[Educational given to Melbourne branch of Socialist Alliance, October 1, 2024. Photo above: Gaza ruins.]
The world is not the same since October 7
Since October 7 last year, Palestine has become the number one issue in world politics. And, as Israel’s current war on Lebanon shows, this is likely to be the case for some time to come.
Israel is in the spotlight as never before in its entire history. More and more people around the world are seeing what Israel is really like: The wanton mass killing, the pogrom-like violence against Palestinians in the West Bank, the endless assassinations and the belief that this will enable them to win.
Our rulers and their system are exposed as never before. No matter what Israel does, the Western leaders — especially its key backer, the United States — defend it, albeit in many cases with all manner of obfuscation. It seems clear that there is no limit to their defence of Israel: No crime or atrocity can shake their basic support.
Israel’s war on Hezbollah
The assassination of Hezbollah’s
charismatic leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah is a big escalation.
(There is a really excellent commemoration article by Ali Abunimah in
The Electronic Intifada.) Over the last two weeks, Israel has
undoubtedly dealt Hezbollah some very heavy blows, killing a whole layer of the organisation’s top leadership as well as killing
or maiming many hundreds more with exploding pagers and walkie talkies.
But however difficult the process, we can expect that Hezbollah will develop new leaders and cadre, new security measures, new communication techniques, and new ways to defend their military assets. We can also expect that the organisation will have no trouble attracting recruits.
It is also worth remembering that the last time Israel invaded Lebanon (in 2006) it did not go well for them. Yes, their airforce — as in Gaza — can kill with impunity and on a vast scale but that will not bring them victory. The resistance in Gaza has not been broken and has likely already rebuilt its armed forces and tunnel infrastructure. And Hezbollah is vastly more powerful than Hamas and its allies.
We are deluged with Western propaganda lies & deceptions
Lie 1. Silence about how Israel came into being & what it is
The colonial-settler nature of Israel is never discussed by our leaders or the corporate media. Israeli apartheid is never discussed. In July 2018, for instance, Israel passed a law defining the country as a “Jewish state”. A report in Vox summarised its three key points:
It states that “the right to exercise national self-determination” in Israel is “unique to the Jewish people.”
It establishes Hebrew as Israel’s official language, and downgrades Arabic — a language widely spoken by Arab Israelis — to a “special status.”
It establishes “Jewish settlement as a national value” and mandates that the state “will labor to encourage and promote its establishment and development.”
Obviously, if you belong to the 1.8 million (21%) Arab minority in Israel proper (i.e., outside Gaza and the West Bank) this is apartheid — you have no real rights.
The law was criticised at the time but there was no reassessment of Western support for Israel.
Lie 2. Hamas & October 7
Hamas is invariably described as a terrorist organisation. This is simply wrong: It is a conservative Islamic resistance movement and right now it is the largest component, the key component, of the armed resistance in Gaza and the West Bank.
We are incessantly told that October 7 was a “massacre”, a terror raid. We should reject that completely. It had entirely rational and legitimate objectives.
Were civilians wantonly killed by resistance fighters? I am sceptical. But in any case, the Palestinian people have an inalienable right to resist colonial occupation.
We can’t judge the struggles of the oppressed by a “human rights” yardstick. Do we go back through history and judge, say, the Spartacus slave uprising, or the peasant revolts of the Middle Ages, through a lens of human rights? This would be simply ridiculous. Whatever atrocities that may or may not have occurred, these events were simply absolutely inevitable responses by the oppressed to the absolute endless horror of class society — and great moments in human liberation.
Of course, we are not indifferent to human rights: That’s one reason we admire and support the Kurdish liberation struggle and its outstanding moral-political stand and record.
Lie 3. Israel’s supposed right to ‘self-defence’
Israel’s supporters — including Australia’s own Penny Wong — constantly proclaim its "right to exist" and its supposed right to “self-defence”. We reject these claims completely. Israel is a brutal colonial-settler state and as such it has no right to exist. As human beings, the non-Palestinian Israeli people obviously have a right to exist, but that has to be as citizens in a single state with equal rights for all. They don’t have any “right” to set up an apartheid state and oppress and dispossess the Palestinians.
Lie 4. Israel is a defence against antisemitism & another Holocaust
With claims to be acting on behalf of all Jews, Israel is the biggest generator of antisemitism in the world. Moreover, most of those who once would have been classical nazi-type antisemites in the West are today fanatical supporters of Israel and fanatic Islamophobes. For instance, the UK’s far-right English Defence League top thug Tommy Robinson is all for Israel.
The best defence against real antisemitism is to fight to get rid of capitalism and imperialism, to fight Islamophobia, and to support Palestine.
Israeli propaganda likes to invoke the Holocaust. But the Zionist record during the Holocaust was criminal. Zionist Jewish Councils collaborated, Zionists in the West did nothing to save Jews. Their exclusive focus on was getting settlers for Palestine. Refugees entering the UK or the US were lost to the Zionist cause. If Jews couldn’t be settlers in Palestine, better for them to be martyrs in Europe. (See Tony Greenstein’s online article Zionism and Antisemitism and his recent book based on this, Zionism During the Holocaust.)
Lie 5. The two-state solution fraud
The often touted two-state “solution” — Israel and a Palestinian state — is a fraud. It is a deception, a fantasy and an acceptance of apartheid. I refer comrades to my recent Links article but I will go through the main arguments quickly:
Israel will never agree. If a Palestinian state were created it would be like one of apartheid South Africa’s “bantustans” — a fiction with no real independent existence.
The 800,000 settlers in the West Bank and East Jerusalem are not going to move. Any serious attempt to shift them would lead to civil war.
There is no territory left for a Palestinian state. The West Bank is covered with Israeli settlements and illegal “outposts”, special Israeli-only roads and industrial plants.
Israel would still exist with 1.8 million Palestinians living under apartheid (as Jonathan Cook’s excellent article in our pamphlet explains).
- There is no physical room for the settlement of the millions of returning refugees in a Palestinian micro-state (3 million outside and 2 million in Gaza and the West Bank). Moreover, Israel completely rejects the idea of any return of the refugees.
One state with equal rights for all
One state with equal rights for all is the only realistic and just solution.
What does it mean? Just like Australia! Of course, here there is racism and discrimination, especially against First Nations people, and great extremes in life choices between rich and poor, but in theory we all have equal rights.
South Africa and the end of apartheid is another case in point. There the Anglo-capitalist rulers realised apartheid was played out (due to the uprisings in the black townships, the military defeat in Angola, and BDS). They forced a change to a non-racial system and won over Mandela to the continued rule of the big corporations. A thin layer of blacks was allowed to join the elite and a layer of white workers lost their privileges. But the capitalist system continued and today a non-racial South Africa is a hell for the masses, formal equality notwithstanding.
But the situation in Israel is quite different.
Israel is not going to de-Zionise. There is no force within the
Israeli ruling class that wants that. And any idea of a "cold" transition to a non-Zionist state seems utterly fanciful.
How might it happen?
The Zionist settler regime must be destroyed. But how? By the resistance of the Palestinian people; and by solidarity around the world, especially in Western countries (pressure, BDS, etc.).
But this alone won't be enough. What is also needed are anti-imperialist revolutions in the Arab world and Turkey and Iran. Especially critical to Israel’s survival are Egypt (which controls the southern Gaza border) and Jordan (which is vital for getting goods and food into Israel).
New progressive regimes in these countries could make a compelling appeal to sections of the Israeli population as well as put enormous economic pressure on Israel.
This year, the March 21 Workers Weekly featured a very interesting debate between Tony Greenstein, Moshé Machover and others. Can any section of the Israeli masses play a part here? Tony Greenstein is very dubious. At the moment the Israeli population is overwhelmingly united behind Israeli supremacy (if not the Netanyahu regime). Only a very tiny minority is anti-Zionist and pro-Palestine.
Look at the Afrikaner working class in apartheid South Africa. It played no progressive role in the transition.
But cracks in the Zionist grip on the Israeli
working class might start to appear if, for instance, a Rojava-type
upheaval took place in say, Jordan or Egypt.
But in any case, the impetus for change can only come from outside (Palestinian resistance, international solidarity, and revolutions in the Middle East).