Marxism, Zionism and the National Question
Opposition To Immigration Controls and The National Question (2/2)
In July 1982, the fused WSL was in the midst of a faction fight between those that argued for support for Argentina in the Falklands War (mostly the old Thornett group), and those that argued that the war was reactionary on both sides (mostly the old I-CL group). Here is what I wrote, in Internal Bulletin 12, in support of the latter position, in “Once More On The Falklands”.
“... Cunliffe objects, 'The reason why the islanders “oppress nobody” on the islands is because of the rigorously chauvinist policy of excluding non-British people”. This is really tautological. The reality is that because of the size of the population, the islanders right to self-determination could be overridden simply by Argentina settling enough people there to outvote the present community. Moreover, whilst we are opposed to immigration laws, their existence elsewhere has not prevented us from defending nation's rights to self-determination, except in the case of Israel, where they are used against the Palestinians who were thrown out of their own country.
Cunliffe could no doubt retort that this is what happened in the Falklands. 'The colony was seized from the young Argentinian nation in 1829. The Argentine garrison was evicted by British military force...' Are we to take this seriously? That the stationing of a few dozen Argentine troops, whose permanent homes would have been in Argentina, for four whole years, gives Argentina a claim on the Falklands against a civilian community who have lived and worked there for 150 years with, until now, no real challenge from Argentina of their right to do so?”
Immigration is not the same as colonisation. What 'Cunliffe' and the Minority were arguing, here, was a version of the argument that Glotzer had put in favour of Zionist colonisation of Palestine, under the cover of a right of "immigration". In other words, considering the matter concretely, in this case, shows that the argument that a right to self-determination is in danger could have been warranted in such peculiar conditions, as against claims that Britain, a nation of nearly 70 million people might be “swamped” by immigration, a completely fallacious and racist claim. But, the reference, in this quote, to Israel, is also relevant, here, because, again, these are peculiar conditions. The mass migration of Jews to Palestine, was not simply the kind of normal migration of peoples across the globe in search of a better life that we argue all workers should be able to enjoy. It was organised from above by Zionism, with large amounts of money thrown into organising it, and originally with the support of other imperialist powers, like Britain. The Zionists also entered into agreements with the Nazis to further encourage the migration of Jews from Germany to Israel for this purpose. The Haavara Agreement between the Zionists and Nazis facilitated the movement of 60,000 German Jews to Palestine between 1933-39.
But, similarly, Israel, today, like the Falklands, has a small population, but not to such a qualitative degree. The population is 9.2 million of which 74%, or 6.8 million are Jews. This is wholly different to the situation in the Falklands, where the population is just 3,400 people. Israel is more like Sweden than the Falklands. A large part of the Palestinian people live in the proto-Palestinian state of the West Bank and Gaza, essentially, therefore, under Israeli responsibility as recognised by the UN. That total population comprises around 4.7 million people. And, unlike the Palestinians facing an organised, well financed, invasion of Zionists, in the early part of the 20th century, Palestinians, today, face a modern, wealthy, and heavily armed Jewish state, intimately tied into the global imperialist hierarchy of states, firmly backed by the US, for which it acts as regional proxy, in the same way that the various Slavic states acted as agents of Tsarism in the 19th century.
The qualitative difference, here, is that, whilst Argentina could easily organise, at a state level, the emigration of 4,000 civilians to the Falklands, so as to carry out a cold annexation of the Islands, no such possibility exists in relation to Palestinians and Israel. The argument that Israel cannot allow a right of return, or other immigration by Palestinians is simply the same kind of racist, “defence of the fatherland” argument used by chauvinists elsewhere, and all the more untenable given the fact that the state itself was created by the expulsion of its indigenous population.
But, the other question is does this make the Israeli state invalid. The answer is clearly no, for the reasons set out previously. We oppose immigration controls, just as we oppose many other policies adopted by the capitalist state, but that does not invalidate the nature of these states, as states. They have all come into existence as a consequence of oppression and suppression of other nations and nationalities, in one form or another. That is the nature of the historical process. We are not moralists seeking to turn the clock backwards in order to right some previous wrongs done, but Marxists that seek to move forward on the basis of what actually now exists. Within that context, the nation state, in its time, was a progressive historical development. But, just as the fetter of private capital was burst asunder by the development of socialised capital, which expropriated the old private capitalists, so this same process, the development of mammoth, socialised capital, also burst through the limitations of the nation state, as capital expanded across the globe, and created a world market and world economy. As Lenin says, this was also a further progressive development brought about by capitalism.
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