The SWP and Israel
Cliff first appeared in the international Trotskyist press in 1938-9 as “L Rock”: the rock would grow into a cliff. He contributed to a discussion on Palestine in the American Trotskyist publication New International. He was obviously a young man trying to think things through. It was an inconclusive discussion, but in 1938-9 he was in favour of the right of Jewish migration. He would criticise himself on that much later, in an interview in the SWP magazine in 1987. In late 1944 Cliff wrote an open letter, published in the RCP journal Workers’ International News, to the delegates at the Labour...