The United Nations General Assembly is commemorating the 75th anniversary of the Nakba, when Zionist colonialism expropriated the land and properties of 750,000 Palestinians, in order to establish the settler-colonial state of Israel. The US, which is only interested in opposing such actions when undertaken by its enemies, not by its allies, refused to attend the commemoration, just as it has continually refused to support enforcement of UN resolutions against Israel over decades.
As Trotsky pointed out in the years prior to the Zionist seizure of Palestinian land, nothing progressive could ever come from such an action, either for Jews or Arabs, and certainly not for workers.
“On the other hand the Jews of different countries have created their press and developed the Yiddish language as an instrument adapted to modern-culture. One must therefore reckon with the fact that the Jewish nation will maintain itself for an entire epoch to come. Now the nation cannot normally exist without a common territory. Zionism springs from this very idea. But the facts of every passing day demonstrate to us that Zionism is incapable of resolving the Jewish question. The conflict between the Jews and Arabs in Palestine acquires a more and more tragic and more and more menacing character. I do not at all believe that the Jewish question can be resolved within the framework of rotting capitalism and under the control of British imperialism....
The very same methods of solving the Jewish question which under decaying capitalism will have a utopian and reactionary character (Zionism) will, under the regime of a socialist federation take on real and salutary meaning. This is what I want to point out. How could any Marxist or even any consistent democrat object to this?”
And, how foresighted were those words of Trotsky, as the reactionary colonial adventure of Zionism not only led to a genocidal slaughter of Palestinians, but also created a monstrous, confessional state that has divided the workers of the Middle East ever since into warring camps.
But, the film of history also cannot be simply wound backwards. The damage has already been done by the creation of that state, and cannot be undone in similar manner by simply demanding its destruction, and replacement by another bourgeois state, this time a Palestinian bourgeois state. For one thing, our goal as Marxists is not the creation of new bourgeois states, but secondly, to bring that about would require a brutal war against the existing Zionist state, in which millions of Jewish and Arab workers would be slaughtered.
Attempting to simply destroy the current state of Israel would be as reactionary as the attempt, now, of Ukraine, backed by NATO, to force ethnic Russians in Crimea, and the new republics of Donetsk and Lugansk back into Ukraine.
The destruction of the Zionist state would be, under those conditions, as reactionary an event as its creation. As Marxists, we do seek the destruction of the Zionist state in Israel, but only in the same way that we seek the destruction of all bourgeois nation states, and indeed, all nation states, as part of creating world socialism, in which the concept of nation and nationality disappears, and in which the requirement for a state itself, as an organ of class rule also disappears.
The route to that resides in the creation of a Socialist United States of the Middle East, which itself requires the unity of Jewish and Arab workers. A starting point, in place of the phantasm of the two states solution touted by the US, as a means of fobbing off Palestinians for the indefinite future, in which time Israel will have simply settled all Palestinian lands, as well as its continued occupation of the Golan Heights, is to demand full and equal political rights for Palestinians living within Israel and the occupied territories, including Gaza. A combined struggle by Jewish and Arab workers could be organised, now, on that basis.
It should include the right to regional autonomy within the entire territory, as a basis for creating a Federal State of Israel & Palestine.
No comments:
Post a Comment