The Israeli ruling class and its international allies are increasingly apprehensive
about the growing “delegitimation” of the Zionist state due to widespread
revulsion at its bloody crimes. From the construction of an Apartheid Wall (aka
“separation barrier”) cutting off the occupied West Bank, to the December
2008/January 2009 massacre in Gaza, to the murder of nine activists aboard the Gaza relief
flotilla on 31 May 2010: the depravity of the Zionists has drained whatever sympathy still
existed for “poor little Israel.”
Amnesty International has been advocating an arms embargo on Israel since January 2009.
In a recent report, the New York-based Human Rights Watch concluded that “there
appears to be no legal justification for Israel’s differential treatment of
Palestinians, which breaches Israel’s obligations under international law, violating
the prohibition against discrimination as well as a host of associated rights” and
proposed that the U.S. “consider suspending financing to Israel in an amount
equivalent to the costs of the Israeli government’s spending in support of
settlements” in the West Bank. The group also suggested that Washington look more
closely at tax breaks for donations to Israeli settlement construction projects to see if
they “are consistent with governmental obligations to ensure respect for
international law, including human rights prohibitions against discrimination”
(“Separate and Unequal,” 19 December 2010).
Appealing to the imperialist predators, who have aided and abetted Israeli crimes at
every turn for decades, to suddenly “ensure respect for international law” is
delusional. But the very fact that such appeals are being made within the bourgeois
human-rights establishment is worrisome to the Zionists. A related, but even greater,
concern is the recent growth of the “Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions” (BDS)
campaign on campuses in North America and elsewhere.
The origins of the BDS initiative can be traced to a 2004 opinion of the International
Court of Justice (ICJ), which noted that Israel’s infamous “separation
barrier” in the West Bank is “contrary to international law,” and
proposed that the parts of the wall built inside the Occupied Territories should be
dismantled and that Palestinians negatively affected by it be compensated. The ruling was
initially greeted with enthusiasm by activists for Palestinian national rights, who hoped
that it might force Tel Aviv to change its policy. But, predictably enough, both Israel
and its supporters in the “international community” were completely
indifferent to the judgment. On 9 July 2005—a year after the ICJ opinion—170
organizations of “Palestinian civil society” called for a new political
strategy explicitly “inspired by the struggle of South Africans against
apartheid”:
“We, representatives of Palestinian civil society, call upon
international civil society organizations and people of conscience all over the world to
impose broad boycotts and implement divestment initiatives against Israel similar to those
applied to South Africa in the apartheid era. We appeal to you to pressure your respective
states to impose embargoes and sanctions against Israel. We also invite conscientious
Israelis to support this Call, for the sake of justice and genuine peace.
“These non-violent punitive measures should be maintained until Israel
meets its obligation to recognize the Palestinian people’s inalienable right to
self-determination and fully complies with the precepts of international law
by:
“1. Ending its occupation and colonization of all Arab lands and
dismantling the Wall;
“2. Recognizing the fundamental rights of the Arab-Palestinian citizens
of Israel to full equality; and
“3. Respecting, protecting and promoting the rights of Palestinian
refugees to return to their homes and properties as stipulated in UN resolution
194.”
The three interlinked tactics (boycotts, divestment and sanctions) were aimed at
achieving three goals: ending Israeli occupation and colonization, securing equality for
Israeli Arabs and winning the right of return for Palestinian refugees. The BDS National
Committee (a loose coordinating body) has not formally endorsed either a “two
state” or “one state” solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. But
the right of return and the demand for full equality for Palestinians within Israel are
widely recognized as incompatible with the maintenance of a ”Jewish state.”
Consequently, most BDS activists favor some variant of a “single, democratic,
secular” state embracing the entire territory of what is today Israel and the
occupied West Bank and Gaza.
The BDS strategy appeals to students, academics and liberals who hope that global
“civil society” can exert sufficient pressure to wring important concessions
from the Zionist ruling class. According to Mustafa Barghouthi, head of the Union of
Palestinian Medical Relief Committees: “Boycott is the best way of changing the
balance of forces. Military force will not work, because of the imbalance of forces, but
also because it is not right. I don’t think Israel will change its policy unless it
hurts, and BDS will hurt it” (The Nation, 28 June 2010). Noura
Erakat, a human-rights attorney, explains:
“The tripartite strategy of boycott, divestment and sanctions is rooted
in economic logic: Israel must comply with international law because non-compliance is too
politically and economically costly to maintain. Divestment pressures institutions with
stakes in Israeli companies, or in companies that sustain Israeli human rights abuses, to
drop their holdings. Boycotts encourage consumers to ‘let the market decide’
upon justice by refusing to buy goods made by companies that benefit from the occupation
or inequality in Israel. Sanctions, on the other hand, are trade restrictions imposed by
governments upon others.”
—Middle East Report, Summer 2010
Each element of the BDS strategy, by itself, is simply utopian; taken together, they
express and reinforce the debilitating illusion that the institutions of monopoly
capitalism and global imperialism can be employed as tools of liberation for the
oppressed.
For many, the appeal of consumer boycotts—beyond the immediate gratification they
offer to those who want to do something “concrete”—lies in the notion of
using the market to modify the behavior of individual capitalists, who, though indifferent
to the suffering of the Palestinians, are very attentive to their own bottom line. Yet
consumer boycotts are notoriously ineffective in achieving even very modest objectives.
Agitation aimed at persuading an undifferentiated and atomized “buying public”
to make political statements through everyday purchases may resonate with socially
progressive middle-class elements, but such appeals rarely gain traction among those who
do not have the luxury to scrutinize labels or pay upmarket prices for household
necessities. In any case, the internationalization of production makes it exceedingly
difficult, if not impossible, to precisely discern which corporations or products have an
Israeli connection and which are untainted. Another problem is that in isolating
particular corporations for moral opprobrium, boycott campaigns implicitly endorse their
“better” corporate rivals and thus obscure the fact that social oppression
derives from the entire system of production for profit.
The divestment tactic has similar problems. Rather than seeking to influence corporate
behavior by indirect consumer pressure, divestment involves direct
appeals to shareholders, both private and public. Capitalist investment tends to seek the
highest rate of return, and profit-making is, in the final analysis, supreme. Even if a
few companies divest from Israel, others will soon step in if there is money to be made. A
recent example was the 2009 sale by Motorola of an Israeli subsidiary which produced bomb
fuses for the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) where the purchaser turned out to be an Israeli
weapons manufacturer. BDS activists hailed the transaction as a victory, while Motorola
denied that it had been influenced by the divestment campaign. Today the IDF is still
getting bomb fuses from the same facility—the only difference is that the owners are
now less susceptible to pressure from Western liberals.
The third element of the BDS campaign is the call for major capitalist powers to impose
“sanctions” on Israel. This presumes that state policy in these countries can
be pushed into benefitting the downtrodden. Marxists view the bourgeois state as a machine
of repression and exploitation—a proposition amply confirmed by the historical
record. Sanctions, much like foreign “aid,” are never anything but a weapon of
bourgeois diplomacy and power projection (humanitarian and other rhetoric
notwithstanding). Sanctions, like those imposed on Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, or more
recently on Iran, are intended to bring recalcitrant neocolonies to heel. In Iraq, the
UN-imposed sanctions resulted in the death of over a million civilians, mostly people from
working-class and poor neighborhoods.
On those rare occasions when the U.S. threatened Israel with various sorts of
sanctions, it did so to advance its own interests (see accompanying article). In the 1940s
and 50s, the object was to ensure political stability in the region. In the early 1990s,
the aim was to launch a fraudulent “peace process.” Palestinian national
rights have never been a priority for Washington (or any other imperialist power), nor are
they likely to be in the future. Yet as America’s grip on the Middle East weakens,
it is possible to foresee the European imperialists distancing themselves from Tel Aviv in
order to pursue new diplomatic openings. Such maneuvering would represent a significant
sharpening of inter-imperial rivalry, but would be unlikely to deliver much besides
rhetorical support for the Palestinians.
BDS & the Left
The overtly reformist premises of the BDS campaign have not deterred many ostensibly
revolutionary organizations from signing on. Their enthusiasm is directly proportional to
their willingness to embrace non-proletarian forces as potential agents of social
emancipation. Among the larger formations that promote BDS is the British Socialist
Workers Party (SWP—the flagship of the International Socialist Tendency founded by
the late Tony Cliff). While occasionally making pro forma references to the desirability
of socialism and formally subscribing to Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution
(which holds that in the imperialist epoch national liberation and other tasks
historically associated with the bourgeois revolution can only be achieved through
proletarian power), the SWP has advocated an openly two-stage strategy in both South
Africa and Palestine. In 1994, the SWP rationalized its call for a vote to the bourgeois
African National Congress as a means to consolidate the gains of the anti-apartheid
struggle. And for years the Cliffites echoed the PLO’s calls for a “secular,
democratic” (i.e., capitalist) state in Palestine/Israel. Today the SWP promotes BDS
as a way to achieve a “meaningful compromise” with the Zionist oppressors:
“Whatever the differences between struggles against South African and
Israeli versions of apartheid, the similarities loom large. Outright military victory was
and is not a viable aim in either case, and negotiations could not take place or have any
prospect of progress until those with power foresaw that the cost of stonewalling would
exceed the cost of meaningful compromise. In South Africa the mutually reinforcing factors
of internal mass mobilisation and external solidarity pressure for divestment and boycott
produced a change in the balance of forces. Without external pressure on companies and
governments internationally, the risings might now be remembered as heroic but not regime
changing. Without mass struggle internally, and the repression it exposed, the external
BDS movement would not have been able to develop widespread support among trade unions,
students, activists and eventually growing numbers of politicians.”
—International Socialism, Autumn
2010
The same article speculates that a BDS campaign might not have as much impact as its
South African antecedent did in the 1980s:
“Can BDS be applied to Israel much as the AAM [Anti-Apartheid Movement]
directed its strategy towards South Africa—and can it have a similar impact? A
consumer boycott is unlikely to bring crisis to the Israeli economy, a socio-economic
system supported by massive US aid. It will, however, bring to worldwide public attention
the circumstances of the Palestinians—which have been obscured by decades of
ideologically distorted reporting and by the efforts by partisans of Israel to dismiss the
Palestinian case.”
—Ibid.
At bottom, the Cliffites champion the BDS strategy not because they think it can bring
the Zionists to their knees, but because it is popular. It also provides their members
with practical activity, while distracting them from the fact that their leadership has no
idea how the utopian formula of a “secular, democratic” Palestine can possibly
be realized.
Other, more leftist, proponents of BDS at least talk about the necessity of a socialist
solution to the national question in Israel/Palestine. In a recent speech, Marcus Halaby,
who has emerged as a leading spokesperson on Middle East affairs for Workers Power
(WP—British section of the League for the Fifth International [L5I]), called for
“a bi-national, workers’ state, which would have to be brought about in the
context of a regional workers’ revolution, which would lead to a federation with
equality of rights and autonomy for all, including the Jewish-Israeli nation”
(“Palestine and Israel: two states or one state and the right of return?,” 15
July 2010). Elsewhere, Workers Power has noted that:
“The Arab leaders—the so-called ‘nationalist’ or
‘progressive’ one[s] as well as the ‘pragmatic’ and
‘conservative’ ones, act objectively as the agents of imperialism in the
region. They represent a major obstacle to the liberation of the Palestinian people, as
well as their own citizens.”
—“A programme of liberation for Palestine,” 27
December 2008
This would seem to point in the direction of applying the program of permanent
revolution in the Middle East. Yet, as is frequently the case with Workers Power, formally
correct premises are followed by starkly revisionist conclusions.
In a lengthy theoretical document on Israel-Palestine, published in 1989, which, to our
knowledge, the L5I still stands on, its forerunner (the League for a Revolutionary
Communist International [LRCI]) addressed the character of Israel’s Jewish
population and the Zionist state’s relationship to U.S. imperialism:
“The Israeli Jews, while they have forged a national consciousness in
the last forty years which is distinct from their sense of themselves as part of world
Jewry, are part of an oppressor nation; their national consciousness has been forged only
by a simultaneous denial of the legitimate rights of the Palestinians to
self-determination. Consequently Israel is an oppressor nation and as such we do not
recognize its right to exist as a nation state.”
. . .
“…since the 1967 war and the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza
Strip the oriental Jews [Sephardim] have experienced a degree of social/class mobility
which has both further stratified them and consolidated the whole Jewish population of
Israel into a shared common oppressive and exploitative relationship to the Palestinian
Arabs.”
. . .
“The starting point for a revolutionary party’s programme in
Palestine and the surrounding countries must be the struggle against imperialism and its
wide variety of local agents. The world-hegemonic imperialist power—the USA with its
fleets in the Mediterranean and the Gulf defends ‘its’ oil and the semi-feudal
rentier regimes it props up in the Arabian peninsula with a limitless arsenal. Yet as its
ignominious fiasco in Iran and its inglorious retreat from Lebanon shows it is far from
invincible when the masses are roused against it even under the most appalling leadership.
This ‘leadership’ whether Stalinist, bourgeois nationalist or clerical
reactionary can however only score partial and limited victories against the USA and its
agents.”
. . .
“So essential to the USA is the existence of the Zionist state that it
is repeatedly forced to adapt its overall strategy and tactics for controlling the region
to the wishes of its Israeli ally. Most frequently undermined and sabotaged are its
relations with its Arab clients (Mubarak, Hussein and the Saudi rulers) who it is
repeatedly obliged to abandon and swindle.”
— “Theses on Zionism, Israel, Palestine and Arab
nationalism,” Trotskyist International No.2, Winter
1989
Confusion abounds in these “theses.” To begin with, there is the petulant
petty-bourgeois declaration that “Israel is an oppressor nation and as such we do
not recognize its right to exist as a nation state.” Does WP recognize the right of
other “oppressor nations” like the Han Chinese, Great Russians or Americans to
exist as nation states?
While Israeli Jews constitute a nation, Marxists do not consider the existing state of
Israel to be a legitimate expression of their national right to self-determination (since
it is premised upon the subjugation of the Palestinians). But all nations have a right
“to exist” and to self-determination, and Marxists defend those rights while
opposing any attempt to exercise them at the expense of another people. It is simply
liberal moralism to suggest that “the whole Jewish population” shares in the
oppression of the Palestinians. Jewish workers are not responsible for the crimes of their
rulers, and few derive any tangible benefits from them (even if they are fooled into
solidarizing with their exploiters by Zionist ideology).
Finally, while Workers Power correctly observes that the Arab states function as agents
of imperialism, the suggestion is also made that they are somehow qualitatively different
from Israel, which is why WP sides with the Arab regimes in the wars of 1948, 1967 and
1973 (see Trotskyist Bulletin No.3). In its April 2007 “Programme of action
for Palestine,” the L5I issued a blank check for the future, declaring: “For
an active defeatist position towards the Zionist state in any conflict with an Arab
bourgeois regime” and “Critical support to even bourgeois Arab states in
economic or military conflict with imperialism and Israel!”
In his July 2010 speech, Halaby distinguished between the Israeli state and the
Israeli-Jewish nation: “If I recognise that they are a nation, then it follows that
I have to recognise that they have the right to a state. I don’t advocate it,
though, and I can’t recognise their actually-existing nation-state as a legitimate
expression of that right.” Halaby also clearly rejects any blanket condemnation of
the Jewish working class: “Despite the reactionary colonisation policy most of the
Jewish population are workers and farmers with no ulterior motive beyond seeking to work
and bring up their families” (op. cit., 27 December 2008). But he remains
deeply pessimistic about the possibility of breaking Israeli workers from their Zionist
masters:
“the liberation struggle should encourage all and any developments
within Israeli society that might fracture the bloc between the Jewish-Israeli proletariat
and the Zionist bourgeoisie. Given the strong material basis and historic durability of
this reactionary alliance, it would be a mistake to make the liberation struggle
strategically dependent on this occurring first.”
—Ibid.
In his 2010 remarks, Halaby advanced the same prognosis:
“I think it will take a series of defeats for Israel to shake the
confidence of Israel’s working class in Zionism’s ability to provide them with
security, with prosperity, with continued democratic rights, and with peace and
normality….
“Now, we might be lucky. They could learn from their defeats quickly
enough that they avoid a complete catastrophe for themselves. They could even learn
quickly enough that a section of them provide useful allies to the struggle. But one thing
I’m not willing to do is to advise the Palestinians to make their struggle
strategically dependent on winning over the Israeli working class.”
If it is not realistic to hope to win over a chunk of the Israeli-Jewish working class
as a strategic ally in the struggle to shatter the Zionist state, then what forces does WP
expect will administer the “defeats” its strategy hinges on? Instead of
attempting to propose a revolutionary solution, Workers Power advocates pushing the
trade-union bureaucracy to embrace the BDS program and bring pressure to bear on the
imperialist rulers:
“Small-scale practical actions can be used to place pressure on the
official workers’ organisations in the West and elsewhere, to promote trade and
academic boycotts of Israel, to block arms sales, military aid and loan guarantees, and to
isolate Israel in the way that the South African apartheid regime was
isolated….
“At the same time we must fight worldwide for workers’ sanctions
and an academic boycott of Israel, the apartheid state. Any international campaign must
target the US and EU governments, which have economic and military ties to Israel, forcing
them to break the link and stop funding the racist, settler state of Israel.”
—op. cit., 27 December 2008
WP reiterated this a few weeks later: “we need to go on the offensive and must
demand that our governments sever all diplomatic contacts, expelling Israeli
ambassadors/withdrawing ambassadors from Israel, cutting all cultural and educational
links” (“Build a Mass Movement to aid the Gaza Resistance,” 13 January
2009).
The keystone of WP’s approach is the “anti-imperialist united front,”
recently rechristened the “anti-imperialist and anti-Zionist united front.”
This formula conflates, rather than distinguishes between, political and military
support—although at times WP seeks to give the impression that its proposed bloc is
strictly limited to practical cooperation and excludes any political support:
“Thus we are advocates of an anti-imperialist and anti-Zionist united
front against each and every attack of these plunderers, including in its ranks
socialists, Islamic and secular nationalists. All we ask from our partners in struggle is
mutual respect for each other’s democratic rights and freedom of expression for our
differing views. Naturally we will never give political support to our united front
partners on their different end goals for society (an Islamic or a secular capitalist
republic).”
—op. cit., 27 December 2008
Yet after baptizing this hypothetical alliance a “united front,” the
political chameleons of Workers Power proceed to anoint their projected bourgeois partners
as anti-imperialists and anti-capitalists who may end up playing a role in “the
insurrection itself”:
“We should organise against any attempt to subordinate the working class
to their oppressors or to non-proletarian ideologies. However, in the united front, we
support joint action with all forces fighting imperialism and capitalism wherever possible
to maximise its chance of success of the struggle, irrespective of the ideology of those
forces. This goes from strikes, military action up to the insurrection itself.”
—Ibid.
This absurdity—postulating a bloc with bourgeois forces not only to
“fight” capitalism but also to carry out the proletarian revolution—can
only be characterized as “left”-utopian popular frontism. Its underlying logic
meshes nicely with WP’s policy of blanket support to imperialism’s Arab
clients in any military conflict with their Zionist rivals.
Having virtually written off the Jewish-Israeli working class as a potential ally on
the grounds that its bond with the Zionist exploiters is too strong, WP proposes instead
to pressure imperialism to sever economic, diplomatic and military ties to Israel while
advocating cross-class blocs with “anti-imperialist” and
“anti-Zionist” Arab bourgeois forces. This amounts to a repudiation of
Trotsky’s program of permanent revolution.
For Labor Strikes Against Israeli Apartheid!
The international labor movement has both the objective interest and potential social
power to effectively defend the desperately oppressed Palestinians through concrete labor
actions. At the height of the campus-based divestment campaign against South African
apartheid in the 1980s, Howard Keylor, a long-time union militant on the docks of San
Francisco and an IBT supporter, proposed a motion that the International Longshore and
Warehouse Union “hot cargo” (i.e., refuse to unload) the next ship arriving
with South African freight. For 10 days, beginning on 24 November 1984, hundreds of Bay
Area dockers defied the companies and their arbitrators by refusing to touch the
blood-stained cargo aboard the Nedlloyd Kimberley, despite the highly ambivalent
attitude of the local union bureaucrats.
This bold action electrified opponents of apartheid. Hundreds of people turned out at
the pier in support and a wide variety of black organizations, community groups and other
unions hailed the dockers’ initiative. On the eleventh day, when the police arrived
to enforce a federal injunction, the union leadership buckled and the South African cargo
was finally unloaded. Yet this powerful example, which was hailed by Nelson Mandela when
he was released from prison years later, resonates internationally to this day.
In the wake of the 2008-09 assault on Gaza, dockworkers from the South African
Transport and Allied Workers Union refused to load an Israeli vessel in Durban. On 20 June
2010, shortly after the flotilla raid, a mass picket of 700-800 workers and activists in
Oakland, California prevented the Israeli Zim Lines ship Zim Shenzhen from being
unloaded for 24 hours. The Oakland picket marked the first time an Israeli vessel was
blocked at a U.S. port, as well as the first international blockade of an Israeli ship
since the assault on the Marvi Marmara. On 19 June 2010, the Palestinian General
Federation of Trade Unions sent a message to Bay Area militants which included the
following stirring passage:
“Dear brothers and sisters, trade unionists, workers, and people of the
San Francisco Bay Area, we remember and salute your historic and massive action on the
docks in 1984, when you acted to boycott the apartheid regime in South
Africa.
“We look to you today from the Gaza Strip and all of Palestine, and call
upon you to repeat that courageous stand today. This genuine solidarity is something we
have longed for and expected.”
In the following weeks, similar actions occurred around the world. In Turkey, Western
Australia, Sweden, Norway and the Indian Port of Cochin, dockworkers’ unions refused
to unload Israeli cargo.
Some of these actions were promoted by their initiators, and welcomed by pro-Palestine
activists, as an implementation of the BDS campaign. Yet the logic of workers’
solidarity actions is in fact counterposed to a strategy premised on the illusion
that opponents of Israeli apartheid can find allies in corporate boardrooms and among the
Zionists’ imperialist patrons. The reason that the international workers’
movement is a potentially powerful ally of the Palestinians is that it can deal tangible
blows to the oppressors by paralyzing the means of production, communication and
transportation.
More concerted labor actions against Israeli apartheid would arouse profound anxiety
among the planners of the imperialist world order—not only because it would pose a
threat to their profits and geopolitical calculations, but also because it would signal a
rising level of class-consciousness in the labor movement. Pseudo-Marxists like Workers
Power, who imagine that it is very clever to combine class-struggle tactics (e.g., labor
boycotts) with class-collaborationist calls on the imperialists for self-reform, are, in
Trotsky’s words, attempting to combine “fire and water”:
‘‘Most dangerous of all, however, is the Stalinist policy. The
parties of the Communist International try to appeal especially to the more
revolutionary workers by denouncing the League [of Nations] (a denunciation that
is an apology), by asking for ‘workers’ sanctions,’ and then
nevertheless saying: ‘We must use the League when it is for sanctions.’ They
seek to hitch the revolutionary workers to the shafts so that they can draw the cart of
the League.’’
—“Once Again the ILP,” November
1935
At that time the issue was Benito Mussolini’s fascist regime’s invasion of
Abyssinia (today known as Ethiopia). Trotsky’s explanation of why workers’
action is inevitably counterposed to capitalist sanctions remains entirely applicable to
today’s struggle against the crimes of Zionism:
“The truth is that if the workers begin their own sanctions against
Italy, their action inevitably strikes at their own capitalists, and the League would be
compelled to drop all sanctions. It proposes them now just because the workers’
voices are muted in every country. Workers’ action can begin only by absolute
opposition to the national bourgeoisie and its international combinations. Support of the
League and support of workers’ actions are fire and water; they cannot be
united.”
—Ibid.
Unlike in 1935, the “democratic” imperialists today do not bother with
verbal denunciations, much less symbolic sanctions, against Tel Aviv. In the advanced
capitalist states, as well as in Israel/Palestine, only a class-struggle strategy can lay
the basis for the liberation of the Palestinian people. Mobilizing the potential power of
the international proletariat, however, requires a fight to forge a new, socialist
leadership for the workers’ movement—one committed to uprooting the entire
exploitative and oppressive system of global capitalism.