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No 1540 22nd August 2018

Corbynite Palestine apostasy in the teeth of demented CIA/Zionist “left anti-Semitism” lie campaign is the most craven retreat yet – underlining the treachery and opportunism of ALL Labourism for all time. The wave of “left” support floating the Corbyn boat has to make up its mind; stick with duplicity and class collaborating cravenness - and a continued plunge into capitalist crisis – or break free to build anti-capitalist revolutionary politics, the only path out of Catastrophic breakdown of the profit system into desperate trade war and all-out shooting war. But needed sharp challenge to Zionist double-think BIG LIE propaganda and censorship not coming from the fake-“left”, all in thrall to Political Correctness retreat from revolution and cowering before demented Jewish “racism” propaganda gobshyte and its cover-up of the 1948 landtheft colonial seizure of Palestinian's land. Zionist aggression now a forward weapon for imperialist crisis bullying. The fight merges with the fight to end all capitalism demanding Leninist science leadership

The Boris Johnson burqa provocations, supine grovelling of Corbynism to demented “anti-semitism” lies and the deepening chauvinist poison fed by Brexit confusion all underline the total posturing PC shallowness and opportunist ignorance of the supposed “left” - all 57 varieties (and more).

The accelerating world economic crisis, now emerging further in openly belligerent tradewar aggression, particularly by dominant US imperialism around Trumpism (rather than the equally vicious but more hidden economic and currency warfare of past decades); in horrific Middle East and Ukrainian destruction; and in the savage economic bullying of victim nations (currently including Turkey, Venezuela, Iran) is increasingly putting the revolutionary necessities facing the world working class, squarely on the table.

Yet not one of these of squabbling pretend “revolutionaries” - from extreme Trots to ultra-orthodox Stalinist revisionists, comes anywhere near giving the working class an understanding of the world catastrophic breakdown which is tearing capitalism apart, the only perspective to make sense of underlying slump austerity, cutbacks and the dirty war horrors being imposed by an ever more depraved crisis-threatened imperialism.

As a result they say nothing meaningful about the urgent need for class-war to overturn and end capitalism, which alone can counter the crude fascist scapegoating and xenophobia being deliberately fostered among workers by an increasingly desperate ruling class as an “explanation” and “solution” for their problems, the prelude to dragging the world back into all out world war for a third time in a century (as soon as the utterly bogus QE-credit fostered “recovery” implodes, as it must, creating Slump conditions far worse than the still continuing austerity impact of 2008).

Open “America First” belligerence will more and more force the rest of the world into hostility to the domineering and bullying of Washington, as for example the Iranians and even the demagogic Turkish president Erdogan are being pushed towards; the Chinese in the tariff retaliations their hugely successful use of capitalism (under planned workers state control) is being forced into; and increasingly from rival major powers like Europe and Japan (as over the Nordstream gas deal with Russia the US is bullying them to abandon).

But even as imperialist collapse deepens and its degeneracy is more sharply delineated than ever, its grotesque inequalities widen to ever more obscene levels and its wastefulness, irrationality and world-damaging environmental plundering and poisoning threaten existence itself, the “left” pulls back from even the tamest of challenges despite the hollow posturing pretences of “Marxism” it has lived by for the long decades of the post-war boom.

Still they avoid the revolutionary lessons and keep on the old useless and treacherous reformist “democracy” games.

Nowhere is this clearer than with the insane topsy-turvy nonsense of the browbeating “anti-semitism” campaign, attempting to paint as “racism” all the growing mass world hostility to the vile and vicious Jewish-Zionist occupation of Palestine (falsely labelled “the state of Israel”) and the inevitable hostility its barbaric genocidal actions generate, not just against Zionism there, but against the entire ‘Israel’-supporting Jewish freemasonry elsewhere throughout Western imperialism.

As crisis has deepened and the aggressive boot-boy role of the Zionist occupation has become increasingly central to the US’s own imperialist warmongering and world intimidation, to keep itself as topdog power and force everyone else to pay for the intractable crisis, so this has reached insane levels of in-your-face bullying lies and fascist black-is-white inversions of reality.

Completely demented allegations now pour out to suppress any and all criticism of the continuing occupation and its smiting Nazi terrorising and slaughter of the Palestinian people, with non-stop massacres, persecution, hounding, torture, terrorising and “low-intensity” ethnic cleansing of its millions, both in the West Bank - to make room for never-ending fanatically aggressive “settlement” land theft, gradually consuming the entire remaining territory - and the even more outright fascist imprisonment of the two million Gazans, penned in by the decade long throttling siege of the Gaza strip, its people reduced to inhuman deprivation and suffering imprisonment in what amounts to a giant concentration camp, without decent sanitation, constant power outages (for most of the stiflingly hot day), and cruelly imposed drug and equipment medical shortages (killing hundreds from untreated cancers etc), all constantly subject to routine blitz butchery, potshot killings, intimidation,imprisonment and collective “punishment”.

As the EPSR has long explained (see EPSR Book Vol 20 Occupied Palestine, nazi-Zionism, imperialist crisis and war), to cover up and “justify” this monstrous oppression for two decades and more, the CIA/Zionist intelligence agencies have deliberately fostered the aggressive nonsense that the occupying Jewish population dominating and taking over another people’s land were the “victims”.

This upside down Goebbels “logic” was sustained by the pretence that any resistance or even criticism of this violent takeover was due to “underlying racist anti-semitism”.

It is a propaganda campaign consciously and deliberately covering over the actual post-1948 reality that it is the land stealing colonialist occupation itself, and its fascist terrorising and ethnic cleansing, which leads to unstoppable bitterness, hatred and resistance, which can only deepen into ever greater anti-imperialist militancy and ultimately all-out anti-capitalist revolutionary struggle once the shortcomings and backwardness of current, mostly religious militant ideologies are worked through.

Particularly since the Iraq war this propaganda nonsense has been escalated, as the Zionist occupation has become more and more intertwined with the warmongering destruction and suppression of the Middle East by crisis ridden Washington, the Jewish entity increasingly used as justification and as a model for the balkanising destruction and blitzing of the region which imperialism (and above all top power the US) has turned to as a central element in its own warmongering “way out” of the greatest crisis ever.

Zionism’s fanatical expansionism has already long served as a useful tool for US domination of the entire lucrative and strategically vital region.

And it has generated growing revolt in itself.

Inevitably resistance and hostility has deepened even further as US imperialism’s warmongering rampages, driven by the needs of its crisis bullying have intensified in the Middle East and elsewhere and as the experience and knowledge of the masses has matured, locally and throughout the Third World, and their self-awareness of their oppressed and tyrannically exploited lives has become ever more intolerable.

The latest dementedly aggressive self-righteousness of the Jewish lobby goes right off the scale in contradictory special pleading in its efforts to suppress the ever growing revulsion and hatred for the barbarities and brutalities of “Israel” imposed on the terrorised Palestinians and the smiting of the proud and dignified Arab world they are part of, and in brotherhood with, (historically, geographically and culturally) and as well as the wider regional states, particularly imperialist demonised Iran.

And this dialectical sharpening of the unstoppably ripening contradictions of the crisis has pushed this Nazi propaganda to absurdity as in its “demands” that completely reactionary “definitions of anti-semitism” be adopted which censor and suppress all debate and discussion.

The gross hypocrisies and self-righteous lies of the Zionists (and the Western Jewish freemasonry networks which also sustain the “Israel” monstrosity - even those protesting their liberal “anti-Zionism”) have never been more glaringly revealed for their upside-down bullying contradictions and Goebbels misrepresentations, than in the astonishing demand that even the most oblique references to the “Israeli” occupation as a “racist state” be deemed the height of anti-semitism in itself, even as the Benjamin Netanyahu government was passing a law precisely with that intent:

Israel has passed a law declaring that only Jews have the right of self-determination in the country, a move described by members of the Arab minority as racist and verging on apartheid.

The “nation state” law, backed by the rightwing government, passed by a vote of 62-55 and two abstentions in the 120-member parliament after months of political argument. Some Arab MPs shouted and ripped up papers after the vote.

“This is a defining moment in the annals of Zionism and the history of the state of Israel,” the prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, told the Knesset after the vote.

Largely symbolic, the law was enacted just after the 70th anniversary of the birth of the state of Israel. It stipulates that “Israel is the historic homeland of the Jewish people and they have an exclusive right to national self-determination in it”.

The bill strips Arabic of its designation as an official language alongside Hebrew, downgrading it to a “special status” that enables its continued use within Israeli institutions.

There are 1.8 million Arabs in Israel, about 20% of the 9 million population.

Early drafts of the legislation went further in what critics at home and abroad saw as discrimination towards Israel’s Arabs, who have long said they are treated as second-class citizens.

Clauses that were dropped in last-minute political wrangling – and after objections by Israel’s president and attorney general – would have enshrined in law the establishment of Jewish-only communities, and instructed courts to rule according to Jewish ritual law when there were no relevant legal precedents.

Instead, a more vaguely worded version was approved, which says: “The state views the development of Jewish settlement as a national value and will act to encourage and promote its establishment.“

Even after the changes, critics said the law would deepen a sense of alienation within the Arab minority. “I announce with shock and sorrow the death of democracy,” said Ahmed Tibi, an Arab MP.

Netanyahu has defended the law. “We will keep ensuring civil rights in Israel’s democracy but the majority also has rights and the majority decides,” he said last week. “An absolute majority wants to ensure our state’s Jewish character for generations to come.“

Israel’s Arab population is comprised mainly of descendants of the Palestinians who remained on their land during the conflict between Arabs and Jews that culminated in the war of 1948 surrounding the creation of the modern state of Israel. Hundreds of thousands of people were forced to leave their homes or fled.

Those who remained have full equal rights under the law but say they face constant discrimination, citing inferior services and unfair allocations for education, health and housing.

In Ma’alot-Tarshiha, a municipality in northern Israel that was created by linking the Jewish town of Ma’alot and the Arab town of Tarshiha, there was anger among Arab residents.

“I think this is racist legislation by a radical rightwing government that is creating radical laws and is planting the seeds to create an apartheid state,” said Bassam Bisharah, 71, a doctor.

Adalah, the Legal Centre for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, called the law an attempt to advance “ethnic superiority by promoting racist policies”.

This latest absurdity is not the whole story of the “left anti-semitism” lie campaign but reveals starkly its bullying thought-control nature, where not only is a complete inversion of reality presented, but like the Orwellian nightmare propaganda methodology in the book 1984, is insisted upon; not only is the world told that 2+2=5 but that they must actually force themselves to believe it, and see five fingers when four are held up in front of them.

Such “double-think” bullying was poisonously attributed by the MI5 informer and police-fink author George Orwell to the Soviet Union, whereas it has always been capitalism which imposes false “reality”, particularly in the great anti-communist brainwashing of the post-war US imperialist dominated world (for which Orwell’s book rapidly became one of the propaganda mainstays – remaining so ever since as part of poisonous official “truth” taught in capitalist schools, repeated by its media and promulgated by its intellectuals, including the whole Trotskyist wing of pretend “leftism”, saturated in petty bourgeois hostility to the workers states and their firm control).

Coincidentally or not, his book was published in 1948, (84 is the reverse), the very year that the Zionist occupation of Palestine was “generously” being granted alleged “statehood” by the Western imperialist stooge United Nations, sanctifying the violent terrorising, massacres, and murderously barbaric ethnic cleansing which drove hundreds of thousands of the Palestinian people from their own homes, land and cities into refugee camps and permanent exile, poverty, and humiliation where they are kept to this day by non-stop genocidal oppressive violence and repeated all-out massacres.

And the cover-up of this monstrous colonialist occupation, by brutal war, of another people’s lands, where they had lived non-stop for at least 1500 years - far longer than the “English” have lived in this island - is the real point of this “anti-semitism” bullying as the EPSR has long explained (No1213 16-12-03):

...post-1945 total Western brainwashing...pretends that the “free world” leadership only ever had good intentions for mankind.

To doubt these good intentions is worse than cursing God in church; and pride of place among these good intentions was, naturally enough, the founding of a homeland for the Jews in “Israel” (i.e. Palestine).

To doubt the goodness of this intention is far, far worse than blasphemy.

It is simply never the done thing to doubt the right of “Israel” to exist, or to doubt the benign purposes of Western imperialism in stitching up this armed colonial land-grab through the comatose United Nations stooge-shop and past the eyes of the brain-dead Stalinist Revisionists, paralysed by delusions of eternal “peaceful-coexistence”.

99% of the internet squawking is arising purely from the EPSR not accepting the fundamental premise that everyone else has been working around, — namely that “obviously, Israel is here to stay”.

The one certainty, however, is the exact opposite, of course.

This “Israel” is nothing but a current colonial land-theft in a new post-1945 era when precisely, these physical colonial empires owned by Western monopoly-capitalist and state interests are the one thing that has had to go (as no longer tolerable to Third World anti-imperialist sensitivities).

Past genocidal monstrousness, like the stealing of North America from its hundreds of native Indian nations, or the theft of Australia from the Aborigines, may still be doubted as ever likely to allow restitution to be made or much of the legitimate inheritance to be put back together again.

But the Palestinian nation was only racistly and genocidally evicted at the point of a gun in 1948 within living memory.

And that homeland destruction continues today not only within the clear indignant comprehension of the ousted Palestinian nation, but physically within their sight on this small crowded territory.

The 7 million Palestinians can peer through the barbed wire of their encampments, refugee hovels, or concentration camps, and actually see their own land being ploughed by the armed colonising interlopers.

And these are not like a few remaining Lokota Red Indians still complaining about loss of land rights in South Dakota, surrounded by 50 industrial states containing a white imperialist power of nearly 300 million population.

These 7 million Palestinians are, in the first place, a formidable political and fighting force in themselves.

But beyond that they are part of the 300 million strong Arab nation which only 700 years ago was an advanced civilisation, more powerful, capable, and sophisticated than European civilisation.

Moreover, it is an Arab civilisation which is becoming increasingly angry against Western domination of their region and the world, and an economic and political power which potentially is in a position to do a great deal about it.

On top of all that, the Palestinians are part of the Muslim religion, — the fastest growing, vastest, and most militant anti-Western philosophy on Earth with an endless number of axes to grind, and enough driving spirit to face down the decadent and criminal West.

This insulting “Israel” implantation must be in the running to be the most outrageous and ludicrous and doomed provocation ever attempted in the whole of world history.

It is only the innate mildness and servitude of the Muslim religion, and the cowed-by-Western-imperialism past 600 years defeats for the Arabs, which have kept the heroic Palestinian fightback against colonial genocide within the limits that it has so far been contained.

But the direction which this epic epoch-making struggle must take next is glaringly obvious.

Having fought overwhelming Zionist military superiority almost to a standstill in a steady escalation over the 55 years of the colonisation’s existence, (having started effectively squashed completely flat, and hampered behind barbed wire and non-stop Zionist armed-harassment and economic-starvation ever since), the Palestinian Intifada is now poised to wage a damaging guerrilla war against Western imperialism that could be the start of a world history turning-point leading to the end of 800 years of European capitalist supremacy.

It is in reaction to this stark projected reality that the emotionalism of the Jewish freemasonry starts hysterically to scream “Anti-semitism”, but only by hurling every scrap of objective reason out of the window.

It starts from a groundless abstract assumption that “naturally, the Jews have a right to a homeland just like every other nation”, etc, — which is endlessly repeated with such conviction that all analysis of this decidedly “unnatural” proposition simply ceases, and anyone having the “bad taste” or “ignorance” to dispute it, automatically qualifies as “eccentric”, “racist”, and “anti-Semitic” at the very least.

Closer examination, however, reveals grotesque and dangerous flaws in this completely abstract “self-determination” supposition.

What “nation”??? Adherents to the Jewish freemasonry are from scores of different national and racial backgrounds.

Their native languages are English, French, Italian, Dutch, Arabic, Persian, Polish, Hungarian, etc, etc, and the one “national language” which was claimed, Yiddish, is basically German.

Having been inserted by Western imperialist armed might into the heart of the Arab Middle East, this bogus “nation” then invented a new language, Modern Hebrew, based on a regional tongue in ancient times which had been preserved museum-like in the liturgy of Judaism.

Racially, the “Jewish nation” runs from black Ethiopians to the fairest of fair Scandinavians. There are no distinct racial characteristics whatsoever to mark out the “Jewish nation” comprehensively.

As a justifiably very famous religious freemasonry, one of the most talented in history, the changing role, meaning, and significance of “Jewishness” is as endlessly complex as that of any other self-identifying and self-protecting group, such as the Catholics, for example, and other famous Christian sects, — all variously persecuting or, mostly, persecuted all through history for a variety of local/political/dynastic/economic reasons, etc, etc.

All other religious freemasonries reveal the same fiendishly complex sectarian patterns of ups and mostly downs.

But it is precisely this ludicrously “religious” issue which “inspires” the most outrageous idiocies of all in the whole “Jewish question”.

It is insane enough to start an armed colonial war on Arab soil by armed and financed Western imperialist fanatics at all in the latter half of the 20th century.

But to try to get away with doing so on the basis of an obscure backward tribal voodoo from 1,000 years ago which prayed to a God who gave a “promised land” to his “chosen people” is gobsmacking stupidity which has 1% at most of “self-determination” abstract rigmarole in it, but 99% of taking the piss.

It is fascist apartheid repression - and the non-stop master-race Jewish blitzing repression of the Palestinians that it is an unavoidable inherent part of, and necessity of the occupation, (which will be overturned and thrown out the moment it relaxes this non-stop repression) which is the overwhelming cause of the hatred and revolt against the artificial state of “Israel” and all who support it, including the entire modern Jewish diaspora freemasonry which almost universally (bar an infinitessimal few) declares its “identity is bound up with ‘Israel’.”

This is nothing to do with the barbaric lumpen scapegoating “anti-semitic” (and anti-communist, anti-Roma, anti-gay,anti-disabled etc) backwardness of 1930s Hitlerism (supported by all imperialism at the time - “Hurrah for the Blackhirts” - Daily Mail) and the suggestion it is, is just the Orwellian “2+2” equation elevated to the realm of higher math calculus.

But it plays on the retreat by the entire fake-”left” into single-issue reformism, from feminism to LGBTQ rights and black nationalism in a dozen ever more convoluted PC permutations, which they have used to maintain a pretence of radical action for decades while evading and diverting from the revolutionary politics that alone can change the world (including sorting out all the single-issue grievances and additional injustices over and above the monstrous unfairness and inequality of capitalist society which breeds and causes all alienation and antagonism).

So desperately bound up are they in these pretences that they are sent reeling by these Goebbels allegations.

Instead of sharply taking the issue head on as a means of exposing the capitalist order and its crisis-drive warmongering (the cause of all the world devastation unfolding), declaring outright in favour of the benighted and genocidally oppressed Palestinian people and their right to fight back against and ultimately expel their tormenting Nazi-Jewish occupiers by every possible means, (painted as “terrorism” by the non-stop massacre and blitzing regimes of world imperialism), and for the rest of the world to take up the struggle as part of a growing revolutionary challenge to all imperialism, the TUC/Labourites capitulate and grovel all down the line, apologising for, or denying even the tepid support once given the Palestinians by the alleged “left” wing of the Corbynista revival.

The reactionary warmongering Blairite wing (with a number of outright Jewish members), now obscenely riding this demented campaign, has long gone far beyond the “normal” treacherous class collaboration of Labourism into outright collusion with imperialist fat cats and warmaking of course, and confirms it now by playing an utterly vicious role to sabotage even the tame Corbynite “left” with this gobshyte.

But the slimy apostasy of the Corbynites, dishonestly hidden behind denials of past positions or solidarity gestures, is essentially no different. It is part and parcel of a slew of backtracking and “compromise” which has abandoned all the (anyway tame and partial) supposed principles which attracted all this popular “left” support in the first place.

And this “false pretences” clarification now confronts all those who formed the “left” groundswell elevating Corbynism, and especially the daily increasing numbers among them who support the Palestinian and wider Arab cause.

Either they abandon their principles and reveal themselves to be opportunist-minded too, or they break with Labourism.

The spotlight is thrown even more onto the fake-“left” Trots and tame revisionists (CPB etc) who piled into Labour (or at least stand behind it by calling for votes for “left” MPs like the SWP), selling this “left” upsurge to the working class as a way forwards, once more heading them off from revolutionary understanding and back behind parliamentary reformism.

Staggeringly, groups like the Weekly Worker CPGB poseurs, holding themselves out as the supposedly more thoughtful and “intellectual” wing of the fake-“left” swamp, continue to declare that the route to socialism lies in “transforming Labour” into the revolutionary party even as these sharp lessons are delivered.

Labour has never been anything but a thoroughly bourgeois party, with a dozen Labour governments proving in practice that it will only ever run and operate for capitalist imperialism and dispelling any early (pre-1920s) confusion among workers that its initial “bourgeois workers party” status would offer a path towards socialism.

To continue trying to override those experiences now, to parasitically ride on its back, is opportunist desperation, and even more so as Corbynism buckles to the 2+2 bullying.

Naturally, to keep their “left” credentials, groups like the CPGB have to deal with the now glaringly obvious nazi-racist nature of “Israel” and this gross anti-semitism campaign, which is done by the sly trickery of deeming “anti-Zionism” to be different to anti-Jewishness – declaring that many Jews outside “Israel” (and some within it) are “anti-” the existing regime.

So they may be, but as the EPSR has also analysed, that is overwhelmingly not out of opposition to the continuing existence of “Israel” as such, but out of fears that the overt nastiness of the Netanyahu-style expansionism will stir eventually unstoppable revolt, losing everything that has been “gained” already.

This differentiation allows any amount of “left” denunciation to be voiced however - even in the case of the Weekly Worker including demands for the overthrow of the Zionist state.

But that is not the same as the overthrow of “Israel” in its very existence.

Only that can provide an end to the oppression and injustice of this dispossession of an entire people, an occupation which can never relax its smiting to hold them down (because they can never stop struggling to win back what has been stolen), and which will constantly be driven to widen its “defensive” boundaries until that people has been destroyed or reduced to an impotent rump like the Aborigines or Native Americans. Again, issue 1213:

There is only one real “Israel”.

It is a terrorising consciously-fascist tyranny and could never be anything else.

Either the return of everything to all of the Palestinians, all of them coming back to reclaim their homeland, — which would obviously mean an overwhelmingly majority Arab state, with just a tiny minority of religious fanatic Jews living on as best they could.

Or the effective eviction of the entire Palestinian nation only two-thirds accomplished so far.

The “two-state” fraud is just a sanitised version of total cleansing, — a permanent police-state tyranny over a few surrounded and isolated Palestinian reservations, just as the original North American inhabitants ended up.

As the EPSR has explained, the only “Jewish” view worth giving serious respect for henceforth, — (in the light of the actual fascist-warmongering tyranny that “Israel” could only turn out to be, given the historical circumstances of being an implanted armed Western colonisation in the era of anti-colonialism, and in the light of how US imperialism’s wider international warmongering agenda is now using the emotive fraud of “defend Israel” as a useful stunt to justify ever-increasing repression of Arab and Muslim nationalism of every kind), — is the Jew who campaigns for the destruction of the state of “Israel” as soon as possible for the sake of humanity.

From admittedly limited practical observation, there do not appear to be any ordinary Jewish adherents anywhere who are openly calling for the wiping out of this catastrophic historical abortion called “Israel”.

Given the history and character of this particular religious freemasonry (not much different from most others, in fact), this absence of any really serious “anti-Israel” Jewish movement is hardly surprising.

In which case come EPSR observations that the old distinction between “Jew” and “Zionist” has no further use, and is just a deliberately confusing deceit, henceforth.

Zionism in real terms lies in the support for the continued occupation of “Israel” by the Jews which is a common position held by both overt Zionists and virtually all notionally “anti-Zionist” Jews too.

And since that occupation is possible only by violently dispossessing the Palestinians to greater or lesser extent, even “anti-Zionist” Jews in practice, are effectively Zionist.

But this core point – central to the Hamas revolt for example – is evaded by all the “left”.

The Stalinists are no better despite their correct opposition to the Corbynite surge:

The Zionists are playing a dangerous game when they conflate anti-zionism and condemnation of Israel with antisemitism, as they thereby de facto claim all ‘right-thinking’ jews (as opposed to ‘self-hating’ jews) are racist believers in jewish exceptional-ism, and supporters of forcible and violent dispossession of Arabs from their lands, and victimisation of those who remain or who seek to return.

Clearly all jews are certainly not in that category, (ea) but the Zionists do their utmost to make them seem, simply by virtue of being jewish, to be major enemies of human decency. We can perfectly understand the motivation for this unjustifiable conflation by the Zionists, for by so doing they seek to delegitimise and criminalise support for the Palestinian people, such as the BDS movement and Israeli Apartheid Weeks on campuses, and to bring down or force into line any mainstream politician espousing however mildly, pro-Palestinian or other anti-imperialist or progressive viewpoints Proletarian April/May 2018.

 

The murderous Zionist government, lawmakers and military leaders must realise that they will not cow the Palestinian resistance with these massacres, as young Palestinians are growing into the boots of the old fighters and openly declare that there will be no peace without Jerusalem - that they will fight on and one day they will all return to their homes.

And it must be noted that, by their crazed brutality, the Zionists are actually doing everything to bring about this longed-for day. We look forward to the time when Zionism is universally reviled in the way that 1930-40s German fascism is today; when the land of Palestine is restored, to its historic borders and people of all religions or none live in peace and equality as Palestinians. Victory to the intifada; long live Palestine! [Proletarian jun/Jul 2018]

But no mention here of the restoration of all land and property, nor of the implications that has for the “ownership” of the Jewish population (who obviously have to hand back every square metre of land, every well, every building etc).

And what does “no peace without Jerusalem” imply except a reversion to the kind of unworkable compromise of the humiliating “two-state” solution which was the brainchild of Stalinist revisionism in the first place, and long advocated by the Lalkar/Proletarian though, as with many past revisionist errors, it now mysteriously disappears (or to be more accurate, is brushed under the carpet).

Only revolutionary overthrow will bring peace and that will not be done by any amount of boycotts, however much they might have some impact.

And while the BDS boycott movement may achieve something, its biggest and potentially fatal weakness (not to say opportunist betrayal) lies in its recognition of ‘Israel’; no mention of that either by Proletarian, not least perhaps because that would mean backtracking all the way to the CPGB-ML’s hero-worshipped Stalin himself who not only recognised “Israel” as a “state” in 1948 but initially even helped arm the Zionists, one of Moscow’s disastrous errors.

Small wonder that their piece finishes with a pious wish for all to “live in peace together”! How, or why that will happen is not addressed

Even a Miss World platitude could do better than that.

Like all the “left” these Brarites leave unresolved the question of the Jewish colonists,implying that they remain, presumably still living on “their” land.

And by therefore declaring the “goodwill” of the majority of the Jewish lobby, it lets them fall in line with the notion that there is “left anti-semitism” by declaring that hostility spilling over onto the Jewish diaspora freemasonry can be driven by “racism”.

But excluding bizarre rightwing and lingering lumpen remnants of old-style scapegoating anti-semitism, (admittedly being encouraged by some elements of the ruling class, particularly around East Europe, but still limited) this is simply not the case in the post-1948 “Israel” period; it is anti-imperialism which drives things.

If anti-Jewishness emerges at all in a crudely generalised form which could be twisted into bigoted anti-semitism by reactionary elements, then blame that on the Jewish network’s insistence that “Israel” be defended.

“Condemning” whatever crude forms the rising hostility might take, like condemning the world “terrorist” and “jihadist” upheaval, is to abandon all Marxist and revolutionary principle and line up with and help grease the wheels for imperialism’s warmongering lies.

It can be tackled in the only way possible, with a full revolutionary perspective for the ending of this Zionist monstrosity and imperialism too; in other words by offering better leadership, just as Lenin said was the way to deal with a turn to crude terrorism.

That is not done by simply calling for a “one-state” solution which most of the fake-“left” have now made their slogan, as the “two-state” option has been trampled allover by the increasingly intransigent Zionist reaction - demonstrating its total historic unworkability as Leninism always said was the case.

First of all the “demand” for a single “democratic state with full and equal rights for all” is no more workable in this epoch of warmongering capitalist crisis than the “two state” answer – the pretence that Zionism and imperialism behind it, is going to move aside for any such compromise is pure fantasy and a deliberately misleading one at that.

It is no more going to happen than the imperialist ruling class is going to step down from its position of historic profit-making dominance and voluntarily (or “democratically”) hand the world over to the working class to build a planned and cooperative, commonly owned, world economy, serving human needs in a sustainable manner in harmony with nature. But secondly, it is not a fair solution anyway even when limiting the argument to Palestine alone. However this fairy tale new Palestine were divvied up, it still would not fulfil the “return of everything to all of the Palestinians” requirement as described in the quote above, which alone makes restitution possible. It leaves a (usually unspecified), amount of land and property in Jewish hands - and thereby the land theft which creates this unsolvable mess.

Such a pretence that some new allegedly “socialist” state would peacefully (!!!) take the property into common ownership and “share it out equitably” is just a fallback position for the “lefts” under which the Jewish landgrab at least partially continues, like a child who has grabbed all the sweeties proffering one back when told off.

By all means it can be proposed that a future revolutionary Palestinian state - which it is clear will only be established by the most dogged revolutionary war (almost certainly as part of wider Middle East or even Third World anti-imperialist struggle) – should do its best to incorporate and make use of that part of the talented Jewish population willing to stay on post-victory and build the new state, even if it means additional costs (along the lines seen in other national liberation victories such as South Africa, or slowly emerging in “Northern Ireland” where the defeated colonists accept the new situation and continue, even allowed to maintain some of their economic privileges for the time being).

But to pretend such an offer is available now, is just pie-in-the-sky liberal reformism and a further expression of brain-dead illusions in bourgeois “democracy” and permanent “peaceful coexistence” and social-pacifist peace struggle begun by Stalinist retreat from revolutionary understanding but infecting all the fake-“left” including the “anti-Stalinist” Trot “No to War” cohorts (and currently seeing its dire consequences played out in the brutal CIA-local bourgeois sabotage of “democratic” left-reformism in Latin America, particularly Venezuela).

Exactly the opposite. The crisis is forcing ever more brutality from this Zionist entity, as the cold-blooded butchery of hundreds shot in the dogged and heroic weekly Gazan Naqba protest has shown and other barbarism too in gratuitous destruction of limited facilities:

Israeli warplanes destroyed the Said al-Mis’hal cultural center in Gaza City shortly before a truce was agreed between Israel and Hamas on Thursday night, bringing two days of violence to an end.

Medical officials said at least seven people were wounded in airstrikes on the five-storey building, a popular theatre venue in the Shati refugee camp in the Palestinian territory.

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF), posting video of the strike on Twitter, said the building had been used for military purposes. Hamas claimed its own offices near the site of the cultural centre had not been struck.

Hamas spokesman Hazem Qassem said: “The deliberate targeting of a cultural centre with airstrikes and destruction... is a barbaric act.”

The Hamas TV channel Al Aqsa reported late Thursday that a ceasefire brokered by Egypt had taken hold “on the basis of mutual calm”.

A senior Hamas official, speaking on condition of anonymity, told the Associated Press the agreement merely ended the latest round of violence, and no long-term ceasefire deal had been reached.

Israeli authorities have yet to confirm any agreement was made, but reports of calm from Gaza on Friday morning appeared to suggest a ceasefire was in place and holding.

The deal is set to be tested later today, however, when Palestinians in Gaza plan on resuming their weekly border protests.

Shortly before the attack on the cultural centre, a Palestinian rocket struck the southern Israeli city of Beersheba late on Thursday afternoon, landing in an open area. It was the first time a rocket had reached the city since the 2014 conflict between the two sides.

The Palestinian Health Ministry said three Palestinians, including a pregnant woman and her one-year-old daughter, were killed in Israeli airstrikes on Wednesday night.

The IDF blamed the latest outbreak of fighting on Hamas, claiming militants opened fire on an IDF vehicle in Gaza on Wednesday.

A Hamas spokesperson, however, claimed Israeli forces had killed two Hamas fighters carrying out a military exercise in northern Gaza in an “unprovoked” attack.

On Thursday Gaza’s Health Ministry identified those killed in subsequent airstrikes as 23-year-old Enas Khamash and her daughter Bayan, and a Hamas fighter named Ali Ghandour.

 

As theatre practitioners who have worked closely with Palestinian artists, we write to condemn the bombing and total destruction of the Said Al-Mishal Cultural Centre in Gaza on 9 August by an Israeli airstrike. We support our dear friends and colleagues who describe their great rage and deep pain at the obliteration of this symbol of Palestinian culture and identity as they mourn the destruction of one of the few large venues for theatre and music performances in besieged Gaza.

Since its establishment in 2004, Al-Mishal served as a home for hundreds of plays, ceremonies, exhibits, musical performances and national ceremonies. It was the venue of choice for theatre companies in Gaza and a space for Gaza’s top musical acts. The centre also included recreational activities for children who were affected by three successive wars in Gaza, including the first dabkeh school for 250 children. It is a devastating loss for the already isolated community.

We are deeply shocked that this act of destruction has not been widely reported in the British press. We support all efforts to continue Al-Mishal’s mission and the campaign for the centre’s reconstruction. We urge the UK government and the international community to take prompt and effective steps to seek a de-escalation of the situation in Gaza, to insist on the effective protection of civilians as a prime legal obligation and to take firm action to ensure that violations of international law are not tolerated.

Mike Bartlett Playwright, Jonathan Chadwick Director and playwright, Caryl Churchill Playwright, [+ a dozen more].

And alongside there continues the now endless cynically imposed horror of the Yemen war, waged separately by the crude feudal/tribal backwardness of the Saudi regime but increasingly part of the same imperialist backed aggression (with the Saudis essentially abandoning past support for Palestine and lining up with US war threats against “rogue states” Iran and already devastated Syria – and behind them Russia):

The bomb dropped on a school bus in Yemen by a Saudi-led coalition warplane was sold to Riyadh by the US, according to reports based on analysis of the debris.

The 9 August attack killed 40 boys aged from six to 11 who were being taken on a school trip. Eleven adults also died. Local authorities said that 79 people were wounded, 56 of them children. CNN reported that the weapon used was a 227kg laser-guided bomb made by Lockheed Martin, one of many thousands sold to Saudi Arabia as part of billions of dollars of weapons exports.

Saudi Arabia is the biggest single customer for both the US and UK arms industries. The US also supports the coalition with refuelling and intelligence.

The investigative journalism site Bellingcat identified bomb fragments, on photographs and videos taken soon after the bombing, as coming from a laser-guided version of a Mk-82 bomb called a GBU-12 Paveway II. Based on marking on a fin segment of the bomb, Bellingcat traced the bomb to a shipment of a thousand of such bombs to Saudi Arabia, approved by the state department in 2015, during the Obama administration.

A spokesperson for Lockheed Martin referred questions about the bombing to the Pentagon. The defence department has said it does not make tactical targeting decision for the Saudi-led coalition but does provide support to improve targeting.

“I will tell you that we do help them plan what we call, kind of targeting,” the defense secretary, James Mattis, said. “We do not do dynamic targeting for them.”

The Obama administration offered Saudi Arabia more than $115bn in weapons in the course of its two four-year terms, more than any previous US administration, according to a report in 2016.

After the bombing of a funeral hall in October 2016 that killed 155 people, Barack Obama halted the sale of guided munition technology to Saudi Arabia, on the grounds that improved precision would not save civilian lives if the Saudi-led coalition were not taking care to avoid hitting non-military targets. The sales were reinstated by the Trump administration’s first secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, in March 2017.

Saudi and US officials have insisted that efforts are constantly being made to limit civilian casualties in the campaign against Houthi rebels, but United Nations figures show the civilian death toll rising, with April this year becoming the bloodiest month of the war so far.

According to the most recent report by the UN high commission for human rights, there have been 17,062 civilian casualties since 2015, including 6,592 dead and 10,470 injured.

“The majority of these casualties – 10,471 – were as a result of airstrikes carried out by the Saudi-led coalition,” the report said.

The bombing...was just one of more than 50 airstrikes against civilian vehicles by the Saudi-led coalition in Yemen so far this year.

Statistics collated by an independent monitoring group, the Yemen Data Project, suggest that the targeting of the schoolbus was part of a wider pattern. According to its records, there have been 55 airstrikes against civilian vehicles and buses in the first seven months of this year – a higher rate than in 2017.

Data also shows that the monitoring body set up in Riyadh purportedly to investigate incidents of civilian casualties has supported the Saudi military version of events in almost every case.

The Joint Incidents Assessment Team (JIAT) has not issued comprehensive statistics but has instead issued periodic press statements. And according to an analysis by Human Rights Watch (HRW), out of 75 incidents where civilian casualties were reported, JIAT has admitted Saudi rules of engagement may have been broken in only two.

In 10 more cases, JIAT has conceded that civilians may have been killed in error and said that compensation would be paid, but human rights advocates said there was so far no sign of any payments being made.

The 9 August airstrike obliterated a bus carrying schoolboys on a field trip in northern Yemen, leaving 40 children and 11 adults dead. The Saudi government told the UN security council that the strike would be investigated – but described it as “a legitimate military action”, saying it had targeted “Houthi leaders who were responsible for recruiting and training young children, and then sending them to battlefields”.

The schoolboys had been on the way to a cemetery where rebels were buried but survivors told journalists that was because it was one of the very few green spaces left in the whole of the northern Saada governorate. Parks and gardens have been destroyed in the relentless fighting.

“They came to the hospital in cars and ambulances. Dozens of children with an array of grisly wounds,” Marta Rivas Blanco, an ICRC nurse at the Al Talh hospital where the victims were taken, wrote in an account of the day for the Guardian. “Some were screaming, some were scared, many went straight to the morgue.”

This sick fascist degeneracy is not separable from the Zionist barbarities and increasingly is all of a piece with the imperialist desperation lashing out in all directions for two decades of US warmaking and bloodletting massacre - and potentially lining up much greater destruction yet against such victims as the Iranian muslim state.

It demands a revolutionary solution in both cases, part of a worldwide need to overturn the entire degenerate and failing private profit system, for which the first task is building the revolutionary party which can reestablish and develop the Leninist science to lead and guide such struggles.

By capitulating to the “left anti-semitism” gibberish such understanding cannot get to first base.

It cannot even point to the glaring hypocrisies of imperialism’s lying “democracy” pretences, around the constant crude scapegoating demonisation of Islamism for exampled, as fostered by the nasty “letterbox” comments of “buffoonish” Boris Johnson or around the provocative rightwing antics of “activist” Tommy Robinson being given the full support and backing of the capitalist establishment (including the stitched-up ruling class judiciary deliberately releasing him on a pretext).

The rich, rightwing ruling class funders who have paid for Robinson’s court defence and the empire-reactionary Tories backing Johnson, make the issue of “free speech” one of their prime justifications.

It is giant fraud.

The pretence that “anyone can express their views right or wrong” is libertarian gibberish. Capitalism has never been remotely interested in sustaining “free speech” for the working class, and any serious class understanding will always be drowned out by its own overwhelming media and press resources.

As Lenin spelt out:

Take, for example, freedom of assembly and freedom of the press. The Scheidemanns and Kautskys, the Austerlitzes and Renners assure the workers that the present elections to the Constituent Assembly in Germany and Austria are “democratic”. That is a lie. In practice the capitalists, the exploiters, the landowners and the profiteers own 9/10 of the best meeting halls, and 9/10 of the stocks of newsprint, printing presses, etc.. The urban workers and the farm hands and day laborers are, in practice, debarred from democracy by the “sacred right of property” (guarded by the Kautskys and Renners, and now, to our regret, by Friedrich Adler as well) and by the bourgeois state apparatus, that is, bourgeois officials, bourgeois judges, and so on. The present “freedom of assembly and the press” in the “democratic” (bourgeois democratic) German republic is false and hypocritical, because in fact it is freedom for the rich to buy and bribe the press, freedom for the rich to befuddle the people with venomous lies of the bourgeois press, freedom for the rich to keep as their “property” the landowners’ mansions, the best buildings, etc.. The dictatorship of the proletariat will take from the capitalists and hand over to the working people the landowners’ mansions, the best buildings, printing presses and the stocks of newsprint.

But this means replacing “universal”, “pure” democracy by the “dictatorship of one class”, scream the Scheidemanns and Kautskys, the Austerlitzes and Renners (together with their followers in other countries — the Gomperses, Hendersons, Renaudels, Vandervelde and Co.).

Wrong, we reply. This means replacing what in fact is the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie (a dictatorship hypocritically cloaked in the forms of the democratic bourgeois republic) by the dictatorship of the proletariat. This means replacing democracy for the rich by democracy for the poor. This means replacing freedom of assembly and the press for the minority, for the exploiters, by freedom of assembly and the press for the majority of the population, for the working people. This means a gigantic, world historic extension of democracy, its transformation from falsehood into truth, the liberation of humanity from the shackles of capital, which distorts and truncates any, even the most “democratic” and republican, bourgeois democracy. This means replacing the bourgeois state with the proletarian state, a replacement that is the sole way the state can eventually wither away altogether.

But why not reach this goal without the dictatorship of one class? Why not switch directly to “pure” democracy? So ask the hypocritical friends of the bourgeoisie for the naïve petty-bourgeois and philistines gulled by them.

And we reply: Because in any capitalist society the powerful tell lies to either the bourgeoisie or the proletariat, while the small proprietors, inevitably, remain wavering, helpless, stupid dreamers of “pure”, i.e., nonclass or above class, democracy. Because from a society in which one class opposes another there is no way out other than through the dictatorship of the oppressed class. Because the proletariat alone is capable of defeating the bourgeoisie, of overthrowing them, being the sole class which capitalism has united and “schooled”, and which is capable of drawing to its side the wavering mass of the working population with a petty-bourgeois way of life, of drawing them to its side or at least “neutralizing” them. Because only mealy-mouthed petty-bourgeois and philistines can dream — deceiving thereby both themselves and the workers — of overthrowing capitalist oppression without a long and difficult process of suppressing the resistance of the exploiters. In Germany and Austria this resistance is not yet very pronounced because expropriation of the expropriators has not yet begun. But once expropriation begins the resistance will be fierce and desperate. In concealing this from themselves and from the workers, the Scheidemanns and Kautskys, the Austerlitzes and Renners betray the interests of the proletariat, switching at the most decisive moment from the class struggle and overthrow of the yoke of the bourgeoisie to getting the proletariat to come to terms with the bourgeoisie, achieving “social peace” or reconciliation of exploited and exploiters.

“Democracy” and Dictatorship Written: December 23, 1918 First Published: January 3, 1919 in Pravda No. 2 [Lenin Collected Works, Volume 28]

And if any understanding should start going somewhere and winning influence it will rapidly be suppressed all the way to imprisonment, assassination and military coup.

The “anti-semitism” issue is precisely a case in point, demanding suppression of the whole question of “Israel” (and with the censorship being given more and more quasi-legal status, to prepare for criminalisation, even as reaction is given free rein and backing):

Donald Trump’s outspoken former adviser Steve Bannon has praised Boris Johnson and Tommy Robinson in the same interview, describing the Tory MP as being potentially “a great prime minister” and the far-right activist as a “force of nature”.

The US rightwing populist said he admired Johnson and that the former foreign secretary had “nothing to apologise for” after his controversial descriptions of fully veiled Muslim women in a newspaper column.

He said Johnson should continue to make similar points. He told the Sunday Times: “Boris just needs to be Boris – true to his nature and his calling – and I think he has potential to be a great prime minister, not a good one.”

Bannon has been in contact with Johnson since he resigned from government last month, although he added: “Any conversations I have with active political figures are confidential – I consider Boris Johnson someone who understands the physics in the ebb and flow of events. Those individuals are rare.”

On Robinson, Bannon said: “Tommy is not just a guy but a movement in and of himself now. He represents the working class and channels a lot of the frustration of everyday, blue-collar Britons … He is a force of nature – like Kanye [West] – not built to be managed.”

Robinson was jailed for contempt of court after he filmed outside Leeds crown court during a trial, but was released on bail this month after an appeal court ruled that he should face a retrial on technical grounds.

The row over whether it was appropriate for the Conservative party to refer Johnson to its own disciplinary processes continued through the weekend. On Thursday, the party said it had asked an assessor to review dozens of complaints that had been made after he compared women wearing the burqa to letterboxes and bank robbers.

The former Conservative minister Damian Green, an ally of Theresa May, said he feared Johnson was “being turned into a martyr by the alt-right”, which would be “a disaster for him and the Conservative party”.

He wrote in the Mail on Sunday: “I am particularly concerned by reports that President Trump’s sacked adviser Steve Bannon is forming a Europe-wide far-right campaign group – and has been in touch with Boris. I hope that no Conservative politician, including Boris, is taking advice from him about how the Conservative party should behave.”

Meanwhile, Tell Mama, the government-backed hate crime monitoring group, said there had been a surge in anti-Muslim abuse aimed at women wearing the hijab and niqab. It said the majority of niqab-wearing victims who had called Tell Mama’s helpline since the article appeared said the perpetrator either used phrases such as “letterbox” or referred to Johnson.

The secretary general of the Muslim Council of Britain, Harun Rashid Khan, said: “The impact of Boris Johnson’s comments is real and worrying, and indicates the importance of a full, transparent and independent investigation into his conduct, in particular given the lack of action in previous cases of Islamophobia in the party.”

A former aide to David Cameron accused Boris Johnson of “moral emptiness”, casual racism and “courting fascism”. Lord Cooper, a former pollster who worked for Cameron at No 10, said: “The rottenness of Boris Johnson goes deeper even than his casual racism and his equally casual courting of fascism. He will advocate literally anything to play to the crowd of the moment. His career is a saga of moral emptiness and lies – pathetic, weak and needy, the opposite of strong.”

The point is not to get involved in defending the wearing of hijab or burqa, or even “women’s right to choose” etc – if anything Marxist history would be against the backwardness of such usually enforced cover-ups and for developing as open a society as possible for everyone of both sexes to flourish in - which can only be possible once communism is established.

And any insistence that it should be an issue in itself because this is “standing against reactionary authority” is at best reformism and worst a diversion (EPSR 1220 17-02-04):

Making a specific issue (one way or the other) of anyone thinking a hijab will help them get there, or bring this about, hardly seems the most fertile furrow to plough, — or any other belief totem or personal idiosyncrasy.

A 100% concentration on Marxist scientific truth about the world and civilisation’s understanding is surely the best approach, leaving individuals to personally grapple with their own emotional or ideological crutches.

Any individual reformist fight against ‘authority’ over such an issue (e.g. French Muslims v state schooldress-code policy) needs treating as such, i.e. pure single issue reformism.

Often, such ‘causes’ are a complete diversion and even a reactionary waste of time.

For example, the very essence of every capitalist society is to endlessly create and recreate divisiveness of all kinds (racial; ethnic; religious; sexist; and above all class, embracing all the others).

And while it is inevitable and good to be always combating racism e.g., the dream of “one day eradicating all traces of racism from all human thinking”, however laudable, is going to be far better served in the long run by building a proletarian dictatorship communist revolution than it is by endless anti-racist campaigning, no matter how determined, energetic, self-sacrificing and inventive.

It is the atmosphere of contempt and hatred being stirred by Johnson et al which is the point, as capitalism stirs up war hatred by any means it can.

Only revolution will stop it. Build Leninism

Alan Scott

 

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