Israel

Cantdocartwheels seems to have a generalising simple view of the world, an idealist's all or nothing view. Are there no countries with anything to inspire you by? Are there no regional conflicts against an oppressor that might be legitimate in the present situation?

For a council communist article on Fascistic 'Zionist Revisionism' in 1930s Tel Aviv;
http://libcom.org/library/brownshirts-of-zionism-barnatan

not going to bin this, discussion's been fine. But "james" may well get banned if he only posts up "so you hate Israel because..." one more time.

national liberation is not legitimate, at least for us. It is not about liberating a group/groups/race or whatever it is about liberating everyone.
On a practical basis the end of an oppressive occupation can be a good thing, although as the forces that require these occupations usually persist the new national bourgeoisie will continue to act exactly as the imperial authorities did.

Quite possibly the best summing up of internationalism I've seen for a while!

It doesn't seem like you've bothered to engage with anything that we've said. What's your take on this? What do you think? What do you have to say about Israel?

Some random comments, all the more random seeming because I can't get the quote tags link to work and don't know how to use them otherwise.

1."the Palestinians themselves are just as oppressed, and their national aspirations are just as denied by the Hashemite kingdom as they are by Israel. [...] And yet you hardly see many leftists burning Jordanian flags. None do, that I recall."

As I recall, the opposition of leftists to the kingdom went a little beyond burning flags when they attempted to undermine the Jordanian regime with a view to overthrowing the Hashemite state: significant in the rather infamous immediate origins of Black September massacres.

2. "A significant amount of the Arab population isn't indigenous, and came to the region as a result of the economic development brought about through Zionism."

Yeah, deserts blooming and all. For fuck's sake. Thousands and thousands and thousands of Palestinians have lived their entire lives in squalid refugee camps, for generations, since being forced out of Israel, mostly around the time of the foundation of the Israeli state. I live in Australia: some indigenous people moved to cities and have jobs and cars right on the land the colonists killed them to acquire. Isn't capitalist progress consequent of settler-colonialism wonderful?

3. Calls for working class unity seem a little abstract if we treat nationalism as a simple ideological error and not something within a particular stratification and racialisation of political economies. In the absence of the latter, complaints about a lack of solidarity by the Palestinian woring class for the Israeli working class can sometimes appear like demands that such unity begin with the least privileged acting in solidarity with the most privileged, which actually risks demanding that the least privileged subordinate their struggles to material interests which have been pretty consistently manifesting themselves as antagonistic to, in competition with, those of the Palestinians.

4. Israel as 'just another state'.

Of course all ideologies of 'national liberation', indeed 'anti-fascism', need to be criticised and opposed. But this line again risks normalising occupation, or sounding like we think black workers in South Africa shouldn't have got so upset by Apartheid (capitalist states do bad things, you know). (The Apartheid regime being one with which the Israeli state acted in alliance, to the point of mutual help with nuclear weapons in efforts to eg. maintain Apartheid.)

The Israeli state deserves our horror and contempt, as I'm sure (or would hope) most here would agree. And its particular form of settler-colonialism and ever-emerging Apartheid, with prevalent fantasies of mass expulsion (or, the marginally more subtle version, of Bantustan-like prison conditions finally forcing more-and-more of the surviving Palestinians to give up and take their chances anywhere else) deserving immediate critique and 'demonisation'.

It is annoying that state's speak 'in our name': as a Jew, though I've never lived there, Israel claims to be 'my' state. This may condition my particular revulsion. When I hear people use a mock-naive tone to question why people are so mean about Israel, I feel sick.

Benjamin Rosenzweig

Or to put it another way, Zionism is a violent capitalist project with an ideology constituted around racial supremacy.

Indeed.

Interesting (and somewhat related article) by a Lebanese anarchist here, in two parts:

Zionism’s Socialist Dilemma: Nationalism, Colonization, and Class Struggle
Part 1
Part 2

Oh, and: "A significant amount of the Israelis are not from Europe, but are, in fact, from Arab countries." Well, yes. Particularly if you count non-Jewish people in Israel as Israelis. But the Jews in the Middle East separate from the immigration organised by Zionists tended to be far far less Zionist than those arriving from Europe.

And one other point. Candocartwheels wrote: " i reckon our james is a pretty dodgy type anyway, since i would wonder why he is trying and thankfully resoundedly failing to stir up anti-semetic comments."

I agree that that seems to have been the point, and this faux-bewildered 'why do leftists pick on Israel?' business is really about invoking the politics of anti-zionism=anti-semitism, whether to elicit anti-semitic comments (or comments that fit the wide spectrum that can now be labelled as anti-semitic) or to see how intimidated/intimidatible people are by this fear or both.

In other words, this is really only comprehensible in the context of the routine use of accusations of anti-semitism to try to silence or attack critics of Israel. But more significant than this, I think, is that I think, in subtle ways, this discourse seems to be having its desired effect on people here. Hence all of the "we have no problem with Israel in particular, it is just another state" business.

Would anyone have said that to, say, an Afrikaan about Apartheid? "We have no problem with the South African state in particular except insofar as we oppose all states"? Or, to be extreme: "The Nazi state is just like any other state, we don't single it out"? I would assume not on the second (Nazi Germany), and think probably not on the first (Apartheid South Africa). Comparisons of Israel with South Africa are not exact, of course - but not because Israel is less extreme in its pursuit of its projects. So it seems to me like people have an anxiety leading them to adopt a form of 'caution' that restricts what they say or how they say it. (Of course, this speculation about motive is just that, speculation - but the tendency I think I am perceiving is not one limited to this forum topic.)

Opposing all states doesn't erase distinctions, and such a flattening out would seem all too polite when "particular" states are busy murdering so many. There are very good reasons why an analysis of the Israeli state's viciousness, and the significant uses to which it puts the billions of dollars of annual US aid, might focus more on dispossession and assassination in the service of a capitalist project emerging from settler-colonialism and organised around ideologies and practices of racial supremacy, than might be the case in an examination of the form of violence and oppression involved in the reproduction of capitalist social relations in Sweden. All capitalist reproduction is violent, as moments of the reproduction of capital on a planetary basis, but the violence of my unemployment benefits being low enough to force me into a really crappy job is different from my suburb being cut off from the use of roads out, from an incursion of state supported heavily armed hostile armed settlers taking most of the water supply and backed up by soldiers, from checkpoints at which friends die because they are not allowed to get to a hospital, from torture when jailed for being suspected of hostility to the Israeli state, from my building being destroyed and everyone in it killed by a missile sent to assassinate someone in one of the flats, from my mother's house being demolished because my brother threw a rock at a soldier...you get the point. Solidarity with working class struggle against these things (except that the economy has been virtually destroyed so there is only a limited sense in which we can say there is a working class) has a pull for me, a sense of urgency, which means I don't want to say that I don't have a "particular" problem with Israel, let alone say it because someone might say I'm singling Israel out if I notice what the Israeli state is doing, right now.

Put another way, ideologies and practices of "anti-imperialism" and "national liberation" emerge as projects from very real material conditions faced by very real people: there is a reason why Sweden, so far as I know, doesn't have significant armed groups struggling for "independence" from occupation (amongst other reasons, the only "occupying" army is that of the Swedish state). It is vital to notice the material conditions and attend to the differences between states, as moments of interrelated processes of reproduction of the global relations that are capital, if we are to find ways to struggle that do not simply pursue the goals of some state-in-waiting.

(Incidentally, the formerly "rejectionist" left-nationalists of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine are somewhat known for their efforts to be fiercely critical of Zionism without being anti-semitic, despite having hijacked planes and having an active armed wing. When the local Jewish population, and the largest Synagogue in Beirut in particular, was being threatened by anti-Semites in Lebanon, armed PFLP members joined with those people, being willing to fight and die to defend (often working class) Jews. Even within those Palestinian 'terrorist' groups who actively chain Palestinian struggle to nationalism, notions of solidarity have been far from purely nationalist or racist at times. And this commitment to such principles by a section of the Palestinian Left has been a problem for proletarian struggles amongst the Palestinians: one role of the Palestinian Left groups in the first Intifada was to use their cultural capital as courageous and principled anti-Zionists and Leftists to channel a much broader insurrection back into simple anti-zionism, subordinating a host of struggles to this dead-end politics. I believe in taking seriously the question of solidarity with the resistance of people to Israeli oppression: i'm not saying I have the answers about how to do it.)

There's almost a surreal quality in hearing that 'real conditions' produce 'real anti-imperialism'. As if anyone had ever said anything different? It's true, there is little more brutal than an occupying army and its agenda may escalate it to particular heights of barbarity; what we are fortunate in knowing however is that any occupying army since at least the 19th century has always had in its primary interest re-establishing the coherency of the economy, the reliability of currency and the submission of the exploited. The Israeli government, and especially the Western powers, have the same interest in Palestine, and that is a national state with territorial compromises and a functioning economy, hopefully led by the PLO, whose leadership is CIA-trained, but tolerant even of a Hamas government that has declared a long-term Hudna (seen in the relative opening of Europe to the new Palestinian government). You are right to call out the bland non-critique of 'a state is a state', because this wears away at our capacity to critically understand the conflict in reducing it to a one-size fits all model. I think, however, that at least some of your points require a very critical solidarity, for instance

Couldn't we make a similar laundry list for the innocents killed in Sderot over the past two years from the rocket teams of Islamic Jihad and Hamas dumping missiles over Israel's southern border? Or for the victims of suicide bombings against civilians? Deaths from drive-bys (even in settlements)? What about the 'urgency' of these deaths? Is it enough to cause us to reconsider how to show solidarity with a particular struggle that stems from a global relation, and its particular manifestation in the middle east?

Still, let's look at your list. Armed settlers are a tough bunch and aren't prone to compromise since their presence is guaranteed either by their guns, or more often, the guns of the state. Obviously a focused struggle against this expropriation is necessary, and may cross into armed opposition. But if we consider who the settlers are, rewarded working class/middle class workers who are guests of the Israeli state, we can see that their settlements exist at the behest of the larger Israeli society.

Somehow that society was able to tolerate and absorb the disengagement of settler communities from Gaza. Call it international pressure, call it a strategic decision by the Shin Bet, call it getting sick of the place, but a majority of Israelis felt like it was appropriate to end that chapter (just like the occupation of the Sinai was ended before the government had a chance to build giant resorts there). The West Bank is more complicated but could follow the same pattern. What's missing in the opposition to settlement in the wider West Bank is, just as one example, the focus of a place like Bil'in. People living in Bil'in oppose the wall because of the imminent effect on their livelihoods, and have managed not to lapse into the nihilist terrorism that plagues Gaza City or Beit Hanoun. What Israeli optomists wanted to believe could happen in Gaza after the disengagement: a lawful, bourgeois Palestinian government more or less strong-armed by Dahlan, that would not be a platform for new attacks against the country, has suffered quite a bit from the constant rocket barrages on the Negev, Sderot etc. I think it's obvious that it is this nihilistic form of resistance, which was at its peak in the terror of the suicide attacks, that prevents the emergence of a broader-based solidarity (speaking strictly from the Israeli side). And so, when it comes to the West Bank, there is a sincere fear of what will happen in the event of a full Israeli withdrawal and the cessation of the occupation, since this would allow the ideologists of Islamic Jihad and Hamas to rebuild rocket workshops and fire directly into Eastern Israel. So the broader political picture cannot be disconnected from the local circumstances which you describe. Again, the settlers are the guests of the state, and on the Israeli side, opinion does not yet turn again them. The key to doing that is specific struggle, one that runs counter to the ideologists of the Palestinian right by having clear goals disconnected from martyrdom and nationalism. This is the kind of struggle that can generalize.

Similarly I would suggest that deaths at checkpoints due to soldiers preventing the weak and sick from crossing are as much the particular problem of an occupation that is perfectly bureaucratic and therefore inhuman, but also a problem that doesn't face widespread Israeli opposition because of the weapons seized at the checkpoints daily plus the agendas of the groups that are smuggling these weapons. People dying at the Gaza border should have just as much outrage at Hamas for allowing Beit Hanoun to turn into a rocket warzone as the Israeli army, which showed for instance during the first intifada that even the unarmed could get their hands broken for throwing stones.

Lastly, you bring up an interesting episode with the PFLP defending a synagogue in Lebanon, but that simply shows how schizophrenic the group is. They certainly had no problems killing Jewish civilians in Lod airport in 1973, nor in the following two incidents:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avivim_school_bus_massacre
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiryat_Shmona_massacre

It would be nice if your projection of opposition to antisemitism onto the Palestinian left represented not only a consistent position (it would have to reject attacks on civilians) or had an echo in the larger Palestinian society. There are some exceptional cases like Barghouti who manage to cut through this divide. But it is enough to point out the near total absence of Jews in Palestinian society (except in settlements) to see the challenges that face such a perspective.

Are they doing it now, though? Anyway, I was referring to European leftists. Maybe I should have made that more clear.

Yes. But I wasn't contesting that fact, I was contesting the notion that all Palestinians are "indigenous". A lot of migrant workers live in squalid cellblocks around the farms in which they are employed for laughable wages; that's horrid even though they aren't "indigenous" in any way.

No, it's quite horrible, but that has nothing to do with indigenousness; just ask African Americans.

Ruling out common interests with people just because they are of a different nationality is not only nationalist, it's tactically disadvantageous for working-class struggle, unless you're planning to build your power on nationalist cross-class collaboration.

And what the "material interests... of the Palestinians"? Are they the same for Ahmed Qari' and for an olive harvester? Are they the same for the Hamas government and its employees? Nationalism is a two-edged sword. Obfuscating the class divisions in another nation leads you inexorably to a disrgard of those in your "own" nation.

You're giving in to a false dichotomy. It's not either struggle under a national flag or sit back and suffer. Just ask the textile workers in Egypt, who've struggled and won, even though they did not do it under the flag of Textile-landia. Racial oppression needs to be fought, but nationalism is not the answer, it's just more of the same problem.

Why not direct that "demonisation" to some other horrors being cause around the world, like the genocide in Darfur? Or the slaughter of Iraqis by fellow Iraqis in downtown Baghdad, for that matter?

The US speaks in the name of "the free people of the world", and the Soviet Union used to speak in the name of the "spirit of the proletariat." All of bourgeois democracy is about a bunch of hacks "speaking in our name".

I don't mind people being mean about Israel, but I really have to wonder why they're not mean to, say, Saudi Arabia.

Indeed, meaning that it should be a lot easier to combine struggles with them against the Zionist regime, don't you agree? Have you heard of the Isreali Black Panthers?

You might be interested to hear about a group called Combatants for Peace, which is a groups composed of Israeli and Palestinian militants who've decided to put aside their differences for peace. They do not have a class analysis, nor do they reject nationalism, but it's true that not all is dark for internationalism in the region.

Lumpnboy: I think that Sphinx and Tree have already made a lot of good points in reply to your posts. You say "all ideologies of 'national liberation', indeed 'anti-fascism', need to be criticised and opposed", but I can't really see how you are opposing them. You seem to find reasons for "critical" support for the PFLP and similar gangs and at the same time seem to want to dilute two essential internationalist principles: that revolutinaries indeed have to be opposed to all capitalist states without distinction or degree, and that the class struggle, workers' unity, really is the only answer to nationalist divisions.

I have had in my life many Jewish friends and have spent a few months in Isreal, some time ago . I met there people of all kinds , and as a whole I liked them. All nations oppress it is the nature of nationhood, so lets make damn sure our brothers and sisters in all nations are not turned away just because their rulers are as corrupt as our own

Excuse me, this is going to be a rather angry post because a lot people have written, well, a lot of crap. I agree with what lumpnboy said basically. But first of all, go read:

http://www.marxists.de/middleast/brenner/

pretty good book except for the Trotskyist bias ("why couldn't they have all just realized Trotsky and the Russian Revolution rulezorz"), but that only takes up a few paragraphs.

Claim completely untrue. Zionist movement actively campaigned to prevent escape of Jews from Europe. They only condoned immigration to Palestine. Ben-Gurion specifically said in 1938 that he would rather sacrifice half of Germany's Jewish children if he could get the other half in Palestine. Plus, the Zionist movement, especially the 'left' (but not just) were deeply in bed with Nazi Germany in the early and mid 1930s.

Zionism began in the mid-to-late 19th century, depending on whether you count organizations not officially Zionist but which organized increasing colonizatory efforts. So there's nothing theoretical here. And like I said for quite a while Zionism did not see itself as antithetical to Fascism.

That's a damn lie and you take that back right now! What have you been reading, Joan Peters? The total number of these was under 20k when the Palestinian non-Jewish population was already nearing 1 mil (plus not all, maybe not even most, of them stayed, being mostly seasonal workers).

Luckily that's not true. Would you have said the same thing about French Algeria? White South Africa? The English colonies on native American land (before they finished all the natives off I mean)? If you don't see why Israel should be counted among these in many respects, you're living in a dream world.

I think that it is your dichtomoy that is not legitimate. I could just as well have said that black/gay/womens' liberation is illegitimate because it's not about liberating any of these groups, it's about liberating everyone. Sure, nationalism is a poor choice as a method of liberation, but this is a crticism to make in the context of that struggle. Plus, if people struggle against oppression in a way that's imperfect, deeply flawed even, you can't dismiss that struggle as illegitimate and wait for them to magically develop Anarchist perspective before allowing them legitimacy for struggle.

Unfortunately I would think you're referring to the 1967 occupation. You're right, of course, which is part of the reason why a two-state 'solution' is not really much of a solution at all in my view.

Yeah, effectively delegitimize 95% of all third-world struggles against Capitalist exploitation because they're not Anarchist struggles. That's great internationalism.

Actually that's not technically true, it's about 60 years in the camps - since 1948 - not 'for generations'. But that's not the right argument against what treeofjudas said (which is false).

No, you couldn't. Several orders of magnitude of difference in effect. Plus, the fact that you are willing to place the violence of the ghettoed and oppressed, albeit politically misguided and lacking moral qualms, with those of the oppressor, . One must also argue against the concept of placing civilian settlerments on border regions to contain indigineous population into small enclaves and then complaining that they get attacked. In some sense it's like the scene from Batman where the Joker puts on a pair of glasses and asks "you wouldn't hit a man in glasses would you?". True, it's not the _fault_ of people in Sderot, but being an unwilling rather than willing tool of oppression does not grant you immunity (plus, the unwillingness is also rather partial but let's grant the benefit of the doubt). Of course one can argue the question of whether attacking Israeli civilians this way isn't defeatist, revanchist, and prevents the possibility of joint struggle, but I don't get the feeling that's what you're trying to do.

First of all, you're adopting the Israeli "now now, you won't get anything by resorting to violence against us" line of the Israelis when you call Palestinian terrorism nihilist. Also, while not having 'lapsed into terrorism', they have also completely and utterly lost their struggle against the wall and the land confiscation/dispossession. This is a long discussion though, I think we've had it on the forum a while ago.

Hey, why are trying to smear organizations' names with acts they didn't commit? One of these is DFLP and the other is PFLP-GC which is mostly a Syrian-backed organization which split from the PFLP right at the beginning. Not that the PFLP has never attacked civilians, but you're trying to confuse and disinform people and that's wrong.

Correct me if I'm wrong, aren't the Palestinians among them all members of the collaborationst, right-wing Fatah (or Fatah-controlled militia groups)?

We're not horned demons. So what? "I have had in my life many Capitalist friends and have visited the WEF conference in Davos, some time ago . I met there people of all kinds , and as a whole I liked them." That's not an impossibility, it's just not very relevant.

In a 'perfect world' maybe. Over the past 60 years, and for the foreseeable future, basing a Palestinian strategy on common interests with Israelis mean, effectively, being either in Israeli Communist Party, or being in one of its satellite organizations and living in denial. Which is a pretty popular option among Israeli Anarchists BTW...

Ok, maybe that's a bit of an overstatement. But really, independent struggle has been of crucial importance to Palestinians, even when it's on a working-class basis. Plus, remember that most Palestinians are dispossessed farmers originally, and are now in sort of a class limbo. You could call most refugees lumpen-proletarians but I'm not sure how accurate this would be. Also there's very little Palestinian bourgeoisie to speak of, especially in Palestine itself. And you have the right of return as a return-to-pre-capitalism utopia... things are complex.

Yes, quite true. Actually, it has been rumored that a cement factory owned by Qurei' was a contractor in the construction of the wall. And that's just the anecdote, the economic misconduct of the PNA is infamous. Read Adel Samara's famous paper on the matter (don't have the URL right now).

I think you're the one adopting a false dichotomy, albeit a different one than you accuse lumpnboy of - a purist dichotomy of either the struggle for 'the real and ultimate answer', and anything else. And I would like to take this opportunity to make a general point of criticism which is that national struggle is also not to be seen as some conscious choice of a reflecting mind of an individual. It is the result of various social and historical forces - within the Palestinian people and in other cases of national struggle. We need to consider these matters from a more materialist perspective, understand why Palestinian politics and struggle are the way they are, and make useful conclusions from there. Knowing that nationalism isn't the final answer, or the right answer, doesn't help you much. You can shout it off the rooftops of Gaza, and it won't convince anyone either. Thinking about how to effect change, either among the Palestinians or among the Israelis,

You're repeating Zionist propaganda: "hey look, somebody's being even more atrocious, ignore us please". You're right that what happens in Iraq or Darfour is much worse than what's happening here, but that's no answer to any argument about what does happen here. One of the problems with super-large-scale atrocities is that they desensitize people to anything that's less atrocious. Hell, I suffer from that desensitization as well, speaking so cavalierly about the tactics of killing Israeli non-combatants... also, you have to direct your angst towards root causes of the events you described. And all three of these are results of Capitalist Imperialism (yes, in Sudan too, there's oil-related meddling, although the details escape me since it's very late at night now).

Yeah, but nobody took them seriously. When Israel kills people, Jews get attacked by Muslims in Europe. Well, sometimes, anyways.

What _I_ really have to wonder about is whether people are really ignorant of the realities of Colonialism or are they just trying to force it all into easily-palatable schemes.

Eyal Rozenberg, I am *not* trying to confuse and disinform people. I did not realize that the split between the PFLP and the DFLP was so early (thought it happened during the Lebanese civil war). I have no ambition of slandering either organization, and ok so the PFLP was involved in only one of these two infamous massacres of unarmed Jewish civilians (including children). This is the organization that is responsible for the massacre of 47 non-combatants on Swissair Flight 330 and several suicide bombings in the al-aqsa intifada which were aimed deliberately at civilians...sheesh. I think the point that I was making stands. I'll respond to your other comments later.

Typed this before seeing Sphinx and TreeofJudas' posts, they said it better, but still:

Well South Africa post-apartheid still sees massive exploitation of the working class, very high poverty rates etc.; The Allies in WWII firebombed Dresden and Tokyo, then dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki; Churchill was the first person to gas the Kurds in Iraq, about 60 years before Saddam.

Much of that could quite easily be said about Iraq at the moment (or as Sphinx said parts of Northern Israel. So I think to single particular states out as "evil" or whatever often tends to gloss over the particularly unpleasant things done by other states all the time. That doesn't mean I think 'they're all the same' - I know where I'd rather be living, and I conditions in some places make it a lot harder for people to pursue working class politics, but I think there's good reason to be 'cautious' as you put it, and more importantly not to let the really nasty shit done in some places distract from the only way that the international class system that causes it can be ended. The really leftist "anti-imperialists" end up supporting all kinds of capitalist gangsters, and there's more of that than I think there are of people like "James" seems to be. It's easy to slip into lazy habits and terminology when you constantly end up distancing yourselves from those viewpoints and I'm sure some of us (including me) are guilty of that on here, so I'd be interested to see your response to ToJ and sphinx.

That'd be more than 5%, which is "significant", assuming your figures are right.

It's not significant in the sense that it does not at all contradict the fact that the Palestinians are an indigineous population. And in the sense that if these 20k tops (effectively fewer but I'm not sure if it's close to 0, 10k etc.) were not to exist, it would have no bearing on the political and economic situation in Palestine.

sphinx: Damn it, it wasn't involved in any of these two! I told you already. PFLP-GC is also implicated in the 1970 Swissair bombing AFAIK. Read your sources seriously before quoting... as for the last Intifadah, yes, you are correct. PFLP were drawn into to the "I'm the most militant, can blow up more people than though" contest and acted against civilians. [edit:] But note that this was after their 2nd leader was assassinated by Israel and their entire cadre was under constant attack (and by attack I mean killings and mass arrests of course). They have carried out 3 attacks against civilian targets pre-1967-occupation areas and 3 or 4 such attacks in the 1967 OTs.

Well, like catch said, about 5% is still siginificant. I did not say a majority. But I'm willing to take that back, It's not a main point in my argument. My argument mostly has to do with opposing the fetishization of indigenous people.

The problem is the target of violence. Those who live in Sderot are predominantly poor working-class families. Like suicide bombings, this rocket barrage tactic attacks the poor.

I think this is a very important statement. Review it and note how it refers to all Jews as a single amalgam with the same interests as the Zionist ruling class.

I know that's what I'm trying to do. To quote myself:

Indeed. Still, it's an interesting development, especially from what stories I've personally heard from them.

That's not true. At least during the time of Matzpen there was a chance of collaboration between it and the DFLP, too bad the latter went into killing civilians and put it to a grinding halt.

There are quite a few Palestinians who are weekly workers in Israel, either legally or illegally. This is at least hypothetically an interesting point of starting a combined struggle on a class basis, at the very least with migrant workers, if not with Jews (who are not that common among the lower tier of the building industry, for example).

I'll try to return to this later, when I have the time. Don't allow me to forget!

I'm not telling European leftists to ignore Zionist atrocities, like the Zionists do. But I really have to wonder at their attachment to this specific issue.

Obviously, Israeli and Palestinian leftists are exempt from this criticism, since for us it's local.

Yes, but going to the root causes forces you to find the enemy even within the ranks of the "indigenous", which runs counter to their national liberation.

People took them seriously enough to die for them in the many imperialist squabbles to which they were sent.

What's so easy to palate about a class-struggle analysis? Certainly not how hard it is to find anyone with which to identify, unlike with most leftists, who have Chavez, or Nasrallah, or whoever the US tries to demonize this time.

treeofjudas, you're criticising the fetishization of indigenous people - but you're doing it from a perspective which is in part or in full blind to ethnic and racial oppression. Consider the case of Sderot. Let us begin with the people of Sderot as subjects rather than objects. They are indeed mostly poor working-class - but in comparison to their neighbors to the south-east, they're living like royalty. And unless some fundamental earth-shattering changes transpire overnight, they will put up a fierce struggle to maintain their significant material privileges over the horde of the indigenous underclass surrounding them. They will sacrifice much to keep Ghaza under siege, literally and economy-wise, because being a worker in the middle east is a much scarier prospect than withstanding Qassam rockets. And it goes without saying that the first thing they are willing to sacrifice is the lives of the people of Ghaza. I _wish_, I _really_ wish, that even a small minority of them had a long-term perspective of proletarian solidarity and resistance. But . And now, let's talk of them as objects. Societies, after all, are not collections of individuals scattered across the land. The people of Sderot were put there. They were put there because the Ashkenazi-supremacist Zionist movement wanted to separate the population it had picked-and-choosed from the home countries from the masses they brought from the Arab countries and from Morocco, to serve as cheap laborers and groundskeepers for the territorial loot. They were put there to solidify the control of a settler state on its peripheral areas. When I spoke of this in my earlier post I clearly referred to them as the passive objects of ruling-class interest; the Mizrachi history in Israel is quite the woeful tale of material and psychologic manipulation, exploitation - and cooptation. Readers are encouraged to read Sami Shalom Shitrit's 'The Mizrachi Struggle in Israel' (I hope they've translated that... http://www.authorsden.com/visit/viewwork.asp?id=12092 ; he's a Zionist social-democrat though). What's even more sad is the outlets into which their struggle has been diverted over the years.

No, of course I don't agree. When has joint Mizrachi-Arab struggle ever happened in Israel? Even the Mizrachi activist group closest to the Palestinian cause, the Mizrachi Democratic Spectrum, had as its most important struggle a demand to get a fair share of the land held by the Kibbutzim and Moshavim for the Mizrachi jews. As for the Panthers, a small faction within them tried to orientate itself towards cooperation with Palestinian elements, but they only went as far as the Israeli Communist party. The on-the-ground panther activity did not involve Arabs (or the question of oppression of Arabs within Israeli society) in any way that I know of.

Yes, you're absolutely right. But it is also the case that publically insisting on this means alienating yourself almost completely from the Jewish-Israeli public. Which is why what I said is easier to preach than to practice.

What I meant was that nobody kills Americans because they think the US constitutes some ideal of freedom.

Come on ... in a forum like this, class reductionism is playing it safe.

admin- fixed quotes

I don't think I'm blind to ethnic and racial oppression, but perhaps my appreciation of it lacks in nuance.

Indeed. But they are not the only Israelis who are putting up a fight to maintain their privileges under the Zionist regime. Observe the Israeli Palestinians (that is, Palestinians who have Israeli citizenship): The fetishization of the indigenous dictates that they should feel solidarity with the non-Israeli Palestinians. And yet, when a fascist like Lieberman suggests that a portion of them should be repatriated with their fellow Palestinians, by a change of borders, they become outraged. They are willing to (hypothetically) sacrifice the lives of other Palestinians to retain their privilege of citizenship in Israel. They, at least, seem to have a very clear understanding of how useless Palestinian national liberation is, at least within the context of a two-state solution.

In any case, you see that both Jews and Arabs work to preserve the privileges granted to them by the Zionist regime; that is, in both cases, an arbitrary privilege is used to split up the working class. The case of Israeli Palestinians makes it even clearer, since Israeli Palestinians are more proletarized as a group than Mizrahi Jews, they do not have an ethnic divide with the non-Israeli Palestinians, and yet they are still adamant about preserving their privilege over them.

These are not the symptoms of a specifically Jewish lack of class solidarity; rather, they suggest that working-class consciousness is absent across ethnic borders.

But what you said in the previous post was:

I wholeheartedly agree that the Zionist regime practices hypocrisy by complaining like this, just like when they refuse to talk to the Hamas government, when previous governments had no qualms about talking, even cooperating with the South African administration, where the term "apartheid" was coined.

I am not complaining, though. I am noting that directing attacks against the easy civilian targets is bad for class solidarity.

Hell, what's most amusing is that the Israeli government complains the loudest about purely military attacks against military targets, and responds more violently against those than against most acts of what would normally be classified by them as "terrorism."

From the website for the movie "The Black Panthers Speak":

I guess I'll just have to watch the movie to get a better perspective.

I don't understand what you mean by this sentence. Would you care to elaborate? Seems to me that a Palestinian national liberation perspective should be a lot more alienating to the Jewish-Israeli public than an internationalist position.

I'd been continuously presenting my internationalist position to hostile CPI members and affiliates for months before I found this place. I've also made similar comments on its website in response to Palestinians with a national liberation perspective.

Also, It's interesting to note how I'm being accused of parroting the Zionist line in one forum, while being called an auto-antisemite on the other. Must be doing something right.

I've only just looked at this forum again since I wrote those posts, so I've missed a bit of discussion and need to think about a response to people in more detail, but first: Alf says that I find reasons for critical support for the PFLP "and similar gangs". He even puts critical in quotes as if I said it, which is not true. Yet the paragraph in which I discuss the PFLP (and not any other "gangs") is in no way giving them support, "critical" or otherwise. Understanding the nature of such groups, their contradictory actions and their overall trajectories, can help to understand the role they play in struggles. As I made abundantly clear, I think, in that paragraph, and not in ways that suggest any support (see comments on the role of the Left in the firt Intifada).

Nor, Alf, do I want to dilute any internationalist principles, not the opposition to all states and not the rejection of all nationalism as only a barrier to revolutionary struggle. What I said was: "Calls for working class unity seem a little abstract if we treat nationalism as a simple ideological error and not something within a particular stratification and racialisation of political economies. In the absence of the latter, complaints about a lack of solidarity by the Palestinian woring class for the Israeli working class can sometimes appear like demands that such unity begin with the least privileged acting in solidarity with the most privileged, which actually risks demanding that the least privileged subordinate their struggles to material interests which have been pretty consistently manifesting themselves as antagonistic to, in competition with, those of the Palestinians." This is not a defence of nationalism, national liberation projects, viewing class interests through a prism of race or anything like these things.

Ok, I met treeofjudas today in RL (http://www.getafirstlife.com/)

When we spoke today we noted that this argument illustrates above anything else how precious the privileges of living in a rich colony within a poor and impoverished peripheral region are - so precious that the Palestinians living in Israel, despite their exploitation and discrimination in Israeli society, are still so much better off - w.r.t the standard of living and the more 'personal' freedoms - than their neighbors to in the West Bank and Ghaza that they indeed consider such a population swap a huge blow. Actually, this fact, and the ongoing processes of social control and engineering they have been subjected to these past 60 years - and of course the danger of going to jail forever or dying if you have any significant regular outside contacts - makes the Palestinians in Israel almost entirely cut off from Arabs in Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan and Syria. So, at least for the past 60 years, we have intra-colony-inter-class-solidarity = strong, cross-border-intra-class-solidarity = weak.

Not exactly, many of them are still farmers - more than the fraction of Mizrahis who are farmers, and certainly if you count non-capitalist farmers, i.e. those who do not employ wage labor, there are more Palestinians. If you measure the presence in the free trades I think the Palestinians are at a minority, and it's certainly the case among the smaller bourgeoisie. No big Palestinian capital in Israel that I know of except some family which owns a chain of supermarkets I think.

And like I explained in our meeting there's plenty of class consciousness, e.g. in Lebanon (I won't give examples here), but there isn't class solidarity with Jewish workers, even the majority of them who are not well-off and struggling to make ends meet, for fairly obvious and understandable (albeit only very partially justifiable) reasons.

That is true, but this is an incredibly weak argument against them since Palestinians had not got any class solidarity from Jews before the bombing and rocket attacks against civilians began (modulo fringe groups, and not referring to what was happening in that category before 1948 which was quite different).

No, read the book by Sami Shalom Chetrit. Kokhavi is quoted as saying that, and I guess it might be technically true, but in their public actions and in their publications in Israel this issue was not brought up as far as I know of. Or, if it was brought it, it was in a very minor way.

Try telling an Israeli Jew that the 'his' state is an imperialist-propped outpost in a system of global exploitation and control...

Heh, they're easy targets from all of the nationalist, Anarchist and authoritarian-Marxist perspectives... and they're not on this forum. What I was trying to say was what lumpboy just put much more eloquently in his second paragraph.

Well, you know, two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.

Lumpnboy: if I have misunderstood you, I apologise. I understand that there is a difference between analysing why nationalism has a particular strength among people subjected to 'national' oppression, and actually supporting nationalist groups. However, reading over your posts again, there still seems to be the notion that Israel/ Zionism is 'enemy number one' and that the Palestinian groups, at least the more 'left' ones, can still contribute something positive to the class struggle. I am also unclear about where Eyal stands, but his vehement criticism of Tree's position seems to indicate that, for him, the basic internationalist stance is far too simplistic.
Perhaps this is just a discussion about how we get the anti-nationalist, internationalist message across, given the tremendous barriers posed by national divisions in the Middle East. But I think the disagreement goes deeper than that.

OK, this thread seems to be reaching some kind of exhaustion/conclusion, so I won't go into some massive response to everything, which would probably be repeating stuff in different words quite a bit anyway (and who needs me to explain why I think sixty years counts as "generations"?)

But just to respond to Alf's last comment:

1. I don't think Israel is enemy number one, but I do think that repeating that "all states are equally to be opposed", while true and vital, can become a way for communists to avoid the accusations of anti-semitism that often come when people discuss the particular violence of the Israeli state, its settler-colonialism, neo-Apartheid chauvinist projects, etcetera. Which can seem like the radical flipside of the kind of relativising-minimising that defenders of Israel come up with ("everyone is mean, why are you picking on us? That's anti-Semitism etcetera.") And since nationalism has a contradictory basis in lived social relations, this flattening out of experiences doesn't become more persuasive for being right in principle: there are reasons why eg. poor Palestinians in the occupied territories might find this a bit evasive, just as there are reasons why the left-communists often had trouble getting a good hearing for their critique of anti-fascism during WWII. This doesn't make the struggle for anti-capitalist, anti-statist, anti-nationalist practice any less urgent: it makes it more so. And thus requires more than repetition of principle, formulas, etc. Of course, this isn't giving an answer, it is just saying that yours (as evidenced in a few remarks on a thread, which is hardly sufficient for a real critique anyway) isn't adequate, which is the easy part.

You write that: "Perhaps this is just a discussion about how we get the anti-nationalist, internationalist message across, given the tremendous barriers posed by national divisions in the Middle East. But I think the disagreement goes deeper than that." I think the differences go deeper than a discussion about propaganda tactics for identical messages, because I think questions of form and content of practice are more than just applying ready-made formulas to each situation and getting the message across, but at least in my case this isn't because I want to support, critically or otherwise, any sort of nationalism, national liberation, left parties, states, "anti-imperialism"... To me this makes the underlying issues of more significance as a discussion amongst revolutionaries. This discussion, its necessity and possibility, has been hinted at here but I think the "big" issues have dominated and made this more difficult (also the way this thread was framed from the start). For which I am as responsible as anyone.

However:

2. I've re-read my comments on the PFLP just to make sure I didn't say something I didn't mean, and I can see how people might have got the impressions they did, so just to clarify: I have known PFLP people and some of the better people involved in Palestinian solidarity here are more supportive of the PFLP than of any of the other major Palestinian groups, so I have had to think a bit about how to relate to this group and about what it is, the role it has played and will play.

I think the point I was trying to make was the the PFLP is a left-nationalist party, and in an environment of so obviously corrupt forces as the Fatah hierarchy, and the increasing dominance of Hamas, the PFLP still contains much of the Palestinian Left...and as such contains some principled leftists who are committed to struggle against Israel, critical of the Palestinian elite in some ways and of Fatah, secular and not the state per se (they refused to enter the Authority). And their courage and history of involvement in struggles etcetera made them, and other parts of the Palestinian Left, the perfect forces to eg. enter into the first Intifada to re-direct those struggles in a narrowly nationalist direction. They were organised enough and had enough political capital, enough respect from and history of involvement with the people struggling, to be able to insert themselves as a leadership in a way that Fatah by itself could not have easily done: minus the Palestinian Left, Fatah would have had a lot more difficulty asserting any control over or appearing to speak for the Intifada. This isn't eg. the PFLP betraying anything: this comes from what the PFLP is. And though there have been massive debates in the PFLP about these matters, and every few years it seems someone big in the PFLP comes out with a statement that the PFLP had unfortunately subordinated all social struggles to national liberation and this would be corrected, the project remains a left-nationalist one and any changes do not alter the forms of leftism and nationalism which define the role of the group. The point is that if I recognise sometimes that the PFLP is not just a bunch of cynical, corrupt gangsters, this isn't because I think they are capable of contributing to a genuinely revolutionary politics in the Middle East, it is because the negative role that they play can actually be worse because of the degree to which they are not cynical corrupt gangsters. And I think if you look back at what I wrote you'll see that this was what I meant.

Benjamin Rosenzweig