Israel/Palestine

See our publications on Israel/Palestine, and articles on fighting left antisemitism.

Debate Part 1: A Letter from the Editors of Against the Current: Nakba One, Two, Three?

The Jewish-Palestinian Arab conflict is one of the most complex political questions that confront the serious Marxist left. We publish an editorial from the US publication May-June 2007 issue of Against The Current , and a response from Sean Matgamna . In sheer magnitude, the Palestine partition of 1947 wasn’t even that year’s most disastrous division of a former British colonial possession. The partition of the Indian subcontinent — between India and the new Muslim state Pakistan — produced roughly as many deaths, in horrific communal violence between Muslims and Hindus, as the numbers of...

Debate Part 2: Reply — Pandering to the “absolute anti-Zionists”

Dear comrades, I want to discuss the “Letters from the Editors”, entitled “Nakba One, Two, Three?” , in the May-June 2007 issue of Against The Current . It seems to me that one of the fundamental responsibilities of those who fight for a rational, working-class, socialist, and consistently democratic approach to the Jewish-Arab conflict is to work to counter the demonisation of Israel and the pervasive falsification of the history of the Israeli Jews, to banish it to the dunghill to which history has consigned the other products of Stalinism. Your editorial letter manages to combine politics...

Anti-Zionism and anti-semitism on the left: a debate - Paul Foot, Jim Higgins, Sean Matgamna

By Sean Matgamna The main bulk of this item is a debate on Israel and the Palestinians in the mid-1990s in Workers' Liberty , between the late Jim Higgins and myself. It was triggered by an article in Socialist Worker by Paul Foot and my response to it in Workers' Liberty . Some of the material in my pieces has been incorporated in the AWL pamphlet Two Nations, Two States , and it did not occur to me that there would be any point in collecting and republishing the exchange until an admiring citizen with a lopsided notion of debate and little discernible interest in politics put two of Jim...

The "Zionophobes" that pushed even the SWP to resign in protest

Kelvin branch of the Scottish Socialist Party (SSP) has submitted a motion to the 2007 SSP conference calling on the party to support the Scottish Palestine Solidarity Campaign and its campaign for a boycott of Israel. Unremarkable? Not when you know about the SPSC. The SP’S’C - or better, SP’S’C, because there’s not much "solidarity" involved - marked Holocaust Memorial Day last year with readings from Jim Allen’s play "Perdition" which gave dramatic expression to the notion that Israel owes its existence to Nazi-Zionist collaboration in the Holocaust). And it hosts Gilad Atzmon (who believes...

For the Palestinians, not political Islam.

About three hundred people marched through central London on Sunday 7 October as part of the “Al Quds Day” march organised by the Islamic Human Rights Commission. In fact, the IHRC has nothing to do with human rights and everything to do with rabidly right-wing political Islam. As the Awaaz/South Asia Watch group, which campaigns against all varieties of religious fundamentalist politics originating in South Asia, puts it, the IHRC is one of a number of UK Islamist organisations which “adhere to the ideology of the ‘absolute rulership of the clerics’ and ‘Islamic government’ advocated by...

The shameful face of Al Quds day

ON the Al Quds march, I held two placards. One with a Palestinian flag and “Free Palestine”, and the other with a photograph of a 16-year-old girl, Atefeh Rajabi Sahaaleh, who was executed in 2004 by the Iranian regime for “crimes against chastity”, having been sexually abused since childhood. As soon as I turned up, I was subjected to a barrage of violent, threatening abuse from large sections of the crowd. Some chanted: “Tatchell is a Zionist, Tatchell is a paedophile. Get out! Get out! Get out!” On six occasions, some of the protesters tried to physically attack me and the Workers’ Liberty...

Israel, Palestine and workers’ solidarity

When it comes to Israel/Palestine and the Middle East more generally, as with so many international issues, much of the revolutionary left prefers to compete to see who can be the shrillest “anti-imperialist” rather than seriously analysing the politics of the region from a class-struggle perspective and identifying working class forces with which they can make practical solidarity. The current leaders in the “anti-imperialist” stakes are the Socialist Workers’ Party (SWP) who are in fact so anti-imperialist that they have become positive supporters of Hamas and Hezbollah — religious...

Al Quds counter-demo

On 7 October, supporters of the Iranian regime are organising an “Al Quds Day” demonstration in London (assembling 12:30 at Marble Arch). This year, the march is backed not only by the Muslim Association of Britain, George Galloway, Yvonne Ridley, Hizb-ut Tahrir, etc., but also by Respect and the 1990 Trust (in which Ken Livingstone's adviser Lee Jasper is prominent). Below is an (abridged) text from the committee which has organised counter-demonstrations against similar marches in Berlin. In 1979, Ayatollah Khomeini called for an annual event on the last Friday of the Islamic fast month of...

International workers’ news round up: Iran, China, Palestine

Iran Free Salehi and Ossanlou Now! A demonstration to secure the freedom of imprisoned worker activists and support the independent labour movement in Iran was about to take place as we went to press. The protest was due to take place on 9 August outside the Iranian embassy in London and at other embassies around the world. It is part of a week of solidarity with workers in Iran, called by exiled Iranian workers’ organisations and the International Transport Workers’ Federation. Salehi was imprisoned in April this year and Ossanlou arrested in July. Many other workers were arrested on May Day...

Help Fatah fight Hamas

David Broder claims in Solidarity 3/115 that “Fatah is simply a bourgeois political party drenched in anti-semitism” and so, it seems, he is unable to distinguish Fatah, clearly and sharply, from Hamas. Certainly Fatah and Hamas think there are big enough differences between them to fight a civil war. But, perhaps, we should conclude that from our particular, working-class point of view there is little to choose between Fatah and Hamas? Given Fatah supports Two States, and Hamas has a reactionary programme for the destruction of Israel, there is a big difference in policy between the groups...

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