Trotskyists and the creation of Israel: Workers' Liberty 3/13

Most “Trotskyists” today are, everywhere, agitators and propagandists against the Jewish state of Israel. Not agitators for the view that Israel should change its relationship with the Palestinians, or that it should help set up an independent Palestinian state alongside Israel. No. The agitation and propaganda centres on the “demand” that Israel should cease to exist. In war they have sided with the Arab states — Egypt, Iraq, Syria, Jordan —in the hope and expectation that, victorious, they would put an end to Israel. At the start of the 21st century they back the medieval-minded forces of...

These Draft Theses were produced by the International Secretariat of the Fourth International in January 1947, and probably written by Ernest Mandel. The first part summarises the historical analyses of Jewry and anti-semitism developed by Abram Leon in his book The Jewish Question, and assesses Zionism and anti-semitism in 1946-7. Forty years of hindsight reveal many flaws in the document. It underestimates capitalism’s ability to revive; it overestimates the force of Arab nationalism; it underestimates the strength of the Zionist drive for a Jewish state. But on many questions of basic...

The statement printed here was an editorial in the Hebrew language publication Kol Ham’amad (Voice of the Class) of the Revolutionary Communist League of Palestine, a section of the Fourth International. The translation appeared in Fourth International in May 1948, the magazine of the SWP USA, led at that time by James P Cannon. An editorial introduction denounced the UN partition plan for Palestine, “which stifles the rising tide of class struggle in Palestine, blurs class lines and creates an atmosphere of antagonistic ‘national unity’ in both of the national communities in Palestine.”...

The following document was issued by the Palestinian Trotskyists in 1948. When the left today writes or speaks about the 1948 Israeli-Arab war, it is a story of anti-Arab atrocities by the Jews, and no more. The clear implication is that the Arab side deserved support, whatever the faults of its leadership. Marxists in 1948 saw it quite differently. Some Trotskyists internationally backed the Jews; the Trotskyists in Palestine itself condemned both sides as chauvinist. They could all see that the Arab forces were led by corrupt feudalists, mainipulted by British imperialism and engaged in a...

The Jewish question since World War Two By Ernest Mandel (“Germain”) [The following article is the concluding chapter written by Mandel for the book The Materialist Conception of the Jewish Question, by A Leon. This book was completed in December 1942. A Leon, the author, was the national secretary of the Belgian Trotskyist party. The Gestapo arrested him in June 1944 and he died a martyr's death in the Nazi concentration camp at Auschwitz.] Years of incessant persecution and indescribable humiliation, the life of hunted beasts as the "normal" form of existence, deportations, "death trains,"...

The Jewish Problem after Hitler "What is obvious is not always known, And what is known is not always present." SAMUEL JOHNSON. The reaction of the official Fourth Internationalist organizations to the Jewish question and the problem of Palestine in the new situation produced by Hitlerism and the war is a measure of their Incapacity to free themselves from outlived theories and political positions. This results in a dreary reaffirmation of old ideas and programs accompanied by the repetitious explanation that "there is no reason to change our position" since "there is nothing new in the...

In 1936 the Communist Party of the USA sent the editor, Malech Epstein, of its Yiddish language paper, Freiheit, to Palestine to report on the Arab-Jewish conflict there. When Epstein broke with the Communist Party a couple of years later, he published an account of his experience in Palestine. He found that the Communist Party of Palestine supported, and sent some of it's members, Jewish as well as Arab, to participate in terrorist attacks on Jews. This summary of his report appeared in the paper of the SWP USA, Socialist Appeal, in june 1939. It was unsigned, but was most likely written by...

Introduction This article expressed the response of the American Trotskyists to the historic turn of the Stalinist Comintern to a new type of “anti-Zionism”. It was the beginning of a new departure whose consequences are today most noticeable in the ostensible Trotskyist movement. For more on what the Trotskyists said in the 1930s and 40s, see Workers' Liberty 3/13: Trotskyists and the creation of Israel. The Communist League of America regarded itself as an expelled faction of the Communist Party of America. Shachtman’s “solidarity” with the party and efforts to influence its members and...