THESES
ON PALESTINE
International
Trotskyist Opposition
8 March 2001
1.
Jewish immigration to Palestine in the last century was an operation of
a colonial character. The constitution of Israel was the birth of a
colonial state of a settler type: based, that is, on the
expulsion of the indigenous population to make room for the
colonists brought by massive immigration, rather than on its
superexploitation by the colonial power and a narrow colonial
elite (a phenomenon analogous to that of the English colonies of
North America, Ulster, the original Boer colonies of the South Africa,
etc.). In no way, therefore, can the constitution of the state of Israel
be seen as a legitimate expression of self-determination of the
Jewish people . It happened with the oppression of the Palestinian
Arab people, dispossessed and driven from their land.
This was in full
accord with the dominant imperialist powers in the region, first British
and then North American. From its debut Zionism was supported by
imperialism. It was an essential instrument in the work of dividing the
Arab people after the First World War and repressing their struggles for
liberation from imperialist dominion. The brief period of conflict
between Zionism and British imperialism (from 1939 to 1948, but
particularly from 1943) doesn t contradict this. In fact, it was
caused by the desire of British imperialism to distance itself some from
Zionism to avoid a major crisis of its rule in the Middle East (particularly
after the great Arab revolt in Palestine in 1936-39). Zionism
immediately shifted its alliance, linking itself with the imperialism
that emerged definitively dominant from the Second World War, that is,
US imperialism (and also using the foolish counterrevolutionary policy
of the Stalinist bureaucracy of the USSR). Therefore, Israel s role
as a direct outpost of imperialism in the Middle East must not be
considered a phenomenon of degeneration that broke with the original
character of Zionism, but as a logical development of the Zionist
enterprise as such.
The tragedy of the
monstrous genocide against the Jewish people by Nazism and its allies in
the Second World War cannot be taken in some way to justify Zionism and
the constitution of the state of Israel. Zionism was born well before
the Holocaust, and the just struggle for the liberation of the Jewish
people from the violence, massacres and oppression of which they were
already victim before the triumph of fascism cannot justify violence,
massacres and oppression against another people (in no way responsible
for the oppression of the Jews) in conjunction with imperialist
colonialism. The frontal struggle against the anti-Semitism expressed
not only by forces openly of the right, but also by some sectors of the
left (for example, some Stalinist or so-called
autonomous tendencies), cannot be separated from the struggle
against Zionism and its oppression of the Palestinian people, without
becoming unilateral and, ultimately, hypocritical.
2. The fight
of the Arab people of Palestine against Israeli oppression and for the
real right of national liberation and self-determination constitutes,
therefore, a legitimate struggle which Marxists should support
unconditionally. The Palestinian struggle should be framed in the more
general struggle for the national liberation of the Arab people. This
nation, united by language, traditions and culture, is artificially
divided by the imperialist powers for their own interests of dominion.
It is enough to look at the borders of the various Arab states. In most
cases they are entirely artificial, consisting of straight lines drawn
with a ruler on maps in Paris or London to determine the spheres of
colonial rule of the great powers. This was particularly evident at the
end of the First World War, when the clear desire for unity of the Arab
people emerging from Turkish dominion was shamelessly betrayed by the
victorious powers. The borders of Palestine are in reality largely
artificial, having been determined only in 1921 (with the constitution
by Great Britain of the Hashemite emirate of Transjordan, the current
kingdom of Jordan). Nevertheless, the reality of the region and
historical development were such that, in the course of decades, in the
first half of the last century, a feeling of particular community was
constituted among the Arabs of Palestine, also cemented by the struggle
against Zionist oppression. Thus it is possible to speak of the
Palestinian people, not distinct and counterposed to, but a component
with specificities of, the Arab people in general. The struggle for the
national rights and liberation of the Palestinian people is not
counterposed to the national unity and liberation of the Arab people in
general, which revolutionary Marxists must support.
3.
Revolutionary Marxists must struggle to develop the perspective of
liberation of the Palestinian people and the Arab people in general on
the basis of the strategy of the permanent revolution. As affirmed in
the Theses on the Permanent Revolution elaborated by Trotsky in 1929:
With regard to countries with a belated bourgeois development,
especially the colonial and semicolonial countries, the theory of the
permanent revolution signifies that the complete and genuine solution of
their tasks of achieving democracy and national emancipation is
conceivable only through the dictatorship of the proletariat as the
leader of the subjugated nation, above all of its peasant masses... This
in turn means that the victory of the democratic revolution is
conceivable only through the dictatorship of the proletariat which bases
itself upon the alliance with the peasantry and solves first of all the
tasks of the democratic revolution.
Revolutionary
Marxists must, therefore, reject any illusory conception of revolution
by stages, and indicate to the masses the perspective of proletarian
power and socialist revolution. They must build revolutionary Marxist
parties based firstly on the working class, develop the political
hegemony of the latter in the process of revolutionary struggle, and win
the masses from the influence of bourgeois and petty-bourgeois
nationalism and Islamic fundamentalism. In vast sectors of the Arab
masses a vague feeling has existed for many decades that links them in
the struggle for national and social emancipation. These feelings have
been exploited and then brutally betrayed by left bourgeois
and petty-bourgeois nationalist leaders (from Nasser to the Baath, from
the Algerian FLN to Qaddafi). Even the development of Islamic
fundamentalism, a variegated movement whose reactionary character must
be denounced and fought without simulation, is linked to the failure of
and disillusionment with the false national-bourgeois Arab
socialism .
Unifying the
struggle for democratic and national demands with the struggle for
social demands, in opposition to all the current leaderships -- whether
openly reactionary or progressive -- Trotskyists must build
their own parties, win the leadership of the proletariat and all the
oppressed masses, and lead them to the socialist revolution.
4. These are
the theoretical positions supported in the 1930s and 1940s by the Fourth
International and its Palestinian section. Not only against Zionism in
general and against the Zionist left (the Labour Party and the Histradut
trade union) supported by a majority of the Jewish colonists, but also
against the Zionist far left (the Poale Zion left and the Hashomer
Hatzair/Socialist League) linked with the so-called London Bureau (that
is, the international coordinating structure of the centrist
forces in the 1930s) and supporting (at least until 1947) the project of
a binational Palestine. In a polemic against the positions of the latter,
during a meeting in 1939 (at the end of the great Arab revolt of
1936-39) of representatives of Arab and Jewish parties on the basis of a
document by the London Bureau, the Palestinian Trotskyists affirmed
their basic positions in a text published in the press of the Fourth
International, declaring their full solidarity with the Arab
nationalist movement and their unconditional support for the immediate
demands of the Arabs: a) cessation of Jewish emigration, b) prohibition
of new land acquisitions by Jews, and c) an Arab national
government.
These positions were
reaffirmed, in their essence, in 1947-48 at the time of the division of
Palestine and the birth of Israel, adapted to a situation partially
modified on the basis of the changed attitude of British imperialism,
which, in a difficult situation in the Middle East, passed to mainly
basing its action on the Arab feudal-bourgeois regimes, in first place
the Hashemite monarchy. The evaluation of the International was that
imperialism had, in effect, succeeded in diverting the struggle for the
emancipation of the Arab people against imperialism, transforming the
1948-49 war into a war among agents of imperialism (agents of American
imperialism in the rising state of Israel, and of British imperialism in
the Arab countries) for the division among them of the territory of
Palestine at the expense of the Palestinian Arab people.
The
November-December 1947 number of Quatri逭e
Internationale, organ
of the International Executive Committee, summarized the position of the
International: The position of the Fourth International on the
Palestinian problem remains clear and sharp as in past. It will be in
the vanguard of the struggle against partition, for a united,
independent Palestine, in which the masses will with sovereignty
determine their fate through the election of a constituent assembly.
Against the effendis and the imperialist agents, against the maneuvers
of the Egyptian and Syrian bourgeoisie, which is trying to divert the
struggle for the emancipation of the masses into a struggle against the
Jews. It will launch an appeal for the agrarian revolution and for the
anticapitalist and anti-imperialist struggle, the essential engine of
the Arab revolution. But it cannot conduct this struggle with any
possibility of success without taking an unequivocal stand against the
partition of the country and against the constitution of a Jewish
State.
In January 1948 the
Palestinian Trotskyist group concluded its theses affirming: We
have to patiently explain to the most advanced layers of the Arab
proletariat and the intellectuals that military actions of a racist
character only deepen the gulf between Jews and Arabs and contribute in
practice to the political division, that the fundamental factor and the
principal cause of the partition is imperialism, that the current war
doesn t do anything but strengthen imperialism, that thanks to the
bourgeois and feudal leadership of the Arab countries -- agents of
imperialism -- we have been beaten in a stage of the struggle against
imperialism, and that we must prepare for victory in a later phase, that
is, for the unification of Palestine and the Arab East in general --
creating the only force that can reach these goals: the unified
revolutionary proletarian party of the Arab East.
And the Second World
Congress of the Fourth International, meeting in April 1948, summarized
the general position of our movement in these terms: In the Arab
states of the Middle and Near East and in North Africa the sections and
groups of the Fourth International favor the unification of the Arab
countries in federations of free Arab republics. These sections fight
for the elimination of imperialism -- British and French -- against the
imperialist intervention of the US, against the landowners complicit
with the imperialists, against their tool, the Arab League, for the
constituent assembly, and for the widest democracy.
In what
concerns particularly Palestine, the Fourth International rejects as
utopian and reactionary the Zionist solution to the Jewish
question. It declares that the total repudiation of Zionism is the
condition sine quo non for a fusion of the struggles of the
Jewish workers with the emancipatory social and national struggles of
the Arab workers. It declares that it is deeply reactionary to demand a
Jewish emigration to Palestine, as it is reactionary to appeal for the
immigration of oppressors to the colonial countries in general. It
maintains that the matter of immigration and the relationships among
Jews and Arabs cannot suitably be decided until after the expulsion of
imperialism by a freely elected constituent assembly with full rights
for Jews as a national minority.
This affirmed the
cornerstone of a revolutionary perspective as the struggle for
Palestinian liberation in the more general framework of the liberation
struggle against imperialism and its local agents. It pointed to the
constituent assembly of Palestine as the instrument of the
anti-imperialist unification of the masses and the concrete realization
of the Arab national government demanded in the 1939
resolution (as can be understood, considering that the Arab population
constituted around 70 percent of the inhabitants of Palestine and that
the texts speak of the rights of the Jewish population as a
national minority ). It proposed the rejection of Jewish
immigration under any pretext (at the same time, the Trotskyists fought
for the opening of the US borders, particularly to Jewish refugees) and
of the constitution of the state of Israel.
5. The
fundamental and programmatic elements of the general positions expressed
by the Trotskyist movement at the moment of the development and the
birth of the Zionist state remain fully valid. It is necessary to
reaffirm and develop them in light of the historical process of the last
50 years and the reality of the current situation.
This implies that
the positions of revolutionary Marxists on the Intifada and the
Palestinian question in general are the following:
a.
Trotskyists express their full and unconditional support for the revolt
of the Arab people of Palestine and are for its development by any
means necessary (with the exception of indiscriminate terrorism
against the civilian population of Israel).
b. The
struggle for the self-determination and liberation of the Palestinian
people from the oppression of Zionism and imperialism and for the
constitution of an independent Arab state of Palestine (the central
demand of the present revolt) is historically fully legitimate and
progressive. In this framework Trotskyists support the full and total
right of all the Palestinian refuges to return to historical Palestine (whether
in the borders of pre-1967 Israel or in the occupied territories) from
which they or their descendents were driven out by the Zionist
offensive, and the recovery of their abandoned property (or financial
compensation where that is impossible) and adequate economic support for
the return at the expense of Zionism and imperialism.
c.
Trotskyists reject the perspective of the Oslo accords, the
Clinton Plan , or other analogous projects, that is, the creation
of a kind of Palestinian Bantustan formed on a small part of
historical Palestine from territories substantially under Israeli
military control, with its borders controlled by the Zionist armed
forces in name of the national security of Israel, without
any economic viability, and subject to an unacceptable series of
external, internal, military, and political restrictions. This would be
a state only formally independent, an Indian reservation of a
low-paid workforce for Israeli capitalism.
d.
Trotskyists also reject the whole perspective of the construction of a
Palestinian mini-state in just the territories occupied by Israel in
1967, which today is the goal of the Arafat leadership. The constitution
of such a state on less than a quarter of the territory of historical
Palestine would not represent the true realization of the desire for
national liberation of the Palestinian Arab people. Particularly, it
would make meaningless the perspective of the return of the refugees.
e. The
perspective of the liberation of the Palestinian people and the
constitution of their independent state implies the destruction of the
Zionist state of Israel, an artificial creation which by its nature
oppresses the Palestinian Arab people and is an imperialist bridgehead
in the whole region of the Middle East and beyond. This destruction
doesn t mean denying the democratic rights of the Jewish people who
live in Palestine. Their presence is by now historically consolidated
and must be recognized and respected. Nevertheless, the national rights
of the Jewish people in Palestine must be subordinated to the priority
rights of the oppressed Arab Palestinian people to self-determination
and the constitution of their independent state.
f. The
struggle for the liberation of the Palestinian people cannot be won in
isolation. It has to find the support and backing of the Arab masses.
The revolutionary mobilization of the Arab people must be based on the
perspective not only of solidarity with the Palestinian people but also
of the anti-imperialist liberation of the Arab nation.
g. But a
perspective such as the full and final liberation of the Palestinian
people makes no sense in the framework of capitalism. The only realistic
solution is that delineated by the permanent revolution. The destruction
of the Zionist state, like the unification of the Arab nation, is in
fact inconceivable without a socialist revolution. The perspective can
only be that of a socialist Palestine within the Arab nation unified on
a socialist basis.
h. This
revolutionary process, in turn, can and must involve the whole of the
Middle East and the North Africa, bringing into being a political and
economic entity strong enough to confront the imperialist reaction. The
perspective must, therefore, be a Socialist Federation of the Middle
East and North Africa that unifies on a voluntary basis the various
peoples of this region, including those today oppressed by Arab regimes,
such as the Berbers and the Kurds.
To realize this
program it is necessary to build a new leadership of the mass movement.
A leadership that fights for the overthrow not only of the Israeli
regime, but also of the bourgeois, feudal-bourgeois, clerical-bourgeois,
and petty-bourgeois regimes of the Arab countries and of the other
states of the region. These are direct agents of imperialist rule or
only demagogically and accidentally anti-imperialist ,
reactionaries and oppressors of the masses, guarantors of the
exploitation of the proletariat and the semiproletariat of their own
countries.
For this it is
necessary to build revolutionary Marxist parties, united in a refounded
Fourth International, parties which are built firstly in the proletariat
of each country, which fight for working-class hegemony in the mass
anti-imperialist movement, contrasting themselves with all the current
leaderships, reactionary (such as the Islamic fundamentalists)
or bourgeois or petty-bourgeois progressive (such as the
Arafat leadership), and which, dialectically unifying national and
democratic demands with social demands, lead the revolution to victory
and transcendence, without loss of continuity, into socialist revolution
( The dictatorship of the proletariat which has risen to power as
the leader of the democratic revolution is inevitably and, very quickly
confronted with tasks, the fulfillment of which is bound up with deep
inroads into the rights of bourgeois property. The democratic revolution
grows over directly into the socialist revolution and thereby becomes a
permanent revolution. Trotsky, Theses on the Permanent Revolution).
6. A complex
aspect of the problem of the national-liberation struggle of the
Palestinian people concerns the concrete modality of the realization of
national self-determination and the construction of the independent
Palestinian state, particularly given the presence of the Jewish
population in the territory of historical Palestine. The position of the
Fourth International in the 1940s, in continuity with that of the 1930s,
rightly centered the solution of this matter on the demand for a
Constituent Assembly of Palestine. The national composition of the
population of Palestine at the time (around 70 percent Arab, 30 percent
Jewish) made this demand logical as the expression of the
self-determination of the Arab people of Palestine (not by chance, as
seen in the texts of the period, which speak of the rights of the Jewish
people as a national minority ).
The situation has
been profoundly modified by the subsequent historical development, with
the consolidation of Israel as an oppressor of the Palestinian people
and the attending demographic changes (today in the territory of
historical Palestine there are around 5 million Jews and 4 million Arabs,
including the refugees living in the West Bank and Gaza; another 3
million Palestinian refugees live elsewhere in the Middle East, but it
is unlikely that all will want to return to their families land of
origin).
The political
answers given to the problem, particularly by the forces that identify
with Trotskyism, are multiple and contradictory. One extreme is
expressed by the Committee for a Workers International (CWI, in the past
also known as Militant from the name of the newspaper of its
principal organization, that of Britain) and of its section in Israel,
which speak of the perspective of a socialist Palestine
alongside a socialist Israel . This position constitutes a
socialist version of the perspective of a mini-state,
expresses concretely an adaptation to the Zionist state, and therefore
should be rejected.
At the opposite
extreme is the position of the current of Morenoist origin.
In its declaration of 13 October 2000 the International Workers League (LIT)
put forward a strong criticism to the Arafat leadership, denouncing its
abandonment of the Palestinian National Charter (of 1964, modified in
1968-69). The text affirms: This Charter correctly started from
the position of no recognition of state of Israel and approved the
defense of a secular, democratic and non-racist Palestine, a Palestine
where Arabs and Jews would live together, with the destruction of state
of Israel, and the expulsion of Zionists. Jews who wanted to live there,
for religious reasons, could peacefully remain in this secular
Palestinian state.
Clearly, the Jews
who would want to stay in Palestine exclusively for religious
reasons are only a small minority of the Jewish population. In fact,
in apparent continuity with previous positions, the LIT seems to propose
the expulsion of the majority of the Jewish people from Palestine. This
is (with some ambiguities and with different positions from the various
PLO organizations) the historical position of the Palestinian National
Charter, which in particular considers Palestinian only Jews
who had normally resided in Palestine until the beginning of the
Zionist invasion (and presumably their descendants, since this
beginning was at the time of the 1917 Balfour Declaration). But this
doesn t automatically make it a correct position.
Naturally, we
don t confuse this hypothesis with a perspective of massacre, and
we know that there have been examples in which a colonial population has
been expelled without this having involved an historical tragedy (for
example, the pieds noirs in Algeria after 1962). We
can also suppose that this can be linked with the perspective of opening
the US borders to those expelled. A part of the Jewish population,
particularly the recent immigrants from Russia, would probably be ready
to voluntarily emigrate, if given the conditions to do so.
With all this in
mind, revolutionary Marxists should strongly reject such positions. They
express, for the Trotskyists who adopt them, an uncritical adaptation to
the (past) positions of petty-bourgeois nationalism. They also make
obviously impossible any hypothesis of the involvement of a part of the
Jewish proletariat and youth in a perspective of anticapitalist and
anti-imperialist struggle, which is a necessity for the perspective of
socialist revolution. The constitution of a Jewish presence in Palestine
is an historical fact, which it is not the task of the revolutionary
Marxists or the Palestinian Arab people to reverse (different, naturally,
is the case of specifically reactionary sectors, open racists and
fascists who obviously should be expelled not only from the West Bank
and Gaza but also from Palestine as such).
Positions favoring
the expulsion of the majority of the Jewish population from Palestine
break entirely with the traditional positions of Trotskyism described
above, which, while condemning Zionism, opposing the birth of Israel,
and favoring the blocking of Jewish immigration to Palestine, recognized
that the Jewish immigrant population already there (Zionist or not) had
the right to stay with full rights as a national minority .
If this were valid (and it was) more than fifty years ago, it makes
absolutely no sense to modify the position today, when a large part of
the Jewish population of Israel has firmer roots in Palestinian
territory.
Some other
formations that identify with Trotskyism (the Spartacists and
the League for a Revolutionary Communist International ,
known also as Workers Power from the name of its British
section) demand as a solution a binational workers state
. This repeats the proposal, indicated above, of the Zionist far left
before the birth of Israel and, in fact, despite the revolutionary
rhetoric, constitutes an adaptation to Zionism. It is frontally opposes
the slogans and goals of the Palestinian revolt, which demands,
legitimately, the birth of an independent Palestinian state, not a
binational solution, even a workers or socialist
one.
The position of the
comrades of the group Militants for the Fourth International
, which works in Israel and supports the Movement for the
Refoundation of the Fourth International , in which our tendency
participates, has a certain analogy with the position just indicated.
Without well clarifying the class character of the new state, they
appeal for a constituent assembly of Palestine in terms (logically,
seeing the historical development of the situation) that appear to be a
binational solution, therefore, with the negatives indicated.
A position from the
Lambertist tradition, taken up again on some recent occasions,
seeks to resolve the matter of a vital general orientation with the
slogan of a constituent assembly , referring not only to
Palestine but also to Jordan. If this territorial framework had
political plausibility, we might find ourselves confronting an
orientation analogous to that of the Fourth International in the 1940s.
Unfortunately, this is not the case. As we indicated in point 2, history
has created a specifically Palestinian people, inserted generally in the
Arab people. But today a united and distinct Palestine-Jordan entity
doesn t exist. Palestine and Jordan were united, under British
dominion, only from 1918 to 1921. It is not by chance that the
historical positions and slogans of the Fourth International always
referred only to the 1921-47 British mandate Palestine and denounced the
secret accord between the Jordanian monarchy and Zionism for the
division of Palestine. What really happened after the war of 1948-49,
when Jordan annexed the West Bank, was the creation of a new, though
different, oppression of the Palestinians and their national and
democratic rights, an oppression not forgotten today. Therefore, this
last perspective is also contrary to the demands and feelings of the Intifada,
which aims at, let us repeat, the realization of the right of
self-determination and the creation of a real state of the Palestinian
Arab people and not of others.
In reality, as the
ITO, we maintain that it would be wrong today, facing the complexity of
the situation, to indicate a precise solution. We maintain that, in
terms of slogans and perspectives, it would be to depart from the
principles we have indicated in point 5 and from the right of the
Palestinian people to self-determination, with the sole limit of
respecting the right of the Jewish people of Palestine to stay, with
full rights democrats. We cannot know today the precise course and
timing of the realization of an independent, socialist Palestine, and
therefore the exact conditions that will determine the modality of the
realization of the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination.
The oppressed population will have the right to decide the precise
relationship to maintain with the Jewish population (after all, the
position of the Fourth International in 1948 indicated that the specific
form of the relationships among Arabs and Jews had to be decided by a
constituent assembly, after the driving out of imperialism).
It is possible that
the development of the socialist revolution, the expulsion of the openly
reactionary and racist sectors of the Jewish population, and demographic
changes will create conditions in which the Palestinian people consider
the framework of a unitary state the realization of their aspiration for
an independent Arab Palestine and in this framework grant democrat
rights as a national minority to the Jewish population.
It is also possible
that the framework of the Arab revolution creates conditions in which
the various specificities of the Arab nation are presented in different
forms and on different territorial bases than today, permitting the
realization of a broader territorial framework (Jordanian-Palestinian or
other) than we first hypothesized.
It is possible, on
the contrary, that the Palestinian people will decide that the
constitution an independent state implies a state distinct from the
Jewish population and that, therefore, Palestine is divided into two
entities: one, in the larger part of the territory, predominantly Arab,
the other, in a smaller part, predominantly Jewish. This (taking up the
original experience of the USSR) in the form of an autonomous region or
republic within a unified Arab socialist republic, or as a federated
state in the more general framework of a Socialist Federation of the
Middle East and North Africa.
Finally, it is
possible, even if unlikely, that the struggle for socialist revolution
creates feelings of such unity between the Palestinian proletariat and
masses and the Jewish proletariat that the Palestinian people choose the
solution of a binational unitary state (also here with various possible
links with a united Arab socialist republic and a Socialist Federation
of the Middle East and North Africa).
History will loosen
this central knot. Trotskyists struggle to lead the masses toward the
socialist revolution. On this ground they indicate the necessary
strategy and tactics. But they don t pretend to impose their
specific solutions to all problems. In Palestine, at the moment of
revolutionary victory, the Palestinian people -- with their free
self-determination and respect for the rights of the Jewish people --
will decide.
For
the defeat of Zionism and imperialism
No
rotten compromises. Revolution until victory
For
the mobilization of the Arab masses against Israel and imperialism
No
confidence in the bankrupt bourgeois, feudal-bourgeois, or
petty-bourgeois regimes of the Arab countries. For their revolutionary
overthrow
For
the demolition of the Zionist state of Israel. For the full democratic
rights of the Jewish people in Palestine as a national minority, in the
framework of the unity of the Middle East
For
a free, secular, socialist Palestine in the framework of Arab socialist
unity
For
a Socialist Federation of the Middle East and North Africa