In View of Israel's Attack on Gaza: The CPUSA's Conciliation of Zionism

I intended to write about why support for the dictatorship of the proletariat is inextricable from any real Marxism. Current events have postponed my addressing that topic for now. Today, I re-read an article entitled "The Palestinian Revolution and the Struggle Against Zionism," by the Line of March Editorial Board, in Line of March: A Marxist-Leninist Journal of Rectification (Oakland: The Institute for Scientific Socialism, 1983). It is a sign of the present state of theory in the U.S. communist movement that I need to turn for pertinent analysis to back issues of an anti-revisionist, anti-Maoist journal put out over 25 years ago--by a group now long defunct.

I do not deny that much has changed since then. In the first place, the Soviet Union and the socialist camp it led no longer exist to help Middle East countries escape the orbit of the United States and the world imperialist system over which the U.S. presides. In Palestine itself, the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) supplanted the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) as frontline leader of the Palestinian people's struggle for national survival against Israel.

Some things, however, have not changed. Israel remains "essentially a reactionary, European settler state based solidly upon the ideology of Jewish chauvinism and the practice of systematic oppression of the Palestinian Arabs, established and defended by world imperialism to strengthen its foothold in the Middle East." ("The Palestinian Revolution and the Struggle Against Zionism," p. 77) Also, now as then, the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) endorses the "two-state solution."

I recommend the aforementioned article in Line of March as it includes a still-timely analysis of how and why the CPUSA conciliates Zionism and why Marxist-Leninists must struggle against such conciliation in order to re-orient U.S. progressive, left, and anti-imperialist activists more towards solidarity with the Palestinian people. Unfortunately, I cannot find the text online, making it impossible at present to link this post to that article.

Susan Webb, in her online article at the CPUSA's People's Weekly World newspaper dated December 31, 2008, agrees that "a peaceful two-state solution is in U.S. interests, including the long-term global interests of U.S. capitalism, not to mention the interests of the Israeli and Palestinian people." The CPUSA, while urging a cease-fire, also denounces Hamas (as well as the Israeli military) as "irresponsible" and "provocative," and calls on the U.S. to "take decisive action for a just diplomatic solution that supports the national aspirations of the Palestinian people as well as the true security interest of the Israeli people."

Let us set aside for now the fact that Susan Webb's statement shows an earnest belief in a harmony of long-range interests among U.S. capitalism, "the Israeli people," and the Palestinian people. The article in Line of March cited above aptly warns that "any conciliation of Zionism on the part of the U.S. left inevitably leads to collaboration with U.S. imperialism." ("The Palestinian Revolution and the Struggle Against Zionism," p. 89)

The two-state solution is dead. It was killed twice, first by the continuing presence within Israel's pre-1967 borders of Palestinians, who now increasingly identify with Hamas and other militant expressions of support for their national hopes--regardless of the fact that they are Israeli citizens and in that sense "Israeli people." Writing in the New York Times on December 29, 2008, an Israeli professor admitted that "[i]f present trends persist, Arabs could constitute the majority of Israel’s citizens by 2040 or 2050." The two-state solution was killed again by ever more Jewish settlements that have turned the map of the West Bank into a jigsaw puzzle of Jewish settlements and Palestinian communities.

Notwithstanding this demographic and geographic reality, the core problem with the two-state "solution" as a long-term resolution of the conflict is that it both denies the right of Palestinians exiled from their country since 1948 to return to their stolen land and homes and envisions the continuing existence of a state privileging Jewish people in relation to Palestinians. No communist would have proposed a two-state solution for South Africa wherein a territorial entity should have been recognized for white settlers and their descendants and any whites from elsewhere who might later emigrate, in order for them to maintain a regime of, for, and by white people. Yet what else is the continuing existence in Palestine of this geopolitical entity for Jewish settlers and their descendants and any Jews from elsewhere who might one day emigrate, than a Jewish version of apartheid?

The fact that Hamas now leads the Palestinian people does not make Palestine's cause any less noble from an anti-imperialist point of view, even if the realistic alternative to the two-state solution currently appears not to be a democratic secular state, much less a socialist one. The primary contradiction is between Zionist occupation and the national liberation struggle of the Palestinian people. That liberation struggle attacks and seeks to destroy the most reliable and enduring if not principal fighting detachment of imperialism in the Middle East, that is, the State of Israel.

Hamas, and not Fatah or other PLO groups, in the main leads the armed resistance. Moreover, Hamas, and not Fatah, rejects entreaties to recognize Israel's right to exist, which rejection anchors Hamas's firm and consistent support for the right of return of all dispossessed Palestinians and for a Palestinian state in all of Palestine. In view of this, Hamas is objectively revolutionary in the context of the current conjuncture, notwithstanding any subjectively reactionary qualities.

Solidarity with Palestine is relatively weak among U.S. progressives, and is not strengthened when the CPUSA, as noted above, concerns itself with what it calls "the true security interest of the Israeli people." Such talk echoes the U.S. foreign policy establishment. Communists should no more take responsibility for the "true security interest" of Jewish settlers in Palestine (or U.S. imperialism, for that matter) than they ought to have assumed responsibility for the "true security interest" of white settlers in South Africa.

Zionist occupation will end, I suspect, as surely as apartheid ended. Whether Jews remain in Palestine after Zionism, as whites remained in South Africa after the end of apartheid, however, depends on a number of factors, including the extent to which they accept the demise of their unjust privileges. The Jews in Palestine, including working-class Jews, have been deeply corrupted by their privileged political, economic, and ideological position in relation to the nationally oppressed Arab masses who are the most exploited and least protected strata of the working class. They will likely in the main defend the Zionist regime to the end. Their belief in the sanctity of their Jewish privileges, a delusion shared by the Jewish left in Israel, should not be conciliated with communist support for a two-state solution.