nationalism, even the nationalism of oppressed peoples.

We have also learnt from the work of the small groups of Arab and Jewish anti-Stalinist revolutionaries in pre-1948 Palestine. They condemned the chauvinism of many Zionists. But they also saw the 1948 invasion of Israel by Arab armies, some led by British colonial officers, as a racial war on the Jews of Palestine.

In our view, much far-left thinking on Israel-Palestine has degenerated. This is partially a consequence of despair at a materially worsening situation. Lack of hope has caused a retreat into increasingly absolute positions. But it is also substantially a product of ideological concessions, principally to Stalinism.

Stalinism's imperialist calculations led it to arm the Zionist forces in the 1947-9 wars. However, it undertook a sharp anti-Zionist turn soon after. Its anti-Zionism bore little in common with the rational anti-Zionism of previous generations of Marxists. Stalinist anti-Zionism elevated Zionism, and Israel, to the status of a world-shaping, absolute evil. These perspectives sat within a wider framework, which some have called campism. Campism divides the world into two distinct camps, one progressive, the other reactionary. Any force opposed to the latter camp is seen as supportable.

It is these political coordinates, far more than the earlier bodies of Marxist theory, that shape the thinking of much of today's far left. This includes much of even the non- and anti-Stalinist left. The Socialist Workers Party, the largest revolutionary group in the UK, responded to the Hamas massacres of 7 October 2023 with a headline telling readers to rejoice.

Bleak

Today, the situation is bleak. Settlements expand. Gaza is devastated. Reaction grows. This has led some to conclude a two-state framework is impossible. But the same trends which make this currently unlikely also make any more democratic outcome, such as a unitary binational confederation, even more remote.

Joint struggle against occupation, sometimes called co-resistance, between Israeli Jews and Palestinians is vital. International pressure on Israel, in the form of sanctions and arms embargoes, has a role. This is especially so when enacted directly by workers such as dockers. But social change cannot be imposed from without.

The Palestinian minority within Israel has an outsized role to play. It comprises around 20% of the population. It faces racism and discrimination. However, it has relatively greater freedom to politically self-assert than the occupied and besieged populations of the West Bank and Gaza. Palestinian workers also play an important role in some sectors of the Israeli economy, such as healthcare and construction. We therefore look especially to movements such as Standing Together, which mobilises Palestinian and Jewish citizens of Israel in joint struggles for peace and equality, as well as around basic class issues such as wages and housing.

We say: End the occupation, Israel out of the West Bank, Gaza, East Jerusalem and Lebanon. Two states, equal rights. For Jewish-Arab workers' unity.