It was impossible to establish the Zionist state in 1948, in Palestine, without it being “at the expense of another nation.” And, the attempt to create such a state by those violent means, could have no other result than to divide Palestinian and Jewish workers, and create the conditions for such division and violence to persist, including the extension of that division in the working-class to the working-class in the surrounding Arab states. Who benefited from that? Not only the Zionist ruling caste, resting upon the Israeli ruling-class, but, also the Arab ruling classes in those surrounding states, who could use Zionism as a convenient bogey, so as to distract from the real enemy of the workers in their own country.
“Social-Democrats must moreover bear in mind that the landowners, the clergy and the bourgeoisie of the oppressed nations often cover up with nationalist slogans their efforts to divide the workers and dupe them by doing deals behind their backs with the landowners and bourgeoisie of the ruling nation to the detriment of the masses of the working people of all nations.”
And, of course, the other beneficiary was US imperialism, which not only kept the working-class divided (not only in the Middle-East, but also in the imperialist heartlands where Zionism had considerable influence within labour movements), but, also, obtained its own heavily armed encampment through which to channel its activities. As the then Senator Joe Bidden put it, “If Israel did not exist, the US would have had to create it”! Indeed, Israel largely is the creation of US imperialism, for all intents and purposes a vassal state dependent upon it, for its existence. As I noted several years ago, Ukraine's dependence on US imperialism would have the same consequence, as NATO used Ukrainian workers blood and bones as grist in the mill of its global imperialist conflict with Russian~Chinese imperialism. As with much else, Trump has simply said it out loud as he now demands his own pound of Ukrainian flesh in the form of control over vast quantities of Ukrainian minerals, and revenues.
It is also no coincidence that the favoured “solution” to the question of Palestine is the mythical “Two-State Solution”, which could only have come into existence itself if the Palestinians agreed to similarly play the role of vassals to US imperialism, though, even with Fatah, in the West Bank, largely prostrating themselves in that manner, and acting as the contracted police force of the Zionist state, it has taken them no further forward, as the process of annexation of Palestinian land and property, and extermination of Palestinians as a people has continued. For social-imperialism, the two-state solution, the creation of two new bourgeois states – Israel and Palestine – is the logical manifestation of its subordination of workers' interests to those of the bourgeoisie, with the workers being removed from any role other than as cheerleaders or cannon fodder for the solutions formulated by the world's ruling classes, which in reality means the solutions to be provided by imperialism.
And, that is most clearly being seen, now, not only with Trump's proposals for Gaza, but, also, in his proposals for Ukraine. The moralistic whining and whimpering of social-democrats and liberals that there can be no peace negotiations without the EU and Ukraine at the table is simply an exposition of their bankruptcy. Trump and Putin have carved up Ukraine between them, just as Trotsky described, in the 1930's, happened to Ukraine, and as happened in many more places, such as the carving up of China. When the wolves gather to rend the flesh of the lambs, they do not engage in discussion of it first with the lambs! Defeated Germany was excluded from the negotiations between the other imperialist powers, at Versailles, who, having carved up the world between them, simply told Germany that the war would resume unless it agreed to their terms. The same happened when, after WWII, the US, USSR, and Britain carved up the world between them, in their talks at Potsdam and Yalta, satirised in "Animal Farm", by Orwell as the pigs and humans, at the end of the book, sitting around the table together.
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