Six Days of War discussion

It's amazing how many people who still think they're Marxists have concluded that US imperialism is not the main threat to peace, but it's tiny Israel, which they insist is "imperialist," practices "apartheid," is conducting "genocide" against the Palestinian people, and just happens to be Jewish, but that has nothing to do with why people are demonstrating against it. And the rise in Jew-hatred while this goes on is either a media myth or just a coincidence!

Yes, Zionism was a colonial-settler movement, but without the fact that the workers movement, dominated by Stalinists and Social Democrats, missed their opportunity to stop Hitler, Israel would never have been formed. If the United Strates and other "democratic" imperialist countries had been willing to let in the huge number of Jewish refugees, Israel would not have been formed. Between 1880 and 1924, only 45,000 Jews from Eastern Europe emigrated to Palestine, the same number who went to South Africa during that period. (The Zionist myth, based on one prayer, said at the Sedar, is that Jews always wanted to go to the Promised Land, but 1,750,000 Jews viewed the US during that period as the promised land. Millions of Jews fought in the Russian Revolution and the other European revolutions rather than flee).

And colonial-settler states don't stay that way, otherwise the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and God knows how many other countries would be characterized that way. One clown who argued with me said they all ARE, but the difference is television! He was born too late (and the Woke, like President Obama, "aren't very interested in anything that happened before they were born" (rough approximation of what he said to Raúl Castro).

But I remember 40 years in the US when we had TV, and almost no one had sympathy for the Palestinians during that long period. A few revolutionaries and some Arab-Americans was it.

After the end of Apartheid South Africa, some people, first in Britain, who didn't understand the role of the Cuban troops or the leadership ability of Mandela and other ANC leaders, and the fighting spirit of the Black working class, claimed that it was all done by the international boycott, and since they claimed that Israel was "an Apartheid state," they thought they could do what actually hadn't been done by a boycott movement, but had merely helped somewhat. These people established ties to Hamas, and convinced various "leftists" in the US as well to join BDS. The fact that the popularity of this coincided with an economic downturn when Jews are always scapegoated, either was missed by them, or, more likely, they didn't give a damn.

Israel is no paradise, but capitalism, just like with the rest of the world, is the main problem. Israel is not that unique. It has capitalists and workers, both Jewish and Arab, frequently in the same unions. Those who say there is no class struggle in Israel, or any other country have given up on Marxism--some of them a long, long time ago.

That was a post on Facebook which had nothing in particular to do with this book. A few days later I wrote what can be considered a continuation of my comments, to which I have added some suggested books. A friend noted that I hadn't commented on Hamas, which is being supported by those demonstrating, knowingly or not.

When I review this book after reading it my main problem will not be that the author supports and has always supported Israel, but mostly our sharply different views of the world. He doesn't see the class struggle as central, and even his comments on the right of nations to self-determination seem not based on any principles, but simply on what is useful to promote his position at any given time. He is, in short, a bourgeois politician.

"Before exhausting or drowning mankind in blood, capitalism befouls the world atmosphere with the poisonous vapors of national and race hatred. Anti-Semitism today is one of the most malignant convulsions of capitalism’s death agony.

"An uncompromising disclosure of the roots of race prejudice and all forms and shades of national arrogance and chauvinism, particularly anti-Semitism, should become part of the daily work of all sections of the Fourth International, as the most important part of the struggle against imperialism and war. Our basic slogan remains: Workers of the World Unite!"
--From the document by Leon Trotsky known as "the Transitional Program." [In the book 'The Transitional Program for Socialist Revolution'] It is also worth reading 'On the Jewish Question' by Trotsky, as well as the two documents on the fight against Jew-hatred in 'The Founding of the Socialist Workers Party.'
This is not a period like the 1970s-90s. We're in a period just before massive workers struggles break out, and reaction is growing, some of it disguised as "leftism" or "liberalism." Jew-hatred has returned in a big way. The old formulas are so outdated as to appear as a cruel joke.

Trotsky was against Zionism, as we were, but he never condemned Jews for settling in Palestine. He never said any country didn't have the right to exist!

On Hamas: It is incredible all the "leftists" supporting a reactionary Islamist current, whose predecessors supported Hitler's Jew-hatred and continue it.

For the question of terrorism there is a short pamphlet by Trotsky taken from various sources entitled 'Marxism and Terrorism.' But an even better pamphlet would be one that's excerpts from Fidel Castro's writings on 'Peace in Colombia' entitled 'Colombia: Fidel Castro on the Debate around Revolutionary Strategy and Lessons of the Cuban Revolution.'

For the origins of Jew-hatred, see Abram Leon's 'The Jewish Question: A Marxist Interpretation.'