Trotzalledem Proletarier:innen aller Länder und unterdrückte Völker vereinigt euch!
Palestine was an Arab-Islamic country, with religious minorities, Arab Jews and Christians.²
1) National question
The Jewish question is not only a „religious question“, Judaism is not just „a religion“. With the development of capitalism, the Jewish question became a national question.
2) Jewish Nation
When political Zionism was formulated at the end of the 19th century, it was not possible to speak of a Jewish nation worldwide. In most countries, the Jewish population lived as an oppressed national minority. In individual countries such as Poland, Ukraine and Belarus, on the other hand, the formation of the Jews into a nation was most advanced.
3) Political Zionism
Political Zionism is Jewish nationalism and at the same time a reaction to anti-Semitism. This nationalism is used by the imperialists for their own purposes. Political Zionism has two sides: a just one, with which it was directed against the national oppression of the Jews and wanted to free itself from it by founding its own Jewish state. On the other hand, it has an aggressive, colonialist character. With his program „A country without a people for a people without a land“ he ideologically/politically denies the existence of the indigenous (autochthonous) Arab people in Palestine and practically organizes their expulsion.
4) Jewish Nation in Palestine
Zionist immigration, anti-Semitism that culminated in the Holocaust,³ and the Jewish people fleeing Nazi fascism played a decisive role in the formation of the Jewish nation in Palestine. After the end of the Second World War, the Jewish population in Palestine was about one third of the total population. Measured by the Marxist criteria of a nation (territory, culture, language, economy and historical community), the Jewish population in Palestine at the end of the Second World War largely constituted a nation.
The right of the Jews to a state in Palestine was thus given. A solution for the peaceful coexistence of the two peoples would be a dual democratic state in which both the Arab and Jewish populations live together on an equal footing. However, decades of imperialist activity had ensured that a partition of Palestine into a Jewish and an Arab state was put on the agenda.
5) Solution of the Palestine question
1945-1948 When the Palestine question was put on the agenda of the UN (United Nations), the socialist Soviet Union advocated the creation of an independent, united democratic common state in which Arabs and Jews live. When it became clear that this could not be realized, she pleaded for the two-state solution, i.e. to found an Arab and a Jewish state in Palestine. The UN’s 1947 partition plan was supported by the Soviet Union because it defended the right of both peoples living in Palestine to self-determination and their right to national state independence, as well as the withdrawal of British colonial power and an end to the imperialist mandate. He was progressive and democratic.
The plan envisaged an economic union of the two states with the aim of enabling a voluntary unification of the Jewish and Arab states in the future. This was a solution to ease the charged situation and create a better starting point for the formation of an independent, democratic Arab-Jewish state. The attitude of the SU was and is also correct in retrospect.
6) Establishment of the State of Israel – An Nakba of the Palestinian People
The imperialists, the Zionists and the Arab reactionaries have prevented the two-state solution. The Zionists proclaimed the unilateral establishment of the State of Israel. The states of the Arab League, also as alleged representatives of the Palestinian people, have started a war against the newly founded state of Israel with the support of some imperialists. In this war, the „An Nakba“, the „great catastrophe“, the systematic brutal expulsion of the Palestinian people from their land, took on enormous dimensions.
7) Zionist State of Israel
Israel is a special case due to its special historical development and current situation. Israel has a right to exist in Palestine. But it is based on the denial and denial of the right to self-determination and the prevention of the formation of a state of the Palestinian people.Israel is a capitalistically developed country dependent on imperialism and has expansionist, colonialist imperialist traits towards the Arab nation and the Arab states.The State of Israel is Zionist, highly racist, militarized and fascist towards the Arab population in the Arab population. occupied territories of Palestine (2011 Gaza and West Bank). The form of rule in the occupied territories is fascist.
The form of rule of the Israeli state in Israel is bourgeois-democratic with a fascist structure of rule over the Palestinian Arab minority. The Zionist state builds a wall around „its annexed land“ as well as through the West Bank, which it colonizes to a large extent. In Jerusalem, the Palestinians continue to be expelled and dispossessed. The Israeli state is waging war against Gaza, walling it in and imposing blockades on it.
8) Solution to the national question
Under capitalism there is no just solution to the national question and there can be no lasting peace. Nevertheless, we as communists must still behave towards this today in imperialism. Today, under capitalist imperialist conditions, we support the establishment of two states on the basis of UN Partition Decision No. 181 of November 26, 1947, as a transitional solution. This solution is the only viable way in capitalism. Particular attention must be paid to adapting to current conditions (population growth, areas). In addition, the right of return of Palestinian refugees must be guaranteed. As communists in Germany, we must expose the game of the imperialist great powers, especially that of the FRG, and support the liberation movement of the Palestinian people!
9) Current solution
The end of the war in Palestine and a peace agreement between Arab Palestinians and the State of Israel is the prerequisite for the development of the class struggle in Israel and Palestine. Under today’s conditions, this is only possible in an imperialist peace. The demand of the PLO (Palestine Liberation Organization) to establish a Palestinian Arab state within the borders of June 4, 1967, in which all Jewish settlements will be dissolved, can be a step towards temporary peace. Such a solution offers both the Palestinian masses and the Jewish working people in Israel an improvement in their conditions and conditions of struggle, but this is not a decisive, forward-looking demand for the Palestinian cause.
The 1967 solution is the most minimal, but even under Zionist occupation it is difficult to achieve, which in no way realizes the right of the Palestinian nation to self-determination and no real democratic solution to the national question in Palestine.
10) Real solution
The real solution lies in the revolutions in Israel and Palestine under the leadership of the proletariat with the goal of socialism/communism. In Palestine, the struggle against the Israeli-Zionist occupation plays the main role in the revolution.
11) Fighting Methods
We reject „suicide attacks“ such as those carried out by Hamas and Jiad, which aim at the indiscriminate murder of the Jewish population, as a means of political struggle, because they do not serve the liberation struggle but harm. They ultimately serve the Zionist state and Arab reaction. At the same time, we condemn all hypocritical condemnations of suicide bombings that work to take the fascist occupation of the Zionist state out of the line of fire.
————————————————————————————————————-
¹ These theses are based on the detailed assessments of the Palestine question in In spite of everything! No. 32/33 June 2004 and No. 47 March 2008.
² At the end of the 19th century/beginning of the 20th century, the Ottoman Empire, under whose rule Palestine stood, collapsed. Due to its strategic importance, Palestine played a central role in the rivalry between the major imperialist powers, especially France and England, for the partition of the Middle East. England took advantage of the rise of Zionism and the associated emigration of European Jews to Palestine to enforce the colonization of Palestine.
In the 1910s/1920s, the Palestinian people rose up against colonial oppression and fought for a free, independent Palestine. Parts of the national liberation forces, such as the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, were strongly anti-Semitic and closely linked to German fascism in the 1930s and 40s.
³German genocide of European Jews.