LEFT COLUMN: 17.10.2000

What we think

Israel and Palestine

Two nations, two states

For Israeli withdrawal and self-determination for the Palestinians!

The key reason for the outbreak of violence in Israel and Palestine has been the increasing frustration of Palestinians with the painfully slow progress of the "peace process".

The responsibility for the violence lies with the Israeli state

From the outset socialists could not believe that diplomatic manoeuvres by the US and other big powers would bring justice. We believed that solid peace could come only through Arab and Jewish workers uniting on the basis of a common democratic affirmation of national rights. We warned that the deal's failure to address the Palestinian people's right to a state of their own would undermine peace and build support for the Islamic fundamentalists who lead the most rabid opposition to peace with Israel in the Palestinian areas and the Arab world.

After seven years of the peace process, and despite some movement, the real issues have still not been dealt with. The Palestinians still do not have a state of their own. Very little has been offered by Israel or the big powers as compensation to the Palestinians impoverished by decades of occupation and oppression. Israel remains the real master in the territories under the Palestinian authority.

For most Palestinians little has materially changed, and the Arab citizens of Israel suffer systematic discrimination as second-class citizens.

The only democratic solution is the immediate withdrawal of Israel and armed Israeli settlements from the occupied territories, the creation of a Palestinian state, and massive financial aid to help Palestinians establish a real future and to compensate for the decades of poverty and oppression.

Israel was founded in 1948 by a combination of long-standing Jewish settlements in British-controlled Palestine and Jewish survivors escaping Hitler's death camps. It was founded in a war with the surrounding Arab monarchies that tried and failed to strangle the Jewish state at birth. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinian Arabs were driven out of or fled the new Israel during the war, and were then banned from returning; over the following years much of the Jewish population of the Arab states was driven out from them to seek refuge in Israel.

In the 1950s the old Arab regimes fell to a wave of Arab nationalism. While the new wave was a progressive force against the old monarchies and Western control of the region, it also reinvigorated hostility to Israel, leading to an Arab-Israeli war in 1967.

The Arab states lost the war in just six days and Israel occupied the West Bank and Gaza, inhabited mainly by refugees from the 1948 war. The Palestinians, previously relegated politically to the role of passive pawns of the Arab states, began to develop an autonomous movement through the Palestine Liberation Organisation.

The PLO distanced itself from the Arab states' old line of "drive the Jews into the sea"', in favour of calling for a "secular democratic state" in all Palestine where Jews could also live. Left-wing socialists who before 1967 had generally argued for self-determination for the Israeli Jews within a Socialist United States of the Middle East now tended to swing behind the new PLO line.

But the "secular democratic state" formula was at best a utopian fantasy. Given the history of war in the Middle East and of genocide in Europe the Israeli Jews would not submit to being ruled by a Arab majority, nor would the Palestinian Arabs happily be a minority in a Jewish-majority state. Neither nation would want to be forcibly amalgamated with the other. Working-class unity across the divide, the essential for any advance, could only be secured by the freedom to be separate.

In reality the "secular democratic state" formula functioned as an alias for a program of the crushing of the Israeli-Jewish nation by an Arab war of conquest, adding only that thereafter the Jews should have individual and religious rights.

The AWL argued instead that solidarity with the oppressed Palestinians needed to be combined with a political programme of two states for the two nations as a means to working-class unity and peace between Arabs and Jews.

In 1988 the PLO shifted to a "two states" programme, recognising the right of Israel to exist. That, combined with the impact of the intifada, an uprising of the Palestinian youth in the occupied territories with stones against the occupying Israeli army, and shifts in international politics, resulted in the first peace negotiations between Israel and the PLO.

Sadly, many on the left still cling to the idea of Arab revolt destroying Israel. In their "good people, bad people" political world, the Israeli Jews are a "bad people" who do not deserve a nation state. But consistent democracy for all peoples and against all national oppression should be our programme.