The International Socialist Organization [ISO] is a U.S. political grouping. On Jan. 10 their website posted this article: "Trump and the Israeli right: Hawks of a feather"
The article contains the old boilerplate about Trump and Netanyahu being the most extreme right-wing political figures ever. [These kinds of formulations have not appeared in Socialist Worker for the last eight years, of course.]
The context for this article: the U.S. government's Dec. 23 UN Security Council vote abstention and Kerry's Dec. 28 speech upbraiding Israel.
You would not, from reading the article, think the author or the organ have any acquaintance with Marxism.
The ISO prides itself on promoting what Hal Draper called a "socialism from below." But their newspaper and publishing house differ from Draper's brand of opportunism. The ISO's newspaper, Socialist Worker, and publishing house, Haymarket, are a salad bar of political "whateverism" where anything tailist and trendy can win some ink, from Chomsky to Angela Davis.
The article's author, Wael Elasady, claims the Palestinian struggle has been marginalized because of the triumph of reaction in Syria, Egypt, and Libya. He does not mention the decades-long marginalization of this struggle flowing from bourgeois nationalist leaderships steeped in Jew-hatred.
Elasady does point out the role Palestinian Authority has in policing the Palestinian people on the West Bank. But there is no mention of the role of the PLO, Hamas, and Arab regimes in the region in politically demobilizing and demoralizing the toilers under their control. Nor their role in inciting violence against Jews, whether by bomb, gun, knife, car, or missile.
The author postulates that if Israel annexes the West Bank, "resistance" might increase. But what kind of resistance? More of the dead-end knife and car-ramming attacks? These only fuel demoralization and atomization.
The article makes the case that Israeli annexation of the West Bank would spur the BDS movement. This front of Jew-hating NGOs might reap a financial boon.
Annexation will certainly spur the petty bourgeois left Jew-hatred we already see in the UK and other imperialist countries.
NB: Jew-hatred ripens today under conditions of capitalism's slow-burning global crisis of production and trade. "The Jews" are made the scapegoat for horrors germinated by the lawful workings of capitalism itself. BDS is a left expression of this ripening; it is transmitted into the middle class through the hysterical "anti-Zionist" milieu.
Elasady's milieu has no answer for the Jewish and Arab workers and farmers in the region today. Instead, they have a set of fifty year old shibboleths, and an unquenchable thirst for the eradication of only one capitalist state in the world.
They place their trust, in this effort, in capitalist governments and organizations [the United Nations, the International Criminal Court], and an international
constellation of BDS charities and foundations.
Such an abject capitulation only increases my support for the perspective laid-out last week on the front page of The Militant newspaper: "....the only road that can open the door to mobilizing Palestinian workers and farmers to fight for their rights, requires recognition of the state of Israel."
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