Jon

Please excuse my delay in reply and thank you once again for a thought-
provoking email. There is no disagreement on the gravity of crimes
committed by the right-wing Israeli state (and the legacy of Jabotinsky in
Sharon’s contemporary era of brutality against the Palestinians). However,
reflecting on your assertion that “the fate of the Palestinian people has
been determined, since 1948, by the ‘force majeure’ application” of Zionism
and its equation with an “explicitly Jewish state”, what does seem to be
missing is the complexity of history (and its accompanying political
debates and struggles). Moreover, your dismissal, once again, of any form
of Palestinian and Israeli workers’ solidarity - if (as you
qualify) “Israeli workers insist that their identity and citizenship is
inextricably bound to a territorial interpretation of the historical polity
of Israel” - is concerning. By way of response then:

Firstly, I offer some detail on the historical role played by British
imperialism and the leaderships of Arab nation-states in the run up to the
1948 partition.
Secondly, I revisit key political writings by the US Marxist Hal Draper
who, at the time, challenged the US-based Cannonite Socialist Workers
Party’s position on the partition of Palestine in 1948 and the subsequent
war between Israel and Arab states.

1) In your last email, 1948 was mentioned as a key year from which nation-
state of Israel began its existence and its repression of the Palestinians.
I agree. But your analysis of Zionism/Israel still seems ‘too neat’: the
Israeli state, the Israeli army, the Israeli population, the Israeli
workers, the Israeli trade unionists, are all conflated, complicit and
guilty of carrying an “exclusionary trait” that is “essentially
schizophrenic” in its anti-Palestinianism. And so what we have is ‘the
oppressor’ and ‘the oppressed’, with a choice between ‘two sides’. Yet, as
Trotsky stated: "to oblige humanity to divide up into only two camps [...]
prohibit[s] the proletariat from having its own independent ideas [...] the
fetishism of two camps [should] give way to a third, independent, sovereign
camp [...] upon which, in point of fact, the future of humanity depends".

In 1903, 25,000 mostly Eastern European Jews already resided in the then
Turkish Ottoman Empire, with a further 40,000 Jewish people arriving
between 1904 and 1914. By 1918 Turkish control had ended, driven out by
Arab forces in alliance with British forces, and British imperialism began
its occupation, with the early promise (to the Arab people) of an
independent Arab state. Also early on, the Balfour Declaration promised
that the British government would work towards “the establishment in
Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people”. Given the conditions
in Europe in the 1920s and 1930s, the emigration of Jewish people to
British Mandate Palestine increased dramatically during this time, with
violent (and fatal) clashes. In August 1929, the British police responded
to the killings of 133 Jewish people by Palestinians by killing 110
Palestinians. By July 1937, the British imperialists (in a Royal
Commission) proposed partitioning the land into a Jewish state and an Arab
state. This was rejected by the Arab leaders involved. Between 1939 and
1940, the British imperialists decided to limit Jewish immigration to
Palestine to 75,000 over five years and imposed a ban on virtually all land
sales to Jewish people. In response, the radical wings of Zionism launched
an armed struggle against the British administration in Palestine. In 1947
Britain referred the Palestine question to the United Nations. The UN drew
up a partition plan for a Jewish state and an Arab state in Palestine, and
whilst a majority vote was passed, the Arab leaders rejected the plan and
the British imperialist forces withdrew from Palestine. On the 14th May
1948 Israel declared itself a nation-state and (on the 15th) Arab forces
from Jordan, Egypt, Lebanon, Syria and Iraq invaded Israel. The secretary
of the Arab League (set up in 1945 with British sponsorship) declared that
it would be “a war of extermination and momentous massacre”, promising that
the Arab armies would “sweep the Jews into the sea”.

Using the words of Chomsky, to the Arab people the 1948 war was “the war of
conquest” – resulting in the exile of hundreds of thousands of Arab
refugees - and to the Israeli Jews it was “the war of liberation” – after
the suffering of exile and savage persecution. From a minority movement,
Zionism (and its territorial expression in Palestine) only gained a
decisive majority acceptance amongst Jewish people when anti-Semitic
persecution reached a devastating peak in the Holocaust. Whilst we can
place a great deal of ‘blame’ for the conflict on the shoulders of Zionist
leaderships, I wonder why then (so far) you have failed to mention the
historical role of the British imperialists and Arab leaderships?

2) As a founder of the US Workers Party in the 1940s, Hal Draper initially
argued against a decision to create an Israeli state, calling instead for a
socialist alternative for the peoples of Palestine (both Arab and Jewish) -
in opposition to the Zionist bourgeoisie and Arab effendis, and in
collective struggle against British imperialism. However, whether the
nation-state of Israel forged by partition in 1948 was “a wise decision or
a mistaken one”, Draper nevertheless insisted on the right of the Jewish
people to make it. At the time, he noted:

“A new state has been set up. A people have declared that they want to live
under their own government and determine their own national destiny. They
have taken a blank check made out to the Right of Self-Determination and
have signed their name to it: Israel. And they have sought to cash it in.
They have done this in the teeth of the opposition – direct, concealed or
weaselly – of the imperialist capitals. And invading their defences and
threatening their independence came the reactionary onslaught of some of
the most [...] reactionary kingships and dynasts of the world, the semi-
feudal oppressors of Arab people.”

Draper disagreed with the partition of Palestine for the reason that it
posed “a setback on the road to getting Jewish workers and Arab peasants
together in lighting unity”. Crucially, however, a subtle political
distinction was made between the right of Jewish people to self-
determination and “the correctness or advisability of exercising this right
to the point of separation under given conditions”. Draper argued that the
refutation of the right of Jewish people to self-determination came from “a
deeply reactionary social class – the Arab lords – whose reactionary aims
in this case are not alleviated by the fact that they themselves suffer
from the exploitation of British imperialism (at the same time that they
cling to that imperialism in order to defend their privileges against their
own people)”.

The specific conditions – posed by the 1948 partition and war – contributed
to Draper’s position that Marxists should call for a full recognition of
the Jewish state by the US government, a lifting of the embargo on arms to
Israel and the right of the Jewish state to defend itself against Arab
invasion. Such a political stance stood in sharp disparity to the Cannonite
US Socialist Workers Party, who (in the pages of its paper Militant) called
for support of neither side, the result of which Draper defined
as “pitiful”. The root of Draper’s critique was the notion that Marxists
should not make a decision to either support or oppose a war on the basis
of whether they support or oppose the politics of the state leaderships.
The key question (as originally put forward by Lenin) is ‘what politics
does this war flow from?’. Given that war is a continuation of politics by
other (forceful) means, Marxists should “analyze concretely the politics of
which that war is the continuation”. Draper drew upon the example of the
Spanish loyalist government’s war against Franco: the concreteness of the
situation showed that “the anti-Franco war did not flow from the loyalist
government’s imperialist character but from the fascists’ attack upon its
democratic base”. As such it was the responsibility of Marxists to call for
the defence of “even this miserable government” via revolutionary means,
without offering political support to the bourgeois People’s Front leaders.
The error that the Cannonites made in the instance of the 1948 war, Draper
suggested, was that they based a political viewpoint upon the reactionary
nature of a Zionist leadership (elevating the argument that such a
leadership potentially provoked new pogroms against the Jews and solidified
the position of reactionary Arab rulers). In effect, the right of the
Jewish people to self-determination was not separated from the politics of
the Zionist leadership; in other words, the possibility of supporting the
former whilst opposing the latter was rejected.

More specifically to the question of whether Jewish people had the right to
national self-determination, the answer Militant gave was: “Yes – but even
if we abstract this question from its aforementioned social reality, the
fact remains they cannot carve out a state at the expense of the national
rights of the Arab peoples. This is not self-determination, but conquest of
another people’s territory”. Draper argued that this was a dishonest reply,
because “[i]t means that the Jews have a right to self-determination but no
right to exercise it” and if they really do have this right then “what
territory can they ‘self-determine themselves’ in without infringing upon
the national rights of the Arab people? Is there any? Obviously none […]
What then does the ‘Yes’ mean?”.

Far from following through on this alternative position to Draper’s – which
would logically advocate a war of defence by the Arab states - the
Cannonite SWP argued that the leaders of the attacked Arab peoples,
in “their anti-Jewish war”, were actually “trying to divert the struggle
against imperialism […] utilizing the aspirations of the Arab masses for
national freedom, to smother the social opposition to their tyrannical
rule”.

Draper’s political analysis was nuanced, farsighted and cohesively
comprehensive. Indeed, during the 1948 war Draper cautioned: “And ill will
it be for Israel if, by dint of blood and sacrifice and heroic toil, they
beat back the Arab invader only to fall over on the other side into the net
of imperialism!”. The only road to lasting peace in Palestine, it was
noted, would be “for the Israelis to wage the war as a war against the Arab
landlords and dynasts and NOT as a war against the Arab people”.

Revisiting this past political debate makes me wonder whether you too Jon
(if you had been around in 1948) would have argued the right of Jewish
people to self-determination but with no actual right to exercise it...

The resurgence of the right-wing in Israeli politics is an especially
worrying trend, as is the weakening of the Israeli left since 1967. The
hardline groups of Irgun and Lehi did play a role in the formation of
Israel in 1948, but their later electoral party of Herut (now Likud) failed
to win an election in Israel until 1977. As trade unionists, consistent
democrats, socialists and Marxists in Britain, any political gesture of
solidarity we make with the Palestinians should not simultaneously write-
off Israeli workers and the necessity for the left in Israel to recover
itself.

Best wishes

Camila