What is the Marxist analysis and explanation of what is going on in Israel-Palestine? Is it inexplicable, or just some accidental or historical animosity between Jews and non-Jews? Well, of course it is explicable, and we do not have to resort to subjective explanations, such as personal, religious or cultural animosities for that explanation. In fact, the same process has been witnessed countless times, in history, over the last 600 years, and the last 200-300 years, in particular.
Human societies developed on the basis of tribes/clans, and these tribes formed nations. For a large part of the existence of humanity, these nations and tribes, small in their numbers, could live mostly separated from each other, first as hunter-gatherers, as nomadic tribes, and later settled in specific locations undertaking agriculture. We could examine the development of empires such as the Roman Empire, or that of the Vikings, which basically operated on the basis of pillaging the wealth of the nations they conquered or raided. However, little would be served for our present purposes, in doing so.
“It is a long-established view that over certain epochs people lived by plunder. But in order to be able to plunder, there must be something to be plundered, and this implies production. Moreover, the manner of plunder depends itself on the manner of production, e.g., a stock-jobbing nation cannot be robbed in the same way as a nation of cowherds.”
Similarly, feudal society had its own objective laws that drove expansion via wars. The need existed for the landed aristocracy to extend the territory from which they could obtain feudal rent, and taxes, could raise armies and so on. But, these are different laws, different objective reasons than those that drive such processes under capitalism. Capitalist production began around the 15th century, as a result of an expansion of commodity production and exchange, itself driven by a growth in the towns. This development did not take place in isolation from the feudal society in which it arose, which itself had consolidated a number of smaller nations and kingdoms into larger political units.
In Britain, for example, the Heptarchy, of the 5th century, had been consolidated into four larger kingdoms by the 8th century, and by the 10th century, a Kingdom of England had emerged, which subsequently went on to subjugate Cornwall, and Wales. Some reactionaries, today, such as those of the Northern Independence Party, would like to go back to that situation. In other words, prior to the development of the modern nation state, a whole process of consolidation based on the subjugation and even extermination of entire nations took place. In what is, now, modern France, for example, there were 300 different nationalities, some of the larger of which, today, survive such as Bretons, Normans and so on.
This feudal development was, therefore, brutal, involving the literal extermination of entire nations that have disappeared from history. But, considered from the perspective of history, and the evolution of humanity, it was progressive, because without those processes, there would not have been the development of larger nations, with a common language and so on, nor, indeed would there have developed the towns, as bands of retainers and so on were dispersed into them that laid the basis for an extension of commodity production and exchange, and, thereby, capitalism.
As Marx describes, it is this development of capitalism, first in the form of merchant capital, and, then, of industrial capital, in the towns, that creates the new material conditions for the further consolidation into the nation state. It is the requirement for a common language, for a level playing field of property and other laws, within which capitalists can operate, that drives this development, and this development requires a single market of this type that is big enough to justify that capitalist production, i.e. production on a large scale. The nations that are not big enough to create such a minimum size of single market/nation state become subordinated to others in the process of the creation of these nation states, or else become dispersed across several such states.
In the 18th/19th century when such nation states are created, this development is historically progressive for the reasons that Marx and Lenin describe. It clears away all of the old feudal rubbish that stood in the way of the development of capitalist production, which itself is required as the means of developing the means of production, the industrial working-class, and establishing, ultimately the global economy required for the development of Socialism. At this point, in the 18th/19th century, the large nation state is sufficient for this development, but the rapid development of capitalism, and of capitalist production soon made that not the case.
Even by the middle of the 19th century, even Britain, as the most developed capitalist state was reliant on the development of international markets into which it could sell its manufactured commodities, and from which it could obtain food and raw materials for that production. That brings each capitalist nation state into competition with others, as well as the trade between them, now, creating the same dynamic that trade between different provinces, principalities and regions previously led to the nation state itself. Even by the end of the 19th century, the nation state had ceased being progressive, and, instead represented a fetter on the further development of capitalism. It was manifest in the wars between those nation states, as each sought to dominate the others, and, thereby, to create larger single markets/states.
“Monopolists are made from competition; competitors become monopolists. If the monopolists restrict their mutual competition by means of partial associations, competition increases among the workers; and the more the mass of the proletarians grows as against the monopolists of one nation, the more desperate competition becomes between the monopolists of different nations. The synthesis is of such a character that monopoly can only maintain itself by continually entering into the struggle of competition.”
(Marx – The Poverty of Philosophy)
A look at the Palestinians shows them to be one of those nations that never rose to the status of creating a large enough, viable, single market/nation state. In Engels words, they represent a “non-historical people”. If the developed nation states of Western Europe, by the twentieth century, were not large enough, to enable the further development of capitalism, then, clearly that could not be the case for the Palestinians. Trotsky had made a similar point about the Balkans, arguing the need for them to create a Balkan Federation. And, as he put it, in his Program of Peace, in which he describes the way the nation state has outlived its usefulness, and become reactionary.
“Capitalism has transferred into the field of international relations the same methods applied by it in “regulating” the internal economic life of the nations. The path of competition is the path of systematically annihilating the small and medium-sized enterprises and of achieving the supremacy of big capital. World competition of the capitalist forces means the systematic subjection of the small, medium-sized and backward nations by the great and greatest capitalist powers. The more developed the technique of capitalism, the greater the role played by finance capital and the higher the demands of militarism, all the more grows the dependency of the small states on the great powers. This process, forming as it does an integral element of imperialist mechanics, flourishes undisturbed also in times of peace by means of state loans, railway and other concessions, military-diplomatic agreements, etc. The war uncovered and accelerated this process by introducing the factor of open violence. The war destroys the last shreds of the “independence” of small states, quite apart from the military outcome, of the conflict between the two basic enemy camps.”
Unlike the 18th and 19th century, then, when the demand for “national independence” or “self-determination” was realisable, and progressive, it was no longer so. Even the big nations were not truly independent, and were forced to club together, either voluntarily (as happened with the EU), or as a result of military conquest and annexation, let alone the small nations who, as Marx and Engels had described, always ended up as pawns in the conflicts between the larger powers, and dependent on, and subordinated to them.
But, of course, its not just the Palestinians that are too small as a nation to form a viable nation state that could have any real measure of independence. The same is true of Israel too, and indeed, of most of the surrounding states. Without massive financial and military aid from the US, the Israeli state would long since have collapsed. It is not just that Zionism, as a reactionary, racist, nationalist and colonialist ideology is driven to try to establish a single Zionist state “from the river to the sea”, but that that ideology, also fits with the material reality that Israel finds itself in, in the era of imperialism, where small nation states are simply not viable. It is forced to do what every other small nation state has done in the past, which is to try to expand its territory, and size of that state by annexation and military conquest, i.e. to subordinate the Palestinians within a single Israeli state, and, in the face of continued resistance by Palestinians, to then, exterminate them, as it is doing in Gaza, and already beginning to do in the occupied West Bank.
Brutal and sickening as it may be, the reality is that, given that the international working-class, and in particular the working-class in the Middle-East and North Africa, has failed to produce its own solution to this problem, by uniting to form the kind of federation that Trotsky described in relation to the Balkans, the most likely outcome, now, at least in Gaza, is that the Zionist state will succeed in its genocide, and effectively wipe out the Palestinians, much as Europeans did with the natives in North and South America, as well as in Australia etc. Already, the West Bank has been made non-viable, as a result of the actions of settlers, backed by the Zionist state, itself backed by the US, UK and EU. It will only be a matter of time, before the Palestinians there are reduced to being museum exhibits, much as with the Native Americans constrained within the reservations.
And, brutal and sickening as it may be, given the failure of international socialism to provide another solution, the reality will be that, as with the genocide committed against indigenous peoples elsewhere, and the formation of other nation states, considered historically, and scientifically, the consequence would itself be progressive. It would create a larger, single, more viable Israeli state, which, undoubtedly, having annexed further territory from Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, and possibly Egypt, would, especially given its backing from the US, UK and EU imperialism, be in a position to negotiate with the surrounding Arab states, to normalise relations, which sets in place the conditions for the coming together of those states into a larger formation, as seen elsewhere in the world, most obviously in relation to the EU.
The calls for a Two-State solution always were utopian, and delusional bourgeois, liberal fantasies, given the Marxist analysis of the material basis of the nation state. It amounted to a demand that capitalism cease being capitalism, that the dynamic, inherent within it, to drive to war as the means of expanding the size of the single market/state, cease to exist, and so that the Zionist state in Israel act differently to every other capitalist state on the planet, which, in itself, indicates the underlying anti-Semitic nature of such a demand.
The existence of nation states in Europe, did not prevent that dynamic leading to a series of European Wars, did not stop the German nation state invading the French and other nation states, for example. The existence of the Ukrainian capitalist/imperialist nation state has not prevented the Russian capitalist/imperialist nation state from invading it, so why would the formal existence of a Palestinian state prevent the Zionist state from invading it whenever it felt the need to do so, to further its own interests?
So long as capitalism exists, this dynamic, and drive to war will continue to exist, whatever formal arrangements exist, as part of some international order, and rule of law. As Marx put it,
“The bourgeois economists have merely in view that production proceeds more smoothly with modern police than, e.g., under club-law. They forget, however, that club-law too is law, and that the law of the stronger, only in a different form, still survives even in their “constitutional State.””
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