Socialist Fight’s position on Israel/Palestine; the Jewish Question

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What slogans for the struggle?

Whilst we are for a multi-ethnic workers’ state we are sensitive to the role that democratic demands might play in the revolutionary struggle. Demands for a constituent assembly and the fight for secular democratic rights are very likely to play a prominent part in the revolution but we know that these must be subordinate to the goal of overthrowing capitalism in Israel/Palestine but also in the entire region of the Middle East. Therefore the governmental slogan and the demands that lead up to it are important. For a Revolutionary Constituent Assembly is the correct mobilising slogan to draw together all the elements and nationalities in the region to begin the battle for workers councils and a soviet government. We reject the ultra-leftist notion that a revolutionary programme cannot contain such democratic demands as part of its whole strategy. Such a position rejects the attempts by the revolutionary party to relate to the current state of the class consciousness of the working class and the fight to bring it into the struggle which alone opens it up to the revolutionary programme as a whole.

Smash of the settler-colonial state of Israel!

For a revolutionary Constituent Assembly!

For Workers Councils united across religious and ethnic divides!

For a Multi-ethnic Workers State of Palestine in a Socialist Federation of the Middle East!

For Workers Sanctions against Israel!

Sever all links between the Histadrut and all international trade union organisations!

Defends Hamas against the Zionist state!

For the military victory of the anti-imperialist guerrilla organizations Hamas and Hezbollah in Palestine, Lebanon and Syria!

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It is our contention that the “Jewish Labour movement” and its handmaiden the ‘Labour Friends of Israel’ are in fact racist, communalist organisations that exist to incite racial hatred against Arabs within Labour and to build support for murdering and ethnic cleansing of Palestinian civilians. Far from proscribing anti-racist, socialist organisations such as Socialist Fight, Labour should be proscribing these racist currents, which are a fifth column within Labour for Israel and Israel-supporting currents, and to put it bluntly a bunch of far-right murdering racists.

The ‘Friends of Israel’ groupings work closely with each other. This was shown in the witchhunt against comrade Downing, when David Cameron (Conservative Friends of Israel) and his shady friend Guido Fawkes (Paul Staines) exhibited such synergy with our own ‘Friends of Israel’ (see the Hutton investigation quoted above) in demanding comrade Downing’s expulsion. These organisations in Britain are smaller versions of AIPAC in the United States, whose power is feared by politicians of all parties. As shown by the fact that both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump attended its recent convention, and engaged in a kind of Dutch Auction as to who could express the most extreme pro-Israel policies, including things like recognising Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, and tearing up Obama’s deal with Iran with a view to military attack.

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This is also very evident in the Tory Party in the UK, whose right-wing in the pre-war period was anti-semitic and pro-Hitler. The leader of the section of the right of the Tory party who was most consistently anti-Hitler, Winston Churchill, was a notorious anti-semite. Their exact equivalents today are philo-semitic, pro-Israel and anti-Arab. And with the phenomena of Blairism, where considerable elements of the Labour right are politically very similar to Tories, the consequences for Labour are also not hard to deduce. We believe that this is one important reason why the Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn has been targeted for smears, disinformation and destabilisation by right-wingers within Labour who are in many cases ‘Friends of Israel’ and work with the Tories and their media (which also happen, not coincidentally, to be pro-Zionist), again as demonstrated in the Hutton document quoted above. And the witchhunt against Socialist Fight and Gerry Downing is a key part of that.