As Israel’s brutal blockade of the Gaza Strip continues and Palestinian despair intensifies, what should be the response of the left? By Ken Crisp

The desperate suffering of the people of Palestine was again brought to the world’s attention on January 23, as thousands of Palestinians broke through the border wall at the Rafah passage and streamed into Egypt to seek help and provisions. Reacting to an Israeli blockade of the Gaza strip, which cut off food and electricity supplies from the Hamas-controlled statelet, Palestinians spent the next 11 days defying the Egyptian army to try and seek some respite from the terror. This action also heaped embarrassment on Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak, who in February also faced huge strikes, tens of thousands strong, by textile workers opposed to his regime.

Clearly the terrible conditions of the Palestinians, which have stagnated or declined over the last 40 years, are primarily rooted in Israeli aggression and national oppression, and will not be significantly improved while they are denied the right to self-determination and their own independent, democratic state.

Aside from campaigning for this cause in general, it is clear that we must also mobilise against all acts of Israeli aggression against the Palestinians; agitate for rights for refugee populations in Egypt and Jordan; and support those fighting for social progress within Palestine. However, while every group on the far left – including those involved in NUS – has some position broadly in favour of Palestinian self-determination, their programmes for the Middle East and ideas of solidarity with the Palestinians are rather more tricky to negotiate.

The Socialist Workers Party supports a ‘one-state’ solution, making Israel and Palestine into a single secular unit – as expressed by their catch-all, non-offensive and therefore meaningless slogan, ‘Freedom for Palestine’. The Socialist Party in England and Wales believes that there will be no self-determination for Palestine this side of the revolution (‘for a socialist confederation of the Middle East’). The Alliance for Workers’ Liberty, whose guru, Sean Matgamna, describes himself as a “Zionist”, takes a ‘two states’ position, whereby an independent Palestinian state would be established alongside Israel. These different ‘solutions’ to the Israel-Palestine conflict are in reality abstract, with little relevance to the concrete situation on the ground and even less relation to a programme for the Middle Eastern left – in their own ways, each of these positions is utopian.

The SWP

The SWP, which controls Student Respect and the Stop the War Coalition, keenly supports the clerical-reactionary Hamas government in Palestine in addition to opponents of Israel such as Hezbollah, whom it lauded at the summer 2006 anti-war demonstration in London. Despite Israel’s defeat in the Lebanon conflict, all evidence shows that any suggestion that these islamists (even if armed to the teeth) could actually overthrow the Israeli state by military might is ludicrous. Furthermore, the SWP also leaves unanswered the question of why the mass of the Israeli population ever would, or should, give up their own democratic rights.

The SWP’s simplistic ‘one state’ analysis is so bereft of understanding of class or democratic rights that it is happy to give a platform to the holocaust-denying ‘anti-Zionist’, Gilad Atzmon, while its primary weapon for solidarity with Palestinians is a pathetic academic boycott, which seeks to inculpate all Israeli academia for the government’s offences.

While many academics do, no doubt, support Israeli chauvinism and the racist policies of Israeli universities which largely exclude Arab students, boycotting is ineffective and far from a tactic native to the labour movement. It is not explained why we should boycott Israeli academics but not those in America, China or, for that matter, the UK. The Socialist Workers Party makes no attempt whatsoever to bring class into the equation, although it will tell you that the fact that many of Hamas’s supporters are unemployed or otherwise poor is evidence that it is progressive!

The AWL

More or less the inverse of this is the AWL’s position, as expressed in NUS by Education Not for Sale. Claiming to take a ‘third camp’ position which organises workers against both the Palestinian and Israeli governments, the AWL’s main concern is reproaching “left anti-semites” and defending the right to self-determination of … Israel. Last year ENS voted at NUS conference to support a motion expressing the European Union’s position on anti-semitism, even though this sought to curb freedom of political expression and silence some (genuinely not anti-semitic) critics of Israel.

Such priorities rather miss the point – although it is correct to criticise the SWP’s denial of the right of Israel to exist, this task is of considerably less practical importance than resisting the denial of Palestinian self-determination, which is really happening now, day after day. Matgamna and his group, who think trade union and democratic rights in Iraq are wholly dependent on a continuing imperialist occupation, do not really have any focus on the Palestinian or Israeli left either. Indeed, when it comes to divisions within Palestinian society, the AWL is firmly in the camp of imperialism’s darlings, Fatah, claiming: “The secular, or more secular, or semi-secular, forces have every right to try to resist, defeat and crush clerical fascism.”

The Socialist Party in England and Wales (together with its Socialist Students) similarly has a formal ‘working class position': ie, making an abstract call for socialism, but again, since the SP has no ideas when it comes to a programme of struggle for this change, and the ‘demand’ is not intended for the ears of any specific people in Palestine, it has nothing of interest to tell us about the conflict. Shouting ‘Socialism!’ as the elixir to extremely complex national questions and deeply rooted hostilities will not suffice.

What is needed from the left is a much deeper and more daring approach. Our approach should call for self-determination for all peoples in the region, including an independent Palestinian state in the West Bank, Gaza and east Jerusalem. Crucially though, we should underline how there is not and cannot be a ‘West Bank’ or ‘Gaza strip’ solution to this question. We must shift the emphasis and struggle for the international unity of the Arab working class, including Iraqi, Syrian and other Arab workers, not least the relatively powerful, if politically compromised, Egyptian workers’ movement.

Re-articulating the so-called ‘Arab question’ is not to revive illusions in Arab nationalism or Nasserism, but to argue for our class programme of extreme democracy and socialism that can potentially unite over 200 million people to lead the fight against the imperialist destruction of the region and spark genuine revolutionary change for the region and the world.