WeeklyWorker

08.10.2026

Three years of genocidal war

Zack Polanski’s Green Party is being demonised as racist because it opposes Zionist racism and dares call for a single-state solution. But is the single state, as traditionally demanded by Palestinian militants and the revolutionary left, actually achievable? What about the two-state solution? Jack Conrad presents the communist view

Since the Gaza ‘ceasefire’ came into effect in October 2025, Israel has killed at least 1,400 Palestinians and injured another 5,000.1 Attacks occur virtually daily. That means well over 75,000 Palestinians have died since October 7 2023 (there are reportedly 10,000 missing). Approximately 175,000 have been injured: one in 13 of the entire population.

Something like 80% of buildings are badly damaged or completely destroyed. According to the UN, between 1.9 million and 2.1 million have been displaced - around 90%-98% of the population.2 Most now live in ‘protected camps’, hemmed in behind Israel’s yellow line. They make do with tents, plastic sheets and makeshift shacks. Israel occupies roughly 70% of Gaza. And, of course, Israel controls, and severely restricts, access to water, power, food and medicines. Malnutrition is common, especially amongst children. Diarrhoea, water-borne diseases, fever and respiratory illnesses saw an estimated 8,500 non-violent deaths in the first 16 months of the war alone.3

Meanwhile, there is the West Bank. At least 1,000 Palestinians have been killed since October 7 2023. Nearly 9,000 are imprisoned or otherwise detained. There is systematic abuse and torture.4 And the IDF and Israeli settlers remorselessly press on with their incursions, land seizures, demolitions and campaign of intimidation.

Albeit using coded language, Benjamin Netanyahu is quite explicit about wanting to see the Palestinians exterminated: he directly equated them with the Amaleks in the Hebrew bible during an official address on October 28 2023.5 Needless to say, the ancient Israelites were commanded by Yahweh himself to “blot out the name of Amalek from under heaven”.6 Israeli audiences are all too familiar with this and other such homicidal passages.

Yoav Gallant, the former defence minister, can be similarly cited about fighting “human animals” and wanting to cut off electricity, food, fuel - “everything”. Israeli president Isaac Herzog branded the Palestinians as being collectively responsible for the killing of Israeli soldiers and civilians on October 7 2023. Other ministers and former ministers too.7

Despite the appalling statistics and damning statements, Andy Burnham’s government stubbornly refuses to admit that Israel is conducting a genocidal war. Formally the position is to wait till a definitive ruling by the glacially slow international courts. London’s mayor, Sadiq Khan, shows no such inhibitions. He says a genocide is occurring. The same goes for countless voices internationally, including the UN commission of inquiry. Note South Africa has an ongoing genocide case against Israel before the International Court of Justice.

So what is genocide? The briefest answer: it is the “deliberate and systematic destruction of a racial, ethnic, national or religious group, either in whole or in part.” Coined in 1944 by Polish-Jewish lawyer Raphael Lemkin, it was officially codified as an international crime by the UN in the 1948 Genocide Convention. Under its definition there has to be (a) intent and (b) acts, which, besides killing, include other things like causing serious harm to a group and the denial of food, water, medicine and power.8

Can there be any reasonable doubt of Israel being guilty as charged? The only honest answer is emphatically ‘no’. After October 7 2023 the intent was clearly there … and, as we shall argue, well before that. The acts of killing, destruction and displacement after October 7 2023, as enumerated above, surely speak for themselves.

Not that there has been no change compared with Sir Keir Starmer. There has been. Andy Burnham condemned Israeli settlements on the West Bank and accused the country’s leaders of war crimes at the 81st UN general assembly in September 2026. Foreign secretary Ed Miliband even talked of ‘ethnic cleansing’. Illegal Israeli settlements on the West Bank are now formally sanctioned.9 British financial supply lines have been cut too.

The shift seen with the Burnham government might be put down to Labour regrowing its moral backbone. But that would be horribly naive. Labour has never had a moral backbone. As a party, especially in government, it has loyally served British capitalism and British imperial interests. Hence support for empire, colonial wars, nuclear weapons and the ‘special relationship’ with the US and its Middle East attack dog. The Jewish Labour Movement (aka Poale Zion) has been a Labour affiliate since 1920 and both Andy Burnham and Ed Miliband were till recently closely associated with Labour Friends of Israel. No, while the change is important, it is of nuance, not substance, and stems entirely from cold political calculation.

The last general election in July 2024 saw the return of five explicitly pro-Palestine independent MPs, most notably Jeremy Corbyn in Islington North. In six other constituencies, candidates running on the same sort of pro-Palestine platform came second. Muslim and left voters deserted Labour in droves. And, of course, in Britain and across the world there have been massive solidarity demonstrations. Zack Polanski’s Green Party enormously benefited from this sustained upsurge (that and the abject failure of Corbyn’s Your Party). Membership has more than tripled and there were sweeping successes in the May 2026 local elections, not least in London’s Hackney, where the Greens took the council from the historically incumbent Labour Party.

Burnham wants those votes back. Nonetheless, despite the diplomatic tiffs, the verbal gestures and token sanctions, the arms trade with Israel continues, as do ‘normal’ commercial relations (worth around £5.9 billion annually). Britain can only go so far, assuming the will was there, without upsetting the US hegemon and thereby suffering potentially dire consequences.

Expansionism

Israel needs to be understood not as a good Zionist state falling into the hands of bad Zionists, such as Netanyahu, Gallant and Herzog. No, from its beginnings (and pre-beginnings), Israel has been a settler-colonial project that by its own self-definition is based on expansionism, war and displacement.

Zionists typically claim that Jews have a right to the whole of mandate Palestine (either because of the approval of the Balfour declaration by the League of Nations in July 1922 or Yahweh’s promise to Abraham in Genesis). Having painstakingly established control over some 6%-7% of mandate Palestine through land-purchases, capital transfers, including the Haavara Agreement with Nazi Germany, and tight political organisation, the New Yishuv - the Jewish state-in-the-making - launched its long intended war against the indigenous population, beginning in November 1947.

With the 1949 armistice Israel had possession of some 77% of mandate Palestine. The nakba (disaster) saw the expulsion of between 700,000 and 750,000 Palestinians. The 1967 Arab-Israel six-day war allowed Israel to incorporate east Jerusalem and occupy the West Bank, Gaza and the Golan Heights. Some 280,000 to 400,000 Palestinians were driven out or otherwise displaced. Palestinians call it the naksa (setback), but it can just as easily be called the second nakba.

Israel is now in the midst of another round of violent expansionism: Lebanon, Syria, the West Bank and Gaza. In Lebanon and Syria the pattern follows the classic ‘defensive imperialism’ of ‘buffer zones’. In the case of southern Syria the new ‘buffer zone’ is there to defend the Golan Heights ‘buffer zone’ (annexed in 1981).

However, when it comes to the West Bank and Gaza, the main drive is ideological, not military. On the West Bank, Israel has uprooted around 40,000 Palestinians since October 7 2023. There are already approximately 700,000 Israeli settlers. Meanwhile, Gaza stands on the brink of starvation, ethnic cleansing and extermination - facilitated by the so-called Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. A third nakba is clearly in the offing.

True, there are far-right elements who on ideological grounds advocate expansion into Lebanon (up to the Litani river) and into Syria (the Mount Hermon area). We are referring to groups such as Uri Tzafon (‘Awaken, Oh North’) and Halutzei HaBashan (‘Pioneers of the Bashan’). They have received explicit backing from government ministers: Bezalel Smotrich, finance, and Idit Silman, environmental protection. Their project is a greater Greater Israel. Nonetheless, mainstream Israeli military planners view operations in Lebanon and Syria (beyond the Golan Heights) as tactical zones, which can be appropriately bartered for concessions of one kind or another.10

As an aside, it is worth mentioning those leftwing Panglossians here in Britain who claimed that Israel “cannot win” in Gaza, that Israel is “unequivocally losing” its war in Gaza, or that Israel has already “lost in Gaza”.11 We hear similar nonsense with Iran supposedly beating the US today. Topsy-turvy claims based on Hamas continuing to hold Israeli captives and Hamas continuing to survive as an armed body.

Well, there are no longer any Israeli captives. All have been handed over (including the dead). More to the point, Israel’s war aims were never really about totally destroying Hamas. Its social roots are deep and surely enduring. No, the defining, ongoing, war aim of Netanyahu and his cabinet is to remove enough of the indigenous population to allow the realisation of their Greater Israel: from Gaza the Palestinians will probably be driven into Egypt’s Sinai, from the West Bank probably into Jordan.

October 7

The part desperate, part audacious Operation al-Aqsa Flood prison break on October 7 2023, carried out by Hamas and other sections of the Joint Room resistance movement, caught Israel altogether unprepared - a “complete failure”, now openly acknowledged by its military.12

Not surprisingly there have been all manner of conspiracy theories about Netanyahu and his cronies being in some way “deliberately” complicit in allowing the whole thing to happen.13 It was, after all, a year in preparation. Warnings were consistently ignored, that is for sure. Hamas military commanders were themselves certainly surprised by the ability of their al-Qassam fighters to go way beyond what had been originally planned as a suicide mission. Expectations were of something like an 80% casualty rate. Military targets, IDF outposts, police stations thereby gave way to what Hamas euphemistically calls “some faults” in the operation: the totally pointless killing of innocent civilians (resulting in baseless stories of beheading babies and mass rapes).14

October 7 did, though, provide Netanyahu with the political excuse needed for the IDF to pulverise its way into Gaza (and upping settler terrorism in the West Bank). True, Israeli public opinion subsequently cleaved into what might be called the ‘peace party’ and the ‘war party’. Nonetheless, the war party commanded a slim Knesset majority and that grew into a clear public majority for the attacks on Iran (which 83% of Jewish Israelis supported, while only 16% opposed15). Netanyahu himself has every reason to keep the wars in Gaza, Lebanon, Syria and Iran going on and on … after all, not only does he want to keep his coalition together, remain prime minister and stay out of jail. He wants a Greater Israel.

There are profound differences over the constitutional set-up in this would-be Greater Israel. General (Liberal) Zionism says it is committed to market capitalism, secularism and the rule of law (which can, of course, see unelected judges overrule Knesset votes). The main political expression of Liberal Zionism is nowadays found in centrist parties, such as Yesh Atid. In ‘theory’ they accept a two-state solution, but in the name of ‘security’ insist on Israel retaining large blocks of the West Bank and refuse to accept any Palestinian right of return. There is, though, Likud, which resulted from a historical merger between liberal and revisionist Zionism (Likud’s official name being the National Liberal Movement). Ideologically it is, like Yisrael Beiteinu, neoliberal, far-right nationalist and populist.

However, in terms of constructing governmental coalitions, Likud, for the moment, relies on religious Zionists, who envisage a Halakhic kingdom ruled by Torah law, as it was in the “days of King David and King Solomon”.16 Hence, while Yisrael Beiteinu is militantly anti-clerical, Likud has quietly diluted its commitment to secularism. The October 27 general election will doubtless shuffle the pack, but not by much (it would, however, be pointless to speculate on outcomes here, except to note the historic shift to the right).

Geographically, as already mentioned, religious Zionists hanker after a greater Greater Israel - based on various biblical passages: Genesis, Numbers, Ezekiel. At its largest extent their Eretz Israel stretches from the Nile to the Euphrates.17 Of course, any such Israel would come with a poisoned chalice: an oppressed Arab supermajority. The Zionist conquistadors would have to permanently deny them elementary rights. The newly acquired Arab population would be far too big to do much else with (ie, expulsion or extermination).

Either way, Israel is predicated on expansionism. The aliyah (Hebrew for ‘ascent’ - or migration to Israel) constitutes a fundamental part of the Zionist project and is enshrined in Israel’s ‘law of return’ (enacted by the Knesset in July 1950). Any Jew, no matter where they live, no matter how dubious their Jewish antecedence, has the legal right to assisted settlement in Israel, as well as automatic citizenship.

A heterogeneous mixture of the genuinely desperate, the cruelly duped, secular dreamers, religious fanatics, economic chancers and Wizz Air second-homers have come to the promised land over the years. Between 1948 and 1992 Israel took in 2,242,500 Jewish migrants. The bulk from eastern Europe - displaced by World War II - and the centres of Jewry in the Arab world and the Soviet Union. Some 85% of Ethiopia’s 170,000 Jewish population, the Falasha, or Habashim, have gone to Israel under the law of return too. Before October 7, however, the flow of migrants had been reduced to a mere trickle. With October 7, that inward trickle became a 470,000 outward flood … but, predictably, all but a few soon returned to what is their national homeland.18

Israel needs people. Or, put more accurately, Israel needs Jewish people. Even a little Israel relies on long-term net Jewish immigration … net Jewish emigration, if it were sustained, would indeed mean that the “collapse of Israel has become foreseeable”.19

Today Israel has a record population of just over 10 million.20 However, some 20% of them are Palestinian Arabs. They are, of course, treated as second-class citizens in what is rightly regarded as an apartheid state. Officially, after all, Israel was founded as and continues to be a Jewish state for Jewish people. Meanwhile, there are some 5.9 million UN-registered Palestinian refugees - in Gaza, the West Bank, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon.21 There is also a Palestinian diaspora living in Saudi Arabia, the Gulf states, the US, Britain, Germany, Chile, Argentina and many other countries besides.

Divide and rule

Before October 7 the Netanyahu government clearly thought it had sufficiently pacified the Palestinians to the point where they posed no serious threat. Within the borders of pre-1967 Israel, the Arab population voted for Islamic and left lists. But, while that means the occasional nuisance due to the fine balance in the Knesset, it is manageable. The same appeared to go for Gaza and the West Bank.

Palestinians were reassuringly split between Hamas rule in Gaza and Fatah rule in the West Bank. True, uncompromisingly, the 1988 Hamas charter demanded an end to the Zionist state of Israel and its replacement by a single Islamic state of Palestine. However, Hamas offered a “long-term truce” in return for Israel withdrawing from all territories it has occupied since 1967: in effect a two-state ‘solution’.

Israel actually encouraged the formation and growth of Hamas from the mid-1980s onwards in order to weaken Fatah. But, following its landslide victory in the January 2006 elections and the Fatah June coup in the West Bank, Israel imposed an asphyxiating blockade on Gaza. That said, since 2018 Netanyahu’s government allowed Hamas to receive “infusions” of Qatari cash and granted tens of thousands of work permits to Gazan residents. The idea was to keep the Palestinians divided and thereby render any Israel-Palestine two-state ‘solution’ practically unachievable. Hence the West Bank was treated as a “burden”, while Gaza was treated as an “asset”.22 That is, until what has been called ‘Israel’s Pearl Harbour’.

The Palestine Liberation Organisation, dominated by Fatah, presides over a series of fragmented Arab reservations on the West Bank grandly called the Palestinian Authority. Its president, Mahmoud Abbas, demands a two-state solution and roundly condemns Israel’s assault on Gaza. He is, however, to all intents and purposes a creature of Israel, a collaborator, a quisling. To put it mildly, he is widely despised.

The PLO’s present line dates back to 1988, when the demand for a return to the status quo ante 1948 was formally abandoned. Fatah had been steadily moving in this direction since the mid-70s; however, the final turning point was the US-brokered Oslo accord, signed in August 1993 by PLO chair Yasser Arafat and Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin. The PLO effectively conceded Israeli hegemony over the whole of mandate Palestine in return for local self-government in Gaza and the West Bank. Abject surrender. The vital questions of Jewish settlements on the West Bank and the right of Palestinians to return to their lands were put aside. A diplomatic triumph for the US and Israel.

Nation-in-arms

Following the 1967 Six-Day War, Israel’s main arms supplier has been the US (before that it was France). Not that there was an instant love affair between the two countries. George Marshall, president Harry S Truman’s secretary of state, was more than cool about recognising Israel in May 1948. Nor was John Foster Dulles, Dwight Eisenhower’s secretary of state, pro-Israel. It was the rise of Arab nationalism, and the turn towards the Soviet Union, instigated by Egypt’s Gamal Abdul Nasser, that led to a US shift.

From 1958 the US-Israel alliance slowly expanded in scope and took its present form after the Yom Kippur War of 1973.23 Noam Chomsky, it should be noted, dates US support for the Greater Israel position to 1970, when Henry Kissinger succeeded in “taking over Middle East affairs”.24 Either way, that relationship solidified in the 1970s to the point where Israel effectively became an American outpost. US and Israeli armed forces are nowadays integrated through the US Central Command (Centcom) - regional air defences, intelligence and active combat operations being closely coordinated.25

By any measure, US economic and military aid to Israel has been considerable. In the 1946-2024 period it amounted to well over $310 billion (in constant 2022 dollars). Today Washington’s largesse goes to ensure that Israel maintains its QME (qualitative military edge). Israel is on a short list of “major non-Nato allies” that gives privileged access to the most advanced US military platforms and technologies. And there is an agreement to supply it with a military package worth some $3.8 billion annually till 2028.26 In return for imperial sponsorship, Israel acts as a US “strategic asset” in the Middle East (a region which, it just so happens, possesses something like 50% of the world’s readily accessible oil reserves).27

Incidentally, there were those on the left who foolishly welcomed the election of Barack Obama in 2008 - the Morning Star’s Communist Party of Britain, George Galloway, Stop the War Coalition - because they hoped he would chart a fundamentally different, peaceful, even-handed course in the Middle East. As we predicted at the time, they were bound to be “sadly disappointed”.28 Whatever the skin pigmentation of the president, America is determined to reverse its decline and that means that big-power antagonisms become ever more acute. Indeed, Obama and his secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, undertook the “pivot to Asia” in 201629: the main aim clearly being to block the rise of China - a policy seamlessly continued by the Biden and Trump administrations.

When it come to Israel, there was, of course, no change: unwavering US support combined with a prolonged economic, diplomatic and military campaign to tame, degrade and maybe bring about regime change in Tehran. This meant guaranteeing the attack dog’s QME. However, even without US sponsorship, Israel has repeatedly fought, invaded and defeated its Arab neighbours: 1948, 1956 and 1967. After that there followed the 1973 war with Egypt and Syria, and four wars in Lebanon: 1978, 1982, 2006, 2023-).

Israel’s armed forces are vastly superior, compared with any Arab country or any conceivable combination of them. It is not just American finance, weapons and spy satellites: Israel’s IDF has the edge, when it comes to battle experience, leadership and morale. Haim Bresheeth-Žabner calls it “an army like no other”.30 We should add that Israel has at least 140 nuclear warheads … and the means to deliver them from land, sea and sky.

Israel is, in fact, a “nation-in-arms” (Ben-Gurion). The IDF constituting the spinal cord of national identity: not country of origin, religious sect or political affiliation. Obviously, this does not apply to the Haredim (Ultra-Orthodox Jews) who make up around 18%-19% of the Israeli-Jewish population. In fact, they represent the absolute exception to the rule about the IDF equalling Israeliness. On religious grounds their young men steadfastly refuse to be conscripted. Their parasitic occupation is studying the Torah (while living on social security and various state subsidies). Nonetheless, with secular (Hiloni), traditional (Masorti) and national-religious (Dati Leumi) Israelis, conscription into the IDF has forged the “new Jew” - as imagined by Theodor Herzl, the founder of modern Zionism.

Coherence

Israel’s notoriously fractious politics misleads unwary pundits. At least a dozen blocs - most with multiple components - are represented in the Knesset. Too many only see the heated blame game over October 7, the desperate attempts of Netanyahu to avoid corruption charges, the mass protests brought about by government attempts at judicial reform and the secular-religious divide. They conclude that Israel lacks the elemental cohesion needed for a viable nation-state. A mistake.

There is a defining ‘security consensus’ against the Palestinian enemy within and without. Virtually the entire Israeli-Jewish political spectrum unitedly oppose any kind of democratic settlement with the Palestinians. The nationalist and religious hard right, including Netanyahu’s Likud, has absolutely no truck with any notion of Palestinian statehood. Centrist Zionists, including the Democrats, merely talk the two-state talk. Only the Islamic and left blocs, Hadash-Ta’al and Ra’am, which rely on Israeli-Arab votes, are serious about a two-state solution: and that means Palestinians settling for the West Bank and Gaza, and nothing more.

Working class politics in Israel - that is, Israeli-Jewish working class politics - hardly exists, at least at this moment in time, as an effective collectivity. Historically there has been a remorseless shift from voting for the Labor Party to parties of the right and far right in an attempt to preserve national privileges. The Jewish-Israeli working class being a labour aristocracy that has seen its social power substantially eroded by years of neoliberalism.31 In 1983 membership of the trade union federation, Histadrut, stood at 1.6 million; today it is around 570,000. Histadrut, note, once the spearhead of Zionist colonisation, has been shorn of its role in health, banking and as a very substantial employer in its own right.

Histadrut needs to be put into the context of colonisation. Marxists have distinguished between various types of colonies: plantation colonies, exploitation colonies, colonies properly so-called, etc. Broadly the colonisation of the India, Congo, South Africa type saw the exploiters enslave people, gaining a fat profit from the native workforce, including peasant farmers, through all manner of barely concealed forms of robbery, cheating and double dealing. That went hand-in-hand with staffing an army officer corps, running a bureaucracy and managing railroads, docks, etc. The colonisers therefore constituted a relatively narrow caste, who often maintained close ties with the imperial homeland (to which they often returned, having made their fortunes).

Nonetheless, it must be understood that in terms of political economy Israel is what Karl Kautsky called a “work colony”32 or what Moshé Machover prefers to call an “exclusion colony”.33 Instead of the colonisers constituting themselves a narrow, often highly privileged caste, the colonisers make up the full spectrum of classes: bourgeoisie, petty bourgeoisie, small farmers, workers, unemployed reserve workers, etc. Instead of relying on the labour of the indigenous population, it is either displaced, marginalised or driven to the point of extinction. Examples: USA, Canada, Australia.

Israel is definitely an exclusion colony. Despite present-day claims, including by those who should know better, there are not “two kinds of Zionism”, the first being a “legitimate liberation movement” against anti-Semitism, and the second, which “ethnically cleanses Palestinians” (Peter Tatchell).34 Zionism sought collaboration with late Russian tsarism. The same went for early German Nazism. Tsarism, Nazism and Zionism alike wanted the ‘Yids out’.

Zionism is, and always was, as presented, crucially in Herzl’s foundational Der Judenstaat (1896), a colonial-settler project. What marked it out was that Zionism began by envisaging Jewish labour playing the vanguard role: “The poorest will go first to cultivate the soil. In accordance with a preconceived plan, they will construct roads, bridges, railways and telegraph installations; regulate rivers; and build their own dwellings; their labour will create trade, trade will create markets and markets will attract new settlers.”35 Hence, whatever the socialistic pretensions of Labor Zionism, from the beginning Israel owed far more to the Blut und Boden (blood and soil) ideology of late 19th century European reaction than anything remotely progressive.

Lenni Brenner makes the salient point:

Enthusiasm for Blut und Boden were part of Zionism before the first modern Zionist ever left Europe. Race Zionism was a curious offshoot of racial anti-Semitism. True, these Zionists argued, the Jews were a pure race, certainly purer than, say, the Germans who, as even the pan-Germanics conceded, had a huge admixture of Slavic blood. But to these Zionists, even their racial purity could not overcome the one flaw in Jewish existence: they did not have their own Jewish Boden. If the Teutonic racists could see themselves as Übermenschen (supermen), these Hebrew racists did not see the Jews in that light; rather, it was the reverse. They believed that because they lacked their own Boden the Jews were Untermenschen and therefore, for their “hosts”, little more than leeches: the world pest.36

To get themselves the soil necessary for national salvation, the Zionists, for good ideological reasons, lighted upon Palestine. What marked them out, when they went there, was not that to begin with they were a minority of the population in Ottoman, and then mandate, Palestine. No, the Zionist project relied on propertyless migrants coming from all manner of different countries, while exercising “no coercive power over the indigenous population”.37

That began to change with the formation of the Haganah militia, but it was poorly armed and could only manage defensive operations till the 1940s. At first the Zionists were substantially dependent on external sources of capital too. After all, they had to purchase land from wealthy native owners and most certainly relied on the good will of an imperial sponsor (to begin with, Britain, which agreed the Balfour declaration in November 1917). This in the expectation of “forming for England ‘a little loyal Jewish Ulster’ in a sea of potentially hostile Arabism”38). The Ottoman empire was about to be carved-up by Anglo-French imperialism and that necessitated finding, or creating, willing collaborators. France promoted the historically established Maronite Christians in mandate Lebanon, the British turned to the incoming Zionist Jews in mandate Palestine.

Histadrut played a determining role in what was to become the political economy of Israel. It organised Jewish workers and forced the Jewish capitalist class to grant all manner of concessions - not least barring indigenous, cheaper, Arab labour from whole sectors of the economy (relaxed somewhat after statehood). Histadrut also provided Labor Zionism with the money, the votes and the organisation needed to make it the dominant force politically from the mid-1930s till the late 1970s. So it was far removed from being a trade union federation of the type normally found in the so-called west.

British left

Obediently, reflecting British imperial interests, mainstream Labourism has traditionally taken a positive attitude towards Zionism. As already noted, Poale Zion affiliated in 1920. And successive Labour conferences voted in favour of establishing a Jewish state in Palestine. Labour tops boasted of the Israeli Labor Party being its fraternal organisation and maintained the closest contacts. Simultaneously, they condescendingly spoke out against Arab feudalism, backwardness and the influence of Nazi ideas.

As for the ‘official’ CPGB in the late 1940s, it temporarily abandoned its historic hostility to Zionism. The CPGB formed a National Jewish Committee, which supported Jewish migration into Palestine and land purchases. Stalin, myopically, saw nothing more than a chance to weaken the influence of a declining British imperialism in the Middle East by supporting Zionism as a ‘liberation movement’ … including by supplying Czech arms.

Hence, toadyingly, in 1948, the ‘official’ CPGB wholeheartedly welcomed the establishment of Israel, greeting the state’s foundation as “a big step toward fulfilment of self-determination of the peoples of Palestine” and “a great sign of the times”.39 After 2,000 years of supposed uninterrupted persecution, the Jewish people had liberated themselves at last. In parliament its MPs, Willie Gallacher and Phil Piratin, sponsored an early day motion condemning the Arab states for their 1948 intervention in Palestine, urging the Labour government to recognise Israel and demanding an immediate end to military aid for Arab states. Ethnic cleansing, the first nakba, did not rate a mention.

On the Labour left Edward Short, Jennie Lee and Tony Benn were proud to be listed amongst the Labour Friends of Israel. They routinely cited the kibbutz as a brave socialist experiment. Eric Heffer even defended Israel’s continued occupation of the West Bank and Gaza after 1967 on the grounds that Israel was “the only genuine democratic and socialist-oriented state in the Middle East”.40

Next to nothing of that left now remains. Today Israel counts amongst those countries dominated by the right and far right, and is therefore regarded as an abomination by those who regard themselves in the least bit progressive. True, there is still a pro-Zionist ‘left’. But it is, thankfully, marginal and widely despised: the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty comes to mind, so does the CPB’s resident Zionist, Mary Davis, and her grotesque ‘Anti-Semitism awareness courses’ (as if the Morning Star’s CPB has an anti-Semitism problem, when, in actual fact, it has a pro-Zionism problem).

Does this mean that the left has arrived at a correct programmatic orientation, when it comes to Israel-Palestine? Hardly - instead we are presented with a range of positions, all of which are far from adequate.

Take the already mentioned AWL and the Morning Star’s CPB. Essentially their two-state ‘solution’ echoes the PLO, Fatah, the Israeli Democrats … and the international mainstream liberal consensus. On the left, it amounts to economistic Zionism. A little Israel - an Israel returned to its pre-1967 borders - is expected to live peacefully alongside a West Bank and Gaza Strip Palestine. Except, of course, it won’t.

For appearances sake, till Trump, US administrations likewise promoted this touching picture of the attack dog lying down with the lamb. But, in practice, the US has backed Israeli aggression to the hilt. The same goes for its allies, such as the UK, Germany and Italy. All cite the ‘right of Israel to exist and defend itself’. So there has been no repetition of the early 1990s, when apartheid in South Africa was negotiated away in a US-sponsored deal, which gave black citizens the vote in return for the ANC leaving capitalist big business intact.

But in Israel-Palestine there is no overwhelming oppressed national majority. There is no threat of a revolutionary explosion. The odds are completely stacked in Israel’s favour. That is why Hamas resorted to a desperate suicide mission and the PLO and Fatah are reduced to impotent verbal gestures, pathetic diplomatic pleading and effective collaboration with the Israeli occupiers. Recognising this, the likes of the AWL, CPB … and various Labour left odds and sods clutch at anti-democratic liberal protests in Israel and peaceniks such as Standing Together … that and common economic struggles, which are supposed to weld together Hebrew and Arab workers into a lever for social change.

In fact, Zionism acts to keep workers inside Israel structurally divided. That means legal, political and material privileges for Israeli-Jewish workers, privileges they will hang onto for dear life … unless there is something much better on offer (Israeli-Jewish workers, especially those at the bottom end of the labour market, have no wish to compete with Arab-Israeli/Palestinian worst paid labour as equals, that is for sure).

As a justification for the two-state solution we are assured that an Israel-Palestine rapprochement would provide the solid, democratic foundations, from where alone the struggle for socialism can begin. In other words, their two-state solution is based on a combination of naive wishful thinking and mechanical, stagist, reasoning. Note, trade union politics - ie, struggles over wages and conditions - are always cut short by the high politics of war, security, national privilege, etc. There have been no Histadrut strikes demanding equal civil rights for Palestinians, a withdrawal from the West Bank or an end to the genocide in Gaza. Nor should any such development be expected within the narrow confines of today’s circumstances.

Hannah Sell’s Socialist Party in England and Wales offers a ‘socialist’ version of the two-state solution. It calls for a ‘socialist’ Israel alongside a ‘socialist’ West Bank-Gaza Strip Palestine. Israel, it should be noted, is treated as a ‘normal’ country: the idea of it remaining a “settler state” is dismissed out of hand.41 That despite its immediate historic origins, the second class status of Israeli Arabs and the remorseless announcements of yet more Jewish settler outposts on the West Bank - the latest and most controversial being the E1 project located to the east of Jerusalem, which would effectively cut the West Bank in two, separate Ramallah from Bethlehem, isolate east Jerusalem and further fragment the area managed by the Palestinian Authority.

Anyway, why on earth two such socialist states would remain separate, especially given the substantial population crossover, is a complete mystery. No less to the point, the means of achieving such an outcome relies almost entirely on trade union politics, which by their very nature are sectional and confined to the relationship between sellers and buyers of the labour-power commodity. Hence trade union politics as trade union politics does little more than reproduce the division of the working class. On the one side, nationally privileged labour aristocrats and, on the other, a nationally oppressed underclass.

Then there is the left version of the old PLO single Palestine state ‘solution’, the SWP being the quintessential example (but, unleashing a floodtide of media-amplified accusations, it was, of course, recently adopted by the Green Party in England and Wales at its October 2-4 2026 Brighton conference). Ignoring the history, power, connections and wishes of the Israeli-Jewish population, the SWP calls for the abolition, the dismantling of Israel and in its place “one secular, democratic [capitalist - JC] state built on the principle of equal rights for all citizens, including Israeli Jews”.42

It amounts to a shibboleth. The SWP has long ago given up trying to seriously think through what is and what is not a viable strategy in Israel-Palestine.43 What it is primarily interested in nowadays - especially post-October 7 - is posturing. The SWP strives might and main to present itself to the mass pro-Palestine demonstrations, not least its student contingents, as the most militant, most implacable opponent of everything Israeli - and thereby sell a few more papers and gain a few more fleeting recruits. Politically, though, the result amounts to tailing Hamas.

Needless to say then, the Israeli-Jewish working class is deemed to be entirely incapable of playing any positive role. Israeli Jews, most of whom consider themselves secular, will paradoxically be allowed individual religious freedom, but not collective national rights under the single-Palestine solution. Israeli Jews, as noted above, are often defined away as a non-nation by the economistic left, but, even when it is admitted that they do constitute a nation, they are classified as an oppressive, counterrevolutionary one, which should thereby be denied the right to self-determination, presumably in perpetuity.

That their ‘solution’ would transform the Israeli-Jewish population into an oppressed nationality never seems to occur. So, for example, Israeli-Jews would have “language rights, freedom of worship and the right to their own culture, but political rights? No.”44 Of course, a nation threatened with a denial of political and national rights is likely to fight tooth and claw against any such outcome.

Objectively, though, the balance of forces is violently against a single-capitalist-state ‘solution’. There are some 7.2 million Israeli Jews (settlements included). About 10-11 million Palestinians worldwide; but only 6-7 million of them live in Israel, the occupied territories, Syria, Jordan and Lebanon. It is fair to say, then, that any projected single Palestinian state would include roughly equivalent numbers of Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs. Assuming, that is, no forcible movement of peoples. No attempt to drive the Israeli Jews into the sea. No closure of refugee camps and dumping of Palestinians over to the west side of the Jordan river. No round-up and expulsion of Palestinian workers in Saudi Arabia, etc. Therefore what is being proposed is a ‘unity’ where one half of the population gets no say in matters - impractical and, in strategic terms, really dumb.

After all, the Israeli-Jewish working class has everything to lose and nothing to gain from such a single-capitalist-state ‘solution’ that is more or less guaranteed to be neither secular nor democratic. They are, therefore, more than likely to resist any such outcome with all their strength. The whole of the 20th century since 1933, but especially the 1943-45 holocaust, tells us that. Without military conquest - a highly unlikely and in and of itself an unwelcome outcome - the immediate demand for a single-state ‘solution’ is entirely illusory. Translated into the ‘Palestine shall be free from the river to the sea’ slogan, it goes down well on street demonstrations, but offers zilch in terms of bringing about a rapprochement between the two peoples in Israel-Palestine and advancing common working class interests.

The call for a single Palestinian state “may seem completely utopian”, once owned up the SWP’s Alex Callinicos. He also correctly stated that there is “very clear evidence that the two-state solution cannot work”. Crucially, there exists, he says, the “massive imbalance of power between the two sides. Israel is one of the greatest military powers in the world, backed and subsidised by the US.”45 Right again.

Hence, it is pertinent to ask exactly who is going to establish the single Palestinian state. After all, according to comrade Callinicos himself, the Palestinians are incapable of achieving any kind of viable state alongside Israel by their efforts alone. How then can we expect them to establish a single state against the wishes of the global US hegemon and the vast majority of 7.2 million Israeli-Jews? Perhaps what the SWP therefore envisages as its agent of change is the so-called Axis of Resistance - what is today a much reduced combination of Lebanon’s Hezbollah, Hamas, Yemen’s Houthis and the Islamic Republic of Iran. In the SWP imagination the Axis could, not unreasonably, be joined by Muslim Brotherhood governments in Egypt, Syria and Jordan.

An anti-working class agency, if ever there was one. However, such a pan-Islamic alliance (leave aside the Shia and Sunni divisions) could, conceivably, defeat Israel, as Saladin’s forces defeated the outre-mer, crusader, kingdom of Jerusalem in 1187. But that would, though, hardly produce a secular Palestinian state. Nor would it produce a democratic Palestinian state.

True, if such an unlikely combination were to come together - and, just as unlikely, achieve military victory over Israel - it might lead to a mass exodus of Jews (to who knows where). But, if that did not happen, the Jewish-Israeli population would have to be subject to extraordinarily harsh measures to crush their inevitable resistance. The poles of national oppression would, yes, thereby be reversed. But, we are told, what does that matter? It would, be ‘national liberation’ via the destruction of the settler-colony … and from the (nuclear?) ashes, hopefully some kind of ‘socialism’ would arise. Not something any genuine Marxist would care to countenance.

Though it might be an inconvenient truth, no democratic solution can be won without the consent of Israeli Jews - that is, a clearly expressed majority of them. Those Humpty Dumpties who claim otherwise are coining a contranym, whereby words become their opposite. Democracy is divorced from basic democratic rights. - it becomes a denial of basic democratic rights.

Yet the fact is, despite the warnings, pained outrage and courage of Israeli-Jewish socialists, anti-Zionists and pacifists, the Israeli-Jewish population consistently - often overwhelmingly - supports the wars of their elected politicians and IDF generals, irrespective of the hatred of Israel that this inevitably engenders.

Why? Israel is a colonial-settler state and all such states face a fundamental problem. What to do with the people whose land has been robbed? With the wars of 1947-49 and 1967, well over a million Palestinians fled or were driven out. Palestinians in Israel, Gaza and the West Bank therefore constitute ‘unfinished business’.

Both the Palestinian enemy within and the Palestinian enemy without engender a permanent state of insecurity. Israeli Jews know they are resented, know they are hated. When it comes to worst-paid labour, the Palestinians willingly undercut them. Then there are the Knesset votes for ‘official communists’ and Islamists, the Hamas October 7 prison breakout, the Hezbollah rockets and Iran’s ‘race’ to acquire nuclear-weapon capability. Understandably, the Israeli-Jewish population feels under constant threat and therefore - insecure, frightened, vengeful, maddened - willingly supports, urges on Israeli aggression, oppression and even genocide. The vain hope is to crush or finally remove all such threats and dangers . An oppressor’s peace.

Does it follow that Israelis cannot make a democratic peace with Palestinians? That any Israeli settlement with the Palestinians is bound to be a sham? There can certainly be no democratic peace with Israel as a Zionist state - any more than there can be with an Islamic Palestine.

Zionism is, arguably, a nationalism sui generis. While it now boasts a homeland, Zionism claims purchase over the loyalty of all Jews, even though the majority of the people-religion are not Israeli and do not speak everyday Hebrew (around 40% of the world’s Jewish population lives in the US, roughly the same as in Israel). No less to the point, the Zionist state is committed to denying elementary rights to a good portion of the population it rules over (ie, the Palestinians in Israel and the occupied territories).

Nevertheless, the Israeli-Jewish people, the Hebrew-speaking nation, is a real, living entity and cannot be dismissed or discounted just because Israel began as and continues to be a settler colonial state. Israel emerged out of the last phase of the British empire, in the midst of a terroristic civil war and unforgivable crimes that no-one should forget. That said, there is no reason for refusing to recognise the definite, historically constituted Hebrew nation which took state form with the May 14 1948 declaration of Israeli independence.

And since then millions of Jews have migrated to Israel, learnt Hebrew, intermarried, had children, assimilated, and made and remade the Israeli-Jewish nation. Today some 80% are sabras - Israeli born - and mostly second or third generation.46 Hence, the Israeli-Jewish nation not only inhabits a common territory and shares a common language: it is historically constituted.

Of course, most, if not all, of the world’s states came into existence by way of terrible oppression. But, while fully taking into account history, any consistently democratic programme must be squarely based on contemporary realities - crucially human facts on the ground. Abolition of Zionist Israel, legal equality for all, secularism, halting expansionism and withdrawing from the occupied territories are basic (minimum) programmatic demands. None of that, however, should be taken as synonymous with an eviscerating reconstitution of the pre-1948 situation. One might just as well call for the abolition of the US, Canada, Australia, etc, and a return of lands to the enfeebled remnants of the aboriginal populations.

The only realistic, progressive and humane programme must be based on a mutual recognition by both Palestinians and Israeli Jews of each other’s national rights. Needless to say, it would be an excellent thing if both nations chose to happily live side by side or, even better, to slowly merge together into a single nation. No rational human being would want to oppose any such outcome. The question is, though, how to arrive at such a happy outcome? Given where we are situated today, our discussion must necessarily turn again to the question of agency.

Arab nation

No democratic solution for the Israel-Palestine conflict can be achieved in isolation. Objective circumstances simply do not permit it. That is as certain as anything can be in this uncertain world.

By themselves the Palestinians - debilitatingly split between Hamas and Fatah - palpably lack the ability to achieve anything beyond abject surrender or hopeless resistance. Certainly not a single Palestinian state, where Israeli Jews have ‘full’ religious rights, but no national rights. There is, however, a way to cut through the Gordian knot: widen the strategic front. There are nearly 300 million Arabs in a contiguous territory that stretches from the Atlantic Ocean, across north Africa, down the Nile to north Sudan, and all the way to the Persian Gulf and up to the Caspian Sea.

Though studded here and there with national minorities - Kurds, Assyrians, Turks, Armenians, Berbers, etc - there is a definite Arab or Arabised community. Despite being separated into 25 different states and divided by religion and religious sect - Sunni, Shi’ite, Alaouite, Ismaili, Druze, Orthodox Christian, Catholic Christian, Maronite, Nestorian, etc - they share a living bond of pan-Arab consciousness, born not only of a common language, but of a closely related history.

Arabs are binational. There are Moroccans, Yemenis, Egyptians, Jordanians, etc. But there is also a wider Arab identity, which has its origins going back to the Muslim conquests of the 7th and 8th centuries. The best known candidate for Arab unifier was Egypt’s president (1954-70), Gamal Abdel Nasser. This uncrowned Bonaparte led the Free Officers’ revolution in 1952, which overthrew the pro-British monarchy of Farouk I. Nasser then oversaw a radical agrarian reform programme, nationalised the Suez canal, allied Egypt with the Soviet Union and put his country on the course of state-capitalist development. This went hand-in-hand with crushing both the Muslim Brotherhood and the working class movement.

Nasser called it ‘Arab socialism’. Especially with his success in the 1956 Suez crisis - an Israeli invasion followed by a pre-planned joint French and British intervention and then an unexpected American veto - Nasser’s popularity soared throughout the Arab world. Pro-Nasser Arab socialist parties, groups and conspiracies were sponsored or established themselves. His name became almost synonymous with pan-Arabism.

Nasser demanded that natural resources be used for the benefit of all Arabs - hugely popular with those below. Everyone knew he meant oil. Of course, the house of Saud instantly became an implacable enemy. Yet because of mass pressure the Ba’athist authorities in Syria sought a merger. Despite the repression suffered by their co-thinkers in Egypt, the ‘official communists’ and the Syrian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood likewise favoured unity.

The United Arab Republic was formed on February 1 1958. Nasser was appointed president and Cairo became the capital. Yet the UAR proved fleeting. Syrian capitalists did not gain access to the Egyptian market and Egyptian administrative personnel were viewed by Syrian officers, bureaucrats and top politicians as acting like colonial rulers. The union ignominiously collapsed in 1961. Opposition came from the Damascus street. However, from then onwards the UAR became a hollow pretence. It united no other country apart from Egypt.

The 1967 Six Day War with Israel proved to be the final straw for Nasserism. Israel’s blitzkrieg destroyed the air forces of Egypt, Syria and Jordan on the ground and by the end of hostilities Israel occupied yet more Arab land. Nasser was humiliated and died soon afterwards a broken man.

Evidently, however, Arab reunification remains a burning, but unfulfilled, task. The fact that Nasser’s short-lived UAR saw the light of day is testimony to mass support for Arab unity. No less to the point, what was a potent sentiment in the 1950s and well into the 1970s needs to be revived in the 21st century and given a new democratic and class content.

So we are not talking about reviving Nasserism. Nor are we talking about something akin to the pan-Slavism which excused so many of the wars and intrigues of the late Russian empire. No, communists need to take the lead in the fight for pan-Arab unity - as Marx and Engels and their comrades in the Communist League did in the fight for German unity. Such a fight, is, of course, inseparable from the task of building a mass Communist Party - first in each Arab country and then throughout the Arab world. A Communist Party of Arabia.

What of reconciliation between Hebrews and the Palestinians? That can only happen in the context of sweeping away Iran’s Shi’ite theocracy, the Hashemite kingdom of Jordan, Lebanon’s sectarian warlord plutocracy, Egypt’s military bureaucratic regime, the House of Saud, the petty Gulf sheikdoms, and establishing working class rule throughout the Middle East. Israel could be offered federal status, with the confident expectation that such an invitation would receive a positive mass response.47

Hence, the road to a united working class in Palestine passes through Amman, it passes through Tehran, it passes through Beirut, it passes through Cairo and it passes through Riyadh.48

What can be done?

Here in Britain we should certainly keep marching. Solidarity with Palestinians, especially, of course, those in Gaza, is rightly joined with the ‘Hands off Iran’ slogan. More must be done, though. Workers at airports and ports can be won to refuse to handle goods, especially arms, headed for Israel. Such agitation would be more than timely. Expecting workers at Rolls Royce, BAE Systems or Leonardo to strike and maybe put themselves out of a much needed job is an altogether bigger ask. Moralistic attacks on ordinary workers should be avoided at all cost. However, despite remaining in the realms of the symbolic, it is quite right to demand that the UK government rescind all export licences for weapons, or weapons parts, going to Israel.

Andy Burnham and Ed Miliband tut-tut over the bad behaviour of the attack dog, but do absolutely nothing when it comes to its master. Maintaining good relations with the US hegemon matters infinitely more than Palestinians facing ethnic cleansing and genocide.

We must openly declare for the defeat of our ‘own’ side: that is, Israel, its US sponsor and its UK and other such enablers. What that poses is going beyond the ‘strike and street’ politics of protest doggedly pursued by the SWP, SPEW, RCP and the other confessional sects. We need to embrace the politics of power.

Jeremy Corbyn’s Your Party could perhaps have organised the pro-Palestine movement into a viable mass party. But bureaucratic control-freakery, a badly coordinated left and the continued attachment to Labourism effectively killed any potential it might have had. Today it is as good as useless. The same goes for George Galloway’s stillborn Workers Party of Britain and Zack Polanski’s roaraway Green Party. Such organisations are superficially committed to radical change, but upon closer examination all they promise is tinkering reform within the system.

Corbyn calls for the end of the arms trade with Israel, but dares not call himself anti-Zionist. He does not want to upset racists. Though his YP is officially committed to socialism, actually that amounts to nothing more than a peaceful, kinder, more caring version of capitalism. There is no thought, no plan, of abolishing the system of wage-slavery. As for the WPB, it does not even propose to abolish the monarchy. Instead it calls for a referendum. Galloway says he would vote for princess Anne to be president!49 As for the GPEW, it supports Nato and its war in Ukraine, and dreams of being a well-rewarded coalition partner in a capitalist government.

So the effective role of these and similar outfits is to reinforce ideological illusions … and thereby ultimately serve capitalism. No, what is needed is a principled, mass Communist Party. Only such a party, organised on an international scale, can lead the working class to state power and put an end to the global capitalist system of greed, imperialist exploitation … and war.

  1. www.aa.com.tr/en/middle-east/israels-ongoing-truce-violations-kill-5-in-gaza-strip/4076745https://www.aa.com.tr/en/middle-east/israels-ongoing-truce-violations-kill-5-in-gaza-strip/4076745.↩︎

  2. www.un.org/unispal/document/report-gaza-strip-rapid-damage-20apr26.↩︎

  3. www.thelancet.com/journals/langlo/article/PIIS2214-109X(25)00522-4/fulltext.↩︎

  4. www.972mag.com/palestinian-children-prisoners-israeli-jail.↩︎

  5. www.abc.net.au/news/2024-01-31/biblical-story-amalek-south-africa-icj-genocide-case-israel/103403552.↩︎

  6. Deuteronomy xxv:19. Also 1 Samuel xv:3. The passage reads: “Now go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass.”↩︎

  7. See www.courthousenews.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/South-Africa-v-Israel.pdf.↩︎

  8. www.un.org/en/genocide-prevention/1948-convention.↩︎

  9. www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/9/28/uk-pledges-tougher-stance-on-israeli-actions-in-gaza-west-bank.↩︎

  10. www.atlanticcouncil.org/dispatches/israel-and-the-new-reality-of-buffer-zones.↩︎

  11. In order: Sophie Squire, ‘Six months of slaughter, six months of resistance’ Socialist Worker April 3 2024; Ofer Cassif of the ‘official communist’ Hadash party in Israel; and US ‘realist’, John Mearsheimer Al Jazeera January 24 2025.↩︎

  12. www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/2/28/what-has-the-report-into-israeli-military-failures-on-october-7-said.↩︎

  13. www.eurasiareview.com/15022024-did-israel-deliberately-ignore-warnings-of-an-attack-by-hamas-to-enable-them-to-destroy-gaza-oped.↩︎

  14. Hamas Our narrative … Operation al-Aqsa Flood p8.↩︎

  15. The Jerusalem Post June 17 2025.↩︎

  16. Haaretz June 3 2019.↩︎

  17. “On that day the Lord made a covenant with Abram, saying, ‘To your descendants I give this land, from the river of Egypt to the great river, the Euphrates, the land of the Kenites, Kenizzites, Kadmonites, the Kadomites, the Hittites, Perizzites, Rephaims, Amorites, Canaanites, Girgashites and the Jebusites” (Genesis xv, 18-1).↩︎

  18. www.jpr.org.uk/insights/israels-jewish-demography-changing-and-it-so-diasporas.↩︎

  19. I Pappé, ‘The collapse of Zionism’ New Left Review June 21 2024.↩︎

  20. The Jewish Chronicle January 6 2025.↩︎

  21. www.unrwa.org/palestine-refugees.↩︎

  22. The Times of Israel October 8 2023.↩︎

  23. See A Ben-Zvi Decade of transition: Eisenhower, Kennedy and the origins of the American-Israeli alliance New York NY 1998.↩︎

  24. N Chomsky The fateful triangle: the United States, Israel and the Palestinians London 1983, p43.↩︎

  25. www.inss.org.il/publication/centcom-5-years.↩︎

  26. www.cfr.org/article/us-aid-israel-four-charts.↩︎

  27. www.washingtoninstitute.org/policy-analysis/israel-strategic-asset-united-states-0.↩︎

  28. J Conrad, ‘Zionist imperatives and the Arab solution’ Weekly Worker January 22 2009: weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/753/zionist-imperatives-and-the-arab-solution.↩︎

  29. H Clinton, ‘America’s Pacific century’ Foreign Policy November 2011.↩︎

  30. H Bresheeth-Žabner An army like no other: how the Israeli Defence Force made a nation London 2020, p13.↩︎

  31. The thesis of the Jewish-Israel working class being a labour aristocracy is closely associated with Maxime Rodinson. See his Israel: a colonial settler state? New York NY 1973.↩︎

  32. See M Macnair (intro) Karl Kautsky: on colonialism London 2013.↩︎

  33. M Machover, ‘Colonialism and the natives’ Weekly Worker December 17 2015: weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1087/colonialism-and-the-natives.↩︎

  34. www.facebook.com/PeterTatchell/posts/the-green-party-conference-motion-on-palestine-demands-that-israel-is-replaced-b/1605812897669445.↩︎

  35. www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/25282/pg25282-images.html.↩︎

  36. www.marxists.org/history/etol/document/mideast/agedict/ch02.htm#top.↩︎

  37. M Shalev The labour movement in Israel: ideology and political economy Westview CO 1996, p1.↩︎

  38. R Storrs Orientations London 1937, p405. Sir Ronald Storrs served as British military governor of Jerusalem in 1917.↩︎

  39. Daily Worker May 15 1948.↩︎

  40. E Heffer, ‘Why Labour should support Israel’ Labour looks at Israel: 1967-1971 London 1971, p31.↩︎

  41. J Horton Socialism Today February 2 2024.↩︎

  42. SWP pamphlet: Palestine, resistance, revolution and the struggle for freedom London 2023, p28.↩︎

  43. Eg, the SWP’s co-thinker in Germany, Ramsis Kilani, comes out with the bog-standard “strikes and mass mobilisations” and “workers developing their own capability for revolutionary self-governance” catchphrases. But, though he denounces “Stalinist conceptions of a revolution by ‘stages’”, that is actually what he advocates (R Kilani ‘Strategies for liberation: old and new arguments in the Palestinian left’ International Socialism No183, Summer 2024). Incidentally, Die Linke, Germany’s so-called ‘left’ party, disgracefully expelled the comrade on entirely bogus charges of “anti-Semitism” in December 2024. Anne Alexander, the SWP’s Middle East expert, confirms the stagism, when she writes of her perspectives for Palestine having “two aspects”: “The first would be [an altogether improbable - JC] revolution inside Palestine, led by Palestinians, for a single democratic and secular state, achieved through the dismantling of the whole social and political system of apartheid by a movement from below”. The second aspect being “a revolutionary process outside Palestine” (A Alexander ‘Palestine: between permanent war and permanent revolution’ International Socialism No181, Winter 2023). Nowhere does she mention ‘socialism’, ‘working class state power’ or ‘social revolution’ ... or even words to that effect.↩︎

  44. Tony Greenstein, Letters Weekly Worker June 27 2024.↩︎

  45. Socialist Worker August 5 2006.↩︎

  46. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabra_(person)#cite_note-5.↩︎

  47. A perspective advanced by Jabra Nicola and Moshé Machover in June 1969. See M Machover Israelis and Palestinians: conflict and resolution Chicago IL 2012, pp15-25.↩︎

  48. To paraphrase first PFLP general secretary George Habash and, before him, first PLO chair Ahmad Shukeiri (see JT Buck The decline of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine Hampshire College MA 2013, p4).↩︎

  49. The Daily Telegraph June 19 2024.↩︎