Israel and the Arabs: hijacked history

Submitted by on 24 July, 2002 - 12:16

Matt Cooper looks at the SWP's literature on Israel-Palestine

On the recent Palestinian solidarity marches we have been confronted with a strange spectacle. Small groups of reactionary Islamic fundamentalists, shouting "death to Jews, homosexuals and socialists". In one case they were handing out leaflets written by a notorious American neo-Nazi explaining how the American media is run by Jews as part of their conspiracy for world domination.

Such people exist and perhaps there is little that can be done to stop them turning up on demos. The strange thing is that the SWP, the biggest socialist force on the left, does nothing to draw a line between such people and itself.
The SWP waves banners which are, apart from the appearance of the word "socialist", indistinguishable from the Islamists' slogans: "NO compromise with Zionism, free Palestine".

If you read the SWP literature on sale at these events, the new edition of John Rose's 1986 Hijack State, and Anne Alexander's New Intifada (substantially an abridgement of Rose's pamphlet), it is easy to see where this seemingly unnatural symmetry comes from.

The SWP too believe that Israel is the devil's work, though in their eschatology the part of the devil is taken by "US imperialism". Its defeat will, both Islamists and SWP agree, come at the hands of the Arab masses, but while the Islamists would drive them into the sea, the SWP would have them forcibly transformed into "socialists".

The two SWP pamphlets share an approach to history. Go to "history" like a schoolboy debater, take what supports and ignore what doesn't support your case. Then generalise upon this one sided distortion of history. If necessary, merely assert the pre-conceived conclusion without support. Ignore or dismiss anything that doesn't fit.

The key idea in the SWP's cut and paste "history" of Israel is that it was the creation of British and American Imperial power:
"...it was the alliance between Zionism and imperialism that turned a defensive reaction to racism into the oppressive force it has been for the last 80 years," according to Alexander.

Rose argues that the Jews in Palestine were the agents of British and then - after 1948 - US imperialism. Israel is seen as a "foreign enclave" (Rose's words) established by British and US imperialism.

The "cut and paste" evidence here is the 1917 Balfour Declaration: this pledged British support for a Jewish "homeland" in Palestine, an equivocal commitment that was repeated in Britain's League of Nations mandate of 1922. For the SWP, that is it, the imperialist seal of approval that tainted Israel forever. However the real history is
most complex.

Winston Churchill's White Paper of 1922 distanced the British government from the idea that a Jewish homeland implied a Jewish state; the Passfield White Paper of 1929 raised the prospect of limiting Jewish immigration into Palestine.

Although in 1937 Britain proposed the partition of Palestine between Jews and Arabs, a further White Paper in 1939 abandoned this and - on the eve of the Holocaust - restricted Jewish immigration to 15,000 a year for five years, after which there would be none.

According to Alexander, "after 1945 the US took on the role of Israel's main arms supplier". This is simply a lie.

After Israel declared its independence, it was invaded by Arab armies, including the British-led Arab Legion. In the first phase of the war the Israeli army fought with whatever they could lay their hands on, and it was only in the second phase that the balance was tipped decisively in Israel's favour, following a secure supply of arms from Czechoslovakia.

When British-dominated Jordan seized the West Bank, which the UN had included in the Palestinian state it proposed to set up alongside Israel, the Israeli left called for
Israel to back a Palestinian movement for their own state there since they believed that Jordan was acting as an agent of British imperialism.

There was no imperial plot to use Israel to facilitate British or American domination of the Middle East. Those imperial powers already dominated. In fact Israel was something of a nuisance to the British, and viewed with uncertainty by the US.
Britain's "gameplan" in 1948 was that the Arabs would crush the Israelis and
then Britain would move back into control in the guise of "peacekeeper".

The one-sidedness of the SWP's account is again demonstrated by Rose's analysis of Israel's relationship to Nasser's nationalist government in Egypt, which had come to power by overthrowing the corrupt (and pro-British) Farouk regime in 1952. Rose highlights how in 1956 Israel reached a secret deal with France and Britain to
invade the Sinai Peninsula and grab the Suez Canal. All of this is
true and well known.

But what Rose doesn't mention, and can't explain, is why in 1952 the Israeli Prime Minister, David Ben-Gurion, had publicly welcomed the 1952 Free Officers revolution that had brought Nasser to power and secretly entered into talks with Egypt.

It was only after the 1967 war that the US became the major arms supplier to Israel. Rose and Alexander not only fail to explain this history, they have also airbrushed much of the important detail out.

The one-sided selection of facts that the SWP retail as "history" leads to the blatantly untrue assertion that Israel is the genetically engineered product of western imperialism: it is its watchdog, it shares its very DNA.

Rose and Alexander's treatment of the Holocaust is no different. In a typically illogical and incoherent section, Rose states that the world in 1945 did seem to give some credence to the Zionist idea that only the creation of a Jewish state could bring an end to anti-Semitism.

Then he asks, "did the world really have to look like this in 1945?", and proceeds to answer, after a fashion, his own rhetorical question. No, the world didn't have to look like this, he states. The world only looked like this because the Zionists deliberately created a refugee crisis, the Zionists helped the Allied powers to shut the door in the faces of the Jews. Zionists had no interest in fighting the Nazis, and because the Zionists capitulated to anti-Semitism by running to Palestine from it, they were at least "kindred spirits" with the Nazis.

Rose supports his argument with selective quotes, but no concrete historical evidence.

"Of course," states Rose, "the Zionists' terrible attitude to the Nazis must never be allowed to hide or disfigure the tremendous courage shown by Jewish resistance to the Nazis. They had to contend not only with the Nazis but with what amounted to a Zionist 'fifth column' in their own ranks".

Rose's representation of the Polish Zionists as a "fifth column" - a term usually used for Nazi agents - is sickening. It was the Left Zionist Youth who helped instigate the resistance in the Polish ghettos and, along with the Communists of the Bund, were the backbone of the fighters in the Warsaw ghetto rising of 1943.

These people were neither a Nazi fifth column nor cowards whose only answer was to
dream of escaping to Jerusalem. The pamphlets continue in similar vain, cataloguing Israel's crimes - an easy task. But at no stage are they given any real context.

Rose's chapter on Lebanon is strong on the wrongdoing of the Israeli Defence Force, but fails to explain why Israel invaded. For Rose this is the proof that Israel is the terrorist state.

Rose and Alexander both misunderstand what the writing of history should be.

History is not the tool of vengeance by the dead upon the living exacted by their self-appointed representatives. Socialists have no right to create, distort or misrepresent the facts of the past in order to bolster our support or hostility to particular causes, peoples and movements of the present.

History should be about understanding the material causes of the present and it should help us to learn lessons and thereby help us work out a socialist line of
march in the future.

Fundamentally, our political programme is not a reaction to history, but carved from the living potential of the present.

It is not just that Rose writes bad history, he fundamentally understands what, for a Marxist, history is.

When it comes to understanding the present, the SWP are even worse. Alexander is very vague about how one might achieve a "democratic socialist state in which Arabs and Jews can live in peace" (except, bizarrely, demonstrating against the World Bank). Why does Alexander fail to mention how she believes the SWP programme can be achieved? Actually, Rose is less coy.

Blinded by his skewed and falsified history, in which Israel was born an agent of imperialism, he can only see the Israeli working class as imperialist agents. For him it is not, like all working classes in the world, the potential agent of historical progress - the force that can overthrow capitalism and build a socialist society.

Of course, with the Israeli working class, as with all working classes around the world there is a need to transform its consciousness - to win Israeli workers to recognition of the national rights of the Palestinians as well as to the fight against their own class
exploitation by Israeli and other capitalists.

Rose's answer, and that of the SWP, is that Israel must be conquered "by the Arab working class, liberating Palestine [Israel], and creating a socialist republic with full rights for Jews and all national minorities".

So, for the SWP, Jewish Israelis are a nation who would be denied the right to self determination even under an (Arab) workers' state. In other words, for the first time in history a democratic and socialist republic will be created by way of crushing the national rights of a peoples, killing thousands of them in the process.

For the sake of argument imagine there has been a successful workers' revolution in Jordan. What should the Workers' Republic of Jordan do?

Rose's answer is that, in principle, it should launch a war on Israel (maybe waiting on the workers of Egypt and Syria to make their socialist revolution) to smash the Israeli state and to bring socialism to them on the barrel of a gun.

Faced with this threat, there can be little doubt that the Israeli ruling class would have no problem rallying their working class behind them to smash the nascent Jordanian workers' state (with the full support of the US, not to mention the ruling classes of the surrounding Arab states, the exiled King of Jordan and so on).

Of course, if Israel attacked it, the Workers' Republic of Jordan would have every right to defend itself, but at the same time these workers should reach out the hand of proletarian internationalism to the Israeli working class.

But Rose has no time for the Israeli working class and the peace movement. He dismisses the "colonial mentality" of Israeli Jews as being akin to that of white Rhodesians or the colonial French in Algeria.

In 1982 Peace Now organised a demonstration in Tel Aviv against the war in Lebanon and Rose, in a rare recognition of a difficult fact, does mention this. He puts the figure for the demonstration at 400,000, but he dismisses it as ".... a one-off affair" and moves swiftly on.

But let's get that 400,000 in perspective. That is 400,000 in a country with a population of a little over four million. A demonstration of equivalent size in
Britain would be six million souls strong - bigger by a factor of 100 than the recent Palestinian solidarity march in Britain which the SWP described as "brilliant" and indicative of a new "mood".

Rose's and Alexander's pamphlets are totally false, degenerate and worthless.

John Rose: The Hijack State, new edition May 2002, and
Anne Alexander: The New Intifada, new edition May 2002

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