Marcus Halaby<\/i><\/p>\n
Marcus Halaby, from Workers Power, recently debated the Alliance for Workers Liberty on the question of Israel and Palestine. This is the speech he gave<\/p>\n
The title of this debate, as I understand it, is two states and workers\u2019 unity or one state and the right of return. I\u2019m going to try to stick to that subject, although I should start off by saying that I don\u2019t think that that\u2019s actually the real nature of our differences, but that it\u2019s become a sort of shorthand for more general, fundamental differences of approach.<\/p>\n
I\u2019m certainly not a rigid one-stater by any means. I think that, like all slogans stated on their own, and as an end in themselves, the slogan of one state has limitations, one of which is that it has nothing to say about the sphere of social relations, about which alliance of classes will be necessary to bring it about and what sort of state they would build on the basis of that; that it doesn\u2019t say anything about the context of the region, the social, democratic and national struggles of the other peoples of the region; and, finally, that it doesn\u2019t say anything specific on its own about the position of the Jewish-Israeli nation.<\/p>\n
For those reasons, I would always have to add that a \u201cone state solution\u201d would have to be a bi-national, workers\u2019 state, which would have to be brought about in the context of a regional workers\u2019 revolution, which would lead to a federation with equality of rights and autonomy for all, including the Jewish-Israeli nation.<\/p>\n
I purposely say autonomy in this context, rather than separate statehood, because there isn\u2019t any way to neatly divide the country without having large minorities in one or the other or both entities. I therefore think the Jewish-Israelis themselves would be better off in a single entity with full freedom of movement, rather than trying to construct a non-Zionist, non-expansionist, non-colonising [Jewish] state in the small part of historic Palestine around metropolitan Tel Aviv, where they form a solid majority of 98 per cent, and where slightly more than half of them actually live.<\/p>\n
I\u2019m actually not opposed in principle to the idea that the Jewish-Israelis, as a nation, should have a state of their own \u2013 and maybe in that sense, I\u2019m a two-stater as well. If I recognise that they are a nation, then it follows that I have to recognise that they have the right to a state. I don\u2019t advocate it, though, and I can\u2019t recognise their actually-existing nation-state as a legitimate expression of that right.<\/p>\n
I also happen to think that two states is a legitimate position to hold in the movement. It\u2019s not one that I agree with, I think it\u2019s utopian and completely misguided in its motivation, but lots of people hold it. Including people like Noam Chomsky and Norman Finkelstein, who still find it possible to support the right of the people of Lebanon and Gaza to defend themselves against Israeli aggression, regardless of who is leading the military aspect of that defense at a given point in time. Who still recognise the specific dynamics of Zionism, and don\u2019t conflate it with national chauvinism in general. Who still support the call for a boycott, and who still find it possible to condemn in advance an Israeli aggression on Iran without hedging it with bizarre equivocations.<\/p>\n
What makes the AWL unique, in my view, isn\u2019t that it advocates two states, but that it does it in the context of an overall politics that confuses and disorganises the movement, including that part of it that also advocates two states.<\/p>\n
Two states is also the position of George Bush and Tony Blair, most of their recent predecessors, and most of their likely successors \u2013 hypocritically, you might say, but it is the commonsense position of imperialist diplomacy, and bourgeois journalism. It is not a position that is unique to those who are opposed to Israel\u2019s occupation of the 1967 territories. Nevertheless, I think it is a legitimate position to hold within the movement for Palestinian solidarity. I don\u2019t agree with it, partly because I don\u2019t think that this conflict is a conflict about territory that can be solved by a division of territory, if it ever was.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s about demography. Today there are 5.6 million Jews and 5.1 million Arabs between the Jordan and the Mediterranean. That\u2019s 3.8 million Palestinians under occupation in Gaza and the West Bank, and 1.2 million Palestinians living as a minority in Israel, where they are about a fifth of the country\u2019s citizens. Within our lifetimes, within the next 15 to 20 years, that is projected to change to 6 million Jews and 9.3 million Palestinians. Even without the return of a single refugee, the Palestinians are going to form something like three fifths of the population of their historic homeland within the near future.<\/p>\n
This is the problem for Israel\u2019s rulers. This is the subject that they debate, not the question of what territory can they afford to concede, what security arrangements would be appropriate after its concession. No one expressed this more clearly, by the way, than Ehud Olmert did, the last Prime Minister, when he was defending the disengagement from Gaza and its extension to parts of the West Bank. He said that the issue was one of making sure that there were \u201cmaximum Jews\u201d and \u201cminimum Arabs\u201d in a particular piece of land. It\u2019s a problem for them because they know that when the Palestinians realise that all that is ever going to be on offer to them is a joke Swiss cheese prison state, they\u2019ll abandon their demand for a separate state and they\u2019ll say, \u201call we want is the right to vote\u201d.<\/p>\n
And, as Olmert himself put it, the day that Israel faces a South African style struggle for voting rights, the state of Israel is finished.<\/p>\n
You should ask yourselves, what will you do when that situation arises? What will you do when the only people left advocating two states are open Israeli racists like Avigdor Lieberman and Fatah bureaucrats who want a state that they can loot?<\/p>\n
All of the Israeli parties think about this demographic problem, obsessively. They all have their own particular solutions to it. Kadima\u2019s solution when they were in power was that they had to crush Hamas, boost Mahmoud Abbas\u2019s Palestinian Authority, persuade them to sign an agreement that allows them to keep most of the settlements on their side of the wall that they\u2019re building, and in that way maintain an artificial Jewish majority within an expanded territory.<\/p>\n
The current Israeli foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman, he advocates solving the same problem in a different way, by expelling Arabs in Israel, by redrawing the border, by handing over the \u201cLittle Triangle\u201d \u2013 one of the major concentrations of Israel\u2019s Palestinian minority \u2013 to the Palestinian Authority, and stripping its inhabitants of their citizenship; by requiring an oath of loyalty to the state as a condition of citizenship for the Palestinian minority in the rest of Israel; and by putting off an agreement with the Palestinian Authority for a state for as long as possible. His argument in favour of that is, we have to do that because otherwise two states means one and a half states for the Arabs, and half a state for the Jews, one where the Arabs are a large minority.<\/p>\n
You shouldn\u2019t think this is an aberration. Israeli society has moved to the right, and surveys show that something like half of Israel schoolchildren \u2013 40.5 per cent of them religious, 59.5 per cent of them secular \u2013 advocate that Israel\u2019s Palestinian minority shouldn\u2019t have equal rights, that 56 per cent of them believe that Israeli Arabs shouldn\u2019t be allowed to run for Parliament, and 48 per cent of them say that they would disobey orders to evacuate the settlements. Or, to put it another way, two fifths of Israel\u2019s population within its 1967 borders, want to remove one fifth of the same population and\/or strip it of its rights.<\/p>\n
Benny Morris, an Israeli historian who\u2019s been associated with left-wing parties like Shinui and Meretz, has actually said that in the context of a major regional war, the expulsion of Israel\u2019s Arab minority as well as of the Palestinians under occupation, could be a legitimate act.<\/p>\n
You\u2019d have to ask yourselves, in what sort of state would simple demographic changes, of the sort that take place in all countries, pose such a threat to the national character of the state that such drastic solutions have to be thought of?<\/p>\n
To do that you\u2019d have to look back at history \u2013 and I agree with you that there\u2019s an issue about narratives \u2013 you\u2019d have to look back at Israel\u2019s origins, and its present day dynamics, and draw the conclusion that the problem isn\u2019t just the occupation alone, but that the occupation is the most visible feature in the present day of Israel\u2019s character as a settler colony.<\/p>\n
Now, I know that some people are squeamish at certain words like \u201ccolonial\u201d and \u201csettler\u201d. I don\u2019t see why they should be, given that the Zionists themselves aren\u2019t, except when they\u2019re talking to western liberals. States like that have existed before in history \u2013 in Canada, in the United States, in Argentina, in Australia. Israel does have all of their usual features, like having a higher standard of living for its privileged colonist citizens than the countries that they originally came from \u2013 which you\u2019d expect, because otherwise it would be difficult to persuade them to live there.<\/p>\n
They often have higher standards of bourgeois democracy for their privileged settler citizens than in the countries that they originally came from, going alongside a national ideology that describes the country as a refuge from persecution and as a land of opportunity \u2013 and Israel, with its cult of the Holocaust, and its tendentious historiography of European anti-Semitism, certainly has that.<\/p>\n
They generally have a hierarchy of racial oppression, one based not just on the common oppression of the natives but on which particular group of immigrants arrived first. Israel does have that.<\/p>\n
In general, they are dependent on an imperialist power and part of its grand designs. That doesn\u2019t mean that they are a puppet \u2013 Argentina wasn\u2019t a puppet of British imperialism [when it was colonising Patagonia and when it was engaged in various] wars in the 19th century, but they do have a strategic dependence on it which is conditioned by common strategic interests.<\/p>\n
The one defining characteristic that they all have is one of constant expansion, and constant colonisation, one that allows them to solve their social problems and maintain an internal class peace at the expense of the natives, until it reaches the objective limits of geography and military superiority. That\u2019s what happened in Australia, that\u2019s what happened in the United States and Argentina and so forth.<\/p>\n
States like that become normal nation-states by annihilating the natives, and by absorbing their shattered remnants as a sort of racially oppressed caste. I think it\u2019s obvious that no socialist should want Israel to become a normal nation-state in that way. It hasn\u2019t been able to so far, not because they\u2019ve been any more or less civilised than previous groups of colonists, who, by the way, have never had subjectively bad intentions, ever \u2013 they\u2019ve always been fleeing from persecution or from economic catastrophe or something.<\/p>\n
Not because of that, but because they\u2019ve had the bad luck to be the last colonial project in history, so they can\u2019t adopt the methods of their predecessors without provoking an outcry that their predecessors didn\u2019t have to deal with. Because they\u2019ve had the bad luck that the natives that they confronted weren\u2019t a scattered assortment of tribes that never experienced anything like capitalism before, and who had barely come into contact with each other, by the time the colonists came into contact with them, but the first colonised people to actually confront their colonisation with something like a nationalist form of resistance, right from its inception.<\/p>\n
You, for your part, you want Israel to normalise itself by drawing a border, by saying that expansion across that border is now done with, that\u2019s the end of that process, and by giving the Palestinians a state on the other side of it. And that\u2019s fine, I\u2019d actually agree with you, if it wasn\u2019t for the fact that Israel\u2019s expansion and its colonisation, isn\u2019t just a bad policy that\u2019s oppressive to the Palestinians and counter-productive for Israelis, and it\u2019s not just a matter of ideology. It\u2019s the material foundation of the state.<\/p>\n
They can\u2019t stop doing it, not because they\u2019re bad people, or a \u201cbad nation\u201d, but because if they stopped doing it, all of the class and ethnic and religious tensions that lie at the heart of their society now, and which are kept within reasonable limits, would suddenly come to the fore.<\/p>\n
In order to be the Jewish State, in order to maintain its Jewish majority, and achieve its ambition of gathering the world\u2019s Jews onto its territory, Israel has to settle Jewish immigrants from across the world, it has to do it at the expense of Palestinians \u2013 because we live in a capitalist society where property is private \u2013 and therefore it has to expand its territory. It\u2019s a state that\u2019s only capable of having a dynamic stability in that sense.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s why every Israeli government has expanded the settlements, even and especially when they\u2019ve been in negotiations. It\u2019s why Israel from its current position of strength, as Workers\u2019 Liberty often puts it, can\u2019t and doesn\u2019t and won\u2019t grant the Palestinians anything like a meaningful state in the West Bank. It\u2019s why working class Israelis are more likely to vote for right-wing pro-settler parties \u2013 and more likely to actually be in the settlements \u2013 than their middle class counterparts. It\u2019s why most West Bank settlers are what you and I would recognise as relatively ordinary Israelis, and not the stereotypical religious zealots who form the vanguard of that settlement. It\u2019s why the peace movement is so weak and isolated, why it doesn\u2019t have a political party of its own, and why it has been unable to find any material force whose interests it can link its struggle to. And it\u2019s also one of the reasons why a boycott is necessary.<\/p>\n
I know that Workers\u2019 Liberty has observed that most Israeli activists oppose it, and I don\u2019t doubt it, but the call for a boycott enjoys support from a broad range of Palestinian organisations, and I think we should be taking our cue from them. Because, unfortunately, regretfully, I think it will take a series of defeats for Israel to shake the confidence of Israel\u2019s working class in Zionism\u2019s ability to provide them with security, with prosperity, with continued democratic rights, and with peace and normality. Even if you restrict your demands to two states, it will take a series of quite serious defeats to do that.<\/p>\n
Now, we might be lucky. They could learn from their defeats quickly enough that they avoid a complete catastrophe for themselves. They could even learn quickly enough that a section of them provide useful allies to the struggle. But one thing I\u2019m not willing to do is to advise the Palestinians to make their struggle strategically dependent on winning over the Israeli working class.<\/p>\n
Israel\u2019s colonising character is also another reason why it\u2019s necessary to defend the right of return. This isn\u2019t a matter of collective repossession, but the only possible guarantee of the Palestinians\u2019 current and future rights; because for the Palestinians, their Nakba, the catastrophe of their expulsion, wasn\u2019t a single event in the past that they could choose to forgive and forget if the conditions were right for it. It\u2019s something that\u2019s still happening now.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s something that happens every day, with each Jerusalem resident who\u2019s denied the right to return to their country after working or studying abroad; with each villager who\u2019s cut off from their lands by a new settlement; with each new war that Israel threatens to exploit to push more Palestinians out. And it is a collective, national right, a component of their right to national self-determination, precisely because their expulsion has been the chief mechanism by which that right has been denied. What will you say after the next war, to the next batch of Palestinian refugees? At what point will you tell them that their right to return to their country takes second place to Israel\u2019s right to maintain a Jewish majority on the territory from which they were expelled?<\/p>\n
Do the Palestinians require strategic allies? Yes, certainly. But I don\u2019t believe that they should look for them in isolation, in the colonial era boundaries of British Mandatory Palestine. They should link themselves with the social and democratic and national struggles of the masses of the region, primarily of the surrounding Arab countries, but also of countries like Turkey and Iran, precisely the arena where Israel exercises its role as imperialism\u2019s enforcer in the region most visibly, and where for the most part the mass of the Israeli people support their government\u2019s adventures.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s a struggle that will necessarily have to be directed in the first instance against the Arab regimes. But it\u2019s one that will inevitably come into conflict with imperialism. And it will mean wars; it will mean wars, as imperialism\u2019s Israeli and Arab agents try to intervene [in it]. To wage that struggle will therefore require all sorts of alliances, with all sorts of bourgeois forces.<\/p>\n
Are there other states that we propose to \u201cabolish\u201d in the course of this struggle? Are there other states that we quite simply don\u2019t think could continue to exist in their current [national] form? Well, let\u2019s see: Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the Gulf statelets, the artificial Hashemite monarchy in Jordan \u2013 I can\u2019t see them having much of a future in a Middle East where there is a regional revolutionary struggle for democracy and for socialism.<\/p>\n
This requires a strategy of actually trying to bring the working class to the head of the struggles for democratic rights and for national rights and so forth. And in order to compete with the existing leaderships of those struggles, with the nationalists and the Islamists and others, in order to wrest the leadership of those struggles out of their hands, you have to take part in those struggles. There\u2019s no other way.<\/p>\n
The Islamists, rather like their close cousins, the nationalists, are just as likely to be on the opposite side of the barricades at any point in time, as they are to be on the same side. But when they are on the same side, it\u2019s necessary to expose them, by pointing up the necessity of an alliance between the workers\u2019 movement and all those who are fighting for the defense of their country against military aggression and so forth. Where they refuse it, which, 9 times out of 10, in the absence of any mass pressure from their own mass base [they will], where they refuse it, [we should] use that to expose them.<\/p>\n
By reducing the complex history of Islamism to \u201cclerical fascism\u201d, I think what you\u2019re actually saying is that you don\u2019t want to compete with them for the leadership of the national and democratic movements. You don\u2019t want to wrest the leadership of those struggles out of their hands. You\u2019d actually prefer to disavow movements that they have the leadership of; because they can\u2019t necessarily be that progressive if they have the leadership of them.<\/p>\n
But then I don\u2019t think the intention of Workers\u2019 Liberty\u2019s overall position \u2013 not two states, specifically, but its general rejection of the idea of the anti-imperialist united front \u2013 I don\u2019t think its intention is to provide an operative programme for militants in the Middle East and for the region.<\/p>\n
I think it\u2019s primarily a programme for Britain \u2013 that\u2019s what I think the problem is. And that\u2019s why I say that for me the problem with your position isn\u2019t two states, but the disorganisation and the confusion that it brings to the movement of those who want to show solidarity with the Palestinians, and with other forces in the region that are fighting imperialism, including those who also advocate two states.<\/p>\n
Camilla Bassi’s speech can be found online here<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Marcus Halaby Marcus Halaby, from Workers Power, recently debated the Alliance for Workers Liberty on the question of Israel and Palestine. This is the speech he gave The title of this debate, as I understand it, is two states and workers\u2019 unity or one state and the right of return. I\u2019m going to try to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7724,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[130,1],"tags":[150,104,223,164],"class_list":["post-2626","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-middle-east","category-uncategorized","tag-apartheid","tag-archive","tag-oppression","tag-palestine"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/fifthinternational.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2626","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/fifthinternational.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/fifthinternational.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fifthinternational.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7724"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fifthinternational.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2626"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/fifthinternational.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2626\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7154,"href":"https:\/\/fifthinternational.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2626\/revisions\/7154"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/fifthinternational.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2626"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fifthinternational.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2626"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fifthinternational.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2626"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}