Two Nations Two States

As World War Two ended, Jewish groups started large-scale guerrilla war against the British, trying to drive them out. Fringe groups had already started such activity during the war. With the oil industry developing, Britain was more than ever concerned to maintain an alliance with the dominant classes in the Arab countries. In November 1947 the United Nations declared for partition of Palestine into a Jewish and an Arab state. Britain effectively abdicated the state power from that point on. Its calculation was that Jewish-Arab war would show that it was essential for Britain to reassert...

We side politically with the losers so far in the Arab-Jewish conflict, the Palestinian Arabs and their descendants. We support their struggle against intolerable conditions and Israeli occupation of the territories where they are the majority. We support the PLO aspiration to have an independent Palestinian state - where the Palestinian Arabs are a majority. The Palestinians have our sympathy, and in general our support for their legitimate national demands. But then what? What do we say about Israel? How did it happen that in the middle of the 20th century a Jewish state reappeared after 2...

Israel confronts the Palestinians on the West Bank as a brutal colonialist oppressor. But the Jewish-Arab conflict is also a conflict of right against right - the right of the Palestinians to have an independent state and the right of Israel to exist in security. Here an attempt is made to untangle the issues. Support for the Palestinians' struggle for an independent state should come first surely? Yes. We support the oppressed. Those who refuse to do that inevitably help the oppressor. As the Irish socialist James Connolly rightly said: "To side with the strong against the weak is the virtue...

The Israeli-Palestinian peace talks broke down in late 2000 and had ended by February 2001. The Palestinian intifada erupted in late September 2001. A right wing, chauvinist government was installed early in 2001 by an Israeli electorate bitterly disappointed that what they saw as major concessions to the Palestinians in the peace talks had not brought settlement, and alarmed by the intensifying conflict. The Palestinian suicide-bomb offensive against Jewish civilians pushed large numbers of Israelis, seeking safety, to back or tolerate Prime Minister Sharon's militarism against the...