#the way Kenya was an option for the israeli settlement

[ohello0]

Yes I’ve seen the israeli blackface video

Yes I’ve seen zionists saying that calling it and the people in it racist is antisemitic

No further comments or questions at this time

[socialismwithasmile]

Three Points on Palestine

By J. R. Markin

1)    Palestine is an oppressed nation subjugated by a settler-colonial project on behalf of the Israeli Bourgeoisie with aid from American Imperialism. The current status-quo was built for this class and benefits them. The Israeli Bourgeoisie will never enter into any significant negotiations or peace talks as long as they hold the upper hand. Only national self-determination of this oppressed nation can ever bring a close to this conflict.

2)    The Israeli working-class has a material interest in continued settlement of Palestinian territory that has not yet been brought under Israeli control. As long as this “frontier” is open, this will seriously compromise the ability of the Israeli working class to participate in Palestinian national liberation struggle. The entire body of the Israeli public, (excluding Ultra-Orthodox Jews and Palestinians) also functions as a “reserve army” for the IDF. The very form of Israeli civil society denies national self-determination to the Palestinian people. Any form of working class internationalism that bolsters this civil society actively hampers the national liberation struggle of Palestinians and thus maintains the entente between the Israeli working and capitalist classes, in the long run actually harming the Israeli working class.

3)    The Palestinian national bourgeoisie, who would traditionally organize the national liberation struggle benefit from the status-quo and show little desire to achieve any form of national liberation. The state that represents the Palestinian national bourgeoisie, the PA is an Israeli sub-state that works with Israeli security in the region and is payed for by Israel. The actions of the PA have on multiple occasions demonstrated that the Palestinian ruing-class does not even have a proper “national consciousness” that understands the struggle in terms of one subjugated Palestinian people, in “Israel-Proper,” Gaza, the West Bank, and Exile vs the settler colonial apartheid state. Instead they seem to be more interested in infighting with Hamas in Gaza than struggling for independence from Israel.

 Therefore:

         Since the Israeli Capitalist and Working classes and the Palestinian capitalist class all benefit from the existing status quo, at least in the short term, the Palestinian working class is the only class capable of achieving national liberation and thereby resolving the contradictions at play in this conflict. Only the Palestinian working class taking power in its own name has the material self-interest to implement a workable solution to the “conflict.” As the Palestinian Bourgeois continue to hold back the Palestinian working classes from national struggle it will inevitably sharpen class contradiction within the society. Thus, unless there is a serious shift in the circumstances in Palestine, national liberation will come with socialism and the self-emancipation of the Palestinian and Israeli working classes simultaneously, or it will not come; the national revolution will be the social revolution.

 Further Issues:

What should Palestinian National Self-Determination look like?

This question can only be answered by the Palestinian working class itself. However, there are several reasons to think that it is not possible for full democratic freedom to exist in a Palestine that remains partitioned between Jews and Non-Jews. Unlike previous settler colonial states there is nowhere for Jewish Israelis to go. This is not Algeria or Kenya where settlers can simply be shipped back to their imperial homelands, the vast majority of Israeli Jews have no homelands to return to. There have always been Jews in Palestine and there will always be Jews in Palestine, saying otherwise is tantamount to calling for genocide or ethnic cleansing. Only a resolution to the problem that includes the Israeli working class is capable of resolving both the problem of Palestinian national liberation and protecting the Jewish community of Israel at the same time. As Omar Barghouti writes,

The only way that we can exercise our right to self-determination, without imposing unnecessary injustice on our oppressors, is to have a secular, democratic state where nobody is thrown into the sea, nobody is sent back to Poland, and nobody is left suffering in refugee camps. We can coexist ethically with our inalienable rights given back to us, and everyone’s and every community’s rights are safeguarded and promoted.

Thus, a single democratic worker’s state in Palestine, appears the only workable option.  

 What should be the role of the International Working Class?

As stated before the national liberation of the Palestinian people can only be carried out by the Palestinian working class. As Lenin writes in a pamphlet on the subject of national liberation:

The proletariat of the oppressing nations cannot confine itself to the general hackneyed phrases against annexations and for the equal rights of nations in general, that may be repeated by any pacifist bourgeois. The proletariat cannot evade the question that is particularly “unpleasant” for the imperialist bourgeoisie, namely, the question of the frontiers of a state that is based on national oppression. The proletariat cannot but fight against the forcible retention of the oppressed nations within the boundaries of a given state, and this is exactly what the struggle for the right of self-determination means. The proletariat   must demand the right of political secession for the colonies and for the nations that “its own” nation oppresses. Unless it does this, proletarian internationalism will remain a meaningless phrase; mutual confidence and class solidarity between the workers of the oppressing and oppressed nations will be impossible

In this vein it is the task of the workers of the world to fight for Palestinian national liberation under the direction of the Palestinian people. Currently that means active support by all working class movements for the Palestinian Civil Society’s Call for Boycott Divestment and Sanctions of Israel as part and parcel to opposition to the actions of their own imperialist governments. In this way the working class must raise the “uncomfortable” issue of Imperialist aid to Israel again and again.