The second section is from the lead article in New International no. 7, "The Opening Guns of World III: Washington's Assault on Iraq," by Jack Barnes, who is national secretary of the Socialist Workers Party. The issue was published a few months after the end of the 1990-91 Gulf War.

The first document is copyright © 1973 by Pathfinder Press; the second is copyright © 1991 by 408 Printing and Publishing Corp. Both are reprinted by permission. Subheadings are by the Militant. Footnotes are in original.  
 
From "Israel and the Arab Revolution"
1. The Socialist Workers Party gives unconditional support to the national liberation struggles of the Arab peoples against imperialism, that is, we support all these struggles regardless of their current leaderships. Our foremost task in implementing such support is to educate and mobilize the American people against U.S. imperialist actions in the Mideast.

2. Israel, created in accordance with the Zionist goal of establishing a Jewish state, could be set up in the Arab East only at the expense of the indigenous peoples of the area. Such a state could come into existence and maintain itself only by relying upon imperialism. Israel is a settler-colonialist and expansionist capitalist state maintained principally by American imperialism, hostile to the surrounding Arab peoples. It is an imperialist beachhead in the Arab world that serves as the spearhead of imperialism's fight against the Arab revolution. We unconditionally support the struggles of the Arab peoples against the state of Israel.

3. The principal victims of the creation of Israel were the Palestinians--i.e., the Arabs who inhabited the region where Israel was established, who have been driven from their homes or placed in subjugation within Israel and the newly occupied territories. The Palestinians are a part of the Arab peoples, but they also form a distinct national grouping, with its own history of struggle against imperialism. There were Palestinian uprisings in 1921, 1929, and during the 1930s, reaching a high point in 1936–1939. At the height of the 1936 rebellion, the Palestinians conducted a six-month general strike. Expulsion from their homeland through the creation of Israel greatly intensified national consciousness among the Palestinians. The upsurge of Palestinian nationalism in the recent period, especially after the 1967 war, was particularly marked in the refugee camps and newly occupied territories as a result of the direct oppression these people have suffered at the hands of Israel. The September 1970 civil war in Jordan further intensified Palestinian national consciousness.  
 
A democratic, secular Palestine
The struggle of the Palestinian people against their oppression and for self-determination has taken the form of a struggle to destroy the state of Israel. The currently expressed goal of this struggle is the establishment of a democratic, secular Palestine. We give unconditional support to this struggle of the Palestinians for self-determination.

An integral part of our program for the Palestinian revolution and the Arab revolution as a whole is support of full civil, cultural, and religious rights for all nationalities in the Mideast, including the Israeli Jews. The major Palestinian liberation organizations also advance this concept and view it as essential to their attempt to win the Israeli Jewish masses away from support to Israel.

4. Our revolutionary socialist opposition to Zionism and the Israeli state has nothing in common with anti-Semitism, as the pro-Zionist propagandists maliciously and falsely assert. Anti-Semitism is anti-Jewish racism used to justify and reinforce oppression of the Jewish people. Marxists have been and remain the most militant and uncompromising fighters against anti-Semitism and the oppression of Jews.

The source of the oppression of the Jewish people in this era is the capitalist system, which in its period of decay carries all forms of racist oppression to the most barbarous extremes. This was horribly illustrated in the holocaust directed against the Jews of Europe by German imperialism under the Nazi regime. Today, anti-Semitism remains widespread in all of the Western imperialist countries. Until the capitalist system is abolished in these countries there is the ever-present danger that a new variety of virulent anti-Semitism can arise.

In the Soviet Union and the workers states of Eastern Europe the privileged Stalinist bureaucracies perpetuate and reinforce many forms of racism and national oppression inherited from the previous capitalist era, including anti-Semitism and oppression of Jews. In these countries a political revolution is needed to sweep away the reactionary bureaucracies and institute the norms of proletarian democracy, equality, and internationalism.

In the colonial and semicolonial countries, including those in the Arab world, the bourgeois regimes perpetuate and foster racism and oppression against national minorities, including the indigenous Jewish population. Only when the colonial and semicolonial countries win complete national liberation, through the process of permanent revolution culminating in a socialist revolution, can the oppression of these national minorities be ended.  
 
Opposition to anti-Semitism
The struggle against anti-Semitism and the oppression of Jews is part of the struggle to abolish all forms of racism and national oppression. This struggle can be fully and finally won only in alliance with all the oppressed of the world.

Zionism is not, as it claims, a national liberation movement. Zionism is a political movement that developed for the purpose of establishing a settler-colonialist state in Palestine and that rules the bourgeois society headed by the Israeli state today in alliance with world imperialism.

Zionism does not represent or promote the interests of the Jewish people. Within Israel, the Zionists lead the Jewish masses into the trap of opposing the national liberation struggle of the Arab peoples, a just and democratic struggle that will ultimately be victorious.

The racist oppression of the Israeli state against the Arabs is paralleled by racist oppression within Israel against Jews who come from the Arab countries and other colonial and semicolonial countries. Israeli capitalism exploits the Jewish workers in addition to superexploiting the Arab workers. Police repression against Arabs carries over to increasing repression against those Jews who oppose Zionism. Clerical restrictions on civil liberties affect Jews, and Arabs even more.

The Zionists promulgate the lie that to be Jewish is to be a Zionist, and therefore a supporter of Israel and imperialism. They thus make it easier for racist demagogues in other countries to foster anti-Semitism among the masses. The Zionists and their imperialist allies, who were incapable of fighting for the salvation of the Jews against Nazism, are incapable today of defending the interests of Jews where they are oppressed.

Cynically utilizing the crimes of the Nazis as a pretext, and with the complicity of the Soviet bureaucracy and the Stalinist movement, the imperialists and Zionists created the state of Israel at the expense of the Palestinians, who had nothing whatsoever to do with the Nazi crimes. Portraying the victim as the criminal, imperialist and Zionist propaganda now attempts to equate the Palestinian goal of national liberation with the barbaric genocidal actions of the Nazis. One of the factors enabling the imperialists and Zionists to make this false comparison is the widespread racism against the Arab peoples that exists in Europe, North America, and Israel.

The imperialists and Zionists to the contrary, the basic interests of the Jewish masses of Israel reside in alliance with the Palestinian liberation struggle and support of the goal of a democratic Palestine. We have incessantly warned Jews throughout the world: Zionism leads you into conflict with your potential allies--the oppressed of the world--and has led you to ally with your worst enemy, imperialism. Imperialism in its death agony has already led to one holocaust against European Jewry; it can inflict similar catastrophes again unless it is overthrown in time by the mass force of the socialist revolution....

8. Although one of the goals of the Arab revolution will be the unity of the Arab peoples, we cannot approach this perspective schematically or formally. Historical developments, not least the divisive role of imperialism, have created separate Arab states and differences among the Arab peoples. The revolution will therefore unfold in an uneven way throughout the region, and can leap ahead or suffer setbacks in one or another of the Arab states or Palestine. We envisage the establishment of a united socialist Middle East. But such a political formation will not issue from a simultaneous and uniform revolution throughout the area....

It would be wrong to attempt to draw a blueprint for the exact juridical and governmental forms of a democratic Palestine or a united socialist Middle East. We cannot predict the length, severity, or the vicissitudes of the revolutionary struggles in the Middle East or provide a recipe for the tactics that will be employed. All of this depends upon many factors, including the development of the revolutionary struggle in the imperialist countries and the workers states, the pace of development of Leninist parties in the Middle East, and the extent to which the Israeli Jewish masses can be won away from adherence to the Israeli state to active support of the Palestinian and general Arab liberation movements.  
 
Zionism against interests of Jewish people
Our program for the Palestinian revolution and the Arab revolution as a whole includes support of full civil, cultural, and religious rights for all nationalities in the Mideast, including the Israeli Jews. But, while we support the right of the Israeli Jews to pursue their national culture within the framework of a democratic Palestine, we are opposed to the Israeli state.

Two of the key arguments used by Zionists in defending the Israeli state are: (1) The Jewish people, an oppressed nationality throughout the world, have a right to self-determination. The existence of the Israeli state is the realization of that right. Because of the historical oppression of the Jewish people, the right to maintain the Israeli state supersedes the national rights of the Palestinian Arabs; (2) However one may disagree with the present policies of the Israeli state or the manner of its creation, the Israeli state must be defended against the Arab peoples, because a victory for the Arab revolution and the destruction of the Israeli state would result in genocide, mass expulsion, or the oppression of the Jews presently living in Israel.

Both of these arguments are false to the core.

The situation of the Israeli Jews is essentially different from that of Jews in other parts of the world. The struggle against anti-Semitism and the oppression of Jews in other countries is a progressive struggle directed against their oppressors. In some circumstances the demand for self-determination for oppressed Jews, directed against the oppressor nation, could become appropriate. Thus the Bolsheviks under Lenin and Trotsky recognized the right of the Jews in Russia to set up a state on their own territory, if they wished.

However, the oppression of Jews in other countries does not justify the creation and maintenance of the existing Israeli state at the expense of the Palestinians, who were not and are not responsible for the oppression of the Jews. There, the situation is the reverse. The Israeli Jews form an oppressor nationality of a settler-colonial character vis-a-vis the Arab peoples. The Israeli state is the means by which this oppression is maintained

From the point of view of the Leninist concept of the right of nations to self-determination, the key fact is whether the given nationality is an oppressed nationality or an oppressor nationality. Revolutionists call for the right of self-determination for oppressed nationalities, those that are being denied their democratic rights through national oppression. This demand means that the oppressed nationalities have the right to decide to form a separate state, or to exist in a unitary or federated state alongside a former oppressor nationality, or to adopt some other form of self-determination, as the oppressed nationality so chooses. The oppressor nationality has no right to decide this question. The purpose of fighting for the right of self-determination for oppressed nationalities is to guarantee them whatever state forms they believe are necessary to end their oppression. In the epoch of imperialism, the national liberation struggles of oppressed nationalities tend to merge with the world socialist revolution against imperialism through the process of permanent revolution.

This revolutionary dynamic is entirely missing from the concept that the Israeli Jews--an oppressor nationality vis-a-vis the Arab peoples--have a right to a separate state. Proletarian internationalism includes the recognition that the struggles of the oppressed nationality and the toiling masses in the oppressor nationality have the same enemy. But it does not at all endorse the concept that oppressed nationalities must support the right of self-determination of the oppressor nationality.

The burden for forging a fighting internationalist alliance rests on the proletarian movement of the oppressor nationality or country. It must prove in deeds that it is opposed to its own bourgeoisie on this question by fighting side by side with the oppressed nationalities and supporting their right to self-determination.

There is no equation between the demand for self-determination for the Vietnamese, which is directed against imperialism and its lackeys in Saigon, or for the Palestinians, which is directed against their imperialist and Israeli oppressors, and the demand to support the Israeli state. The latter is directed on behalf of the imperialists against the Arabs, primarily the Palestinians. In the current situation, this demand mobilizes the Israeli Jews against the Arabs, who are oppressed by Israel.

The second argument of the Zionists is equally false. It is not justifiable to assume that a likely development of the Arab revolution will be the future oppression of the Israeli Jews. There is no reason to believe that the Arab liberation movement--contrary to the dynamic of such struggles everywhere else, contrary to the basic principles being put forward by its most advanced components (the Palestinian liberation fighters)--will institute a system of national oppression against the Israeli Jews. To consider that the Arab revolution will necessarily threaten the national oppression of the Israeli Jews is an unfounded fear of the revolution itself, a fear which is incited for counterrevolutionary reasons by the imperialists and Zionists.

Of course, the possibility of future oppression of the Israeli Jews cannot be theoretically excluded. A bureaucratic deformation or degeneration of the state power issuing after a successful revolution in Palestine could conceivably result in systematic oppression of the Jews. Under such circumstances, the demand for their right to self-determination could become appropriate. But this unlikely future possibility does not justify the existing oppression of the Arab peoples through the maintenance of the Israeli state.

In contrast to this speculative future danger, there are real problems which will definitely have to be surmounted after the victory of the Arab revolution. Even under the most favorable conditions in which the socialist revolution in the Middle East can take place, many vestiges of national oppression suffered by the Arab peoples will still remain for a time. The revolutionary policy is to give preferential treatment to the formerly oppressed nationalities as the only means by which they can overcome all the economic, social, and cultural deprivations that they have suffered at the hands of Israel and the imperialist countries....

We explain to the Israeli Jews, as we have in the past, that their future lies only in aligning themselves with the Palestinian and general Arab liberation movements, wholeheartedly and without any reservation whatever. It will be to the extent that they do this that they can escape from the trap that Zionism and imperialism have set for them in the Mideast....  
 
Washington: chief oppressor in Mideast
The fact that the United States is the chief imperialist power involved in the Mideast makes opposition to Washington's aims and actions there our central task in defending the Arab revolution. During the 1967 war itself, the SWP was the only major organization on the left to rally to an internationalist defense of the Arab revolution. Since then, as the importance of this sector of the world revolution has increased, defense of the Arab revolution has been an increasing part of the SWP's political activity. During the 1970 civil war in Jordan, the SWP campaigned against the threat of direct U. S. military intervention.

The SWP's political work in this area has centered on an educational campaign to counter imperialist and Zionist propaganda against the Arab revolution. Continuing this campaign remains the central focus of our political activity in defense of the Arab revolution. This campaign takes the form of thorough press coverage of developments in the Mideast, expanded publication of literature, participation in debates, teach-ins, organizing speaking tours, and other means of educating the newly radicalizing forces to an internationalist position on this question.  
 
 
From "The Opening Guns of World War III"
BY JACK BARNES  
Communists have no trouble in recognizing the need for unconditional solidarity with an oppressed nation against imperialist attack, regardless of the class character of its government, as we've proven once again during the Gulf war. At the same time, communists and other vanguard fighters for true national independence and sovereignty--whether in Iraq or anywhere else in the region--must recognize and act on the fact that there are conflicting classes within these oppressed nations.

The Palestinians are among the biggest victims of the fakery of the bourgeois governments in the region, all of which falsely claim to speak and act in their interests. These blows were dealt to the Palestinians not just by the treacherous Egyptian, Syrian, and Saudi regimes--or by the desperate King Hussein of Jordan, who will turn his guns on the Palestinians again, if he finds it expedient, just as he did in September 1970.¹ No less damage was done by the reactionary demagogy of Baghdad, which postured as the champion of the Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim peoples, while in practice it sapped their capacity for anti-imperialist struggle. Baghdad cynically called for "linkage" of Iraq's partial withdrawal from Kuwait with the Palestinians' demands for national self-determination.

The leadership of the Palestine Liberation Organization also did great harm to the Palestinian struggle by endorsing this demagogic, after-the-fact linkage. This tailing after Baghdad left PLO leaders politically disarmed to explain the real linkage that does exist with the Palestinian struggle; the pressing need for action in solidarity with Iraq in the face of imperialist assault; the reactionary character of Baghdad's brutal invasion of Kuwait; and the fight against imperialism throughout the region and the world.  
 
Bourgeoisification of PLO
The failure of the PLO to chart such a revolutionary course is a reflection of its growing bourgeoisification. This evolution was revealed more clearly by the U.S. aggression in the Gulf, but it was not caused by the war. The political retreat by the central PLO leadership has been under way for some time.

A political toll has been taken over the past ten or fifteen years by the continued dispersion of the Palestinian people. A whole layer of Palestinian youth have grown up outside the historic lands of Palestine. A PLO apparatus has been built up throughout countries in the Middle East and North Africa hosted and financed by the bourgeois regimes in the region. A few factions of the PLO have become willing tools in the hands of these governments. The blows dealt to the PLO forces in Lebanon over the past decade by the Israeli regime, by the Syrian regime, and by the various Lebanese bourgeois political forces--these have had an additional disorienting and demoralizing impact on layers of the leadership, turning their eyes further away from the ranks of the Palestinian masses inside and outside Israel. The gap has grown between the PLO apparatus and the young Palestinian fighters inside the borders of "Greater Israel," where the liberation fight has been centered more and more.

But this is not a finished process. The PLO remains a revolutionary-nationalist movement with a predominantly petty-bourgeois leadership. The outcome of the PLO's political evolution remains intertwined with the living struggle of the Palestinian people, who have not been cowed or defeated. More of the leadership of the Palestinian movement has shifted to the occupied West Bank, to Gaza, to Jerusalem, and to inside Israel's pre-1967 borders--especially since the beginning of the intifada more than three years ago. More of the leadership is being taken by those who are pressing forward the fight for land, for equality, for national self-determination, for a fully sovereign Palestinian state, and who in doing so are helping to change the world....

The battle for national liberation has gone through a particular evolution and important changes as the twentieth century has unfolded. These cumulative developments have altered the class character and caliber of the leadership necessary to take the next steps in the struggle against imperialist domination, semifeudal oppression, and capitalist exploitation.

Only fifty years ago, with the outbreak of World War II, a great movement for decolonization began to sweep the world. At the opening of that war, the vast majority of what are today independent countries were colonies. When the United Nations was launched at the close of the war in late 1945, it initially had only 51 members; today there are 159.

This political independence was not granted by the imperialist colonizers out of the goodness of their hearts. Independence was conquered through struggle--by the peoples of India and Iraq to throw off British rule; by the Indochinese, Algerian, and Syrian peoples against French rule; by the Filipino people against U.S. colonial rule; by the Indonesian people against Dutch imperialism; by the Congolese people against Belgian colonialism; by the peoples of Angola and Mozambique against Portuguese rule; and many others.

If you don't count Hong Kong as a colony--and I don't anymore; its rapid integration into China is not only a foregone conclusion, but actually running ahead of the scheduled 1997 formalities--then the largest colony left in the world today is Puerto Rico. If anything, this fact increases the importance of the anticolonial struggles that remain to be settled, particularly of numerous islands in the Caribbean, the Pacific, the Indian Ocean, and so on. But the scope of the post-World War II decolonization conquests is impressive.

While in each case there were landlords, merchant capitalists, and other indigenous exploiters who collaborated with the colonial powers to the bitter end, the decolonization movements nonetheless mobilized broad united fronts behind the fight for national independence. Representatives of different classes, with directly counterposed social interests, carried substantial weight in these battles.

Independence struggles were fought and led to victory under leaderships that were often bourgeois or petty bourgeois both in program and social composition. The workers and peasants were the most self-sacrificing fighters, the courageous battalions without whom the battle could not have been won. But the dominant political leaderships were not proletarian or communist in the vast majority of cases. Most of the regimes that came to power were bourgeois, not workers' and peasants' governments.  
 
Exhaustion of nonproletarian leaderships
The victories of the decolonization movement gave an impulse to a second set of conquests in the struggle for national liberation--ones that were often intertwined with the anticolonial fight itself. This was the struggle to wrest back from direct ownership by imperialist interests the most basic resources and infrastructure--the national patrimony--of countries in the Third World. These struggles marked much of the 1950s and '60s, and continued even into the late 1970s with the Iranian revolution.

In 1956 the Egyptian government headed by Gamal Abdel Nasser took back the Suez Canal from British and French finance capital, for example. Regimes throughout the Middle East, Latin America, and elsewhere nationalized oil fields and mineral rights. Class lines in these battles were drawn more sharply than in the decolonization battles themselves, since layers of native exploiters had economic interests that were directly tied to major imperialist-owned banks and monopolies. Workers and peasants often took advantage of these confrontations with imperialism to press demands on the neocolonial regimes for land reform and labor rights, and in the process won some greater space to organize and practice politics.

But in the big majority of cases these resources taken from the direct domination and exploitation of the imperialists were transferred to the domination of local, rising capitalist classes, either directly to private owners or indirectly through the neocolonial regimes they controlled. Once again, the conflicts that culminated in the nationalization of these former imperialist properties were carried through largely by bourgeois and petty-bourgeois leaderships and without the establishment of workers' and peasants' regimes.

The most pressing tasks that confront workers and peasants in most of the Third World today, however, require a different class character and caliber of leadership if they are to succeed. The tasks of national liberation, of carrying through to the end the liberation of the toilers from imperialist domination and superexploitation, cannot be advanced short of a struggle against the local capitalist and landlord classes, whose interests are completely intertwined with those of the imperialists. Thus, the political challenges before national liberation movements in tackling this next set of historic tasks require greater political clarity and working-class leadership.

That's the road forward to lasting economic and social development. That's how to rid these countries of social structures and institutions that ensure their permanent subjugation to imperialism. That's the only way to prevent the gains from even limited economic and social development from ending up in the hands of a thin layer of capitalists, the government bureaucracy, and the military officer corps, while the vast majority of workers and peasants are driven into deeper impoverishment and brutally repressed when they resist. That's the only way to carry through land reforms that are thoroughgoing and that don't--through the mechanism of the capitalist rents and mortgages system, and domination over credit, marketing arrangements, and sources of agricultural equipment and supplies--simply end up reproducing massive landlessness and class differentiation in the countryside.  
 
Need for working-class leadership
These pressing tasks confronting anti-imperialist fighters in most semicolonial countries today are the product of the crisis of the imperialist system itself, of the failure of capitalism. It is capitalism that has robbed workers and peasants the world over who fought courageously--and at great sacrifice--for their national independence, only to find themselves today the debt slaves of imperialist banks. Only to find themselves still subject to the dictates of the great oil cartels, the giant merchants of grain, and other imperialist interests.

The imperialist enemy can no longer be fought successfully in the same ways as in past decades. Colonial independence has been achieved in most countries. The national patrimony of land and other mineral resources has been nationalized in many cases.

In the most direct and immediate sense, the problem for the toilers is not that the bourgeois and petty-bourgeois parties and organizations are ineffective as instruments in the struggle for socialism; that's always true. But the social reality that above all poses the demand for working-class leadership is that the bourgeois ruling classes have become the main prop of imperialist domination of these countries at this point in history, even if in great conflict with this or that imperialist power for periods of time. So it is impossible to carry through to completion the struggle for national liberation under their leadership; they have to be fought against and replaced.

Just look at the utter incapacity of any of these bourgeois leaderships even to take a united stand against the imperialist banks and say: "No! We're not going to pay one more cent on the interest payments that are devastating our countries. Cancel the debt!" In 1985 Cuban president Fidel Castro launched an international effort to convince not only popular movements and labor unions but the heads of state of various Latin American and other Third World governments to join together in a campaign to press for this demand. There were no preconditions, no pressure to bring in other questions--just a collective stand to refuse to pay the foreign debt that was strangling these countries.

But Castro did not find even a single taker. And, as he sharply underlined several years later, a historic opportunity to confront imperialism when it was vulnerable was lost. The neocolonial ruling classes cannot and will not help lead a fight to cancel the debt, because such a campaign endangers the very mechanisms of capitalist banking and credit that these local exploiters themselves benefit from and depend on.

The kind of struggle necessary to take on the next tasks of national liberation requires the organization of the workers and peasants politically independent of the capitalists and landlords, who block the progress and development of the nation. It requires a strong worker-peasant alliance. It requires the fight for political space to organize and engage in struggles.

It requires an internationalist orientation toward the battles of other toilers, not only elsewhere in the Third World but in the imperialist countries and throughout Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. It requires an anticapitalist program and proletarian leadership. And it requires the fight to replace the current neocolonial bourgeois regimes with workers' and peasants' governments.

This is why we are convinced (1) that struggles to carry through national liberation to the end will be a stronger, not a weaker, force in world politics in coming years; and (2) that in the great majority of these countries, to be an effective revolutionist today and tomorrow is to be a communist. Over the past three decades we have seen how such leadership can and will develop in the course of revolutionary struggles against national oppression.
 
 
1. In September 1970, King Hussein's army, with the support of Tel Aviv and Washington, launched an all-out attack on Palestinian refugee camps and communities in Jordan, aiming to blunt the growing militancy of the Palestinian freedom fighters and maintain stable relations with Israel. More than eight thousand Palestinians were killed in the assault, a massacre that has become known as "Black September."
 
 
Related articles:
Palestinian people resist Israeli brutality
Harris condemns Israeli aggression, calls for self-determination for Palestinians
Harris addresses Palestinian activists  
 
 
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