THESES ON PALESTINE
International Trotskyist Opposition
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 Quatriéme 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