The USA promises a "roadmap" for Israel/Palestine, but has not published it. The "hawks" who pushed this war, and now hold the high ground in Washington, have the same sort of ideas on the issue as Ariel Sharon. Any "Palestinian state" they support will be a Bantustan, a long way down the road.
The anti-war movement should feed into renewed mobilisation round the simple, clear demand that Israel get out of the occupied territories now and let the Palestinians form a state of their own with the same rights as Israel.
The basic answer is a democratic, socialist federation of the whole region, enabling the massive oil riches to be used for the common good rather than to enrich monarchies and despots, with the right to self-determination for every nationality, including the Palestinians, the Israeli Jews, and the Kurds.
Unfortunately the ideologues of the anti-war movement have wrongfooted themselves here, too, by adopting the add-on slogan "Freedom for Palestine" in order to facilitate a "popular-front" alliance with the Muslim Association of Britain (British offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood, the largest, oldest and richest Islamic-fundamentalist party in the Arab world). "Freedom"? Isn't that vague enough for almost anyone to support? Yes, but the Brotherhood means by it an Islamic state from the Jordan to the sea, where Jews would have no national rights but only those of a religious minority.
In coming years, if the Iraqi workers' movement revives, one of its main foes within Iraqi politics may well be Islamic fundamentalism. To help that movement effectively, we will need to understand what has been wrong about the anti-war movement's alliance with fundamentalism.
