Leftists united for Israel?

Theodore Herzl

"Two Nations, Two States: socialists and Israel-Palestine" is a rather unusual pamphlet. It's published by a British Marxist group, the Alliance for Workers' Liberty (AWL), and argues in favour of Israel's right to exist. Indeed, many of the arguments advanced are Zionist. Some pro-Palestinian groups support a two-state solution, but the AWL supports it from a pro-Israeli viewpoint. Thus, they are for an independent Palestinian state on the West Bank and the Gaza strip precisely *because* they believe in the legitimacy of a Jewish state in the rest of Palestine. The AWL took this position already during the late 1980's (or perhaps even earlier), and have been loathed by most of the British left ever since (they have taken a whole range of other unpopular positions, too, while remaining a somewhat sectarian Trotskyist group overall).

AWL's pamphlet (which has several authors, but is attributed here to Sean Matgamna, the apparently perennial leader of this group) argues that a two-state solution is the best way to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The AWL is opposed to “the right to return” for Palestinians to the pre-1967 areas of Israel. The group is also opposed to divestment campaigns and Islamism. While the AWL never explicitly calls itself Zionist or left-Zionist, most of their arguments make sense only in such a context: Zionism isn't imperialist, Zionists had the right to settle in Palestine and really did make the deserts bloom, the expulsion of Oriental Jews from the Arab states is comparable to the expulsion of Palestinians from Israel, etc. Since the AWL claim to be Trotskyists, they naturally attempt to prove that Lenin and Trotsky were close to their position. One issue is absent: the AWL never tackles the question whether Israel can defend itself militarily against Arab attacks from the 1949 borders. Nor do they discuss the nuclear option. A more hard line Zionist might accuse the AWL of naivety or utopianism…

The most interesting articles in this collection argue that the Trotskyist anti-Zionists are really mimicking the line of Stalin and the post-Stalin Soviet leaders (whom Trotskyists otherwise oppose). This seems to be correct, and has been documented by others, too. In Sweden, the main culprits on the left in terms of *really* militant anti-Zionism during the 1980's (when I first became interested in these issues) were the Maoists, the Hoxhaites and the Morenoites. Of these, the Morenoites were Trotskyists, while the Maoists and Hoxhaites were *anti-Soviet* Stalinists. Yet, their vulgar attacks on Israel, Zionism and the Jewish lobby closely resembled the official Soviet attacks from the 1970's quoted at length by the AWL! The Stalinists at least had the excuse that Uncle Joe had said pretty much the same thing as the “revisionist” Brezhnev on this particular issue, but what excuse did the Moreno faithful have, I wonder? They broke some kind of world record in anti-Zionist vulgarity, by declaring that “today, Arab anti-Semitism is in some ways progressive”…

While I don't agree with every single argument in this pamphlet, I nevertheless recommend it as an interesting riposte to the usual anti-Zionism of the left. The articles are also available on-line at the AWL's website.