Israel-Palestine: unravelling the issues

Why a Palestinian Arab state?

The Palestinian Arabs are a defeated people, the main victims of the Jewish-Arab war of 1947-9 and of wars since, especially the 1967 war in which Israel won control of the West Bank from Jordan and of Gaza from Egypt.

The root problem of the Palestinian Arabs is their dispossession by the Israeli state. However, their condition today is not just Israel’s responsibility, and it cannot be mended by seeking revenge on Israel.

The fact that many Palestinians continue today as refugees is also to be explained by intra-Arab politics, and by the desire of various Arab states to have them as a living indictment of Israel. Arab states, to different degrees, deny rights to Palestinians living in their territories, and push them to rely on facilities provided by the UN.

The part of Palestine allotted to the Arabs by the UN in 1947 was not unilaterally taken over by Israel, but divided between Israel, Jordan, and Egypt in the 1948-9 war, most of it going to Jordan.

Since 1988 Palestine Liberation Organisation policy has been for a fully independent Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza. A detailed plan for that has been worked out in the “unofficial” Geneva Accord.

Israel will not easily agree to that. The many Israeli settlements built in the West Bank, in a deliberate political effort to establish claims to permanent Israeli control, since the 1967 war stand as an obstacle. The big role in Palestinian politics of Hamas is also an obstacle. But while merging the Palestinian and Israeli-Jewish nations by decree in a democratic single state is impossible, an independent Palestinian state can be won by struggle on the basis of justice for both Jews and Arabs. Those who want to help the Palestinians should argue for it.

Is a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza viable?

No small state is viable on its own in the modern world economy. In fact, not even large states are viable as sealed-off units, except on a much lower economic level than capitalism has so far achieved.

But small nations can and should have the right to political independence. If the Irish, why not the Palestinians?

Support for the oppressed

Socialists must side with the oppressed against their oppressors. In general, we side with the Palestinian Arabs against Israeli oppression. However, to side with an oppressed people should not mean that we adopt all the views of every group within it, or even of its majority. Those views may be one-sided or even chauvinist.

As Lenin put it: “We fight against the privileges and violence of the oppressor nation, and do not in any way condone strivings for privilege on the part of the oppressed nation”.

Who are Hamas?

Hamas grew out of Mujama’ al-Islami, which in turn grew out of the Gaza branch of the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood. They have since switched their links towards Iran. In the 1970s and early 80s they focused on welfare activities, religious preaching, and a drive (often violent, but eventually successful) to force Palestinian women to wear the hijab. The Israeli occupation authorities then favoured them over the relatively secular nationalists.

The Mujama’ and Hamas turned to anti-Israeli activity during and after the 1987-8 intifada. They have grown from the despair created by the impasse since 2001 of political efforts, and were strong enough in 2007 to stage a coup in Gaza (from which Israel had withdrawn in 2005). Their aim is to make all of (British-Mandate) Palestine an Islamic state. Their message to the Israeli Jews is: “We have only one thing to say to you: get out of our land. Get out of our sight... There is no place or safety for you” (Ismail Haniyeh, 7 October).

Hamas is clerical-fascist. It is not a national liberation movement. More realistically, it is part of the network of a regional-imperialist power, Iran, bigger than Israel. Iran has sway also in Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq, and over oppressed nationalities like the Kurds in its own state borders.

Fighting imperialism

Some say the destruction of Israel is necessary to defeat imperialism in the Middle East. Israel is more prosperous than the immediately surrounding countries, but it does not rule them or draw super-profits from them. Since 1967 Israel has had close ties with the USA. But the Israeli state existed before those links existed — the USA imposed an official arms embargo on Israel in 1948 — and could continue to exist if they were broken.

Israel is surrounded by Arab and Islamic countries, hostile to varying degrees, with much larger populations. Those countries have their own ruling-class ties with the big powers, and some of them, like Iran, their own regional-imperialist drives. Bahrain, Jordan, Kuwait, Oman. Qatar, Turkey, and the UAE host sizeable US military bases; Israel has only two tiny US facilities (for its missile-defence system).

To identify Israel as the arch-imperialist, or as the prime tool of imperialism, in the area, is to be an apologist for the Arab and Islamic ruling classes.

The Israeli workers

Implicit in the common argument that “the answer” in the Middle East is a socialist revolution made by the Arab workers is the idea that the Israeli workers can play no positive role.

Within Israel, there is a peace movement pushing for compromise with the Arabs.

It has won huge support at some times, less at others. For decades now it has been marginalised by the failure of the peace negotiations in 2000-1 and of increasingly feeble attempts to revive them, and by the rise on both sides of right-wing politics. But it exists, today in movements like the Jewish-Arab group Standing Together.

Not all the peace activists are workers, by any means, but some are. Israel has an independent trade union movement and Israeli workers have organised large strikes. The trade unions organise Israeli Arab workers too.

The “right of return”

There was war in 1947-9 between the Jewish community in the “British Mandate” (1918-48) territory of Palestine (before that the area was part of the Ottoman Empire) and, first, Arab militias coming mostly from Syria, then, the surrounding Arab states. The Jews had become about a third of the total population and sought to set up their own state in part of Palestine to be a refuge for Jews after the Holocaust. Although Marxists censured the politics of the Jewish leadership, almost no Marxist supported the Arab states in the 1948-9 war.

The Jewish community won that war. About 700,000 Palestinian Arabs fled or were driven out of what became Israel, and a smaller number of Jews were driven out from other areas of Palestine. In the following years, over 600,000 Jews fled, or were driven out from, Arab and other non-European states, and came to Israel. Those refugees and their descendants have been integrated into Israeli society. The majority of the Jews in Israel today were born there.

Today there are about 14 million Palestinian Arabs scattered across the world. Nearly six million of them are registered as refugees. They are almost all great-grandchildren, grandchildren, or children of 1948 refugees. The Arab states’ poor treatment of them makes them continue to seek facilities from the UN refugee programme set up in 1949.

Socialists are in favour of the free movement of people. That is one thing. But “return”, as in the now-popular slogan “Exist! Resist! Return!” is about the collective resettlement into what is now Israel of a special cohort numbering two-thirds as many people as are already there, not about scope for a variety of individuals who want to live in that majority-Jewish society.

The collective “return” has been understood by both Arabs and Israelis as implying the replacement of Israel — as one of many coded ways of proposing the destruction of Israel. Omar Barghouti, the leader of the “BDS” campaign, writes in his book on it: “You cannot practically reconcile the right of return for refugees with a negotiated two-state solution”.

Anti-Zionism and antisemitism

In the earlier part of the 20th century, the different strands of Zionism compromised only a minority political current among Jews. Most Jews opposed Zionism. Marxists argued that Jews should unite with non-Jewish workers for the class struggle in the country where they lived, rather than going off to create “utopian” Zionist colonies and inevitably compromising themselves by seeking protection by big powers for those colonies. Conservative and religious Jews had their objections too.

The Jewish state is no longer a scheme for the future. It is a fact over 75 years old. Most Israelis live there because they were born there. The meaning of “Zionism” is not so clear. Usually it is taken to mean any sort of sympathy or identification with Israel, however critical — in other words, the reflex response of most Jews worldwide.

Then “Zionism” is denounced as something akin to racism. This is ideological terrorism, used to prevent any consideration of the issues that does not start with root-and-branch condemnation of Israel.

The “absolute anti-Zionist” demand that “Zionism” should be undone — i.e. that the Israeli Jewish state should cease to exist, and that the Jewish nation should instead dissolve into an Arab state — is not necessarily racist, but it is inescapably antisemitic. It implies hostility to the Israeli Jews, and hostility to that big majority of Jews worldwide, the “Zionists”, who instinctively identify with Israel.

Should we boycott Israel?

No. It would be a gesture having no plausible positive practical effect but a very large negative ideological effect on our ability to establish an independent working-class stance against both Israeli and Arab chauvinism.

Most practical “boycott, divestment, and sanctions” activity has been aimed against “accessible” targets — Israeli film-makers or academics seeking international links, Israeli LGBT activists seeking to join international protests, and so on. Those are not the people responsible for the misdeeds of the Israeli state.

If the boycott activity acquired momentum, it would also feed into, and in practice quickly become, antisemitism, targeting not Israel but non-Israeli Jews.

Israel = South Africa?

Israel is said to be the same sort of “settler state” as South Africa was before 1994, when rigid legal divisions gave the white people vast privileges over the black. A common political programme is advocated for both: smash the settler state.

But the big waves of original Jewish settlers in what is now Israel were refugees, not colonists backed by a home country using them to dominate the land.

The pioneer Zionists insisted on Jewish labour within their settlements, as part of their drive to build up a compact Jewish society in Palestine. Whatever one thinks of that “Jewish labour only” policy, it was the opposite of the mass exploitation on which modern South Africa was built.

In Israel there is not a ruling Jewish caste exploiting Arab helots. In South Africa white people used to hold all the positions of wealth and power while black people did all the basic labour in the mines and the factories. In Israel there are low-paid Arab (and immigrant) workers, but the big majority of all people employed are Jewish.

“Smash the settler state” in South Africa meant: abolish the monopoly of power and the caste privileges of the white minority. Let the majority rule.

But what would “smash the settler state” mean for Israel? It is a state which is relatively democratic for its Jewish majority. For an external force to “smash” this state would not be a matter of destroying a repressive apparatus, but of overrunning Israel and forcibly destroying or suppressing the Jewish nation.

In recent years many have described Israel as “the apartheid state”, usually to imply it must be destroyed. They refer to reports by respected human rights groups.

In fact the brief B’tselem document attempts no equation with South Africa before 1994. It lists inequalities suffered by Palestinians, and says that they amount to “apartheid” in a looser sense, with no argument about comparing to South Africa rather than to, say, Algeria in its treatment of Berbers.

The much longer Human Rights Watch document states that it “does not set out to compare Israel with South Africa under apartheid or to determine whether Israel is an ‘apartheid state’.” Its chief argument is that the horrors of Israeli rule in the West Bank feed back to and shape the whole picture. True. The answer is for Israel to get out of the West Bank.

A secular democratic state?

In 1969 the Palestine Liberation Organisation proposed the scheme of reuniting Palestine in a “secular democratic state” where the Arabs who were expelled or fled Israeli territory in the wars of 1947-9 would exercise their collective “right of return”, but Jews would have the rights of a religious minority.

In 1988 the PLO dropped that policy in favour of an independent Palestinian state alongside Israel. Many leftists used to advocate the old PLO formula of single “secular democratic state”; many now promote Hamas as the foremost expression of Palestinian militancy, and so have faded out “secular democratic”. Hamas wants an Islamic state in Palestine “from the river to the sea”.

Socialists want every state to be secular and democratic. What has been special about the “secular democratic state” slogan for Israel-Palestine is the proposal to merge the two nations in one state.

National identities and conflicts will not be overcome or superseded by decree. A joint “secular democratic state” could be established only after (long after) the conflict between the two nations had been allowed to fade by some other settlement.

The only practical meaning of the “secular democratic state” slogan can be as an ultimatum — merge the two nations — behind which is posed a fearsome “or else”.