WW and the Israel/Iran debate: what I got wrong

Submitted by martin on 1 December, 2008 - 12:28 Author: Martin Thomas

I got something wrong in my previous comments on the current Weekly Worker campaign - which consists of wriggling out of debate with AWL on Israel and Iran and at the same time claiming that we evade debate with them.

An article by Peter Manson in Weekly Worker 746 contains nothing new on the campaign, but provides a suitable occasion to correct the error. It also provides an opportunity to alert readers to a new political turn by the WW, being undertaken under cover of the smokescreen provided by the campaign.

Strictly speaking, Manson's screed includes one new thing: a complaint that AWL "has taken to deleting all fresh comments posted on its website that challenge the AWL's stated reasons..." Actually we deleted, and explained we would continue to to delete, "comments" that were not fresh, but simply repeated the WW's accusations. Being open for debate does not oblige us to give the WW group unlimited scope to clutter our website with attempts to drag us into "you excused an Israeli nuclear attack on Iran"/ "no, we didn't"/ "you did so"/ "no, we didn't"/ "I say you did"/ "no, we didn't" exchanges.

So much for that. What was my mistake?

I wrote that it was eight days after accepting a debate on "Israel, Iran, and socialist politics" that the WW group suddenly made it a precondition that we accept the WW group's assessment of the debate on the subject which took place on 12 October (with Moshe Machover as the anti-AWL platform speaker but WW people providing most of the anti-AWL speeches from the floor) and register that by accepting a WW-chosen title for the new debate.

Actually, it was 12 days. The discrepancy is minor, but has some significance. As we shall see, it indicates that it took two sessions of the WW group gathering together for collective "hate-the-AWL" sessions before they could hype themselves up to the stance of demanding a "confession" from us as a precondition for debate.

The reader will recall that I wrote to WW on 14 October proposing the debate on "Israel, Iran, and socialist politics", and got the reply that they were keen to debate "this subject" (my emphasis). It all seemed fixed bar the details of date and meeting place.

Five days passed. Then the WW group had a meeting on 19 October. Whether they reprimanded Mark Fischer (who had been corresponding with me from the WW office) or not I don't know, but in any case they decided to start the "insist-on-our-title" ploy.

Mark Fischer duly wrote to me on 20 October. "Given Matgamna's farcical behaviour at the October 12 event, plus your own mendacious report subsequently - it is important that you are tied down on what we will actually debate... Thus it is appropriate to use the title of Matgamna's original July 24 'discussion article' for the event - 'What if Israel bombs Iran?'"

It was hardly likely that I would reply: "Oh yes, of course I agree that our speeches on 12 October were 'farcical' and my report was 'mendacious'. Of course we have to have your title to keep us in line!"

In my response (22 October), I deliberately avoided Fischer's verbal-pugilistics style. I just wrote: "But the debate we've challenged you to have, and which you've accepted, is on 'Israel, Iran, and socialist politics'."

If Fischer's 20 October email had just been a matter of him gratuitously practising a "tough-guy" style, and WW had really wanted the debate, then the obvious way out - as I suggested in subsequent emails - would be to "tweak" the debate title by mutual agreement. In the nature of the case, that would mean choosing a deliberately "neutral" title - maybe just "Israel and Iran".

As we know, in fact Fischer came back with "There is no possibility that we will accept a debate titled 'Israel, Iran and socialist politics'." He fired off a series of wordy emails insisting that they would not debate us until we censured ourselves for our stance in the debate on 12 October and recognised that by accepting WW's preferred title. If we didn't do that, he claimed, we were evading debate!

In previous comments, I'd assumed that that response - i.e., in effect, WW withdrawing from the previously-agreed debate - came pretty quickly after my 22 October email (thus, eight days after the original agreement to debate).

In fact it didn't. Fischer's stance of 20 October had, despite all the verbal "tough-guy" effects, contained the statement "We will debate you on Israel and Iran", which at face value suggested the possibility of agreeing on a neutral title.

At first WW did not know how to respond to my mild demur of 22 October. Although Mark Fischer is an Internet enthusiast - most of his replies to my emails came within hours - this time he delayed.

WW's definite withdrawal came only on 26 October, i.e. after the next of the WW group's weekly meetings. There was a fresh political decision by WW to step up the verbal pugilistics so as to pose the question of a debate in terms which they knew neither we nor anyone else in comparable circumstances would accept, and thus to allow WW the possibility of simultaneously evading debate and appearing to demand debate.

So, what else was happening in those meetings on 19 and 26 October? Readers who have studied the whole correspondence over the debate will know that early on in it I asked for clarification on what WW's position on Israel-Palestine now was.

On 12 October Tina Becker of WW had told me (as I understood it) that WW was moving towards a position "closer to Moshe Machover's" (from the formal "two-states" position which WW adopted in 2002). I asked the WW office if I'd understood right.

Fischer initially replied on this question in belligerent (though not enlightening) style, but eventually just stopped responding to that element in my emails.

What was going on? Maybe, I thought, John Bridge was preparing to go over to the Machover line, but didn't want to be rushed, or forced into open debate on it. He wanted a smokescreen to shelter the political shift.

It seems my suspicion was correct.

A two-part article by Bridge in WW 746 and 747 concludes:

What of reconciliation between Israeli Jews and the Palestinians? In my opinion this can only happen in the context of ending the US-UK occupation of Iraq, sweeping away the House of Saud, the petty Gulf sheikdoms, the corrupt regimes in Egypt, Syria and Libya, the Hashemite kingdom in Jordan and the creation of a centralised Arab republic. The form we envisage for working class rule.

Therefore our two-state solution in Israel-Palestine is another duality. Both an Arab and a proletarian solution. Doubtless an anti-Zionist Israel would be offered associate status by the Arab republic. Akin to Switzerland or Norway in relationship to the present-day European Union. A step away from merger.

This is a garbled version of Machover's argument. It is harder than it might otherwise be to disentangle because of Bridge's adoption of Tony Blair prose - sentences without verbs. I won't attempt the disentangling here. But a version of Machover's line it evidently is.

I recommend Sean Matgamna's recent article discussing that line.

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