My Thirty essays (with two essays by James Robb) covering the 10-07 pogrom, the war against Hamas, the resultant spike in Jew hate and the right of Israel to exist as a refugee for the Jewish people are now in one place.

https://theunionofworkers.wordpress.com/2024/02/27/my-essays-on-the-10-07-pogrom-and-associated-issues-are-now-in-one-place/

Israel’s right and need to defend the safety of a refuge for Jews

[....] The U.S. government continues to advance the U.S. rulers’ class interests by pressing the government of Israel to agree to back off its decisive fight to defang Tehran, Hamas, et al. U.S. imperialism does not start from defending Jews from pogroms or Israel’s right to exist as an all-too-necessary refuge to Jews.

It’s only concern is the stability the U.S. capitalist class requires for its own profit-driven interests, including the Biden administration’s efforts to reach an accommodation with the regime in Tehran.

After Oct. 7 the White House warned Israel not to go into Rafah on the Gaza-Egypt border. It complained when an Israeli bombing raid killed Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah. And now the Joseph Biden administration is telling Israel not to try to destroy Iran’s nuclear development facilities. But Israel’s capitalist government is not willing to put Israel’s existence and the lives of millions of Jews on the line by caving in to the U.S. rulers’ demands.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told the U.N. General Assembly Sept. 27 that Israel will do everything it must to prevent Tehran from getting nuclear weapons.

The Times of Israel noted Oct. 7, 2024, that on Sept. 30, Biden had begun the day by calling for a “ceasefire now” between Israel and Hezbollah. “Hours later, the IDF announced that it had begun a series of raids aimed at dismantling Hezbollah posts on the Lebanese side of the border.”

Full article: https://themilitant.com/2024/10/12/showdown-looms-in-middle-east-israels-right-and-need-to-defend-the-safety-of-a-refuge-for-jews/

Support Israel as a refuge for Jews.

Genocide? 12 months and still the IDF saves lives.

Seen elsewhere: 

"IDF forces in Gaza rescued Fawzia - a 21-year-old Yazidi woman who was kidnapped from her home in Iraq by ISIS when she was only 11 years old. She was sold in Iraq as a girl to a resident of Gaza who visited the country, and he took her to Gaza. Today, after a decade, she was reunited with her family."

Political context for Israel's founding

Dave Prince's 2020 introduction to Abram Leon's study The Jewish Question (written during the Nazi occupation) is a welcome addition to the classic work, alas timely and essential given today's uptick in Jew-hatred by both the petty-bourgeois left and right.

The new edition is augmented by a section of maps and many pages of magnificent photos.

Of particular interest to me is Prince's account of events in 1945-48 that culminated in the founding of Israel.

....Revolutionary and pre-revolutionary situations did emerge in several imperialist countries in Europe in the aftermath of World War II and the Soviet Union's victory over efforts by German imperialism to destroy the remaining conquests of the Bolshevik Revolution. Moreover, exploited toilers and oppressed peoples across the Asia, Africa, and the Americas launched national democratic struggles for land, labor rights, political liberties, independence, winning freedom from colonial rule for hundreds of millions.

In Cuba the battle against imperialist domination culminated not only in a socialist revolution but also, for the first time since the Bolsheviks, one guided by a communist, not Stalinist, leadership. A leadership that was based on and acted in the interests of the working class, both there and internationally.

In Europe, revolutionary opportunities for the working class and its allies came to naught, however. Meeting in Yalta in early 1945, US, British, and Soviet leaders Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and Joseph Stalin ratified the military facts on the ground by recognizing post-war "spheres of influence." Moscow was awarded Eastern Europe, much of which had been occupied by Soviet armed forces marching toward Berlin. 

Implicit in this pact was cooperation by Stalinist communist parties in Greece, France, and Italy to block revolutionary prospects anywhere in southern or Western Europe and assure the restabilization of capitalist rule. This class collaborationist course was rationalized by the illusion that imperialism would maintain peaceful coexistence with the Soviet Union. Instead of advancing the organization of workers to make a revolution against the ruling class in their own countries, CP leaderships assured their members and sympathizers that Moscow's bureaucratic Economic Planning would, over time, prove its superiority and win over working people to socialism.

In face of these Stalinist betrayals and defeats, prospects to resolve the Jewish question along the revolutionary proletarian road pointed to by Trotsky and by Leon were also betrayed.

With borders shut tight by Washington, London, and other imperialist powers, Jewish survivors of the Nazi extermination effort looked to Palestine as their refuge from misery and persecution. They looked to, and some 700,000 found a way to go to, what in May 1948 was proclaimed the state of Israel, a Jewish state. It was recognized within hours by US President Harry Truman, followed soon after by the Soviet Union – the first two governments of the world to do so.

Leon explains that his treatment in this book of the Zionist movement is limited to its inability to offer a solution to the Jewish question. The place of "Zionism in Palestine, of course, is another question," he writes.

There is no answer to that question that does not address what has been wrought since the end of World War II by capitalism and the class struggle in the Middle East and internationally. That includes both the enduring fact of Jew hatred, as breakdowns in the imperialist world order multiply, and the unresolved national dispossession of Palestinians.

Israel is nearing its seventy-fifth year as a state, with a population encompassing working people who are Jews, Arabs, and others. For decades workers, peasants, and the oppressed across the Middle East and North Africa have been wracked by the treachery, bankruptcy, and rot of Stalinist, bourgeois nationalist, and Islamist political currents falsely claiming to speak and act on their behalf. And never have the Palestinian people been more bereft of political leadership either capable, morally fit, or above all of a proletarian class composition and outlook able to advance the struggle for their national aspirations.

Recognition of Israel together with a contiguous, sovereign Palestinian state is the course class-conscious workers must champion and explain.

That is the course that today can enable Palestinian, Jewish, and other toilers of the Mideast, whatever their religious or other convictions, to recognize the interests they hold in common. The course that could enable them to come together in struggle against their exploitation and repression by capitalist governments and ruling classes - whether in Israel, the Arab states, Iran, or elsewhere - as well as by Washington and other imperialist powers.

Only along that road can class solidarity be forged through common battles, including the revolutionary struggle in Israel and Palestine to take power out of the hands of the capitalist rulers and replace them with workers and farmers governments, governments that act in the interests of working people and the oppressed across the region.

As history and the class struggle are proving once again in the early 21st century, Abram Leon could not have been more correct that there is no way quote "to resolve the Jewish question independently of the World Revolution." But along that revolutionary course, any political party aspiring to speak and act in the interests of the working class that does not today recognize Israel's right to exist sets itself on a collision course with the interests of all toilers, of all national origins, in the Middle East and world over....

Book review: Year Zero of the Arab-Israeli Conflict 1929 by Hillel Cohen

Review by a comrade on Amazon:

August 6, 2018

Format: Kindle Edition

As the Ottoman Empire was crumbling during World War I, the imperialist United Kingdom was already making plans for its future, which included British rule and a "Jewish National Home." This was typical of British policy; divide and conquer. Sir Ronald Storrs, the first Governor of Jerusalem, explained what a "Jewish homeland" in Palestine meant for the British Empire: "It will form for England," he said, "a little loyal Jewish Ulster in a sea of potentially hostile Arabism."

Jews at the time of the Balfour Declaration were 3–5% of the Palestinian population. While the Zionist movement was not to be content with British rule, Israel has continued to be a loyal backer of imperialist interests. But here one must be careful not to confuse the goals of the Zionist leaders with the Jewish immigrants, who largely were just looking for a place to be safe from pogroms. If everyone in a country was guilty of the crimes committed by its leaders, we in the US would be living in a nation of war criminals! Zionism was a bourgeois nationalist movement. Most of the leaders had never given much thought to the fact that there was an existing Arab society in Palestine. As a communist, while I support the rights of oppressed nationalities, my main interest is in seeing solidarity built between Arab and Jewish toilers. Zionism was against this idea, hiring Arab labor only when there were no Jews available. And yet many of these people claimed to be "socialist." The Arab nationalists were also following a bourgeois ideology.

While I fully agree with Maxime Rodinson's idea that Israel was formed as a colonial-settler state (See Israel: A Colonial-Settler State? (English and French Edition), I also agree with him that "Colonists and colonizers are not monsters with human faces whose behavior defies rational explanation, as one might think from reading left-wing intellectuals." And the colonial settler character of a state doesn't last forever, or else we would be viewing the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and many other countries in that way.

In the short chapter on Palestine in "Red Orchestra" leader Leopold Trepper's book The Great Game: Memoirs of the Spy Hitler Couldn't Silence, Trepper, then a militant in the Palestinian Communist Party, trying to organize unions of both Jewish and Arab workers and social groups along similar lines, wrote: "Then, also in 1928 [sic], anti-Jewish riots broke out, accompanied by lynchings. These riots were the occasion of a dramatic misunderstanding between the Palestinian Communist Party and the Comintern [Communist International]. In the eyes of the Comintern, pogroms of this sort signaled the beginning of the rise of the Arab proletariat, a movement it was necessary to encourage… This absurd policy undermined the influence of the party among Jewish workers." Trepper was deported from Palestine by the British. The nature of the Communist International was rapidly changing into simply an arm of Soviet foreign policy. Trepper learned about Stalinism the hard way.

But not much was known internationally about these events. In a 1934 interview with Leon Trotsky (see On the Jewish Question), he was asked the following:

"Question: The official Communist Party characterized, without question, the Jewish-Arab events in 1929 in Palestine as the revolutionary uprising of the oppressed Arabian masses. What is your opinion of this policy?"

"Answer: Unfortunately, I am not thoroughly familiar with the facts to venture a definite opinion. I am now studying the question. Then it will be easier to see in what proportion and in what degree there were present those elements such as national liberationists (anti-imperialists) and reactionary Mohammedans and anti-Semitic pogromists. On the surface, it seems to me that all these elements were there."

Today it is possible to do what Trotsky couldn't do: To put together a wealth of both primary source and later writings on these events, and that is what Hillel Cohen has been able to do. He examines all the evidence from all sources, both written at the time, and written years later. The background was that increasingly Arabs were seeing that land sold to Jews was not just about individual transactions, but about the whole character of the country being threatened when Arab national consciousness was just coming into being.

The Arabs were faced with Zionism, which viewed Jews as a nationality, and viewed that Palestine was their homeland (regardless of whether they believed that God had granted it to them). There were both Jewish and Arab victims, but the Jewish victims were frequently attacked in their homes (there were a few cases of Jews attacking Arabs in their homes, but they were relatively rare). Arab victims were more often killed by either Jews or the police when they were involved in attacking Jews. The Zionist movement had its own armed wing, the Haganah, and the Arabs were not as organized. Many of these massacres took place because of the spread of rumors, which as always were often not true.

There were both Jews and Arabs who refused to go along with this conflict--and risked their own lives to save their neighbors. For the most part the Jews killed were not recent immigrants who had come to build a homeland for the Jews, but Arabic-speaking Jews who had lived in Palestine for at least several generations, and who had been considered friends and neighbors of some of the Arabs who killed them or supported their murder. While the Arabic-speaking Jews were often treated with contempt by the European Jewish arrivals, this tended to create Zionists out of people who had not been. The Arab reaction in 1929 was largely vengeance; not a political response. On the Jewish side there was a growth of the Revisionists—the ultra-right wing of Zionism. But the "Labor Zionists" also had no interest in publicizing the story of Arabs who saved Jews, and most Jews and Arabs ended up making martyrs of people who had slaughtered the unarmed, and the lies got bigger and bigger on both sides!

Hillel Cohen finds it necessary to explain repeatedly that people who have their main identity as belonging to a nation or religion are frequently willing to dispense with the truth when it comes to attacks on those they view their "own." He is right to do so, but I have never been a patriot of US imperialism or a Jewish nationalist. For 50 years I have been a communist internationalist. While knowing the history is essential, even more essential is knowing what is to be done now.

"I don't think anyone has been slandered more than the Jews," Fidel Castro told Jeffrey Goldberg, a national correspondent (now editor) for the Atlantic magazine, in a September 2010 interview. "The Jews have lived an existence that is much harder than ours. There is nothing that compares to the Holocaust."

In the interview, Goldberg wrote, Castro criticized Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, then-president of Iran, for denying the Holocaust and "explained why the Iranian government would better serve the cause of peace by acknowledging the 'unique' history of anti-Semitism and trying to understand why Israelis fear for their existence."

Cuba's revolutionary government has strongly opposed Tel Aviv's assaults and discrimination against Palestinians. But Castro responded, "Yes, without a doubt," when Goldberg asked if he thought Israel has a right to exist as a Jewish state.

And Fidel Castro was correct! Anti-Semitism has always been considered "the socialism of fools" by the Marxist movement. It lets the major capitalists off the hook by claiming that attacking Jews is attacking capitalism. The best book to explain who the Jews are and why anti-Semitism exists from a Marxist viewpoint (and all other viewpoints sidestep the issue) is The Jewish Question: A Marxist Interpretation. This book was written by a Belgian follower of Trotsky, who died shortly after in the Holocaust. He belonged to a movement that didn't treat all German soldiers as Nazis; they and their French comrades put out newspapers directed at the German soldiers (see also Swimming Against the Tide: Trotskyists in German Occupied France). For the view of their American comrades on World War II, see Teamster Bureaucracy (Teamster series) and Socialism on Trial: Testimony at Minneapolis Sedition Trial.

For how the National Socialists integrated the socialism of fools into their ideology, I recommend Fascism and Big Business.

Today the deep crisis of capitalism is boosting anti-Semitism as it always has. Also today during this crisis there is this Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement aimed at Israel when there no longer is any revolutionary leadership of the Palestinians.

There was no such movement when the PLO was revolutionary! Revolutionary Marxists supported the PLO during those years (see Israel and the Arab revolution: Fundamental principles of revolutionary Marxism and Palestine and the Arabs' Fight for Liberation). But today Hamas is a reactionary group that hates Jews and wants Islamic rule, and the Palestine Authority is a bureaucratic organization, afraid to change anything that might threaten its leaders' privileges. And Palestine is not a rallying cry of the Arab revolution, which today is directed at their own corrupt leaders.

While supporting the fight of the Palestinians, revolutionary Marxists never took the position that Israeli Jews were all reactionary, or that Jewish immigration per se was the source of the problem. The fact that there were people on both sides who tired to stop the slaughter, and that there are people like Hillel Cohen who tell the truth, however unpopular it may be, should give us hope.

But more importantly, today, in Israel, Arabs and Jews often work side-by-side and are in the same unions. They have gone on strike together; they participated in the same protests around the housing crisis a few years ago. And now, as I write, they are participating in protests against Netanyahu's "Nation-state" law. This is what must be encouraged! The US Socialist Workers Party has put forward a peace proposal based on the following three points (see the 'Militant' for more information):

• For recognition of a Palestinian state and of Israel
• For repeal of U.S. Jerusalem Embassy Act [which calls for an undivided Jerusalem]
• For workers' solidarity in Israel, Palestine, the world over

One-state solution and two-state solution

Statement from a comrade on Facebook:

I've been reading about this for awhile. The PLO is a demoralized and bureaucratized movement, not at all what it was when it issued a call for a democratic secular Palestine. I think from their point of view it's more out of desperation than as a forward road. This is not to say that there aren't Palestinians and Israelis who would genuinely like to be part of a single country; of course there are.

The question isn't really about one state or two: The question is what will advance the interests of the workers, farmers, and other oppressed people among both Israelis and Palestinians. Right now there isn't much of an organized fightback in Israel/Palestine, and that not an isolated fact; it's true throughout the world. The working class and the oppressed are everywhere taking a beating. In both the Mideast and the world one of the most dynamic things has been the movement of the Kurds. But now they've suffered a setback too, although hopefully just a temporary one. Read the article, and then take another look at the Socialist Workers Party statement from a few weeks back.

I believe the mass of Palestinians want their own state, but they have a leadership which is incapable of moving forward. You can't look at the question of one state or two outside of the whole international context.