Debates with the IBT on the National Question: Palestine

Your article “Stop the Gaza Genocide! Marxism and the Struggle for Palestinian Liberation” (27 November 2023) is a species of centrism on Palestine. In this article, you direct your fire against our view that the struggle for Palestinian liberation is a lever for social revolution, denouncing it as Pabloite. You argue that:

Today, at the height of Israeli tyranny, Gaza is in ruins, attacks in the West Bank are rising and the Palestinians are literally fighting a life-and-death battle against Zionism. There is a national war going on and the two sides are Palestinian liberation or Zionist expansion. How can you deny that the struggle against national oppression is absolutely central to the struggle for revolution?

We must ask ourselves the decisive question: how are we going to actually have a revolution in Palestine? For us, the way is to fight for a communist strategy for the liberation struggle—the only course that stands a chance of success because it is premised on uniting the masses in the region, crucially Arab and Israeli workers. But consider what such a national liberation entails. It would mean going up against the entire social order of the Middle East that is held intact by the imperialists, Zionism and the various Arab nationalist regimes. If this is not advancing social revolution, then I would be curious to hear what your definition of social revolution is. Your loyalty to the so-called theory of interpenetrated peoples makes you forget the essence of permanent revolution: the fusing together of democratic with socialist tasks!

The truth is concrete, comrades. When it comes to Palestine, you cannot move a millimeter as a revolutionary without confronting head-on the complete inseparability of the national and social questions. You write that Palestinian communists would make military blocs with Hamas (fine) and raise “transitional ‘economic’ demands”! In the rubble of Gaza, your great intervention is to raise economic demands?! This is crass economism and a complete scandal. For all your correct points about the need to break workers from Hamas and anti-Jewish chauvinism, your intervention would fail spectacularly at doing so, because it is not premised on championing the national struggle that animates the Palestinian people. You will never challenge the hold of Hamas on economic grounds while they are literally under siege by Israel. The only way to break their influence is to show how they are an obstacle to the national liberation and self-defense of the Palestinian people, i.e., the basis of their popular support. But you cannot do this if you do not yourself seek to champion this cause but denounce those communists who do.

This brings me to the next question, which is about how to build the unity of the Palestinian and Israeli masses. We both agree on the need for this as this is the way to destroy the Zionist state. But in our view, your perspective cannot build such a unity. The only way to build unity is by championing the fight for Palestinian liberation and motivating to the Israeli working class why Palestinian liberation is in their material interests, that their own emancipation will come through Palestinian national liberation.

In line with your economist approach on what Palestinian communists should do, your approach to building unity is to call for class unity, or build an anti-Zionist Arab-Jewish workers’ defense force. Fine. But how should we build the defense force that you propose? It helps to be concrete. There are two obstacles: first, getting Jewish workers to break from Zionism, and second, getting Palestinians and Arabs to join forces with Jewish workers. Why should they do these things?

In both cases, the answer is the same. As long as the Jewish workers do not win the trust of the Palestinians, do not say that they will fight against their own government for their national rights, then no Palestinian will ever want to join forces with an Israeli Jewish worker. Similarly, as long as the Jewish workers do not come to see that the very existence of the Zionist state is the reason for their degradation and lack of safety, they will not break from Zionism. They must be made to see that they are used as pawns of imperialism precisely because of the national oppression of the Palestinians. We must seek to apply the basic principle Engels elaborated: no nation can be free if it oppresses another. Only on the basis of the working class of the oppressor nation actively championing the cause of the oppressed nation can we speak of working-class unity; anything else is empty words.

The Reactionary Legacy of the iSt on Palestine

Since 1948 all the way to today, every single war waged by Israel has been a war whose purpose was to expand its territory at the expense of the Palestinians and the Arab countries in the region. They have been wars of national aggression on the part of Israel in the purest sense of the term. On the side of the Arabs, they have been wars of national defense, even when it was they who initiated the military clashes. This is true today just as it was true in 1948.

The reactionary approach of the iSt on the Palestinian question is most clearly seen when we look at how it approached these early conflicts. As the years went on and a substantial pro-Palestinian movement grew in the West, it moderated some of its early stances and took a more pro-Palestinian approach. But it never confronted or corrected the underpinnings of its program, which were pure and simple capitulations to Zionism.

The first major article of the iSt on the Israeli question is the 1968 article in Spartacist No. 11 titled “Turn the Guns the Other Way.” As the headline suggests, it opposes with equal measure both the Arabs and the Israelis in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war.

What was this war? It was a war of pure aggression on the part of Israel, in which it conquered the Sinai Peninsula, the West Bank and the Golan Heights. But for the iSt, all it saw was bourgeois forces on both sides. It denied the right of the Arab regimes of the region to self-defense against Zionism, even when their lands were being occupied and conquered. But it doesn’t end there. Not only does the article not take a side with the Arab regimes in 1967, but it retrospectively defends Israel against the Arab regimes in the 1948 war. The very war whose outcome caused the permanent displacement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians and the massacre of thousands!

Now of course, comrades of the IBT will argue that the iSt changed its position. This is true at least as regards the 1948 war. But it matters on what basis this position was changed. Instead of accounting for the open capitulation to Zionism—which is what support to Israel meant in 1948—the iSt simply claimed that new facts were available that made clear that the Jews in Palestine were never under threat of being exterminated. Of course, these facts were available since 1948 and do not in any way explain this grotesque position.

The article which dodges this capitulation is the very article the IBT today defends as a key pillar of the iSt which must be defended at all costs: “The Birth of the Zionist State” (published in Workers Vanguard: Part One in No. 33, 23 November 1973; Part Two in No. 45, 24 May 1974). So let’s look at this seminal article and the position it took on the 1948 war.

The article starts off by stating that “we must look at the 1948 war which led to the present state of Israel and the simultaneous expulsions of several hundred thousand Arabs from their homes and lands.” It goes on to state correctly that:

However, when it comes to taking a position on the conflict itself, it refuses to take a side with the Arab forces against Israel.

I believe there is no fundamental dispute between us over the broad lines of what happened. Following the 1947 UN resolution partitioning Palestine at the expense of the Palestinians, the Israelis launched a military offensive, massacring Palestinians and expelling them from their land. After the state of Israel was declared, a coalition of Arab regimes declared war on Israel. There is also no dispute between us that the Arab regimes were militarily ineffectual, self-interested and even treacherous.

Rashid Khalidi’s The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine explains how the King of Jordan actively worked against the formation of a Palestinian state. Again, we have no dispute here.

Where there is a dispute is on the interpretation of these facts. Here you defend the position taken by “Birth of the Zionist State” that there was no side to take in this war because:

We think this is totally wrong. For us there is a fundamental difference between the Zionist military campaign, which was exterminating and displacing the Palestinians, and the Arab regimes, some of which wished to expand their territory and rule over the Palestinians. It’s quite concrete for a Palestinian: the victory of one meant displacement, dispossession and murder, i.e., the Nakba, while the victory of the other meant having a monarch ruling over you rather than a Palestinian national government, which most would have preferred. Sure, the latter scenario is not ideal. But can you seriously treat these two outcomes as co-equal?

There is a reason why Palestinians were appealing to the Arab regimes to come to their defense. There is also a reason why the Arab populations of the neighboring countries felt so strongly that they needed to come to the defense of the Palestinians. While Palestinians were developing their own distinct national identity, they remained part of a common Arab people. Khalidi makes clear that it is under this popular pressure that the Arab regimes were forced to intervene. He also explains that despite his previous treacherous deals with the Israelis, King Abdullah of Transjordan was pushed to confront the Israeli army, halting their genocidal expansion in the process. Do you really think the Palestinians should have stood back and not taken a side in these clashes?

The fact is that the war was only the first in a series of wars of Zionist expansion. The Zionist offensive in 1948 was ultimately against not only the Palestinians but all the Arab regimes in the region. This is one key reason why they intervened.

In its essence, the war of 1948 is no different from the genocidal war being waged in the Middle East today. It is the exact same dynamics at play: Zionist expansion, treachery on the part of the Muslim regimes and conciliation of imperialism in the workers movement in the West. If it is important today to re-examine the 1948 war, it is to understand and draw lessons from the legacy of not only the iSt but of the Trotskyist movement as a whole, which at the time of the events also failed to take a clear side in defense of the Arab regimes and Palestinians against Zionist expansionism. It is necessary for the IBT and all other communist tendencies to draw lessons from the failures of the past.

Palestine offers a great challenge which, as you note, “puts Marxists to the test” that most fail. A genocide is actively raging, the entire left is divided between pacifists and blind tailism of nationalists, and much of the world has settled into a hopeless fatalism on the issue. We have had many political disagreements over several different issues with you in the past, but Palestine was never one of them. Broadly speaking, we were usually in agreement with you when it came to the Middle East. One notable early exception occurred in 1983, when a group called “Islamic Jihad” blew up the US and French barracks in Lebanon, killing hundreds of imperialist troops. The SL/US raised the social-patriotic call to save the lives of the surviving American imperialist forces: “Marines Out of Lebanon, Now, Alive!” Our forerunners, instead, demanded: “Imperialists Out of Lebanon—By Any Means Necessary!” For this, you denounced us as “bloodthirsty” maniacs who craved the death of every American Marine and suggested that anti-black racism might be a motivating factor. We wonder if you still defend this slander or the original capitulation it was meant to cover up.

Our programmatic differences on Palestine began with your rejection of the revolutionary perspective developed by the Spartacist tendency in the mid-1970s, most significantly in “Birth of the Zionist State, Part 2.” In Spartacist No. 68, you write:

This passage is so full of distortions it is hard to know where to begin. We have often spoken of “removing” democratic (above all, national) questions from the agenda in the sense that divisions within the working class over such questions can prevent proletarian unity in the class struggle and foster allegiance to the bourgeoisie. This does not imply that we do not take these questions seriously and lack a program to address them. To the contrary, what it means is that Marxists have a duty to approach these questions in a manner that can bring class questions to the fore. We develop tactics that aim to do that, e.g., calling for national independence when antagonisms between workers across national lines have reached the point of undermining joint struggle. By contrast, you now seem to view these issues (or least the national question) as possessing some sort of inherently revolutionary content, although you are quick to add that this is only true if the working class takes the lead in promoting them.

Due to its interpenetration with the Jewish-Israeli nation (which like all nations has the right to self-determination), it is impossible to equitably resolve the question of Palestinian national oppression under capitalism. The SL created no new “theory” but merely recognized this objective reality and refused to abandon the Leninist approach to the national question by recognizing only the rights of the oppressed nation, as did the Pabloites. On the one hand, you seem to acknowledge that the SL was correct to recognize the mutual incompatibility of the national rights of interpenetrated peoples under capitalism and the need for proletarian state forms to resolve them. On the other hand, you assert, without evidence, that the SL viewed the revolution to put those state forms in place as “a process in which both national groups will shed their national sentiments in favor of unity on economic demands and liberal solidarity.” If by “economic” demands you simply mean class issues, then yes of course we seek to build binational workers’ unity around such demands. Where is your evidence that the revolutionary SL ever promoted “liberal solidarity” in place of joint working-class struggle? And if the Spartacist tendency believed that “both national groups will shed their national sentiments” in the course of the revolution, then why did it seek to win Jewish-Israeli workers to the perspective of a binational workers’ state, which necessarily implies the existence after the revolution of two nations?

You suggest that the advantage you have over the position outlined in “Birth of the Zionist State” is that you, unlike the SL of the time, really know how to make a revolution. Yet your perspective, we are told, is “to put the national liberation struggle of Palestinians … at the center of our revolutionary strategy”:

Your strategy, then, is to foster a “national liberation” uprising “of Palestinians” which, because led by communists, will not “impinge on the national rights” of Israelis. You describe this as a fusion of the struggle for national liberation and that for socialism, but it is you who cannot explain how a struggle for Palestinian national rights being placed “at the center of our revolutionary strategy” could be merged with the struggle for socialism when the latter requires at least a major sector of the Jewish-Israeli working class to fight as well. The point that “Birth of the Zionist State” was making, and which you seem not to understand, is that it is precisely the agitational significance of recognizing that the right to self-determination of Israeli Jews (which they currently exercise through their apartheid state) will be respected that can allow the national question to be “removed from the agenda” in the course of mobilization on class (or “economic”) issues and the fight for socialist revolution.

We of course defend the Palestinians. We of course recognize that they are nationally oppressed. We of course defend their right to self-determination and promote it. But we believe that their freedom can only come about through joint class struggle with Jewish-Israeli workers, who are strategically positioned to destroy the Zionist state and expropriate the racist Israeli bourgeoisie, which is in their own material interest. Joint struggle for socialism will not be possible if Jewish workers remain under the spell of Zionism, which chains them to the bourgeoisie largely by manipulating their fear that their national rights (indeed, very existence) will be threatened without a “Jewish state.” “Centering” the struggle for Palestinian national rights, which would exclude Israeli Jews under capitalism due to interpenetration, will do little to assuage those fears, no matter what phrases about the national rights of Jewish Israelis you bury in your propaganda. Even if your main political motivation is not the struggle for socialism but for Palestinian national liberation, you must “center” class interests and the struggle for socialism as the framework in which democratic problems could be resolved equitably. Anything else is bourgeois nationalism, which is a dead-end not only for those who want socialism but even for those who want the national liberation of the Palestinians.

Given all of this, we confess to being somewhat surprised that you have not come out with a worse line on the current crisis in Gaza. We were pleased that your supplemental “Only Death and Defeat with Hamas: A Revolutionary Road for Palestinian Liberation” recognized that sectarian violence on 7 October 2023 bound Jewish Israelis closer to Zionism, that breaking this link required some orientation to Jewish-Israeli national rights, and that the only possible solution requires joint class struggle towards a socialist revolution. In broad strokes at least, the line on Palestine expressed in your supplemental was still a distillation of the interpenetrated peoples “theory” you had trashed in Spartacist No. 68 less than a month before. We considered the possibility that the supplemental was just a knee-jerk response to events that called the bluff of every abstract formulation in Spartacist No. 68.

At the Melbourne debate between our organizations (which we published as “Spartacists Adrift: Revolutionary Leadership & Permanent Revolution”), we found ourselves being denounced by comrade Charlotte for retaining a “theory” that still clearly informed the public stance of the ICL. She did not actually repudiate any core element of the interpenetrated peoples “theory,” instead emphasizing in the most abstract way the “centered-ness” of Palestinians, their oppression, anti-imperialism and national liberation.

The decision to republish the supplemental in Spartacist No. 69 later that year suggested the ICL was no closer to figuring out a coherent strategy for Palestine. That issue’s new content, “Marxists & Palestine: 100 Years of Failure Lessons and Prospects,” doubled down on its rejection of interpenetrated peoples while reintroducing, in the most confused manner possible, programmatic elements that flow from just such an understanding:

Your assertion that “the purpose of the theory [of interpenetrated peoples] was to present the fight for Palestinian self-determination as illegitimate, invoking the bogeyman that any struggle in this direction would violate the right of self-determination of Israelis” is a strawman. A class-struggle approach to “the fight for Palestinian self-determination” is what the revolutionary iSt advocated—a perspective that distinguished it from the Pabloites and Stalinists who sought to put a “socialist” face on the bourgeois nationalist “fight for Palestinian self-determination.” The latter was and is characterized by a complete disregard for the national rights of Israeli Jews and, of course, the leading role of independent proletarian action. A “fight for Palestinian self-determination” that ignores the national rights of Israeli Jews is bound either for a reversal of the terms of oppression (an unlikely outcome) or failure due to the lack of resonance from a fearful Jewish working class (see: the past 80 years). The only “red herring” is your claim that the Spartacist tendency’s position was one of “refusing to fight for Palestinian self-determination in the name of Israeli self-determination” and hence “defending the Zionist status quo.”

You then went on to write:

Comrades, that is the revolutionary iSt’s position and our position today, and it is one that is rooted in the “theory” of interpenetrated peoples. We would remind you that “the continued existence of a Jewish nation in the Near East” under a binational state would inherently imply that Jewish workers had come to identify their nation’s own self-determination with that state. Otherwise, it would not exist as binational. That means that the national rights of Israeli Jews must be incorporated in the proletarian-socialist struggle for Palestinian liberation. In other words, “Not Jew against Arab but class against class!”

And if you now hate that slogan, then why did you (correctly) note that “[t]here is a material basis to win the Israeli working class,” that Israelis experience the “second highest rate of poverty in the developed world,” and that Jewish minority populations are “consigned to the worst jobs and the worst segregated living conditions”? This sounds like you’re suggesting a class-struggle program with—shock horror—“economic” demands. In the recent article “After October 7: Where Are We Now?” you confirmed that this program would involve a mutual struggle against the effects of imperialism on both Palestinians and Israeli Jews, explaining to “Israeli toilers” that Zionist militarism exacerbates their poverty and calling for the spread of class struggle even into the ranks of the IDF.

At the same time, you seem to want to go out of your way to undermine the application of this program by intimating that the Israeli Jews shouldn’t have equal national rights after all. In “Marxists & Palestine: 100 Years of Failure Lessons and Prospects,” you write that “the entire state of Israel is a settler colony built on the dispossession of the Palestinians. The 700,000 settlers in the West Bank, some of whom have lived there for decades, are not fundamentally different from those living in the rest of Israel.” If by “settler colony” you simply mean that the ancestors of (most) Israeli Jews settled in the area the way that white Australians, New Zealanders and North Americans did, then why are you equating them with the settlers who are currently in the process of stealing Palestinian land? The dispossession of the Palestinians was a historic crime, but it contributed to the forging of a Jewish-Israeli nation. The existence of that nation is a fact, whether or not we like the way it was created. Presumably you don’t like the fact that Indigenous Canadians were dispossessed and killed to create the Quebec nation, but you recognize the right of Quebec to self-determination.

Of course, at a sufficient level of abstraction there is no hard and permanent distinction between West Bank settlers and the rest of the Jewish-Israeli population, but the immediacy of the dispossession they are carrying out is a felt political reality both by Palestinians and Israeli Jews. Does your equation of all Jewish Israelis with the West Bank settlers mean that they have no national rights? Presumably you don’t think so. Why, then, do you make the equation in the first place? It is not in the service of a Leninist program but of petty bourgeois moral conscience. It is a concession to the nationalism of the oppressed nation, which you imbue with revolutionary content.