The Middle East

What is your general analysis and judgement about the Middle East, about the war in Lebanon and its end with the UN resolution on the use of the French and Italian troops?

The third invasion of Lebanon arose over the kidnapping of Israeli soldiers but that, in turn, was really a solidarity action of Hezbollah with the Palestinians, who face terrible persecution. Gaza is one giant prison camp. The economic situation in the Palestinian areas is unprecedented. Never in its history, even going back to the 1930s, has there been so much poverty, unemployment, suffering and desperation as there is now. Hezbollah started this action partly in solidarity with the Palestinian people. Israel has arrested and imprisoned 9,000 Palestinians. Also, Hezbollah fighters are in Israeli prisons. This action was used by Israel as a pretext for a preconceived plan to attack Lebanon and Hezbollah. The promise of the Israeli government of Olmert that the infrastructure of Lebanon would be thrown back 20 years has been partly realised in the colossal destruction inflicted by Israel.

However, this is the first time since the formation of the state of Israel that the Israeli ruling class and the Israel Defence Force (IDF) have faced such an open defeat on the field of battle. The IDF only got a couple of miles into Lebanon. It was confronted by determined resistance and was not able to overcome Hezbollah, signifying a defeat for the Israeli ruling class in general. It is also a defeat for US imperialism and its policies in relation to Lebanon because they had initiated a series of offensive actions up to the invasion, including the eviction of Syria from Lebanon. It was also a step towards further attacks on Syria. There was also speculation that the war in Lebanon was preparation for further military action against Iran, although that is a different question. We support the withdrawal of all foreign troops from Lebanon. The Lebanese people should have the right to decide their own fate.

The consequences of the war have been profound on both sides. First of all, Hezbollah, based upon the poor Shia masses, has a history which is somewhat different to other groups which have Islamic antecedents. It is different from Hamas, for instance, at the present time. There are some similarities in the sense that Hezbollah and Hamas are products of the Israeli ruling class’s aggression and attacks on Lebanon and the Palestinians. Hezbollah was created as a result of the Israeli intervention of 1982 and was actually formed in the Iranian embassy in Damascus. However, it would be wrong for us to conclude from this that Hezbollah is just a stooge of the Iranian regime. Of course, it has connections because of the Shia links but it is not just a ‘creature’ of Tehran. It has developed independently.

Members of the Lebanese Communist Party, for instance, and others on the left whose independent influence had declined came in behind Hezbollah as a resistance organisation. There have even been favourable statements recently from Nasrullah, the leader of Hezbollah, about the role of Che Guevara, of socialists, in combating imperialism. So it is not a typical Islamic organisation. In fact, it has been forced to drop the idea of an Islamic state in Lebanon as a result of the pressure it has come under and the support it received from groups other than the Shias, such as the Sunnis, Christians and so on.

In the course of the war, Hezbollah played, at least partially, the role of a legitimate organisation of Lebanese national resistance to imperialist intervention. This does not mean to say we give uncritical support to Hezbollah. It is not a socialist organisation. But in the war and afterwards its leadership was aware of the potential for increasing its support amongst the non-Shia sections of the population. Nasrullah welcomed the initial support of 80% of the Christians, Druze and other confessional groups in Lebanon. This has created a new situation within Lebanon. But unless Hezbollah develops in a class direction and puts forward a class and socialist alternative its development could be stalled. It has received widespread popularity by giving grants of $12,000 to those whose houses have been destroyed. Signs with ‘Made in America’ on bombed houses directly connect the bombing to US imperialism, a reflection in any case of the consciousness of the Lebanese population. Inevitably under capitalism, where there is a struggle for resources, the leaders of the different ethnic and religious groups will attempt to exploit the position for themselves, therefore temporary unity can break down. However, out of this present situation may come a new class consciousness. There were movements of workers on electricity prices before the war began; a class movement from below was developing in Lebanon. The role of socialists, Marxists and Trotskyists is to support legitimate actions of resistance of oppressed people against imperialist intervention but at the same time to raise the socialist and class issues.

We have made general points on the UN in our publications. It is no different in the modern era to the League of Nations, which Lenin and Trotsky opposed. We have to recognise that there is a feeling amongst many workers that, after the terrible experience of the Lebanese people, maybe a ‘buffer’ is needed between the belligerents to prevent a new outbreak of war. But it was very striking that there was no suggestion of the UN going in by Blair or Bush until the Israelis had bombed the hell out of Lebanon and were in the process of trying to realise their ‘war aims’. Blair did not even call for a ceasefire, which led to mass revulsion in Britain and probably was the tipping point in the clamour for his removal. He will be removed from office in any case in the next period. There was general disgust that he was not even prepared to call for a ceasefire when women and children were being killed and injured, when collective punishment was being inflicted on the people of Lebanon. The UN as a solution was rejected by the Lebanese people. UNIFIL had a presence in Lebanon before the war began in the so-called buffer zone. They did nothing to prevent the war. The UN could only be wheeled in once the combatants themselves had agreed that the war would not go any further at that stage.

Will the UN maintain the peace? No. Why should an ordinary worker in Britain or Italy, who would never think of turning to the employers to solve his or her problems, embrace the employers’ organisations internationally, like the UN, which is ultimately in the grip of US imperialism? In fact a recent article in the Financial Times appealed to the US, which finances the UN, to support it because it is “good for US business’, which is true. US imperialism will use the UN when it serves them, when it is acting on behalf of the so-called ‘international community’ as was the case in the Korean War. It will go outside the UN, as in the Vietnam War, when it cannot necessarily get support. Over Iraq, when it faced difficulties in the UN, it resorted to the ‘coalition of the willing‘, which is now the ‘coalition of the reluctant and very unwilling‘. The UN is not an alternative. We say the real solution or ‘buffer force’ in Lebanon is the Lebanese working class coming together with the Israeli working class to oppose the war because they are the people who suffer. In Israel, the Olmert government will collapse. In all probability it will be replaced be a more right-wing government, maybe led by Netanyahu. Another war is rooted in the situation, and it will be the ordinary Lebanese and Israeli people who will suffer. In that sense, the UN and its resolution, ratifying the deployment of French and Italian troops under the blue helmets and banner of the UN, are not the solutions to the problems of Lebanon. It is the working class in Israel, in Lebanon and throughout the Middle East as a whole, with the support of the working class in Europe and elsewhere, which holds the key to the situation.

Hezbollah

The second question is that you say you support the right of Hezbollah and the Lebanese people to resist but you criticise the use of the Katyusha rockets against Israeli towns. Some people could answer that there was such different strength of forces in this war that Hezbollah used what was possible – they had very intelligent rockets to attack government buildings and not Israeli towns. How can we decide on military tactics of organisations that concretely defend their own citizens in Lebanon?

First of all, we have to make it clear that Hezbollah and any other Lebanese national resistance forces have the right to militarily resist Israeli intervention. That goes without saying. It has the right to confront the IDF, to use rockets to attack Israeli military targets and bring down military aeroplanes. That is a legitimate part of a military resistance. Hezbollah and the Lebanese resistance in a war also have the right to attack specific military targets within Israel itself.

As far as military tactics are concerned, there were mistakes made by both sides which rebounded on them. After the kidnapping of Israeli troops, the Israeli government concluded that by targeting civilians, not necessarily Hezbollah, the suffering of the Lebanese would result in the alienation of Hezbollah from the population. The bombing would drive a wedge between Hezbollah and the Lebanese population. Exactly the opposite took place. The Lebanese population, rather than blaming Hezbollah, indicted the Israeli state and began to support Hezbollah as a legitimate representative of national resistance.

On the other hand, American correspondent Charles Glass, who was kidnapped by Hezbollah in the 1980s and is an informed writer on the Middle East and Vietnam, in an interview in the London Review of Books, made the point that Nasrullah probably also thought from his point of view that the 4,000 rockets fired by Hezbollah would produce a schism between the Israeli government and the Israeli working class. But it did not happen. The situation in Israel was a mirror image of what took place in Lebanon. The Israeli population more than in other wars in the first instance came behind the government – 90% support.

The second issue is the rockets that landed in Israeli Arab areas. They did not just target Israeli Jews (that is impossible) and even that would be wrong, but they struck Israeli Arabs. In the most mixed town in Israel, Haifa, the Israeli Arabs were seriously affected. There was a mass exodus from Haifa. In the aftermath of the war, some of the Israeli Arabs said: well, some of us were injured or died but that is part of the war. But in general, that is not the attitude. Quite apart from the Israeli Arabs, it drove the Israeli working class into the arms of their own ruling class. It was counterproductive just as terrorism in general is. We would not dispute Hezbollah’s right to resist but on that particular tactic we think they were wrong. It was indiscriminate and therefore wrong in that concrete situation.

The consequences in the rest of the Arab world are another matter. The Lebanese war has had a ripple effect throughout the Middle East. Originally, the feudal, semifeudal and capitalist rulers of Egypt and Saudi Arabia came out and attacked Hezbollah for allegedly provoking this war. This was mostly because they are Sunni, and Hezbollah was originally Shia and its main base still is. But this created a split between the ruling classes of the Middle East and the Arab ‘street’. The overwhelming majority of the Arab masses reasoned: how is it that a guerrilla force estimated at no more than 3,000 to 5,000 fighters has humbled the mighty Israeli military machine. Yet all the Arab armies with all the gold of the Gulf States, with all the potential power of Egypt and the others, could not have the same effect? It is the first time since 1948 that the Israeli military machine has been stopped in its tracks.

Israel and Palestine

In Italy, the far left has always had a not very good approach about the position ‘two peoples, two states’. Firstly, because the normal position, not only on the left but in general, is that the Palestinians need their own state. There is a big difference between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism, and in Italy there is an ideological attack against anti-Semitism. In the international revolutionary movement and also in the Fourth International after the Second World War when there was partition, the Fourth International was against it. There was a section in Palestine that voted against partition and was for one country with minority rights. So we have always supported the position of one state with rights for the minority in Palestine. We are Marxists and we believe that in a future world there will be no borders. The two states solution means not less but more states. Of course there is an important working class in Israel but the most important is in Egypt, so the question is: should socialists today support ‘two peoples two states’ and how do you reply to those who put forward a one-state solution?

The most important law of the dialectic is that truth is concrete. On the historical issues, it is indisputable that Trotskyism, starting from Trotsky himself, opposed a Jewish state being formed on the territory of Palestine. That was his general position in the inter-war period. However, he modified his stance after the Nazis’ persecution of the Jews became evident. A new situation had emerged. Trotsky was always flexible when taking account of new important factors. There was a feeling on the part of the Jewish population to get out of Germany and Europe and with this went increased support for the dream of a new homeland.

Under socialism, reasoned Trotsky, if the Jews wanted a state in, say, a part of Africa, with the agreement of the African people, or in Latin America, it could be considered but not in Palestine. Here, it would be a bloody trap for the Jews. It is amazing how this prediction has been borne out. There was an article in the Financial Times recently, on the Middle East, in which some bourgeois professor said: the most dangerous place for any Jew in the world today is in Israel. It is the bloody trap which Trotsky warned against. The Trotskyist movement opposed the establishment of a separate Jewish state in Israel because it was a wedge against the Arab revolution. Israel was set up as a result of the colonisation of Arab lands, by driving out the Palestinians and by using a mixture of radical and even ‘socialistic’, nationalist rhetoric directed towards a Jewish population who had escaped the nightmare of the Holocaust and the Second World War.

A state or a series of states can be established by the brutal displacement of peoples. Look at the removal of the Greek population from many parts of Asia Minor and of Turks from Greece following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. If you went back and redrew the map, you would now have huge exchanges of populations. As a result of a terrible crime against the Jews in Europe under Nazism-capitalism, this was then used as justification for a crime against the Palestinian people, That remains an indisputable historical fact.

Two states?

However, the reality now is that, in the course of time, a Jewish or Israeli national consciousness has been created. What do Marxists say to this? Just ignore the real situation and continue with the old position? The solution of the USFI, the Socialist Workers’ Party (SWP) and others on the left is a Palestinian state – which was originally our policy – of a unified Palestinian state with autonomous rights for the Jews. They put it forward in a bourgeois context. We always put it forward in a socialist framework. We do not have the position of a two-state solution on a bourgeois basis as do, for instance, some tiny groups. That is a utopian dream. If the Oslo accords gave only a small portion of historic Palestine to the Palestinian people, under Olmert’s proposals for a redivision of Palestine, which is now off the agenda, it would leave just 10% as a state for the Palestinians. It is a Bantustan. It is not a viable state as far as the Palestinians are concerned. There is no possibility of a viable capitalist two-state solution. An interim arrangement could not be ruled out but it is not a solution to the national problems of either the Palestinians or the Israelis. Nevertheless, the idea of a two-state solution, of a socialist Palestine and a socialist Israel within a socialist confederation of the Middle East is, in our opinion, a correct programmatic demand.

The question we have to ask ourselves is how are the legitimate aspirations of both societies to be met? In both populations there is now a national consciousness, irrespective of what has happened in the past. This is our starting point. Before the Lebanese war, the idea began to develop within the Palestinians that they were condemned to remain within some kind of ‘Greater Israel’. Some Palestinians then said: we want the vote, and this frightened the Israeli ruling class. They were concerned about a demographic time bomb which would change the character of the Israeli state. That is why Sharon and then Olmert decided they could not maintain the Greater Israel perspective – from the Mediterranean to the Dead Sea and incorporating Gaza – for one very simple reason. If the Palestinians were kept imprisoned in that state, they would then demand equal rights: the right to vote, one person one vote, as in South Africa under apartheid. Within a measurable period of time they could become the majority within Israel. So the dream of Likud of a Greater Israel had to be abandoned and Sharon and Olmert went over to the idea of repartition, which would give them a Jewish majority in an Israeli state and a truncated bourgeois state in what was left of Palestine. This was acquiesced to by the Bush regime.

We have to face the fact that the Palestinian and Jewish peoples have decided that they could not live together in one state. That is their consciousness. What does a Marxist and a Trotskyist say in this situation? You say that we do not want further states, we do not want the break up of unified states and, abstractly, that is true. But socialists and Marxists cannot compel different peoples to live in the same state. There is still a national question in the background in Italy, in Alto Adige. Who knows? That could come up in the future, That is like a shadow, which in some circumstances could take on substance. What would be our position? We may have to accept it It is possible that Spain could break up. It is possible that India could break up. India is not a unified state in many senses. It was unified in one sense for the first time by British imperialism but it is now made up of different ‘nationalities’. Lenin said we cannot build a new socialist, communist society on the basis of the slightest compulsion against a nationality, a group or a layer in society. Look at the lengths to which the Bolsheviks were prepared to go in order to convince opponents of their ideas by argument and example. They were even prepared, after the revolution, to say to the anarchists: well, we disagree with your proposal for ‘no state’ but we will consider giving you a certain part of Russia. You can establish an anarchist commune there. Then let us go through this experiment with you, which will convince you that your alternative of an anarchist ‘stateless’ society in the transition between capitalism and socialism would be seen to be utopian. The civil war and all its consequences meant that this idea was not carried out but the approach was valid. Lenin and Trotsky understood that the national question is similar to the land question. Giving small parcels of land to the peasants may represent a step backwards economically but they had no alternative in Russia in 1917 if they were to win the peasants. It is a case of one step back with the hope of two steps forward in the future.

If you had a two-state socialist alternative, the Israeli masses could approach the Palestinian masses and discuss with them: ‘We think this could be a solution’, or vice versa. A dialogue and discussion could be opened up. Approach the Israeli workers with the idea that they would be forcibly incorporated into a common state with Palestinians against their will and they will say: ‘We will fight to the death. We have nowhere else to go.’

This is not the situation of South Africa under apartheid. George Galloway, the Respect MP in London, has raised the idea that there could be a “de Klerk moment” in Israel. De Klerk represented the Afrikaners but he decided that the game was up; the whites had to hand over power, or the illusion of power, to the Africans. But that was only possible against the background of the collapse of Stalinism and also on the basis of the bourgeoisification of the African National Congress (ANC). The demographic relationship in South Africa in 1990 was seven non-whites to every white. That is not the situation in Israel-Palestine at this stage. The Israeli population will fight. Even the ‘peace camp’ will fight if their right to a separate state is under threat. The Israeli working class will fight if you threaten them that they will be driven into the sea. Therefore, transitional demands are necessary in order to approach the masses. We say: you decide what the borders of a future state will be under a socialist confederation. It is even possible, on the basis of a socialist revolution in the Middle East, that the Israelis and the Palestinians would then decide to live together in one state with autonomy for both. We cannot say beforehand. But the dialectic of the situation is if you try and impose one state on them now, it will be rejected.

Israel is a running sore in the region. A key question in the Middle Eastern revolution is how to split the Israeli workers away from the ruling class, Challenge them, threaten the idea of an Israeli ‘homeland’, then there is no chance of achieving this. The Israeli state is a creation of imperialism. But an indigenous arms industry has developed, technical industries, etc., and they can hold the Arab population at bay almost indefinitely, or as long as capitalism survives. What hope is there for the Palestinian masses on the basis of this situation? There is no alternative on a capitalist basis. A two-state capitalist solution is no solution at all. It will result in an abortion of a state. A two-state socialist solution, the borders of which we cannot define in advance but which would be voluntarily and democratically defined by the Palestinian and Israeli people, is a very important weapon for approaching these workers. We accept that many Arab workers, to begin with, will have the attitude that the Israeli state has to be dismantled. It is an imperialist wedge against the Arab revolution. But once it is posed correctly, it can be accepted. It is noticeable that, before the current war, the population in Palestine had reluctantly concluded that a two-state solution was the alternative and the Israeli population had come to the same conclusion. But now, if it means a new border, with only 10% of historic Palestine in a new ‘state’, that is a different situation.

On the national question, Lenin’s writings are amongst the treasures of humanity, as Trotsky put it. But the national question today is immeasurably more complicated. For Marxists, it has two sides. We are opposed to bourgeois nationalism, which seeks to divide the working class. We are for the maximum unity of the working class across borders, continents and worldwide but at the same time we oppose the forcible incorporation of distinct nationalities into one state against their will. We would support, for instance, the people of Quebec if they voted by a majority in a referendum to separate from Canada. We are also in favour of an independent socialist Scotland. But if, in Canada, the Quebec bourgeois then refuse to accept the rights of the minorities within an independent Quebec, we would oppose them. Some of the Quebec nationalists are for the independence of Quebec but are against the rights of the native peoples. We oppose that.