"The project to found Israel as a settler state was and still is “a crime”, said comrade Conrad. But that crime has resulted in the coming into being of an Israeli Jewish, or Hebrew, nation and a working class solution must recognise this reality. While comrade Conrad could envisage the necessity of expelling recent Israeli settlers from the West Bank as part of an agreed democratic settlement, it was out of the question to talk about uprooting the Israeli Jewish people as a whole. The Israeli Jewish nation, like any other, has the right to self-determination, so long as it is not exercised at the expense of the oppression of other peoples.
The founding of the state of Israel resulted not only in the creation of an Israeli nation, but a Palestinian nation too. So now there are two mutually hostile nations contesting the same territory. Of course, if the two nations were prepared to join together in a democratic, secular state, that would be an excellent thing, but such a merger could only be achieved on a voluntary basis and the overwhelming majority of Israeli Jews reject it out of hand. What is more, the Israeli state is “armed to the teeth and allied to the US”, the most powerful imperialist country on earth. So how would it be possible to attain a single state in current circumstances? Comrade Conrad concluded by saying that we need to approach the whole question from a different angle - taking the perspective of the Arab revolution as our starting point. The working class “must win leadership of the Arab nation” to achieve a democratic solution for the entire Middle East. A voluntary merger of the Arab peoples under working class hegemony, having defeated Zionism, would certainly grant the Israeli Jewish nation the right to self-determination, including the right to form their own state." http://cpgb.org.uk/worker/789/mapping.php On Fri, Oct 16, 2009 at 12:03 PM, Andrew Pollack <acpolla...@gmail.com>wrote: > And the notion that Palestinians SHOULDN'T return > and that the current colonizers won't accept being a minority, flies > in the face of a variety of historical examples, from Algeria to South > Africa and so on. The main lesson of those examples being, of course, > that the majority will find a way by whatever means it can to assert > its rights. > Andy Pollack > > ________________________________________________ YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
