Dennis Brasky writes: If the Israeli Jews are offered self determination after the coming socialist revolution, what form will that take? Won't it be a Jewish state in Palestine - where the Palestinians would want their state? But the Jews already have such a state, so why do they need a revolution? This would do nothing to break away the Jewish working class from Zionism. On the contrary, it is an unprincipled concession to it, one that the Palestinians could never support. Any leftists advocating it would earn for themselves distrust. ================================= It's not possible to conceive of a socialist revolution in Palestine/Israel which would not involve the participation of the Jewish masses, and if such were to come to pass, the question of a "Jewish state", especially in terms of what it has come to represent, would be moot. It's very unlikely that Hebrew-speaking revolutionaries, having shed their blood with Arabic-speaking Palestinians against the Zionists and the Zionist idea, would be asking, if anything, for more than the new state's support for the preservation of their language and culture.
Crucially, however, your stance avoids the question of how to respond to the actual political situation as it exists today. The only discernible movement is in the direction of two rigidly segregated states, with the subordinated Palestinian entity hardly warranting being called such. Fatah and the rest of the world with few exceptions accept the continuation of an Israeli state de jure and Hamas and it's allies are reluctantly compelled to do so de facto. In this context, it's almost utopian to even envisage a federation of two Palestinian and Israeli states as a transitional measure, much less a socialist revolution which dissolves these boundries, but at least the former is something which leftish forces in each society have contemplated as more realizable at the outside, and a possible basis for united action. You invoked Lenin, but neglected to mention or are perhaps unaware that the Bolshevik notion of self-determination allowed for such voluntary federations, perceived as an interim measure accompanying progress towards socialism at the economic level, so it it would not be unprincipled for someone such as yourself to support such a temporary political arrangement in the Middle East as consistent with that tradition. On the other hand, it seems clear that if there is any program at the present time which most Arabic-speaking Palestinians, let alone the overwhelming majority of Hebrew-speakers, "could never support", it is placing a revolutionary socialist agenda ahead of their national aspirations, and that "any leftists advocating it would earn for themselves distrust" from both sides. ________________________________________________ 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
