Following the debate on 12 October on Israel and Iran between Sean Matgamna of AWL and Moshe Machover, AWL wrote to the Weekly Worker group proposing a debate between AWL and WW under a similar title ("Israel, Iran, and socialist politics" - the 12 October was "Israel, Iran, and the left").
Click here for the debate on Israel-Iran since July 2008, and here for the story so far on WW wriggling out of debate.
That was on 14 October. WW agreed, reserving judgement on the date. Then on 22 October they sent an email "insisting" that the title of the debate be changed to "What If Israel Bombs Iran?"
It seems now as if they will use this "insistence" as an excuse for not debating. Two pages of the WW of 23 October are given over to an article by Peter Manson trying to justify the excuse. The underlying issue, as we'll see, seems to be uncertainties and ambiguities in the WW group's views on Israel-Palestine.
For months now WW has been running articles which start with odd passages in an article by Sean Matgamna in Solidarity 3/136 of 24 July, and build up an absurd conclusion - that Matgamna "excused an Israeli nuclear attack on Iran".
Manson's new article exemplifies again a central trait of WW polemic - "projection", taking what their adversaries are saying and turning it back-to-front. A nuclear-armed Iran, under a regime which has long made "death to Israel" its catchcry, would be a threat to Israel? No, Israel and the USA are about to nuke Iran!
WW wriggles out of debate with AWL? No, AWL is wriggling out of debate with WW!
"The CPGB has written to the AWL calling for a debate... Martin Thomas has replied. But he wants a different, broader, vaguer title...", writes Manson.
It economises so much on use of brainpower, doesn't it, just taking what you polemicise against and turning it upside down?
In fact AWL wrote to WW (14 October); WW accepted. They made no demur about the title, "Israel, Iran, and socialist politics", which, after all, was very similar to the one they hadn't objected to for 12 October ("Israel, Iran, and the left"). Later (22 October), WW insisted that the title be changed.
Now it looks as if they will withdraw from the debate unless we agreed to change the title, which we won't. We've written to WW asking yes or no, will they withdraw or won't they, and received in reply lots of bluster but no answer.
The 12 October debate itself had originated in a public challenge to WW by Sean Matgamna on the AWL website (3 August), followed up by an email from myself (for AWL) to the WW on 19 August.
In their first response to the 19 August e-mail, WW said they would debate. Somehow, I'm still not sure how, in the course of the correspondence about the date, place, title, and speakers for the debate (all that correspondence was with WW, not with anyone else), they wriggled out, and turned it into a debate between AWL and - not WW, but Moshe Machover, who disagrees with WW on Israel!
We weren't really unhappy about the substitution. As Sean Matgamna said on 12 October: "Moshe knows a lot more [on the issues] and it’s far more fruitful debating him... I’m very pleased to be debating him".
But in the 12 October debate and in their press the WW people had made a great noise about how they wanted to debate us and we were allegedly reluctant. So we decided to clear that up. We wrote to them on 14 October as described above.
In August-October WW said they would debate, and made no complaint about the title, but substituted a different speaker who disagrees with them for their side of the debate! Now in October-November they agree to speak, but wriggle out by complaining about the title!
Will they stick to this withdrawal from the debate they claim so much to want? Up to a point, it doesn't matter much.
All that WW have to say about Sean Matgamna's article in Solidarity 3/136 has been said a dozen times over, and all that needs to be said in reply has been said in writing and in the 12 October debate. There would be some value in probing the ambivalences and shifts in WW's ideas on Israel-Palestine (still formally "two states", but apparently regressing from that), but the chances of getting an intelligent exchange of ideas do not look good.
It remains to deal with a few other things in Manson's rodomontade.
- Manson claims "Matgamna ducked it completely" in the 12 October debate. "The word 'Iran' did not even pass his lips in his opening 35-minute speech".
Sean Matgamna chose to cover the WW accusations in his second speech instead, in the middle of the debate. The relevant bits are below. Moshe Machover also scarcely mentioned Iran in his opening speech. He concentrated, as Sean Matgamna did, on the underlying programmatic issues about Israel-Palestine.
- In Solidarity 3/140 I wrote: "After seven speeches from WW people [on 12 October], and vehement ones too, we were none the wiser about their actual policy". Oh, replies Manson, WW just wanted "not to be diverted from the topic of the meeting".
In fact, not only Moshe Machover but most of the non-WW people on his side in the debate focused on the programmatic issues about Israel-Palestine. No-one else found WW's arguments about Sean Matgamna "excusing an Israeli nuclear attack on Iran" very interesting.
Everyone was out of step - "diverted from the topic of the meeting" - except little Johnny (and little Mark, and little Peter...)?
- Manson tries to defend his strange "paraphrase", in his speech on 12 October, of Sean Matgamna's Solidarity 3/136 article.
The whole thing depends on tricks.
- Sean Matgamna's objections to various arguments that would be used to condemn Israel (Israel as such) in the wake of such an attack - arguments which in fact have already been used in anticipation - is construed into a refusal to condemn any attack.
- Matgamna's opening paragraph, spelling out the evil consequences of an Israeli attack on Iran, and his repeated insistence that "socialists should not want" such an attack, are dismissed.
- Matgamna's sentence saying that "there is good reason for Israel to make a precipitate strike at Iranian nuclear capacity" is cited without reference to the immediately following sentence which said that we are not Israeli nationalists (i.e. what is good reason for Israel is not necessarily good reason for us).
- Manson tries to answer our criticism of the Hopi line that "a nuclear-free Middle East" is the "only just demand" to make in response to Iran's development of nuclear weapons. Just as saying that "the only just demand is for a nuclear-free world" in response to Britain's nuclear weapons is covertly to condone those weapons, so also the Hopi formula condones Iranian nuclear weapon development until such time as Israel scraps its nukes.
Manson claims that he has been "unable to find" the formula "the only just demand". It is in Moshe Machover's written debate with Sean Matgamna: read it, Peter! Or you could have listened when Moshe Machover was expounding it on 12 October, with no dissent from WW.
- Manson claims "we [WW] have never said that Israel 'is going to nuke Iran'." Not those exact words. But for months now much of WW's agitation has followed the line of its 7 August front page headline - "Threat of Israeli nuclear attack is horribly real" - and the claim in that issue that "Israel is an outpost of US power in the Middle East.... [After] an Israeli 'pre-emptive' blow against Iran... Iran would be bombed back into the stone age" by the USA.
In the 12 October debate, Duncan Morrison of AWL cited the front-page headline from WW of 1 November 2007 - "Iran is developing nuclear weapons... Iran is an anti-semitic state" - and got loud heckling from the WW people: "We were wrong". Manson writes only that "it now seems possible that the regime has given up on any attempts to procure such weapons" - which indicates that it had been making such attempts, and it is also possible that it has not given up.
- The rowdiness in the 12 October debate which WW make much sanctimonious outcry about started with Dan Randall of AWL being shouted down when he criticised Moshe Machover's sarcastic reference to "nasty Hezbollah", and pointed out that Hezbollah is indeed nasty. There followed sarcasm from WW speakers about "nasty" Iran. Manson protests that WW is critical of the Iranian regime. It is. But his own article illustrates how softened that criticism has become. "Yes", concedes Manson, "the regime is 'nasty', but so too are those of the US and Israel". He registers no difference between bourgeois-democratic USA and Israel, and clerical-fascist Iran.
- Manson repeats the WW claim that the rowdiness in the debate was due to AWL members being drunk. At last, he names names: Matt Cooper and Jim Denham were "completely inebriated".
I was there. I know they weren't drunk. Manson is lying.
Manson mentions an exchange after the end of the debate, when Matt Cooper was bad-tempered in an argument with a WW-er, and Manson complained to me. I shrugged: Matt Cooper is cantankerous in our own AWL branch meetings, and it's no big deal.
Manson reports this as: "Thomas did not deny that Cooper had been drinking heavily". I didn't deny that two plus two makes five, either: I wasn't asked about either proposition.
Enough of all this. We're not interested in more stupid bickering with WW about whether two plus two is five, or Matt Cooper was drunk, or us writing to them is really them writing to us, or Sean Matgamna speaking about Iran is really Sean Matgamna not speaking about Iran.
Since the 12 October debate, we have found from conversation with WW people and correspondence with the WW office that their position on Israel-Palestine is shifting.
Before 2002, the WW group had a conventional kitsch-left "destroy Israel" line. In 2002 they came over to "two states" (though always still with some ambivalences).
Now, according to an email from Mark Fischer at the WW office in response to our queries: "Our official position, voted for in a 2002 aggregate, is for two states. See: http://www.cpgb.org.uk/worker/432/solution.html.
"As you will have seen from various discussion list contributions [no, I don't know what he is referring to] by some CPGB comrades, we have a minority that disagrees with this position". [This minority is described in a post on the AWL website by Tina Becker of WW as "supporters of a one state-solution along the SWP's lines"].
"Also, some Weekly Worker writers, including Peter Manson, have since advocated that the two-states policy should [word missing] an element of a larger programme for an Arab federation. See the end of this article, for example: http://www.cpgb.org.uk/worker/636/two%20nations.htm". [This third view is described by Tina Becker in her posting in these terms: "I personally (and a few others) have moved closer to Moshe's position"].
Manson's article cited by Fischer states that: "Reconciliation between Israeli Jews and the Palestinians can only practically happen in the context of... pan-Arab unity". It is a garbled version of Moshe Machover's line, since Machover has always argued that a socialist federation of the whole region is a precondition, not merely "pan-Arab unity".
Manson's article also stipulates that for peace a Palestinian state "must cover a much larger area than the Gaza/West Bank". Since the Arab-majority areas of Israel, which would of course have a democratic right to secede to a Palestinian state, are not very big, that means that Manson stipulates that the conquest (presumably by the wished-for united Arab state) and clearing of "large" areas currently solidly Israeli-Jewish-populated is a precondition for peace.
All this is unclear, but makes two things clear. First, why on 12 October the WW people fervently applauded all the speeches by "dismantle Israel" speakers, and made no attempt to differentiate from them. Second, why WW feels comfortable about having its "side" of the argument represented by Moshe Machover, who states flatly that Israel has no right to exist in "anything like" its present form.
Here, unlike in the farcical agitation about Sean Matgamna allegedly "excusing an Israeli nuclear attack on Iran", there is real material for a debate.
A debate on the political issues could be useful. In such a debate, of course, the WW people would have full scope to pose whatever questions they liked about Matgamna's Solidarity 3/136 article, whether we considered those questions contrived or not.
But what they actually want, I think, is not to debate, but to be able to agitate about AWL not debating.
Sean Matgamna, in the 12 October debate, on a possible Israeli attack on Iran and his article in Solidarity 3/136
"I spelled out what I was concerned with in my article. I was concerned that we shouldn’t by implication, by responding to an attack by Israel, imply the right of Iran to have a nuclear weapon. I was concerned that condemnation of a very specific act by Israel should not feed into the dominant demonisation of Israel.
"The point here is that we have legitimate criticisms of Israel... and make a rational proposal for solving the Jewish, Palestinian - however you want to describe the two components - conflict. [The out-and-out condemnations of Israel] don’t flow in to a proposal, or a rational proposal, or a feasible proposal for solving the conflict, but they flow into the sort of crazy demonisation that culminated in denying that Israel has a right to exist....
"I can see a Jacob’s ladder, a fantasy. 'You didn’t use the word condemn' [complain the WW people]... 'You didn’t use the word condemn and therefore you are excusing a military strike, a nuclear attack on Iran'. That is the politics of craziness...
"I actually did, in the article, say I was against an attack.. I did also say that the most likely result would be to strengthen the [Iranian] regime.
"At the end of the day you have to accept the fact that the Iranian regime is clerical fascist. You say that workers are attracted to political Islam because of grievances. That I’m sure is true. It seems to be a very big part of what happens on the ground in terms of social policies. In fact, however, that is true of many other fascisms... We are against an [Israeli] attack but we are not in favour of the mullahs having a bomb..."
The whole correspondence
The whole correspondence is here.