Main NI Index | Main Newspaper Index
Encyclopedia of Trotskyism | Marxists’ Internet Archive
From Socialist Worker, No. 114, 22 March 1969, p. 2 & 3.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
THE STRUGLE of the peoples of Asia, Africa and Latin America against imperialism is part of the struggle against world capitalism. The Middle East is an important section of this fight.
But the struggle of the Arab people for freedom is complicated by the existence of Zionism and its offspring – the state of Israel.
|
|
A series of human tragedies brought the Jews to Palestine – pogroms in Tsarist Russia, persecution in Eastern Europe and the holocaust of Nazism.
When they reached, Palestine, they found it was inhabited by Arabs. Whatever the motivation that brought the Jews there, an increasing conflict between Zionist settlements and the Arabs was unavoidable.
Zionism built a self-sufficient economy, closed to the Arab population. The employment of Arab workers has been blocked.
In Tel Aviv, with more than 500,000 inhabitants there is not one Arab worker, nor one Arab inhabitant.
In the whole Kibbutz movement there is not one Arab. Not one Arab child is allowed into any Jewish school or kindergarten.
And the Arab peasant, out of sheer poverty, was ready to sell his produce for a much lower price than was asked by Jewish agriculturists, the Zionists prevented the fellahs from coming and selling their produce in the Jewish market.
When, under pressure of hunger, a fellah dared to break the boycott, he was beaten and his goods were spoiled.
Every member of the Zionist Trade Union Federation had to pay two special compulsory levies: 1. ‘For Jewish labour’ – funds for organising pickets, etc. against the employment of Arab workers, and 2. ‘For Jewish produce’ – for organising the boycott of Arab produce.
The discrimination against the Arabs is clear from the fact that Israeli state funds for development in the Arab part of Israel are not 10 per cent per person of those in the Jewish part.
In opposing the local Arab population, Zionism had to try and. serve the ruling imperialist power. The guiding principle of Zionist diplomacy has always been to affiliate itself with the world power whose sphere of influence was Palestine.
Herzl, the founder of political Zionism, courted mainly the Turkish Sultan and the German Kaiser. After World War I, Zionism was orientated toward British imperialism. After World War II, Zionism switched its attachment to American imperialism.
Zionism has been subsidised heavily by Western capitalism.
You need only think of the hundreds of millions of reparations paid by West Germany. This is not the product of Bonn’s contrition over Nazi crimes towards the Jews – after all 20 million Russians were killed by the Nazis and still not a single Mark was paid to Russia by Bonn!
It is because Washington willed it that Bonn paid it to Israel. Between 1949 and 1964 nearly $6,000m came to Israel via German reparations, economic aid from the United Stategovernment and from Jews in America and elsewhere. (S. Zarhi, Peace and the Israeli Economy, New Outlook, Tel Aviv, February 1967).
This sum comes to some $3,000 per head of population in Israel. It is a fantastic sum.
Israel naturally supports and is supported by imperialism everywhere. It supported the French war in Algeria during the years 1954–61, supplied arms to the Portuguese government in Angola and went as far as to accept feelers from the Saigon government, which asked for advice on how to control the Vietcong.
You may well wonder what Moshe Dayan was doing in South Vietnam at the beginning of 1967 when he stayed there as a newspaper correspondent. Was it to learn the use [words missing] or was to teach the Americans and Marshal Ky the use of Palmach and Nahal?
Socialists and revolutionaries everywhere must support the underprivileged, oppressed Arab workers and peasants in their resistance to imperialism and its ally Zionism.
This does not mean that all Arabs are revolutionary or anti-imperialist. The Kings of Saudi Arabia, the ruler of Kuwait and other Persian Gulf Gulf dukedoms and King Hussein of Jordan are dutiful allies of imperialism.
But even the ‘anti-imperialist’ Nasser or the Ba’ath rulers of Syria and Iraq are not more consistent, in fighting US and British imperialism than Chiang Kai-Shek was in fighting Japanese imperialism.
Neither Nasser nor the Ba’ath can ever become revolutionary, can ever grow beyond their middle-class social basis of the army officers, civil servants and teachers, sons of merchants and prosperous artisans, better-off peasants and small-scale landowners.
Because of its very shallow roots in the masses, Nasserism and the Ba’ath are very brittle, very prone to factionalism (hence the breakup of the United Arab Republic – the secession of Syria from Egypt – in 1961, the bitter conflicts with Kassem’s Iraq, and so on).
Because of its social base Nasserism and the Ba’ath vacillate between republicanism and the obscene embrace of ‘our Arab brother’ King Hussein of Jordan, or King Feisal of Saudi Arabia. Nasserism also vacillates between an attack on the ‘Moslem Brotherhood’, including the execution of a number of their leaders, and Islamic fervour.
One of the main lessons from the collapse of Ben Bella in Algeria and Kassem in Iraq (as well as Nkrumah in Ghana and Sukarno in Indonesia) is that the bonapartist regimes in backward countries, trying to balance between the working class and the peasantry on the one hand, and imperialism on the other, as well as between the Great Powers (the policy of ‘positive neutralism’), are extremely unstable.
For a really successful anti-imperialist revolutionary struggle, Nasserism and the Ba’ath are found wanting: they are far too removed from the masses.
For such a struggle it is necessary for the national revolution to be intertwined with the social revolution, for the workers to take over the oil fields, factories, railways, etc. and for the peasants to carry out a revolutionary land reform,
Before the June War in 1967 there were a quarter of a million Arabs under Israeli rule (some 1,000,000 refugees have left, or were driven out of their homes in the 1948 war).
Since the war there are nearly two million Arabs under Israeli rule. And their resistance is growing daily.
Until now the two main organisations which led the resistance movement have not been very effective, nor consistently anti-imperialist. Their organisations are Al-Fatah and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.
Both have an agreement - overt or otherwise – with the existing Arab regimes on not intervening in their internal affairs.
It is true the Popular Front uses the language of Mao, Che and Castro, but its tacit agreement with King Hussein of Jordan and the Ba’ath of Syria show its real vacillating nature. Al-Fatah is very heavily subsidised by the Arab oil rulers.
There is probably no place where Stalin’s ‘theory’ of stages – which separates the national from the social revolution – proves more bankrupt day after day than in the Arab East.
To give an example: one of the weakest links in the chain of imperialism in the Middle East is Iraq. The Ba’ath. regime that has not touched the imperialist oil companies at all is exposed in the bloody suppression of the Kurds and in the public hanging of ‘spies’ (after a secret ‘trial’).
To expropriate the oil companies one has to unite Arabs and Kurds, as the Kurds are on top of the oil fields of Mosul and Kirkuk.
If the language of Che and Castro is being used by the Popular Front while it follows the opportunist policy of Stalin, Nasser and the Ba’ath, Dayan is forcing the Arab resistance movement into more and more radical channels.
The expansion of Israel in the Six Days’ War brought it into an impasse: the two million Palestinians are like a bone in the throat of Zionism – it cannot be swallowed or spat out.
For military-political reasons, Israel dare not withdraw from the occupied area. Neither can it assimilate the Arabs. Resistance is growing daily.
The attacks by Israeli forces on Beirut airport at the beginning of the year were nothing but a sign of weakness, an act of desperation.
The Zionist oppression of the Palestinian Arabs and the continuation of imperialist exploitation of the Arabs all over the Middle East will force the movement into a more and more revolutionary path.
The 1948 victory of Israel led to the overthrow of King Farouk and the feudal landlords of Egypt. The Israeli victory of 1956 led to the overthrow of the Nuri Said feudal regime in Iraq.
Now every day of survival of Israel as an expansionist and segregationist state exposes the spinelessness of the middle class regimes of Nasser and the Ba’ath.
The self-reliance of the guerrillas will increase and the movement will spread beyond the boundaries of occupied Palestine.
The Arab workers and peasants who suffered oppression over a long period of time need both social and national Revolutionary policies. National emancipation and social emancipation are inseparable.
Only when the workers take the key industries and the peasants take into their hands the land, can a really victorious struggle against imperialism and its hangers on be carried out, however long, bloody and tortuous this struggle may be.
The only possible solution to the needs of the Middle East is the workers’ and peasants’ revolution aimed at the establishment of a socialist republic, with full Rights for Jews, Kurds and all national minorities.
Main Socialist Worker Index | Main Newspaper Index
Encyclopedia of Trotskyism | Marxists’ Internet Archive
Last updated on 16 January 2021