Dear Comrades,
 
In this letter I want to touch on the Revolutionary perspective for Palestine. Clearly this is a major question for revolutionaries in this region. Your perspective is two socialist states that will fuse some time after the socialist revolution. May I ask what makes you think that this is the road to the socialist revolution? Clearly you have the same position as the former militant Ted Grant Tendency (and “Socialist Struggle” the CWI section in Israel) whom you characterized as a right centrist. I assume that your reject the notion of a world Jewish nation. To argue for two states (socialist or not) you must assume that the Zionist movement created a new Israeli-Jewish nation in Palestine. May we ask on what ground you assume that, when the Zionist movement and the Israeli state deny the existence of such a new nation? In case you are not aware of it, in the Israeli ID you cannot insert in reply to the question about nationality the term Israeli, but only Jewish. In other words, the term Israeli is not included in the list of the existing nations around the world in the office of the Ministry of Interior.

We do not accept the argument that the whites in South Africa constitute a separate nation for the same reason we reject the idea that the Israeli Jews are a nation. We are dealing with settler colonialists in both cases, with cultural and languages rights, but not with a nation. It is the Palestinian national struggle against Zionism and imperialism that is in the forefront of the revolutionary struggle in the Middle East and the role of the class conscious workers is to fully support this struggle while at the same time struggling for an Arab-Jewish working class revolutionary leadership to lead this struggle. 

For long this heroic struggle remained in the hands of the bourgeois and petit bourgeois. In that way it cannot win. A key demand in this struggle is the right of the Palestinians refugees to return to their homes, from which they were expelled. The two states “solution” is in opposition to this key demand. To avoid the revolutionary power of this transitional demand the reformist Communist party of Israel calls for a limited return restricted by agreement between Zionism and Palestinian authority supervised by the UN. A truly reformist perspective.

Once the working class will take state power, do you think it will divide the country or accept its partition? Why?  Do you conceive that the Arab-Jewish workers in power will divide the country along the existing lines of 80% of the land to the Jews and 20% to the native Palestinians? Why? Where according to your notion the borders will be fixed? You should be aware that in reality the Zionists erased even the Green Line that existed after the 1967 War. 

CG 

Yossi Schwartz
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The Israeli Government of War Crimes and Budget Cuts Has Fallen

The Need of the Hour: An Organization Independent from Zionism
The immediate reason for the crisis of the Israeli government coalition was the clash between the former Labor Party leader Ben Eliezer and the Likud party leader Sharon over the division the budget—an economic declaration of war against the working masses, the poor and even the Jewish and Arab petty bourgeoisie, for which both parties and all the other members of this government are fully responsible. The Likud blamed Mitzna, the newly elected leader of the Labor Party, for the crisis, arguing that Ben Eliezer was forced to compete with him in making leftist poses. In fact Mitzna, a former general and Haifa major, is in no conceivable sense of the word a leftist, but his campaign does reflect the fear of the capitalists’ servants from the mass struggle against this government of war and economic crimes. Not that Mitzna is ready to stand at the head of this struggle; on the contrary, he will do everything to liquidate it. But his victory in the Labor primaries is an echo of that struggle, its political shadow within bourgeois Zionist circles. In actual fact, Mitzna is just a bearded Barak. If Sharon had illusions that with the departure of the Labor Party from the government he was going to receive automatic support from the settlers’ right, he proved wrong: the settler Liberman demanded a price that Sharon was unwilling to pay and as a result the government fell apart.

The deeper reason for the fall of the Israeli government is the crisis of Zionist society, a society headed by war criminals, where every fifth person and 28% of the children live under the poverty line, and whose main production articles are weapons and cannon fodder for the US oil companies. If in the past the state of Israel was a golden cage for the Jews with a highly developed social welfare system, now the gold is gone and only the bars of the Zionist death trap remain.

Unfortunately this government of grotesque murderers and plunderers did not fall as a result of the direct insurrectionary action of the masses, but as a by-product of the world economic crisis of capitalism. The productive forces, choking under the strait jacket of the imperialist relations of production, threaten humanity with new and ever more destructive wars and famines, and at the same time open the possibility of new socialist revolutions. In this country the crisis of capitalism raises above all the possibility of a mass transfer of Palestinians against the background of an imperialist war of aggression on Iraq, and on the other hand the possibility of a common Arab-Jewish struggle against their class oppressors, joining the demands of the Jewish workers for bread and work with the demands of Palestinians for national liberation and the return of the refugees.

The most advanced section of the masses in this country is unquestionably the Palestinian workers, who have no illusions about the character of the Zionist state. The Jewish workers must join hands with them if they want to free themselves from the chains of Zionism and succeed in their class and social struggles. But in order to do that they need an independent Arab-Jewish workers’ party based on a program of struggle against the regime of exploitation and leading to a workers’ government.

Among the Jews there is no workers’ party, not even a reformist one. All the existing parties are Zionist and represent the interests of the capitalists. On the other hand, the Arab parties, including the Communist-Party-led front Hadash, act almost without exception as conveyor belts linking the Palestinian masses with the Zionist state an imperialism: that is the real meaning of the “two states for two people” slogan.

We believe that the election period should be used to convey the message that we need an Arab-Jewish Workers’ Party independent from all fractions of Zionism, from Efi Eitam and Sharon to Shimon Peres and Mitzna. An organization that will fight for decent wages and unemployment compensations, for free public services, etc. but at the same time will raise demands linking the social struggles with the Palestinian national liberation struggle and the anti-imperialist struggles in the Middle East. Demands which go beyond the framework of the Zionist bourgeois state, such as the defeat of the war against the Iraqi people, the full implementation of the right of return for the refugees, nationalization under workers’ control of closing factories, reduction of the working week without reducing wages and social conditions.

The activists able to create this organization exist, but are now dispersed among the Arab parties, Hadash, the Histadrut, the democratic and social organizations fighting against occupation and the economic policy of the government. We ask Hadash to take the initiative of creating an independent workers’ party based on the above- mentioned program, able to offer a political alternative to the masses looking for a way out of the present swamp of blood and misery. We will fully support the formation of such an organization and will strive to convince its militants of the correctness of our program. 

If the leadership of Hadash boycotts the creation of an independent workers’ party, we will ask their militants to force their leaders to commit themselves not to support Mitzan or any other Zionist hangman. We condemn the Hadash campaign against Abnaa ElBallad and other comrades calling to boycott the elections, describing them as supporters of Liberman, as a return to the Mafiosi methods of Stalin.

If the leadership of Hadash refuses to be independent of the Zionist bourgeoisie, calls to support Mitzna or any other Zionist candidate, and does not fulfill its duty of struggling everywhere against the transfer plans which are being openly discussed in Zionist circles, we will call to boycott the elections due to the lack of any political alternative. If the danger of a war against the Iraqi people becomes imminent, we will demand from the leadership of Hadash and the Arab parties to stop immediately the participation in the election campaign and concentrate all our forces in organizing the masses to defeat the imperialist aggression.