100 Years of Failure

https://iclfi.org/spartacist/en/69/palestine

Gaza has been pounded into rubble. Nine months of Israeli bombing and ground offensives have slaughtered countless Palestinians and made this open-air prison a living hell. In the West Bank, Israeli troops and Zionist mobs are expelling Palestinians from their homes and bulldozing them to build new Jewish settlements. The mass protests that broke out around the world after Hamas’s 7 October offensive have not stopped this genocide and the movement is losing momentum. For their part, the Arab states have mostly made empty gestures of support for the besieged Palestinians. U.S.-backed ceasefire negotiations, UN resolutions and ICC investigations have only provided a diplomatic fig leaf while the Americans and other imperialist powers continue to arm and support the Zionist state. Meanwhile, Israel is advancing toward the Zionist goal of occupying all of Palestine, from the river to the sea.

As this catastrophe unfolds, most leftists, echoing Palestinian nationalists, fatuously claim that the struggle is progressing favorably and is on the path to victory. A common chant is “Palestine is almost free.” It is true that there is widespread public sympathy for the Palestinian cause, that Israel has lost hundreds of soldiers and that its international reputation has suffered. But the Palestinians are facing annihilation, not liberation. In order to provide a way forward for the Palestinian struggle, it is necessary to start by telling the truth about the current situation. Far from doing this, most Marxist groups internationally are actively cheering on the movement as it heads toward defeat. Rather than fighting for a different course, they tail the movement’s leadership, whether liberal or nationalist. As a result, while so-called Marxists have been omnipresent in the struggle, they have been largely irrelevant to its outcome.

This is not a new problem. Rather, it is just another iteration of the century-long failure of the Marxist movement to formulate a revolutionary strategy for the Palestinian liberation struggle. From the zigzags of the early Palestine Communist Party (PCP) to Stalin’s support to the Nakba in 1948 and the cheering of Yasser Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in the 1970s, the Marxist movement is saddled with a disastrous record on the Palestinian question, failing to establish itself as a serious pole against Zionism, nationalism and imperialism. Now more than ever, it is urgent to draw lessons from these failures and provide a course that can defeat the Zionist state and open the road for Palestinian liberation and social emancipation.

This is the aim of the present document. On the basis of a materialist analysis of the Palestinian question, it explains the cause of past failures, offering a genuine path for victory.

The Nature of the Palestinian Question

To understand the Palestinian question, it is necessary to look at its origins and development. The British seized the territory of Palestine from the decaying Ottoman Empire in the First World War. At that time, the Jewish population was a small minority, mostly long established in the area. However, in the 1917 Balfour Declaration, the British gave their support to the Zionist colonial project of carving a Jewish “homeland” out of this Arab country. This was a cynical ploy to foster a national conflict in the region to better assert British rule. European Jewish colonists emigrated to Palestine, purchasing land from large Arab landowners and evicting masses of peasants. As Zionism required the direct support of imperialism for its survival—first British and then American—the Jewish settler colony built itself as a fortress of imperialist reaction directed against the rest of the Middle East.

From its inception, Zionism was a reactionary nationalist answer to Jewish oppression, premised on the dispossession and expulsion of the Palestinian people from their homeland. Zionists went to Palestine under the slogans “conquest of labor” and “conquest of land,” well knowing that labor and land were to be conquered by driving out the Arab population. Right-wing Zionists, who used to be known as “revisionists,” have always been consistent in this goal. Liberal Zionism, known in the past as “socialist” or Labor Zionism, has always been hypocritical, seeking to reconcile the lofty principles of “socialism” and liberal democracy with the genocidal logic of the Zionist project.

Naturally, Zionist expansion in the first half of the 20th century provoked a growing reaction in the Arab population, which erupted in increasingly violent revolts. It is through these struggles that the Palestinians developed a national consciousness distinct from that of the Arab population in the rest of the region. Originally, the leaders of the Palestinian struggle were found in layers of the traditional Arab elites, whose interests were directly threatened by the Zionists. However, these layers were also tied to the British, who guaranteed their privileged position over the Arab masses. From the early traditional elites to the modern nationalists, the leadership of the Palestinian movement has always represented the interests of an upper layer that is forced to confront the Zionist project but, given their class position, is incapable of defeating imperialism and Zionism.

The brutal exploitation of Palestinians and their heroic resistance place them in the vanguard of the struggle against imperialism in the Middle East. However, the Arab, Turkish and Iranian masses stand divided, separated into rival states ruled by a cabal of monarchs, clerics and dictators who put their reactionary interests above the fight against imperialism and Zionism. The historic problem of the Palestinian liberation movement has been to seek support from these upper layers at the expense of uniting the entire Middle Eastern working population in struggle against its own rulers and the imperialist overlords. This problem is inherent to nationalism, which views conflicts strictly through the lens of national antagonism. Thus, Palestinian nationalists can only conceive of fighting the entire Israeli nation, a battle they cannot win; relying on Arab regimes, on which they cannot count; and maneuvering between the great powers that directly benefit from Palestinian oppression.

The crux of the Palestinian question is that two nations claim the same territory, and neither has anywhere else to go. The historic injustices brought down on Palestinians cannot be redressed with the creation of a rump Palestinian state, established on a fraction of Palestine’s historic land and under permanent threat from the far more powerful Zionist state. Nor can it be achieved by confronting the whole Israeli nation, which is sure to fight to the death for its national existence. Rather, the Zionist state must be broken up from within by severing the bond tying the working masses to the Zionist project. The basis to do this lies in the class interests of workers in Israel, who are themselves exploited by the Zionist rulers and whose own condition is degraded by Palestinian oppression and their role as pawns for the imperialists in the region. The emancipation of the Israeli working class runs through the national liberation of Palestine. As Engels wrote, no nation can be free if it oppresses another.

At the heart of the Palestinian question is a national problem, but one that cannot be solved in a strictly national framework. Every step toward Palestinian freedom runs up against the entire capitalist order in the Middle East. This makes it self-evident that the Palestinian liberation struggle requires a revolutionary leadership that will fuse the national cause with the social emancipation of the working class throughout the region. In other words, the Trotskyist program of permanent revolution. It is on the basis of this approach that we will seek to evaluate the record of the Marxist movement on the Palestinian question.

The Jewish Question: Communism vs. Zionism

The Marxist movement has a solid foundation on the national and Jewish questions. Writing during World War II, the Belgian Trotskyist Abram Leon provided a materialist understanding of Jewish oppression (The Jewish Question: A Marxist Interpretation [New York: Pathfinder Press, 1970]). He explained how, under feudalism, Jews fulfilled a special economic function as moneylenders that was no longer needed under capitalism. In Western Europe, the bourgeois revolutions opened the doors of the ghettos, and the assimilation of the Jews seemed to be an accomplished fact.

But in Eastern Europe, when the collapse of feudal society robbed Jews of the material basis for their existence, there was no widespread industrialization to allow these millions of now-superfluous middlemen to become integrated into the proletariat. Particularly in the Pale of Settlement, the western region of the Russian Empire, life for Jews meant impoverishment in shtetls (Jewish villages) and frequent pogroms. A small part of the Jewish population became capitalist or proletarian; a larger part emigrated, thus breaking the tendency toward assimilation in the Western countries. The largest part of all remained in the wretched condition of small merchants “strangled between the jaws of two systems; feudalism and capitalism, each feeding the rottenness of the other,” as Leon wrote.

The 1917 Bolshevik Revolution liberated the Jews of the Russian Empire, leading great numbers toward the banner of communism and away from Zionism. They saw their future in the destruction of the old economic order that could find no place for them and in the construction of a new, socialist society. Communism and Zionism were naturally counterposed, and the early Communist International (CI) fought against the latter’s influence. As the “Theses on the National and Colonial Questions” from the Second Congress of the Communist International in 1920 explained:

“The Palestine affair is a crass example of Entente imperialism and the bourgeoisie of the relevant country working together to swindle the working classes of an oppressed nation. Under the cover of creating a Jewish state in Palestine, Zionism actually delivers the Arab working population of Palestine, where the toiling Jews constitute only a small minority, to exploitation by Britain.”

Confronted with the request by Poale Zion (Workers of Zion) to join the Comintern, the CI’s Executive Committee wrote in an August 1921 letter that “there are tendencies within your movement that are in principle incompatible with those of the Communist International.” It argued against the notion that settling Jews in Palestine would be liberating and stressed that “the complete liquidation of such ideology is the most important condition which we feel compelled to stipulate” (Bulletin of the Executive Committee of the Communist International No. 2, 20 September 1921). Furthermore, it demanded that Poale Zion oppose Jewish emigration to Palestine and change its name to the Palestine Communist Party in order to show its intent to represent not only Jewish workers but also the Arab toilers. When the majority of Poale Zion refused to accede to these conditions, the Comintern made clear that it had been prepared to make “great concessions with regard to propaganda and organization, in order to facilitate thereby the development of Communism even among the most backward portions of the Jewish proletariat.” They continued: “The only relations between the Communists and the Poale Zion since the rejection of the conditions of entrance have been those of the greatest hostility” (“To the Communists of all Countries! To the Jewish Proletariat!”, International Press Correspondence, 1 August 1922).

Palestine Communist Party: Between Zionism and Arab Nationalism

When the Palestine Communist Party was admitted into the Comintern in 1924, the Stalinists had taken political power in the Soviet Union and the CI was on its course of degeneration. From being an instrument for world revolution, it was being transformed into an adjunct of Stalinist foreign policy, based on the reactionary perspective of building socialism in one country in peaceful coexistence with imperialism. Thus, CI interventions into the PCP were not driven by what was needed to build a revolutionary party.

At its founding, the PCP formally opposed Zionism, but this break was partial. The PCP had emerged out of the left wing of Poale Zion, and its membership continued to identify with left Zionism. It was composed mainly of Jewish settlers who arrived with no knowledge of Palestine and barely any awareness of the people who lived there. Its membership was highly unstable, with many simply leaving Palestine when they were won to communism in order to escape “the Zionist hell.”

The PCP did seek to unite Arabs and Jews, but it did so without frontally opposing Zionism. For example, a 1921 May Day leaflet issued by the PCP’s precursor called for Arab workers to join the Communists’ demonstration and stated that Jewish workers had come to Palestine as allies in joint struggle against Arab and Jewish capitalists. Of course, in a context of Zionists driving Arab peasants from the land and Arab workers from their jobs, this fell on deaf ears. The PCP’s approach implicitly amounted to demanding that the Arab masses shed their legitimate national aspirations as the precondition for unity; the struggle against Zionism had to be set aside in order to “unite” against the bosses.

That position was completely counterposed to the Leninist approach to the national question. As Lenin laid out in “The Socialist Revolution and the Right of Nations to Self-Determination” (January-February 1916):

“The proletariat of the oppressor nations must not confine themselves to general, stereotyped phrases against annexation and in favour of the equality of nations in general, such as any pacifist bourgeois will repeat…. The proletariat must demand freedom of political separation for the colonies and nations oppressed by ‘their own’ nation. Otherwise, the internationalism of the proletariat would be nothing but empty words; neither confidence nor class solidarity would be possible between the workers of the oppressed and the oppressor nations.”

While the question in Palestine was not one of political secession, Lenin’s point retains its full validity. The responsibility of Jewish communists in Palestine was and remains first and foremost to oppose the national oppression of the Palestinians. Only on this basis can we even begin to speak of class unity.

It is precisely this lesson that many so-called communists reject today when they issue calls for unity that are not premised on the liberation of the oppressed. Lutte Ouvrière (LO) is notorious in this regard, proudly marching in the streets of Paris under banners reading: “Against Imperialism and Its Maneuvers, Against Netanyahu and Hamas, Proletarians of France, Palestine, Israel…Unite!” Again, unity will only happen through Palestinian national liberation—a cause which LO rejects. Unsurprisingly, LO also prettifies the early PCP.

From the mid 1920s through the mid 1930s, the CI intervened to force the PCP to orient to the Arab majority. While this was indeed necessary, the Stalinists carried it out with bureaucratic methods and in the service of reformist aims. The CI eventually required PCP members to re-register based on a pledge to support the Arabization of the party and replaced most of the Jewish leadership with Arabs. On the political level, the turn flip-flopped between blanket and sterile denunciations of the Arab nationalist leadership, labeling them as “nothing but a tool of reaction,” and complete conciliation of these same leaders (quoted in Joel Beinen, “The Palestine Communist Party 1919-1948,” MERIP Reports, March 1977).

These changes in the party intersected Hitler’s coming to power in Germany, which brought a flood of German Jewish immigrants to Palestine. From 1933 to 1936, more than 130,000 Jews arrived in Palestine and the Yishuv, the general body of Jewish settlers, grew by about 80 percent. These developments brought tensions between Jews and Arabs to a new height, culminating in the 1936-39 Great Arab Revolt, an upheaval that ranged from protests and peasant uprisings to a general strike and armed insurrection.

The Palestinian Communists supported the leadership of the revolt, initially throwing their authority behind the Mufti of Jerusalem, Amin al-Husayni, who had emerged as its leader. The PCP hailed him as “belonging to the most extremely anti-imperialist wing of the nationalist movement” (quoted in Ghassan Kanafani, The 1936-39 Revolt in Palestine [New York: Committee for a Democratic Palestine, 1972]). To say that this was a prettification is a gross understatement. The head of a rich landowning family, al-Husayni had been appointed in 1921 by the British High Commissioner, who viewed him as essential to maintaining stability in Palestine. Although loyal to the British Empire, al-Husayni saw the Zionist project as a threat to the Arab elites he represented, propelling his initial leadership of the revolt. But as the movement developed, the insurrectionary workers and peasants began to threaten the interests of large landowners, a class to which he belonged. As a result, the Mufti cut a deal with the British in 1936 to end the general strike and helped them suppress the first stage of the Arab Revolt.

It was clearly correct for the PCP to support the revolt and even fight side by side with the Mufti. But it needed to do so critically, showing the masses at every step how he was holding back the struggle, including through anti-Semitism, which prevented winning over Jewish workers. Instead, the PCP supported this clerical leader, who not only led the movement to defeat but literally oversaw the killing of communists. In “The Palestine Communist Party 1919-1948,” Beinen shows that the PCP’s liquidation into the nationalist movement went so far as to demand that its Jewish members take part in terrorist actions against the Jewish community.

Unsurprisingly, the PCP’s policy was unpopular among its Jewish base and tore the party apart. Reflecting deepening national divisions within the party, the PCP Central Committee created a new structure called the Jewish Section. This section was critical of the overzealous support to the Arab Revolt and increasingly adapted to Zionism. Seeing “progressive circles within Zionism,” it called for a popular front with Zionist groups and parties. Eventually, the Arab-led Central Committee demanded the dissolution of the Jewish Section. This demand was resisted, leading to a split.

The suppression of the 1936-39 revolt consolidated the military and economic basis for a separate Zionist state. British imperialism used the Haganah, a Zionist militia of over 10,000 men, to put down the uprising. Almost 10 percent of the adult male Palestinian Arab population was killed, wounded, imprisoned or exiled, including the Mufti and almost all of the Palestinian nationalist leadership. At the same time, a network of roads was built between the principal Zionist colonies that was later a basic part of the infrastructure of the Zionist economy. The main road from Haifa to Tel Aviv was paved, the Haifa harbor was expanded and deepened and a harbor was constructed at Tel Aviv that later killed off the Arab port of Jaffa. In addition, the Zionists monopolized contracts for supplying the British troops who had started to flood into Palestine as the Second World War began.

That new conflict accelerated the PCP’s catastrophic course, particularly when—following the orders of Stalin—it admonished Palestinians and Jews alike to join with the British in the “democratic” war against fascist Germany. In a polemic against the small group of Trotskyists in Palestine written just prior to the war, Leon Trotsky insisted on the importance of opposing both imperialist camps. He wrote:

“Should revolutionary defeatism be renounced in relation to nonfascist countries? Herein is the crux of the question; upon this issue, revolutionary internationalism stands or falls.

“For instance, should the 360,000,000 Indians renounce any attempt to utilize the war for their own liberation? The uprising of Indians in the midst of a war would undoubtedly aid strongly in the defeat of Great Britain. Furthermore, in the event of an Indian uprising…should the British workers support them? Or, on the contrary, are they duty-bound to pacify the Indians, and lull them to sleep—for the sake of a victorious struggle of British imperialism ‘against fascism’? Which way for us?”

This touched precisely on the problem that was polarizing the PCP. Indeed, support to British imperialism was unpopular among its Arab members. Although they did not necessarily oppose Stalinist support for British imperialism in the war, they could not stomach the PCP recruiting Arabs for the hated British army. Within a few years, this difference and growing nationalist divisions impelled Arab members to split from the PCP and found a left-wing organization called the National Liberation League. The PCP was again reduced to its Jewish membership. That latest course of capitulation prepared what would become the PCP’s greatest betrayal: supporting Israel in the Nakba.

Support to the Nakba: Stalin’s Great Betrayal

At the end of World War II, the British Empire was collapsing under the weight of its war effort and the strains of maintaining the colonial Empire. This led to British withdrawal from Palestine, handing authority to the United Nations. In 1947, the UN General Assembly adopted a partition plan dividing Palestine between Arab and Israeli states. The latter was accorded large areas, many of which were inhabited by a majority-Arab population.

For the Zionists, this was not enough. As soon as the UN voted to partition Palestine, Zionists launched an offensive that eventually displaced more than 700,000 Palestinians and conquered 78 percent of historic Palestine. Entire cities were emptied of Palestinians, and their orchards, industry, transport, factories, houses and other possessions were seized. This massive ethnic cleansing, which gave birth to Israel, became known by Palestinians as the Nakba—the catastrophe.

The initial Zionist offensive sent shockwaves throughout the Arab world. In his book The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2020), Rashid Khalidi describes the unfolding tragedy:

“In this first phase of the Nakba before May 15, 1948, a pattern of ethnic cleansing resulted in the expulsion and panicked departure of about 300,000 Palestinians overall and the devastation of many of the Arab majority’s key urban economic, political, civic, and cultural centers. The second phase followed after May 15, when the new Israeli army defeated the Arab armies that joined the war. In belatedly deciding to intervene militarily, the Arab governments were acting under intense pressure from the Arab public, which was deeply distressed by the fall of Palestine’s cities and villages one after another and the arrival of waves of destitute refugees in neighboring capitals.”

As Khalidi mentions, the Arab League, a coalition composed principally of Egypt, Transjordan, Iraq and Syria, intervened against Israel. The King of Transjordan, Abdullah I, played a pivotal role in this conflict. Having initially conspired with the British and the Zionists to stop the formation of an independent Palestinian state in order to annex part of its territory, he was eventually pushed into confronting Israel and represented the coalition’s most serious military force. His treacherous role contributed significantly to the coalition’s defeat, which sealed the fate of the Palestinians.

However, King Abdullah never claimed to be a revolutionary Marxist. Joseph Stalin, on the other hand, betrayed the Palestinian cause in the name of communism and the Soviet Union. It was Stalin, together with American president Truman, who pushed through the resolution for partition in the UN. It was the Soviet Union that was the first country to formally recognize the state of Israel. Abba Eban, a future Israeli foreign minister, described how Soviet recognition represented “an incredible opportunity; in a moment all of our plans on the discussion at the UN were completely changed.” Going further than diplomatic betrayals, from 1948 to 1949 the Soviet bloc sent arms to the Haganah via Czechoslovakia, providing crucial equipment to the Zionist militias that were rampaging against Palestinian cities and villages.

The support of the Soviet Union to the Nakba was a betrayal of historic proportions, not least because the USSR was seen around the world as the leader of the working class and the colonial revolution. Naturally, the various Communist parties and Stalinist organizations taking part in Palestinian demonstrations today bury or deny this lamentable record. For example, the Communist Party of Greece (KKE) papers over this crime, writing that “The massacre of the Jews by the Nazis and the anti-Semitism promoted by the bourgeois classes before the Second World War in many capitalist countries led to the acceptance by the USSR and the international labour movement of the creation of the state of Israel alongside the state of Palestine” (“Short Answers to Current Ideological-Political Questions Concerning the Israeli Attack and Massacre Against the Palestinian People in the Gaza Strip,” inter.kke.gr, 20 November 2023).

Trotskyists on the Nakba: Zionism and Centrism

In addition to the Communist Party, there was also a small nucleus of Trotskyists in Palestine. Coming mostly from Zionist backgrounds, from which they never completely broke, they were organized in the Revolutionary Communist League (RCL) in the late 1930s. Tony Cliff, a leader of the RCL, was from a prominent Zionist family in British-occupied Palestine and joined a Labor Zionist organization in his youth. By the 1950s, Cliff was living in Britain, cheering Arab nationalism as leader of Socialist Review Group, precursor to the Socialist Workers Party. But in 1938, Cliff was singing a different tune: “It is evident that the British know full well how to exploit the elementary needs of the Jewish worker, namely immigration and colonization, neither of which contradicts the real necessities of the Arab masses” (“British Policy in Palestine,” The New International, October 1938, our emphasis). Needless to say, the mass immigration of Jews to Palestine and its colonization did contradict the real necessities of the Arab masses. These lines were all the more damning given that they were written in the midst of the Great Arab Revolt against Zionist colonization.

These views were not unanimous in the Trotskyist movement. Cliff was sharply denounced by the South African Trotskyists, who argued:

“Apologetic critics of Zionism from the ‘left,’ so-called socialists and communists, who are fond of talking about Marx and dialectics, but whose socialism goes no deeper than their skin, are shocked that the wrath of the Arabs is directed not only against British imperialism, but also against the Jews in Palestine. These liberals are unable to understand why, on meeting with a united Zionist front of bourgeoisie and labor, a hostile united front, siding with their enemy, British imperialism, and supporting it, the Arabs should come to the conclusion that all Jews in Palestine are Zionists and therefore their enemies. This conclusion is, to be sure, a wrong one, but where are the signs that would make this clear to the Arabs?”

This was a prescient criticism, but it was never incorporated into the practice and program of the Trotskyists in Palestine.

The difficulties of the international Trotskyist movement in developing a correct program for the question of Palestine were in large part caused by its decimation during the world war. Trotsky himself was murdered in 1940 on Stalin’s orders, and many of the Fourth International’s most experienced cadres, such as Abram Leon, died at the hands of either the Stalinists or the Nazis. The Trotskyist movement emerged from the war weak and disoriented over the profound changes taking place in the world. When it came to Palestine and the Jewish question, this weakened movement came under strong pressure to conciliate Zionism in the wake of the Holocaust and with hundreds of thousands of survivors who were denied entry into the imperialist countries languishing in displaced persons camps. Those pressures were compounded by the fact that the Stalinists, social democrats and most of the trade-union movement in the U.S. and Europe supported the creation of Israel.

The Trotskyists’ disorientation was reflected in the 1947 “Draft Theses on the Jewish Question Today” written by Ernest Mandel, a leader of the Fourth International. The Theses contained many correct points, including:

“The Fourth International must therefore do its utmost to dissuade the Jewish refugees from immigration to Palestine; it must endeavor, within the framework of a movement of world solidarity, to get the doors of other countries opened to them, and must warn that Palestine is for them a terrible trap; and in its concrete propaganda on the question of Jewish immigration, it must start from the sovereignty of the Arab population.”

However, the Theses described the establishment of a Zionist state as utopian, even though Israel’s military and economic foundations had already been laid. They also appealed to the Arab masses to use attacks against the British to “bring forward concretely the question of withdrawal of British troops.” But those attacks were being carried out by the ultra-Zionist Irgun militia against restrictions on Jewish immigration! The Theses denied that the British were, in fact, withdrawing from Palestine and that Zionist terrorism was a precursor to the mass displacement of Palestinians.

When it came to the Nakba itself, the most overt capitulation to Zionism came from Max Shachtman’s Workers Party (WP) in the U.S. The WP supported the foundation of Israel, claiming that its war against the Arab countries was one of national liberation. Praising Israel’s declaration of independence, they denounced the intervention of Arab states:

“Invading [Israel’s] defenses and threatening their independence came the reactionary onslaught of some of the most backward and reactionary kingships and dynasts of the world, the semi-feudal oppressors of the Arab people.

“This reactionary invasion was launched with but one end in view—precisely to deprive the Israeli people of their right to self-determination.”

These reactionary Zionist politics were the direct result of the 1940 split of the WP from the U.S. Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party (SWP). The split, which was caused by Shachtman and his clique refusing to defend the Soviet Union, reflected the pressures of petty-bourgeois public opinion, particularly from the New York Jewish socialist milieu.

As for the Fourth International, it at least opposed the UN partition plan for Palestine. The British Revolutionary Communist Party, for example, wrote: “Partition of Palestine is reactionary from every aspect—neither the Jews nor the Arab masses have anything to gain from it” (Socialist Appeal, December 1947). For its part, the U.S. SWP published an editorial that correctly stated that the Jews “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” (The Militant, 31 May 1948, emphasis added).

However, in the war between the Zionists and the Arab League, the Fourth International refused to side with the Arabs, denouncing them and the Zionists as equally reactionary. The same SWP editorial stated:

“Neither are the Arab rulers conducting a progressive struggle for national independence and against imperialism. They are, by their anti-Jewish war, trying to divert the struggle against imperialism, and utilizing the aspirations of the Arab masses for national freedom, to smother the social opposition to their tyrannical rule.”

The RCL in Palestine argued the same position in an editorial titled “Against the Stream,” writing: “We say to the Jewish and Arab workers: The enemy is in your own camp!” (Fourth International, May 1948).

This was profoundly false. The 1948 war was a national war of expansion by the Zionists against the Arab Palestinian population. Despite the reactionary nature and all the machinations of King Abdullah and other Arab rulers, they were objectively fighting against the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians. It is simply false to argue that the victory of the Arab League would be just as reactionary as that of Israel. For the Palestinians, Arab victory would have meant remaining on their historic land. If the war had somehow turned into a war of oppression against the Jewish population, its character would have changed, calling for a different response. But at no point was this posed in the slightest.

Some, then and now, argue that the links between the Arab League and British imperialism were proof that both sides in the war were reactionary. It is true that both Israel and the Arab side were supported, in some ways, by various imperialist powers. But this was a secondary factor. The war was not about competing imperialist aspirations in the region but about driving the Palestinians off their land. The 1948 war and every subsequent war—1967, 1973, 1982, etc.—were wars of Zionist expansion. The only correct position for Marxists in these conflicts was to side with Palestine and the Arabs.

The refusal by Trotskyists in 1948 to do this was a capitulation to Zionism in the face of the Nakba, an utter betrayal. Yet almost all contemporary Trotskyists uphold this as an example to follow—making revolutionary intervention impossible today: from our organization (until now) to the Revolutionary Communist International, both Bolshevik Tendencies, the League for the Fourth International and the Trotskyist Fraction/Left Voice. Left Voice wrote: “We think that the Jewish Palestinian Trotskyists in the late 1940s had the only realistic vision for resolving the conflict” (“The Farce of the ‘Two-State Solution’ and the Socialist Perspective for Palestine,” leftvoice.org, 16 December 2023). How being defeatist in the Nakba did anything to resolve the conflict is for Left Voice to explain.

The Green Line

The borders established as a result of Israel’s victory in the 1948 war are called the Green Line and were recognized by UN Security Council Resolution 242 following the 1967 war. This resolution became a cornerstone of the Arab-Israeli conflict, forming the basis for Israel’s peace treaties with Egypt (1979) and Jordan (1994), for the 1993 Oslo Accord and for all discussions about a two-state solution. Here is what Nayef Hawatmeh, leader of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, correctly said about Resolution 242:

“Acceptance of the resolution directly implies:

“(1) Endorsement of the conquest and loss of territory that befell the people of Palestine in 1948.

“(2) The liquidation of the Palestinian resistance movement to safeguard the frontiers of the state of Israel.

“(3) The continued existence of an expansionist state closely linked with American imperialism by virtue of the common interest of the two parties that Israel should continue to exist as an instrument for expansion and for the repression of the national liberation movement in the Middle East.”

The Spartacist Tradition

Here we must address the stained legacy of our own tendency on the question of Palestine. The Revolutionary Tendency, the opposition in the SWP that gave birth to the Spartacist League in the 1960s, was led by a group of cadres who originally came from Shachtman’s Independent Socialist League. Despite their correct struggle against the degeneration of the SWP, they brought with them the Shachtmanite tradition on Palestine. This was most clearly seen in the 1968 article “Arab-Israeli Conflict: Turn the Guns the Other Way” (Spartacist No. 11, March-April 1968), which not only took a retrospective position of siding with Israel in the 1948 war but advocated the defeat of both sides in the 1967 war of Zionist expansion. The article demanded “the signing of a peace treaty on the basis of the 1949 truce boundary lines, thus granting Arab recognition to the right of a Hebrew nation to exist.”

This pro-Israel position was changed with the seminal article “Birth of the Zionist State,” Part Two (Workers Vanguard No. 45, 24 May 1974), where the Spartacist tendency adopted the somewhat less reactionary line of the SWP on the 1948 war—defeatism on both sides. Ridiculously, the justification for this change was not that the earlier position was openly Zionist but that “new factual material” had come to light.

Moreover, the article developed the so-called theory of interpenetrated peoples, proclaiming: “The democratic issue of self-determination for each of two nationalities or peoples who geographically interpenetrate can only conceivably be resolved equitably within the framework of the proletariat in power.” It is true that a just resolution of the Palestinian conflict requires proletarian power. However, the purpose of the theory 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. In this framework, the Spartacist tendency issued abstract calls for class unity, putting forward such slogans as “Not Jew against Arab but class against class!” In more recent years, our tendency’s propaganda heavily denounced Zionist terror but still refused to put the national liberation of Palestinians at the center of a revolutionary perspective.

The question of self-determination for Israel is a red herring. Israelis already have a state, and its purpose is to stop the Palestinians from having their own. Under current conditions, refusing to fight for Palestinian self-determination in the name of Israeli self-determination simply amounts to defending the Zionist status quo. The real question is for the Palestinians to exercise their right of self-determination in a way compatible with the continued existence of a Jewish nation in the Near East. This is possible only in the form of a unified, binational state based on resolving the historical injustice committed against the Palestinians and where both nations enjoy full democratic rights in regard to language, culture and religion. Such a state can only be established by shattering the Zionist state and through a revolutionary overturn of the entire region.

While the ICL has now rejected and drawn a hard line against the pseudo-Marxist theory of interpenetrated peoples, other organizations in our tradition—the League for the Fourth International, the Bolshevik Tendency and the International Bolshevik Tendency—continue to uphold its legacy of capitulation to Zionism.

Arab Nationalism and the 1967 Defeat

In the period following World War II, anti-colonial uprisings broke out around the world, from Vietnam to Algeria and Latin America. In Egypt, the Free Officers coup of 1952 swept away the British stooge King Farouk and brought the radical nationalist Colonel Gamal Abdel Nasser to power. Impelled by the 1948 defeat at the hands of Israel, Nasser sought to free Egypt from imperialism and modernize the country. He promoted pan-Arab nationalism, pushing the unity of Arab League states to drive the imperialists and Zionists out of the region. In 1956, Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal, seizing it from its British and French owners, and closed it to Israeli shipping. This action was wildly popular in the Middle East and throughout the Third World. In response, Israel invaded Egypt together with Britain and France. But under heavy pressure from the U.S. and the USSR, the invading forces withdrew shortly afterward in a humiliating defeat.

In May 1967, Nasser again closed the canal to Israeli vessels. Israel once again retaliated and, in a pre-emptive airstrike, destroyed almost the entire Egyptian air force and then launched a ground offensive into Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula as well as the Egyptian-occupied Gaza Strip. This prompted a new war between the Arab League and Israel, which ended in another disastrous defeat for the Arabs. By the end of what is known as the Six-Day War, Israel had seized Syria’s Golan Heights, the Jordanian-annexed West Bank (including East Jerusalem) and the Egyptian-occupied Gaza Strip. Some 300,000 Palestinians out of almost one million were expelled from the West Bank, another displacement that would have long-term consequences.

Up to this point, Palestinian nationalists had placed their hopes in Arab regimes such as Nasser’s to advance their own liberation. However, the 1967 defeat clearly showed that imperialist-backed Israel vastly outmatched Arab forces in conventional warfare. As a result of this defeat, together with the never-ending treachery of the Arab regimes, Palestinian nationalists concluded that they needed greater independence from their patrons and ramped up their strategy of guerrilla struggle, inspired by the models of Cuba and Vietnam.

In this context, Yasser Arafat’s PLO became the main force in the Palestinian nationalist movement. Reflecting the new orientation, in 1968 Arafat revised the Palestinian National Charter to assert that “commando action constitutes the nucleus of the Palestinian popular liberation war.” The PLO still needed support from Arab regimes, which it secured by adopting a principle of “non-interference”—that is, agreeing not to criticize the regimes. The more left-wing, Marxist-Leninist-inspired Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine criticized this capitulation but shared the PLO’s overall guerrilla strategy. The late 1960s and 1970s saw a series of hijackings, bombings and kidnappings, including the kidnapping and eventual death of Israeli athletes during the 1972 Olympics in Munich.

Individual terrorism as a tactic has always been rejected by the Marxist movement, which bases its perspective on the mobilization of the working masses. The nature of the Palestinian conflict gives the guerrilla road an even more desperate and counterproductive role. In the first instance, unlike a “banana republic” propped up by imperialist corruption, the Israeli state relies on the militarized fist of an entire nation. Together with the massive support it receives from its imperialist patrons, this makes it impossible for the Palestinians to break the state of Israel through conventional military means, much less through guerrilla tactics. Second, acts of terror against Israeli civilians, including those of Hamas on 7 October, do not weaken but rather strengthen the Zionist fortress, welding the population tighter to its rulers. Third, the purpose of the guerrilla road in Palestine has always been to pressure either the Arab regimes or the imperialist powers to intercede on behalf of the Palestinians, a futile and suicidal endeavor.

That is not to say that Marxists reject armed resistance. On the contrary, military resistance, including through united fronts with nationalist forces, is of crucial importance. However, it must be part of a broader revolutionary strategy that must include winning over a segment of Israeli society, centrally its working class. This is not out of humanitarian considerations but out of vital necessity for the Palestinian cause. There is simply no other road than to break up Israel from within. Even if Israel were somehow defeated through purely military means, one must only think back to the Masada, when Jews besieged by the Romans chose mass suicide rather than defeat, to understand what the Zionist fanatics would be willing to do in the face of an existential threat from without.

After 1967, most of the Western left flipped from capitulating to liberal Zionism to leading cheers for the Palestinian national resistance, including justifying the guerrilla road. This prevented winning the best elements from the nationalists to communism. In the end, many of this generation of courageous fighters were massacred by the Mossad, including Ghassan Kanafani, a PFLP leader who was blown up in his car in 1972.

Today, just as back then, it is necessary to oppose the method of individual terrorism. Instead of conciliating Palestinian nationalists, the duty of Marxists is to win them to an internationalist working-class perspective. As Lenin laid out in the article already cited:

“The socialists of the oppressed nations must, in particular, defend and implement the full and unconditional unity, including organisational unity, of the workers of the oppressed nation and those of the oppressor nation. Without this it is impossible to defend the independent policy of the proletariat and their class solidarity with the proletariat of other countries in face of all manner of intrigues, treachery and trickery on the part of the bourgeoisie. The bourgeoisie of the oppressed nations persistently utilise the slogans of national liberation to deceive the workers.”

The Israeli Matzpen Socialists

The most radical and anti-Zionist organization on the Israeli left was Matzpen. Founded in 1962, it grew after the 1967 war, when it began to argue that Israel was a colonial-settler state from inception and to advocate self-determination for the Palestinians. Matzpen took the position that “it is the recognition of the basic nature of Zionist ideology and the total break with it which permits the affirmation of an internationalist position and which is thereby the basis for a common battle between Israeli and Palestinian revolutionaries” (“Military Escalation Within Israeli Society,” matzpen.org, 10 February 1972). However, they did not think the Israeli working class could be broken from Zionism:

“Although class conflicts do exist in Israeli society, they are constrained by the fact that the society as a whole is subsidized from the outside. This privileged status is related to Israel’s role in the region, and as long as this role continues there is little prospect of the internal social conflicts acquiring a revolutionary character. On the other hand, a revolutionary breakthrough in the Arab world would change this situation.”

Matzpen viewed their role in Israel as waiting for the Arab revolution to come from outside. Furthermore, they believed that only Israeli youth, i.e., students and intellectuals, could be broken from Zionism, not the working class. This petty-bourgeois approach relies on the fickle “progressive” ideas of this social layer rather than on workers who have a material interest in revolution. Thus, their call to “de-Zionize” Israel amounted to moral appeals to the enlightened middle class.

Today, groups like the British Socialist Workers Party praise Matzpen but embrace its weakest point. They argue that the working class in Israel will never fight for revolution, unlike workers everywhere else, because it benefits from the oppression of Palestinians. They give the example: “The average wage of Israeli workers is almost double that of Palestinians” (“What Is the Role of Israel’s Working Class?”, socialistworker.co.uk, 16 January).

It is true that Israeli workers have a privileged status in the region as a result of Israel’s alliance with U.S. imperialism. But Palestinian oppression is not in the class interest of Israeli workers. Conditions of life for the Israeli masses are much worse than in Britain, the U.S. or Germany, with Israel having the second highest rate of poverty in the developed world. The oppressive conditions of life—the militarization of society, the dominance of religious reaction, racial oppression, gross inequalities—are all products of the oppression of the Palestinians. This theocratic tinder box of class, ethnic and gender oppression is mainly held together by Zionist ideology. There is a material basis to win the Israeli working class to revolution and Palestinian liberation, which require a complete break from Zionism.

Take the example of the Arab Jews, the Mizrahim. These Jews, who used to live throughout the Middle East, were forced to emigrate to Israel by the rise in anti-Semitism fueled by the Arab regimes as well as by Zionist provocations following the Nakba. In Israel, they were treated the way the Zionists treated other Arabs, as backward savages. By the 1970s, Mizrahim comprised 50 percent of the Israeli Jewish population. Although their status was above that of the Palestinian citizens of Israel, they were kept at the bottom of Israeli Jewish society by the Ashkenazi ruling class, consigned to the worst jobs and the worst segregated living conditions. That remains true to this day.

Mizrahim have much to gain in fighting for the liberation of Palestinians, who are oppressed by the same Zionist state and ruling class as they are. But in seeking to integrate into Israeli society, this layer often embraces the most rabid Zionist views. This contradiction goes to the heart of the problem of revolution in Israel. Layers that are more ideologically reactionary have stronger material reasons to revolt, while the liberal layers, which most leftists look to, are in fact more materially tied to the status quo.

The Post-Soviet World Order and the Defeat at Oslo

The 1980s was a period of defeat and retreat for the Palestinian struggle. The 1982 Lebanon war ended in disaster for the PLO, and in 1987 the first Intifada was brutally repressed in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. These military defeats went hand in hand with the growing isolation of the PLO in an international context of increased U.S. belligerence and Soviet retreat. With the collapse of the USSR in 1991-92, the world order fundamentally changed. This provoked an ideological shift in the Palestinian struggle, with its leadership becoming increasingly conservative, unwilling to struggle and desperate for a deal.

In March 1991, U.S. president George Bush Sr. announced, “The time has come to put an end to the Arab-Israeli conflict” and brokered the first peace talks to include Israel and Palestine as well as Egypt, Syria, Jordan and Lebanon. His successor, Bill Clinton, followed in his footsteps and proclaimed himself the peacemaker in the Middle East. These lofty U.S. imperialist pretensions were symptomatic of the period, which was characterized by U.S. hegemony and the triumph of liberalism in the Cold War. The U.S. could afford to embark on grand projects for “peace on earth” under Pax Americana. Of course, their version of peace was the continued subjugation of the Palestinian people and the stabilization of Israel’s security.

This resulted in the early 1990s in the U.S.-brokered Oslo Accords. The agreements marked a major capitulation by the PLO, which recognized the Zionist state, overturning the 1968 PLO charter that had defined Palestine as “an indivisible territorial unit.” Furthermore, the PLO accepted that the Jewish settlements in the West Bank would remain under Israeli control and agreed to establish the Palestinian Authority (PA), which, by policing territory under Palestinian control, would act as Israel’s overseer in the West Bank and Gaza. Under the pretext of ongoing negotiations, they left Israel in control of water and agreed that the PA would have no authority over foreign relations, external security or Israelis in Palestinian-administered territory. The Oslo Accords offered a bantustan-style mini-state, a grotesque promise that was not even fulfilled.

The goal of the Oslo Accords was to pacify the Palestinians and freeze the conflict by dangling the hope of a two-state solution. The Zionists took advantage of the PLO’s capitulation to press the Palestinians ever more firmly, gradually reducing their territory and launching constant attacks against Gaza and the West Bank. This process culminated in the signing of the 2020 Abraham Accords under the Trump administration, which laid the basis for the Arab states to normalize relations with Israel by recognizing its sovereignty. Presented as a triumph for Israel, the Accords promised the relegation of the Palestinian cause to the margins of history.

However, the tightening of the vise around the Palestinians was sure to provoke a reaction. The open treachery of the PLO led Palestinians to increasingly turn to Hamas and other Islamist forces, which offered a more radical confrontation with Israel. Sporadic clashes between Israel and Hamas over a decade culminated in the frontal assault on Israel with Operation Al-Aqsa Flood on 7 October 2023. This attack, together with Israel’s genocidal response, shattered the status quo in the region and banged the last nail into the coffin of the Oslo Accords. The heightened intensity and brutality of the conflict intersect the breakdown of U.S. hegemony, which brings with it increased turmoil in the world. It is in this new context that revolutionaries must approach the next steps in the struggle for Palestinian freedom.

Marxist Perspectives Today

While the Hamas attack shattered the status quo in the region, in the Marxist left the political status quo of disorientation and capitulation has not budged an inch. Socialists of all stripes continue to zigzag between the two poles of Zionism and Arab nationalism.

On the right wing, we find groups like Lutte Ouvrière in France and Lotta Comunista in Italy, which, despite opposing Israel’s bombing of Gaza, denounce the struggle for Palestinian liberation as a reactionary nationalist cause. Slightly to the left but in the same broad category, we find the Committee for a Workers’ International and International Socialist Alternative, which hide their rejection of the national liberation of Palestine behind liberal solidarity with the movement and empty abstractions, such as the following:

“What’s needed is an international, mass, working class movement to cut across militarism, nationalism and sectarianism. Such a movement needs to oppose the ruling classes of all countries who benefit from maintaining the status quo, and unite working people to bring down all the reactionary regimes on the basis of a revolutionary socialist program for peace and stability for all.”

Such platitudes about working-class unity against capitalism are meaningless if they are not premised on the national liberation of the Palestinians. What must be understood is that the starting point for unity between workers in Palestine and Israel is rejection of Zionism, and that socialist revolution is possible only by putting the Palestinians’ national aspirations front and center.

On the other end of the spectrum are those leftists who uncritically cheer the leadership of the Palestinian movement. The Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL) in the U.S. is open about this: “The role of the movement in the United States is not to critique the ideology or strategy of the Palestinian liberation movement, but rather to do our part to support Palestinians in overthrowing the yoke of colonialism so that they can decide for themselves how they wish to organize their society” (“Why the Palestine Movement Is a Struggle for National Liberation,” liberationnews.org, 3 March). Most, like the British SWP, are not so overt and criticize the methods and ideology of Hamas. But these afterthoughts in no way aim at challenging the hold of nationalism on the Palestinian struggle.

For all of these groups, the role of communists is not to give the movement a revolutionary direction but to be foot soldiers for the liberals and nationalists. That is where both trends unite. No matter their position on Palestine itself, most Marxist groups cheer on the protest movement by sweeping under the rug the fact that it is led by pro-imperialist liberals, or by openly promoting these people—from U.S. Democratic Party politician Rashida Tlaib to Labour MP and NATO stooge John McDonnell in Britain.

The most perfidious role is played by centrists like Left Voice of the Trotskyist Fraction. They have no problem identifying some of the key issues of the movement, writing in an article about the U.S.:

“Already early in the movement, groups like Jewish Voice for Peace and the Party of Socialism and Liberation, as well as nonprofit leaders, positioned the movement as a pressure campaign, as opposed to a movement meant to build the independent power of the working class and oppressed people.”

This is very true. But what practical conclusions does Left Voice draw from this analysis? Does it center its interventions in the Palestinian movement on breaking it from its liberal, pro-Democratic Party leadership? No, it does not. Most of its activity consists of raising empty calls to “massify the movement” and organize “united actions in the streets.” When engaging in polemics with the likes of the PSL, it can point out how they capitulate to Hamas and the Communist Party of China and even criticize their conciliation of the Democrats. But Left Voice does not say a word about their cheerleading for Rashida Tlaib, the main figure in the Democratic Party tying the Palestinian movement to the party of genocide. In fact, Left Voice has carefully avoided exposing Tlaib’s treacherous role.

Exposing Tlaib in the U.S., Mélenchon in France and John McDonnell in Britain are not secondary issues. For anyone serious about breaking the Palestinian movement from its liberal track, it is precisely these “left” figures who must be exposed. It is one thing to say, “We must oppose the Democrats.” It’s another matter to say, “We must oppose Rashida Tlaib.” The former can be accepted among radical liberals. The latter will directly take on their illusions.

It was precisely the centrism typified by Left Voice that Lenin denounced in his polemics against Kautsky. The latter could denounce war in general, and even the right wing of the Social Democratic Party. But Kautsky refused to fight for a split with the social-chauvinist elements in the workers movement. Today, Left Voice can call for a break with the Democrats in general. But it refuses to fight for a split with the “left-wing” bourgeois component of the movement.

That is the central task of communists and has been the guiding principle of the ICL’s intervention into the Palestinian movement since 7 October. In the countries where we have intervened, we have sought to show the necessity of communist leadership by putting forward a perspective that concretely advances the movement while exposing the limitations and treachery of its current leaders. This is the difference between centrists, who observe the problem only to avoid it, and revolutionaries, who chart a course to overcome the obstacles to victory.

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The Palestinian liberation struggle enters a new chapter, which, once again, puts Marxists to the test. In Palestine, revolutionaries must actively participate in and organize the struggle against the Israeli onslaught, including through united actions with the other groups of the Palestinian resistance. But they must refuse to mix banners and instead use every opportunity to subject the Islamist strategy to ruthless criticisms, always putting the interest of the broad movement first. At the same time, revolutionaries must work within Israeli society, crucially in the working class and the army, to push forward every show of anger at the Zionist government, link it with the Palestinian cause and further a split with all forms of Zionism.

In the Muslim world, revolutionaries must galvanize the widespread pro-Palestinian sentiment of the working masses, connect it to the imperialist oppression of the entire region and orient it in a struggle against the corrupt ruling cliques. Unconditional opposition to imperialism and staunch opposition to the nationalists are preconditions to uniting all workers and peasants, and in particular those from oppressed national minorities which the imperialists seek to use to divide and rule (e.g., the Kurds). In the Global South, boycotts and diplomatic appeals amount to nothing. Revolutionaries must direct the struggle toward weakening the position of the U.S. imperialists, the main power behind Israel and also their main oppressor.

In the West, as outlined above, revolutionaries must fight for a split from the movement’s liberal and reformist leaders. In particular, they must struggle in the workers movement to unmask the social-chauvinist policy of the trade-union leaders, showing how their support to Israel (open or concealed) goes hand in hand with their sabotage of the most elementary struggles for workers’ livelihood.

On all fronts, the struggle to advance the liberation of Palestine confronts revolutionaries with the need to frontally oppose those who lead it. The century of capitulations by the Marxist movement to Zionism or nationalism has been paid with the blood of Palestinians, led to countless betrayals and defeats and denied them a proletarian solution to their national oppression. The task at hand is to build communist leadership of the Palestinian and anti-imperialist struggle—the key element missing for the last 100 years.