A "moral right" to terrorism?

According to Professor Ted Honderich of University College London the 'Palestinians have a moral right to terrorism' (The Independent, 2 November 2006). He goes on to explain that the "…Palestinians have a moral right in historic Palestine, including Israel, to their terrorism against that [Israel's] ethnic cleansing...Everybody believes the Palestinians have a right to a viable state..." Socialists do not make moral appeals, and have, since the Party's inception in 1904, opposed terrorism/wars: whenever have our 'problems' been solved by workers killing each other? And states?! Such ignorance!

Socialists do not go down that well-known leftist cul-de-sac of supporting oppressed and disadvantaged national minorities achieve statehood. We wonder if the Professor and others in favour of this position realise what a Sisyphean task they undertake? By way of illustration replace 'Jews' in the quotation below with any of the following:

* the indigenous peoples in North America, South America, and Australia;

* the Basques, Galicians, and Catalonians in Spain;

* the Bretons, Alsatians, Corsicans, and Savoyards in France;

* the Abkhazians and Ossetians in Georgia;

* the Sorbs in Germany;

* the Kurds and Turkmen in Iraq;

* the Kosovars and Hungarians in Serbia;

* the Moravians and Ruthenians in Slovakia;

* the Chinese in Vietnam;

* the Koreans in Japan;

* the Tamils in Sri Lanka;

* the Québécois in Canada;

* the Nagorno-Karabakh in Azerbaijan; and

* the Hawaiians in the United States.
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"In one of his first articles after becoming a Socialist, Marx argued that Jewish people should seek emancipation, not as Jews, but as human beings. To do this they should abandon their religion - just as Christians should abandon theirs - and become members of a secular human community in which money and the state should be abolished, i.e. Socialism. In the meantime, under capitalism, Jews should enjoy the same political rights, in a secular democratic state, as Christians and others."
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The Socialist Party has repeated this message many times, including on the emergence of the new Jewish State of Israel in Palestine (itself an 'artificial subdivision of the old Ottoman Empire'):

"Within the tormented area of the struggle Arab and Jewish workers have already given evidence of where the chains rub them by the strikes that have taken place against Jewish, Arab and alien masters. These Jewish and Arab workers form the vast mass of the population of the territories involved; they are the poverty-stricken exploitable material without which neither the Jewish nor Arab capitalists and landowners, nor outside capitalists, would be able to reap their harvest of profit from those rich areas. Industrially and commercially Jewish capitalists have been the progressive force. They have brought highly developed Western methods to a backward area, and in places have made the desert bloom. But with Western methods they have brought Western forms of wage-slavery and expanded under cover of nationalist ideals."
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Then and now Arab and Jewish workers have more in common than with the capitalists who exploit them. The creation of a separate Palestinian state, viable or otherwise, will no more end this exploitation than, for example, when a new black master class took over the state at the end of the era of apartheid in South Africa.

Furthermore, as "...long as we have capitalism, that is, competition and contest between capitalists and capitalist states, buying and selling, land grabbing for profits and other gains, which leads to bullying, threatening, spying, open hostility, conflict, terrorism and open military war, we will never be free of violence and terrorism."

'Workers of the World, Unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains.'

To see a how the modern Israeli state has emerged over millenia, see: "Imperial History of the Middle East".

RS