One-State, Two-State or No-State Solution ?

The Palestinian Authority puts in a UN bid for statehood, in a few days time.The 66th UN General Assembly will vote on Palestinian state which would include the West Bank and Gaza, with East al-Quds (Jerusalem) as its capital. The Palestinian state alongside Israel will amount to little more than a string of ghettoes or bantustans, dissected by Israeli settlements. There is the other little discussed choice for the Palestinans and that is to accept the reality of Israel’s control over the whole of what used to be Palestine and demand citizenship and civil rights within a single secular state. This would be equivalent to the ending of apartheid in South Africa but would not solve the problems faced by the majority of the population. Not that the emergence of such a secular state is any more easy to envisage at present in view of the prevalence of ethnic-supremacist, sectarian and even racist outlooks in both Jewish-Israeli and Palestinian society. Palestinians have been replaced in menial jobs by workers from Thailand, the Philippines, and Africa. The number of unemployed among Israelis has also increased. So Palestinian workers are increasingly superfluous to the labour needs of Israel's capitalist economy. This gives even more cause for concern about their fate. It may be tempting to support the underdog and take sides with the Philistine David versus Israeli Goliath. But such thinking blinds us to the real causes of the particularly brutal history of the Middle East. Peace is always better than war. Because wars are never fought in the interests of ordinary people. And because in wars it is always ordinary people who suffer. 

So, irrespective of the issues involved or the terms agreed, Socialists can only welcome the ending of any war in any part of the world. Stop the killing is our permanent policy. Israel uses terror on a much larger scale than Hamas, though that is solely because it has much greater military capacity. In the insane world of global-politics the real winners are never the oppressed or their alleged champions, but the powerful who direct affairs from afar. One of the saddest and longest lasting examples of a working class divided against itself is the continuing factional struggle between Israeli and Palestinian workers. 

"The people" do not exist except as an ideological construct, an abstraction manipulated by defenders of a capitalist status quo (through government, media, schools) to cover up very real class divisions. The land, the factories, — none is owned by "the people", but by a small group of capitalists who profit very well, safe, many miles away from the violence. Hamas could probably have saved “their people” from the fury of the Israeli war machine by ceding power in Gaza to the Palestine Authority. 

SOYMB make this point not to diminish Israel’s direct responsibility for its atrocities, but rather to highlight how little the Palestinian (as well as Israeli leaders) really care about ordinary people. Socialists have always argued that the workers of all countries have more in common with each other than with those representing the interests of capital. The poor worker from Palestine face the same condition as the Israeli worker. Both are faced with the fundamental problem of capitalism which forces worker against worker not for their own interests, but for the interest of profit. Israeli workers have already given evidence with their recent mass protests of where their own chains rub them. The Israeli working class suffers as it surrenders its freedom and political power in exchange for the safety of the security state. The working class is left to do the dirty work for the owning class, the employing class and the officer class - working in their factories and dying in their armies. Both sides can only lose their lives and liberty, so long as they see their own interests lying in the suppression of each other, rather than in the destruction of the murderous armed elites that promote the war on both sides. 

 World socialists are revolted by the violence of the Palestinian conflict. We condemn both sides and denounce the senseless killing of our fellow workers. History shows that in times of war, working-class interests are never served by workers throwing in their lot with nationalist or other political leaders of capitalism, whether they are well-funded like the Israeli state, or weaker like Hamas. Unlike most on the Left, we don’t single out Jewish nationalism for special condemnation. We condemn all nationalisms equally. The Left argue that they support the struggles of the Palestinians because they are oppressed as a people, and their right to self-determination must be fought for. This illustrates the romantic/moralistic approach of the leftists – the oppression of Palestinian workers is made qualitatively worse by the denial of national rights, that is, the denial to the Palestinian capitalists of a free hand in exploiting their workers and conning them into believing that they share a common interest in defending a patch of land. The “Palestinian nation” is just as much a myth as the “Jewish nation”, or any other nation. Nationalism is the ideology which seeks to justify the capitalist division of the world into separate “nation-states”, each competing to gain a place in the sun for its ruling class and each with killing machines at its disposal.

 In the new nation, Palestinians would still be oppressed as workers, and the land would belong to a new set of owners. They would still be subject to poverty, to the tyranny of their rulers and to the chaos of capitalist existence. We utterly reject this view of the way humanity should organise itself. We ask that workers set aside the reaction of nationalism and religion to join together to root out the real problem itself—capitalism. Instead of a “two-state” solution, world socialists offer the “no-state” solution as the only one that can ever give the Middle East lasting peace. The Socialist Party re-affirm that all peoples should seek their emancipation, not as members of nations or religions or ethnic groups, but as human beings, as members of the human race, as citizens of the world, not subjects of nation-states.