Several months ago I went along to a very well attended local meeting organised by a left group on the assault on Gaza. Their house speaker was someone I’ve always found well informed and interesting, and the guest speaker has written authoritatively on the subject. There was little to disagree with in what they said.
What I hadn’t expected was the response to my contribution from the floor. It was the first time I’d ever been shouted down at a left meeting. My heresy was that, while supporting the Palestinian right to resistance and criticisms of their organisations’ strategic and tactical choices, socialists don’t have to agree with them. It should be self-evident that Hamas is anti-democratic and has a reactionary social and political programme for Palestinian society. Secular, feminist, socialist Palestinians would be considered rivals or enemies my them. It was a straightforward assertion of the need for a socialist perspective. As best I could make out through the barracking the objection was that we have no right to criticise.
This new book is a timely restatement by Joseph Daher of that basic idea and is very welcome as there seems to be no sign that the genocide in Gaza is likely to end soon – if anything the Israeli settlers seem hell bent on extending it to the West Bank.
Back when the meeting took place, we probably had a theoretical understanding of how brutal and murderous the Israeli state and its allies in the British and American governments could be but lacked the imagination to conceive of such a sustained campaign to eradicate Gaza and its population. It has exceeded all expectations both in the ongoing loss of life and the destruction of everything that makes society possible.
To get a measure of just how complicit the British and American governments are in the carnage, it is worth watching this documentary on their responses to Bosnia. Then as now it was felt that dead Muslims matter less than dead Europeans or Israelis, but eventually they stopped the Serb genocide in Bosnia. Today they send the weapons to speed it up in Gaza.
The value of Daher’s book is that it sets out the fundamentals both of the historic development of the issue with chapters on Antisemitism, Zionism, the Palestinian national movement, how Hamas developed and what its ideas are and, most importantly, what a working class solution might look like for Israelis, Palestinians and the region. It barely needs to be said that such a solution has nothing in common with what Hamas proposes.
Daher’s starting point is that Zionism is a colonial project which required and continues to require the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from their homes and land. The settler in this video certainly agrees with that, making the case of colonialists through the centuries that colonialism “gets a bad rap” and Palestinians and other colonised peoples need to be driven off their land. Even those Palestinians who are Israeli citizens feel the weight of this apartheid mentality and Daher cites a study which identifies at least 65 laws which mark them as inferior to Jewish citizens. Hence, for socialists the opposition to Zionism is “refusing the legitimization of institutional mechanisms of racial hierarchy”.
Hamas, as Daher observes, is not the same sort of formation as ISIS. However, both in their own way are political expression of counter-revolution with reactionary ideologies, programmes and practice. They have little in common with the original PLO programme of a democratic secular state in which Jews, Muslims and Christians could co-exist and be integrated. Socialists don’t support the sectarian killing of civilians but in Germany, the US and Britain we are seeing a real limiting of our right to express any form of solidarity with every form of Palestinian resistance.
A feature of the Israeli mass protests against Nethanyahu’s far right, apartheid government has been the absence of any meaningful expression of even sympathy for the Palestinians. Daher argues that reform of the Israeli state is impossible and the platitudinous “two state solution” is meaningless. He reasserts the socialist demand for a democratic, secular state in historic Palestine as a shared home for Israelis and Palestinians. At the moment this seems like an impossible aspiration, but it is the only message of hope for the peoples of the region in this time of an ongoing genocide.
Source >> Liam Redux
You can purchase a copy of Palestine and Marxism here
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