This is an update of a previous article published in October 2023
Roger Silverman, London UK
Israel justifies its slaughter of men, women and children in Gaza on the grounds that Hamas murdered civilians and took innocent hostages. Israel has in the last five months alone murdered some 30,000 civilians, and has for years kept thousands of Palestinians hostage in its own jails. Gaza has become Israel’s killing field. It is this sickening hypocrisy that has generated a worldwide mass protest movement comparable with those during the Vietnam and Iraq wars. We must act now to translate that revulsion and outrage into direct action, above all to demand divestment, a boycott of Israeli products, and mass trade-union activity to block arms supplies.
Israel was from its inception a racist regime; it is explicitly defined as a Jewish state. Jews the world over have an automatic right to settle there; Arabs who had lived there for generations were expelled. Inevitably, this led inexorably in the end to its logical conclusion: genocide.
Before the holocaust, Zionism had no mass base in the ghettoes. It was little more than an exotic fringe sect – something like the Marcus Garvey “back to Africa” movement in the USA or the Rastafarians in the Caribbean. The rich political and cultural life within the persecuted Jewish communities of Europe flourished in the socialist Bund. Their riposte to the Zionists, just as towards the fascist Black Hundreds, was: We’re going nowhere! This is our home!
Zionism was a handy tool seized on by British imperialism. With the Balfour Declaration in 1917, made during the First World War when the Ottoman Empire had crumbled, it cultivated Zionism as a strategic weapon – just as it promoted Wahhabism to divide and rule within the Arab world, of which Hamas is an offshoot. A Jewish homeland in Palestine would serve as an outpost to protect its control of the oilfields against the Arab revolution and, at that time, of Egypt, the Suez Canal and the sea route to India. In the words of the first British military governor of Jerusalem, it would be “a loyal little Jewish Ulster in a sea of potentially hostile Arabism”.
In all the territories administered by the British Empire, a calculated policy of “divide-and-rule” was set in motion. We still see the consequences of “British civilisation” in ethnic conflicts around the world today: in Northern Ireland, the Indian sub-continent, Sri Lanka, Cyprus, and the Middle East.
Their strategic aim was to plant a stable surrogate regime within the explosive powder-keg of the region. But at the end of the Second World War they also had a more immediate motive. There were hundreds of thousands of desperate holocaust survivors, refugees from the concentration camps now languishing in displaced persons’ camps. The creation of Israel would keep them out of Britain and America.
It was the holocaust which gave substance to Zionism. What had previously been a peripheral reactionary sect began to look like it could offer a credible lifeline. Jewish survivors of the concentration camps, desperately seeking refuge somewhere they could begin to build a new life risked their lives sailing rickety boats across the Mediterranean, where some of them were sunk by British colonial warships – just like their counterparts today, but in the opposite direction.
Zionism was an acknowledgement of despair, a capitulation to anti-semitism: a lasting triumph of Nazism. In that sense the genocide in Palestine today is an indirect aftershock of the failure of the German revolution of 1918-23.
In the 1920s there had been 500,000 Arabs and 150,000 Jews living in Palestine, many of whom worked side by side. The heroic revolutionary Leopold Trepper, who was later to organise within Nazi Germany the underground communist spy network the Red Orchestra, had organised the Ichud/Itachak (Unity) movement, which brought Jewish and Arab workers under a single banner, organised joint strikes and challenged the Zionist Histadrut, which only admitted Jewish workers.
Now, like the apartheid regime in South Africa, Israel explicitly defines itself as a communal ethnic state.
The historic justification for Zionism was always that without a state of their own Jews would be condemned to constant persecution. Today we see the final proof of the opposite. Far from offering them protection, the Zionist state has placed Jews in even greater danger. In the last thirty years alone, at least 2,000 Israelis have been killed in attacks. Do the Jews of Israel feel safe today? The surge of support for Netanyahu’s war on Gaza, coming so soon after a wave of daily mass demonstrations against his regime up to October 7th, is a mark of how frightened they are of being overrun by the Arab masses.
And how about the security of Jews outside Israel? For
Jews in the “diaspora”, an undercurrent of dormant anti-semitism was always
lurking in the shadows. But today a new variant of anti-semitism has become rampant.
The worldwide revulsion at the horrors in Gaza has breathed
new life into it. I’ve seen comments on facebook like: “How can I ever feel
comfortable now talking with a Jew?”, “Now I understand why ordinary Germans
accepted the holocaust”, and even “How can anyone not be antisemitic when they
are committing genocide?”
The bloodbath in Gaza is not unprecedented. Israel is acting just the same as any settler regime. Compare America, both North and South; or Australia and New Zealand; or Kenya, South-West Africa, the Congo, South Africa, etc. Terrible and genocidal crimes of extermination were committed against the indigenous populations of all these countries, and similar crimes are being inflicted today against the Palestinians. The difference is that the racial oppression in Israel has been wilfully abetted by world imperialism.
But history can’t be unwritten. We don’t call for the expulsion of the descendants of these migrant settlers. Generations have grown up in Israel in the last 75 years, and they have no other home. Where are they to go? Back to the concentration camps? Back to the ghettos? What we condemn is Israel’s identity as a racially-designated state in which non-Jews face discrimination and now mass slaughter.
World imperialism wants a so-called “two-state” solution: in effect, the creation of a subjugated Palestinian Bantustan with just the formal trappings of statehood. Others, with the best intentions, have called for a single state with equal rights for both communities – a solution which could in any case only be achieved by the overthrow of the existing Israeli state. Socialist internationalists must stand neither for the two neighbouring hostile mini-states, nor for one single unviable common state within what is still just an artificially designated strip of land. So what is the only solution?
Not one of the states in the region is sustainable. Following the collapse of the Ottoman empire, British and French imperialists ruthlessly carved up the region by drawing arbitrary lines on the map – the Sykes/Picot plan. Communal strife has raged throughout the region ever since: with years of civil war in Lebanon, and Syria, and Yemen; full-scale massacres and endless sectarian atrocities in Jordan, Iraq, Iran…
All these states are artificial constructs imposed by imperialism. We should stand for a socialist federation in which all the communities could live in peace: the creation of a common homeland in a harmonious socialist federation of the Middle East. Yes, that may seem utopian – but how practical has any alternative solution turned out? As with all the nightmares convulsing civilisation today, the unity of all working people on a socialist foundation provides the only possible way out of catastrophe.
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