“An individual, a group, a party, or a class that ‘objectively’ picks its nose while it watches men drunk with blood massacring defenceless people is condemned by history to rot and become worm-eaten while it is still alive.
“On the other hand, a party or the class that rises up against every abominable action wherever it has occurred, as vigorously and unhesitatingly as a living organism reacts to protect its eyes when they are threatened with external injury – such a party or class is sound of heart. Protest against the outrages in the Balkans cleanses the social atmosphere in our own country, heightens the level of moral awareness among our own people. The working masses of the population in every country are both a potential instrument of bloody outrages and a potential victim of such deeds. Therefore an uncompromising protest against atrocities serves not only the purpose of moral self-defence on the personal and party level but also the purpose of politically safeguarding the people against adventurism concealed under the flag of ‘liberation’.”
(Trotsky, The Balkan Wars, p 293)
Trotsky wrote this in criticism of the Russian liberal interventionists such as Miliukov, who were censoring the reports, from people like Trotsky, of the atrocities being committed by the forces of “liberal interventionism” in the Balkans, much as we have seen such atrocities committed by the forces of “liberal intervention” in the more recent Balkan wars, in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and Syria. It is a direct mandate that socialists must oppose the military adventures of their own imperialist state no matter how loudly that state, and its propaganda machine, proclaims that it is acting for the most noble of reasons. The revelations about the activities of the British state in murdering innocent civilians in Ballymurphy, fifty years ago, is just the most recent example of that lesson for British socialists.
But, it is not necessary to have to overcome the attempts to hide the truth of such atrocities, by media censorship, or to wait half a century to get to the truth, to see the reality of the atrocities being committed by the Israeli colonialist/imperialist state against the Palestinian people. Even the bourgeois media of the world is showing it to us, in graphic detail, as every day goes by. The primary responsibility for stopping those atrocities lies with the Israeli working-class, just as Trotsky, and socialists at that time, put the responsibility on the working-class of the imperialist states, involved in the Balkan Wars, to put a stop to the carnage, by their own actions.
Of course, we could just throw up our hands in moral outrage, as the liberals do, and protest the actions of the Israeli government, and we could, of course, point to the thoroughly hypocritical position of the US, UK and others that need little excuse to send their forces supposedly to counter atrocities committed by states that are not strategically aligned to them, but who will not even stop the billions of pounds of military aid and equipment that they send to the already massively militarised Israeli state. The liberal interventionists argued that their “surgical” military strikes, against Serbia, were by far the most efficient means of stopping further murderous attacks on Kosovan Albanians – they weren't, and could have led to WWIII – but, then, where are the similar surgical strikes against the Israeli war machine, to prevent its bombing of Palestinian men, women and children in Gaza? Where, even, is the stopping of the billions in military aid and equipment? Instead, we get the outright lying response of the Biden government and Johnson government of the right of Israel to self-defence, as though such self-defence is not already ensured by the massive military capability of the Israeli war machine, and its “iron dome”, missile shield, against the ineffective missiles fired mindlessly and recklessly, in desperation, by Hamas, in response to Israeli atrocities! How does, “self-defence” of such a huge, nuclear armed, and militarised state, require the use of massive military power against Palestinian civilians?
But, such moral outrage does not solve the problems faced, here and now, by the Palestinian people. The primary responsibility for stopping the genocidal attacks of the racist Israeli state, resides with the Israeli working-class itself. So, long as the Israeli state holds millions of Palestinian and Arab peoples in chains, the Israeli people, Jews and Arabs alike, can never be free. Now is the time for the Israeli working-class to unite against their joint oppressor, the Israeli state. And, its manifestation in the Bonapartist regime of Netanyahu. The Israeli working-class, should call a General Strike to demand an end to the bombing, and military attacks on Palestinians, both in Gaza, on the West Bank, and within Israel itself. They should be supported by the working-class across the globe, particularly the workers in the other imperialist states that provide cover for the actions of that state by their miserable talk of a right to “self-defence”, and their massive provision of military equipment to it. The working-class in those countries too should take direct action to stop military equipment being sent to the Israeli state.
The Israeli state stands arrogantly against global, liberal demands for it to stop the murderous attacks, because it knows that those demands are the cries of paper tigers. The United Nations, and now the International Criminal Court, as well as bodies such as Human Rights Watch have repeatedly found the Israeli state guilty of war crimes, of breaching international law, and human rights, but they have never, and have no intention, of ever holding the Israeli state, and its Bonapartist regime accountable for them. But, nor should the working-class expect these bodies, all controlled by the ruling class to do so. The tasks of history resolve upon us, not upon our class enemies to complete. The primary task, and the means of fulfilling the tasks of history comes down, not to trying to right every wrong, as it is manifest, but is to unite the working-class itself within and across borders, so as to mobilise against our class enemy.
The Israeli state now responds to the pleas of liberals by saying it is not interested in any quick-fix, band aid solution, which sounds very much like a suggestion that its current murderous attacks on Palestinians, which come as part of its renewed drive to force Palestinians further from their lands, to deny Palestinians of even more political and human rights, is part of an on going final solution of “the Palestinian problem”. Israeli workers can have no part in allowing the Israeli state to implement such a strategy. That requires not just immediate class action to halt the Zionist war machine, but united class action by Israeli workers to demand political rights for all living within the remit of the Israeli state, including all those in the occupied territories, and Gaza.
That includes the right of all to vote in elections to the Knesset, and to stand candidates for the Knesset, and other political bodies across Israel and the occupied territories. The reality is that the whole of Israel and Palestine is under the auspices of the Israeli state, and the continued talk of a two state solution is just a means of deferring recognition of that reality, and the continued denial of rights, and oppression that goes with it. It should include the right of the greatest political autonomy of political institutions in what should effectively be a federated states of Israel and Palestine. Socialists in Israel and Palestine, should seek the closest possible unity of the working-class in trades unions, and workers parties that organise Jewish and Arab workers across the region, against any separation based upon the ideas of cultural national autonomy. For a single Israeli Workers Party organising Jewish and Arab workers across the whole of Israel and the occupied territories and Gaza. We need a socialist alternative to the reactionary nationalist division of the working-class that allows the Jewish nationalists on the one side, and the Palestinian nationalists, such as Hamas, on the other, free rein to pursue their own reactionary agendas, and the resultant devastating division and hostility that causes.
There can be no support for the idea that the heavily militarised, nuclear armed Zionist state has a right to defend itself, any more than socialists supported the slogans of self-defence for Britain, France or Germany in WWI and II. As Lenin pointed out, the demand for self-determination had been turned into a reactionary demand for defence of the fatherland by social chauvinists. We are not bourgeois defencists. For socialists, including those in Israel, the main enemy is at home. The main task of Israeli socialists – Jewish and Arab alike – is not defence of the Zionist imperialist state, but their own overthrow of that state, and its replacement by a workers' state. The idea that that state is in any way under threat, and requires defending against Palestinians armed with sticks and stones, or even with ineffective missiles fired from Gaza is risible.
But, that does not mean that we should not also be critical of the reactionary nationalists of Hamas too. We have a duty to defend Palestinians against attacks by the Zionist state, but that is not the same thing as defending any particular Palestinian group such as Hamas, which appoints itself as representative of the people. On the contrary. As the Communist International stated in the Theses on the National and Colonial Questions,
“the need for a determined struggle against attempts to give a communist colouring to bourgeois-democratic liberation trends in the backward countries; the Communist International should support bourgeois-democratic national movements in colonial and backward countries only on condition that, in these countries, the elements of future proletarian parties, which will be communist not only in name, are brought together and trained to understand their special tasks, i.e., those of the struggle against the bourgeois-democratic movements within their own nations.”
In the case of reactionary Islamist organisations like Hamas, Hezbollah etc., it is not even a question bourgeois-democratic trends. Instead, as the theses also states, there is a need to oppose such reactionary elements.
“second, the need for a struggle against the clergy and other influential reactionary and medieval elements in backward countries;
third, the need to combat Pan-Islamism and similar trends, which strive to combine the liberation movement against European and American imperialism with an attempt to strengthen the positions of the khans, landowners, mullahs, etc.”
The firing of thousands of rockets by Hamas, indiscriminately into Israel is not any part of a revolutionary struggle of the type that Lenin and the Comintren advocated. It is specifically designed to avoid the building of a mass revolutionary movement, and instead to keep control in the hands of a small reactionary elite, whose methods are designed not to forge proletarian unity, as the basis of a revolutionary struggle, but to drive division and enmity, as the basis of further and deeper division. The millions of Dollars spent on those rockets, which are wholly ineffective, and counter-productive, would be better spent providing for the education of Palestinian children, of providing better healthcare and welfare for the Palestinian people, and of enabling them to develop their own independent political organisations. Hamas, of course, will not do that, because it would mean enabling the Palestinian workers to not only better oppose the Zionist state, but also to oppose the clerical-fascist regime of Hamas itself.
If Israeli workers have the responsibility for demanding an end to the war offensive of the Zionist state, then the Palestinian workers have responsibility for dealing with the reactionary role of Hamas, and other such reactionary nationalist, and Islamist elements, and to build their own independent proletarian organisations in opposition to them. The responsibility of the global working-class is to enable them to do that, by seeking out those proletarian elements, “the elements of future proletarian parties, which will be communist not only in name, are brought together and trained to understand their special tasks, i.e., those of the struggle against the bourgeois-democratic movements within their own nations”, no matter how small, and to assist their development.
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