In 1917. as WWI drew towards a close, and the Ottoman Empire, faced defeat alongside its German ally, British imperialism began drawing up plans for its new carving up of the world's borders, to its own advantage, and to the disadvantage of its defeated competitors. Just as British and other European colonialism drew arbitrary lines on maps in Africa, and elsewhere, around land it claimed for its own, so too they did in the Middle-East, and in Asia, creating many of the problems that the world faces today. The same Sir Mark Sykes, who was the British half of the Sykes-Picot Agreement that carved up the Middle-East, creating artificial states such as Iraq, that merged together different nations and nationalities, over their heads, and acted to deny, entirely, any prospect of statehood for other nations and nationalities, such as the Kurds, was also responsible for drawing up plans for an entirely artificial, new state as a national homeland for Jews. It was announced in the Balfour Declaration, which, again, was entirely designed to further British imperialist interests.
Palestine was part of the Ottoman Empire, and so Britain felt no problem in ignoring the wishes of the Palestinians that had suffered from colonial oppression by Turkey, when it decided, over their heads, to promise to simply seize part of Palestine, and hand it over to Zionists, to form a confessional Jewish state, though it never, itself, committed to this latter aspect, as it faced opposition to the project, from non-Zionist Jews and others, who saw the inevitable consequence of it, in creating an upsurge of anti-Semitism.
The model for it, however, could also be seen in the carving out of the Six County statelet in Northern Ireland, designed to give an inbuilt and sectarian dominance to the Protestants, themselves the product of the policy of colonial settlement, instituted by Britain, as its means of dominating Ireland. But, British, short-term, imperial interest, was, also, to secure the support of Zionist Jews for its war effort, especially as, in 1917, the Bolshevik Revolution, took Tsarist Russia out of the war. The promise was made, by Balfour, to Zionist Jews, such as Lord Rothschild.
This commitment, to create a Zionist state, in Palestine, of course, came long before the Nazi Holocaust, which has been used as the justification of a Zionist state, ever since. In fact, Zionists had been presented with various other options, they considered, for a homeland, such as in Uganda, which they had rejected. Despite, the way the issue and history is often presented, therefore, there was no historical basis for choosing Palestine, in which the Jewish population was a small minority, and whose historical ties to the land were mostly mythical, and had ceased to exist, thousands of years earlier.
Yet, today, Zionists not only present this mythical historical basis for the creation of the Zionist state, but even more. In their maps of the region, the borders of Israel extend to those mythical Biblical lands, meaning the expression of their colonialist ambitions to seize even more of Arab land, which, at every opportunity, they have continued to do. Netanyahu even used a similar such map, when he spoke at the UN General Assembly, in which he, thereby, denied the existence of any Palestinian nation, and consequently, possibility of a Palestinian nation state, in much the same way that Putin denied the existence of a Ukrainian nation, or nation state.
In fact, for Netanyahu, as for many of those Zionist terrorists that fought for the creation of a racist, confessional state, the main enemy has always been Palestinians and Arabs, as opposed to even the Nazis and fascists like Hitler and Mussolini they looked to as role models and allies for the creation of a racist, totalitarian state. The Stern Gang, for example, openly sought an alliance with the Nazis and Mussolini, with Stern going to fascist Italy to train. And, today, Netanyahu continues in the same vein claiming that “Hitler didn't want to kill Jews, but was persuaded to do so by a Muslim!”
The idea that Zionism was ever going to actually agree to a Two-State Solution was hopelessly utopian and delusional, and the idea has simply acted as a sop to liberals as well as to Palestinians, for more than half a century, during which time Zionist regimes in Israel, of all political stripes, have simply continued to expand its territory, to deny non-Jews of political rights, and to use its military might and backing from US imperialism to do so. Politicians across Europe and North America even admit in private that there is no prospect of a Two-State solution, because of the Zionist occupation and settlement of the West Bank.
Where imperialism has spoken out vociferously against acts of annexation by its global strategic rivals, such as Russia and China, or even sub-imperialist powers such as Iran, Serbia, Argentina etc., and used it to justify its own military intervention against them, as currently in Ukraine, it has taken no action against its ally Israel, for its annexations and oppression against Palestinians, despite the existence of UN Resolutions labelling Israeli actions as illegal, as well as numerous indictments of the actions of the Zionist state, amounting to war crimes.
Even when the Zionist state – and it has to be defined as a Zionist state, rather than the Israeli state, because Israel, itself, as a country, comprises not just Zionist Jews, but non-Jews and non-Zionist Jews, as citizens, although the non-Jews are denied equal citizenship rights – has openly murdered Palestinians, who are also US citizens, for example with the killing of Al Jazeera journalist, Shireen Abu Akleh, the Zionist state brazenly proclaims that none of its soldiers will be held accountable, and US imperialism and its allies, gives it a free pass, and simply announces, as Biden and Starmer have done, that they stand rock solid behind the racists and murderers of the Zionist state, which acts as their military outpost in the region.
The idea of splitting off sections of the working-class into what today would be called “safe spaces”, but which are, in fact, simply ghettoes that avoid dealing with the underlying issues of inequality, was advocated by petty-bourgeois, nationalist elements in the labour movement, from the start, but always opposed by Marxists, and specifically codified by Lenin and the Bolsheviks in their polemics with the Bundists, Austro-Marxists and others, such as the national-socialist ideas of Pilsudski that also infected the ideas of Rosa Luxemburg. The Bolsheviks emphasised that we are opposed to the idea of national self-determination that acts to divide workers across borders, and that, instead we are in favour of the self-determination of the working-class.
As Lenin put it,
“As the party of the proletariat, the Social-Democratic Party considers it to be its positive and principal task to further the self-determination of the proletariat in each nationality rather than that of peoples or nations. We must always and unreservedly work for the very closest unity of the proletariat of all nationalities, and it is only in isolated and exceptional cases that we can advance and actively support demands conducive to the establishment of a new class state or to the substitution of a looser federal unity, etc., for the complete political unity of a state.”
But, British imperialism, was, of course, unconcerned with any such considerations, in simply drawing new lines on maps, and its effect on millions of people contained within them. Despite its proclamations, nor was it, or is it, concerned with moral considerations of the plight of peoples, or concepts such as democracy or freedom, but only with its own imperialist interest, be it immediate financial interest, or immediate strategic interest, vital to longer-term financial interest. And, so, although Britain, via the Balfour Declaration promised land that it was not its to give, to the Zionists, it was driven by its own immediate, imperialist interests. But, as Trotsky notes, later, it re-evaluated those interests, as it considered its interests in allying with a more numerous Arab population, and one that, across the region, was strategically important, as World War II, began.
At the start of WWI, of course, as anyone who has watched Lawrence of Arabia, knows, Britain had made numerous promises to the Arabs, in order to enlist their support against the Ottomans, and Germany, promises that they quickly reneged upon, at the end of the war. The experience after WWII was to be the same. Trotsky noted, therefore, in 1940, the reactionary dead-end that Zionism presented.
“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 attempt to solve the Jewish question through the migration of Jews to Palestine can now be seen for what it is, a tragic mockery of the Jewish people. Interested in winning the sympathies of the Arabs who are more numerous than the Jews, the British government has sharply altered its policy toward the Jews, and has actually renounced its promise to help them found their “own home” in a foreign land. The future development of military events may well transform Palestine into a bloody trap for several hundred thousand Jews. Never was it so clear as it is today that the salvation of the Jewish people is bound up inseparably with the overthrow of the capitalist system.”
And that was also consistent with the position on the national question set out by Lenin.
“The working class supports the bourgeoisie only in order to secure national peace (which the bourgeoisie cannot bring about completely and which can be achieved only with complete democracy), in order to secure equal rights and to create the best conditions for the class struggle. Therefore, it is in opposition to the practicality of the bourgeoisie that the proletarians advance their principles in the national question; they always give the bourgeoisie only conditional support. What every bourgeoisie is out for in the national question is either privileges for its own nation, or exceptional advantages for it; this is called being “practical”. The proletariat is opposed to all privileges, to all exclusiveness.”
Again, this is in contrast with Zionism, which is inseparable from the demand for “exclusiveness” and for privileges for Jews not extended to others living within the Zionist state.
“The bourgeoisie always places its national demands in the forefront, and does so in categorical fashion. With the proletariat, however, these demands are subordinated to the interests of the class struggle. Theoretically, you cannot say in advance whether the bourgeois-democratic revolution will end in a given nation seceding from another nation, or in its equality with the latter; in either case, the important thing for the proletariat is to ensure the development of its class. For the bourgeoisie it is important to hamper this development by pushing the aims of its “own” nation before those of the proletariat. That is why the proletariat confines itself, so to speak, to the negative demand for recognition of the right to self-determination, without giving guarantees to any nation, and without undertaking to give anything at the expense of another nation.”
(ibid)
The Zionist state could not be established other than at the expense of another nation, i.e. Palestine, and consequently was bound to create conditions and a dynamic that would lead to continual armed conflict, which can ultimately only be resolved by Socialism, in the form of a United Socialist States of The Middle East and North Africa. However, as Lenin sets out in his writings on The National and Colonial Questions, and Trotsky also sets out in Permanent Revolution, that does not prevent Marxists from advancing the demand of a struggle for equal political rights for all citizens, here and now, a struggle that is integral to the proletarian revolution. That struggle for equal and universal political rights, for all citizens within the borders of Israel and occupied Palestine is the Marxist alternative to both the delusional, and, in fact, duplicitous demand for a two-state solution, as well as to the petty-bourgeois nationalist demands to destroy the existing Zionist state, and erect upon its ashes some new bourgeois class state.
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