From the Spartacist internal discussion bulletin “Exchange of Views II: Between the SL/US and the RWP of Ceylon”
New York, 12 August 1974
Ceylon
Dear Comrade Samarakkody,
This letter is intended as a reply to section V of your letter to Robertson dated 9 February 1974, subtitled “Arab–Israel Question.”
Our differences on the Near East do indeed seem to center on the nature of Israel as an “outpost of imperialism.” You draw a fundamental distinction between Israel as an “outpost of imperialism” and all other states in the Near East, even those such as Jordan and Iran which you characterize as “client states of imperialism in the Middle East.” Of these “client states of imperialism” you write:
“The history of imperialist aggression and colonization provides numerous cases of client states of imperialism, through which the latter carried on aggression and maintained their colonialist powers. Feudo-capitalist rulers of such states have been found to function as agencies of imperialism in the Middle East—even now Jordan and Iran.”
—“Letter to Robertson” [International Discussion Bulletin No. 3], 9 February 1974, p. 18
You claim that:
“The reason why imperialism has not been able to convert Arab states (Jordan — Iran) into imperialist outposts as in the case of Israel is that there is a struggle against imperialism in all colonial and semi-colonial countries. While all the countries of the Arab Middle East have formal political independence, severe imperialist exploitation continues in most of these countries. Especially in the oil-rich areas the imperialist oil companies have extracted enormous profits. They need to continue such exploitation. Nixon’s threat to use force against the Arab countries operating the oil boycott was proof that the struggle to end imperialist pressure in those countries is real. These backward countries of the Middle East cannot move out of their state of economic stagnation without eliminating imperialism from their countries and from this region. The Arab masses, the so-called national bourgeoisie and even the Arab feudal kings are adversely and directly affected by imperialism.
“It is precisely this conflict between the people of the Arab states and imperialism that manifests itself from time to time with anti-imperialist actions and confrontations between the feudo-capitalist rulers and imperialism in the Arab states.
“On the other hand in regard to Israel there is no question of any conflict with imperialism in this state, except in the sense that the working class of Israel has an interest in the struggle against imperialist oppression. There are no issues on which the anti-imperialist struggle is posed for the people of Israel. This unique situation of a country at the very centre of a region in which imperialism has maintained its exploitative system being free of imperialist exploitation has only one explanation—that is because Israel functions as an outpost of imperialism.”
—Ibid., pp. 18–19
Thus we are told that these client states of imperialism, Jordan and Iran, through which the imperialist powers “carried on their aggression and maintained their colonialist powers,” are nonetheless in conflict with imperialism because their economies are exploited and their economic development is retarded by imperialism. Furthermore this conflict between the people of the Arab states and imperialism supposedly manifests itself in confrontations between the feudo-capitalist rulers, the agencies of imperialism in the Middle East, and imperialism.
Here we are presented with a series of inverted Maoist categories such as “feudo-capitalist rulers” (or compradore bourgeoisie) who are both the “agencies of imperialism” and “exploited” by imperialism. Furthermore, the passage implies that the main axis of social struggle by the Arab masses is expressed through confrontations between these feudo-capitalist rulers and the imperialists.
We are also told that as distinct from the “client states of imperialism” Israel is an “outpost of imperialism” because there is “no question of any conflict with imperialism in this state.… There are no issues on which the anti-imperialist struggle is posed for the people of Israel … except insofar that the working class has an interest in the struggle against imperialist oppression.” Elsewhere you write:
“Is it not relevant to inquire how this unusual phenomenon of a ‘relatively advanced European capitalist order’ has been transplanted in a sea of backwardness in the Middle East, where feudal kings still reign? The agrarian revolution and other democratic rights have still to be accomplished in all these countries of the Arab East, while in this State of Israel there are no such unresolved bourgeois-democratic tasks. And if ‘Israel lacks the industrial resources to support such an order,’ what is the explanation for this unique social phenomenon? And when a state which has only flowers and fruits as its chief export products maintains a ‘relatively advanced capitalist order’ without any serious economic and social problems, without balance of payments problems, problems of increasing debts, etc., it only means that imperialism maintains this state not on economic development and exploitation but as an armed encampment.”
First, it should be noted that you have chosen military terms such as “imperialist outpost,” “imperialist fortress” and “armed encampment” to describe this “unusual phenomenon.” In the strict and literal sense, one [can] refer to the British naval base at Trincomalee or the U.S. Sixth Fleet in the Mediterranean Sea as “outpost of imperialism,” “imperialist fortress,” or “armed encampment.” Giving a broader usage to these military terms, one could contend that the British converted Malta and the U.S. converted Okinawa into “imperialist fortresses.” By analogy one can speak of the British-owned Suez Canal or even the state of Israel as an imperialist outpost. As you point out, we ourselves used this analogy in our resolution on the 1967 Israel-Arab War. The undisputed point we wanted to make there is that Israel could have come into existence only under the sponsorship, and in the service of, somebody’s imperialism. This was recognized by the important Zionist leaders. Thus, to find a sponsor for the Zionist colonization, Herzl approached the most reactionary, most notoriously anti-Semitic leaders of the imperialist powers: the Black Hundred pogromist, Russian Minister of Interior, Plehve; the Turkish sultan; the German Kaiser; and finally the British Colonial Secretary, Joseph Chamberlain. Heizmann, who throughout his life cast Britain in the role of “godfather,” wrote during World War I to C. P. Scott, editor of the Manchester Guardian:
“We can reasonably say that should Palestine fall within the British sphere of influence and should Britain encourage Jewish settlement there, as a British dependency, we could have in twenty to thirty years a million Jews out there, perhaps more; they would develop the country, bring back civilization to it and form a very effective guard for the Suez Canal.”
—Transformation of Palestine, Ibrahim Abu-Lughod, ed., 1971, quoted in “Zionism as Western Imperialism,” Richard P. Stevens, p. 41
These sentiments were put even more crudely for the consumption of Israeli public opinion by the editor of the mass-circulation Zionist daily Ha’aretz:
“Israel has been given a role not unlike that of a watchdog. One need not fear that it will exercise an aggressive policy towards the Arab states if this will contradict the interests of the U.S.A. and Britain. But should the West prefer for one reason or another to close its eyes one can rely on Israel to punish severely those of the neighboring states whose lack of manners towards the West has exceeded the proper limits.”
—Ha’aretz, 30 September 1951, quoted in The Other Israel, Arie Bober, ed., Doubleday, Anchor, 1972, p. 99
This chauvinist filth clearly states how Israel’s ruling establishment conceived of the Zionist colonization and the formation of a Zionist state as an “outpost of imperialism.” Certainly it behaved in exactly that way when the neighboring state of Egypt’s “lack of manners toward the West exceeded proper limits” by Nasser’s nationalization of the Suez Canal. Israel marched off with the British and French to “severely punish” the Egyptian nationalists. There is no doubt that Israel was prepared, if called upon, to play a similar role in Lebanon or Iraq in 1958 and in Jordan in September 1970.
At the time of the 1848 revolution and its immediate aftermath, the term “outpost” was given a meaning by Marx and Engels which made it applicable to nations. Lenin writes in “The Discussion on Self-Determination Summed Up”:
“Marx and Engels at that time [1848–49] drew a clear and definite distinction between ‘whole reactionary nations’ serving as ‘Russian outposts’ in Europe, and ‘revolutionary nations’, namely, the Germans, Poles and Magyars.”
—Critical Remarks on the National Question, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1971, p. 131
But here Lenin is stressing the concrete historical context in which Marx and Engels drew a sharp distinction between “reactionary nations” which served as “outposts” of reactionary Russia and “revolutionary nations.” He describes the conditions as: (1) that capitalist development still had a historically progressive mission to fulfill; (2) that this mission could only be fulfilled in the process of national consolidation (similar to the French Revolution) in which smaller nations, the “relics of peoples,” are absorbed into more progressive nations, breaking down feudal-particularist barriers; (3) that the main bulwark against progressive capitalist development in Eastern Europe was Russia (e.g., Russia’s suppression of the 1848 revolution in Hungary); and (4) that the South Slav nations were incapable in this period, because of their cultural and social backwardness, of articulating a genuinely progressive bourgeois-democratic movement. Therefore the separatist aspirations of the Balkan nations could only be tools of Russian reaction and the role that was played by the French nation, i.e., the role of the leading nation of revolutionary national consolidation, could only be played by the Magyars, Poles and Germans. But Lenin’s main point here is the historical specificity of this distinction between “reactionary” and “revolutionary” nations. The conditions which might have made such a distinction valuable in the period 1848–71 no longer existed in the epoch of imperialism when capitalism was no longer progressive, when capitalist development produced not national consolidation but national oppression, and when Russia was no longer “the main enemy” but itself dominated by finance capital. Lenin is polemicizing against both the right-wing social-chauvinist opportunists like Cunow and the left-wing Polish Social Democrats (the “consistent” and “wavering annexationists” as Lenin calls them respectively). Both take this distinction of Marx and Engels out of context to suit their own purposes. In the case of the opportunists, they sought to defend their respective bourgeoisies as leaders of the “revolutionary” nations against the “reactionary” ones. The left-wing Polish Social Democrats, on the other hand, wished to deny to small and economically unviable nations the right to self-determination since they would be “outposts” of somebody’s imperialism.
“The Discussion on Self-Determination Summed Up” was written in 1916. Through the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–5 Lenin shared Marx’s conception of the Russian question. He held that tsarism was the bulwark of European reaction and could be destroyed only by external assault. Thus, believing that Japan was not yet an imperialist power and that any blow against Russia could only be for the better, Lenin supported Japan against Russia. During this period revolutionary defeatism was seen as having a unique and categorical application to Russia.
Here it is important to repeat that Marx and Engels considered the South Slavs “whole reactionary nations” because they lacked a democratic bourgeoisie and a developed labor movement and were therefore incapable of the liberal-labor alliance which Marx and Engels envisioned as necessary to sweep away feudal vestiges in Eastern Europe. Until 1905 Lenin also tended to consider that Russia was a “whole reactionary nation” whose working class was too weak and whose bourgeoisie was too tied in with tsarism to carry out the democratic revolution. After the 1905 Russian Revolution and the demonstration of the capacity of the working class for nationwide political struggle, the historic mission for destroying tsarism shifted, in Lenin’s view, from the task of external assault to the task of the Russian working class in alliance with the peasantry. As Brian Pearce wrote in “Lenin and Trotsky on Pacifism and Defeatism”:
“The overwhelmingly important result of Tsarist Russia’s defeat in 1905, however, was to put an end to the ‘special question’ of Russia as a question to be solved on the international plane. Whereas Marx and Engels had had to decide in all international conflicts which outcome would be most disadvantageous to Russia, and work for that, and even to incite war against Russia, from 1905 onward the liquidation of Tsarism could be safely left to the Russian working class, which had now stepped into world history.”
—reprinted in What Is Revolutionary Leadership, Spartacist Publishers, 1973
Thus, by World War I, revolutionary defeatism was no longer seen by Lenin as uniquely applicable to Russia; it had become an obligation for the labor movements in all the belligerent countries in an imperialist war. In “Discussion of Self-Determination Summed Up” Lenin states explicitly that Marx and Engels’ distinction between “whole reactionary nations” which become “outposts” of Russian reaction and “revolutionary nations” was no longer applicable and could be resurrected only to defend social chauvinism. And this is just as true in the Near East today as it was in Europe in World War I. To claim that Zionism of 1973 equals tsarism of 1848–1871—”the bulwark of reaction”—or that Israel is an imperialist outpost the way the South Slavs were Russian outposts, is to deny the existence of imperialism as the political and economic bond between foreign capital and the native Arab and Jewish bourgeoisies. It is a denial of the existence of a Hebrew working class whose historic mission is the destruction of Zionism. Instead it can only be an ideological defense of the Arab bourgeoisies and their false claims that it is they who will destroy Zionism and carry out the tasks of democracy in the Near East. In short, it is a denial of the permanent revolution in the Near East.
“Imperialist outpost,” and “imperialist fortress” are very good analogies in describing Israel. But a very good analogy can become a misleading and mistaken analogy if it is abused, especially by mistaking the analogy for the reality itself. To equate Israel with Trincomalee or the Sixth Fleet can be highly misleading indeed. For then one must, as you do, assert that since there can be no contradiction between imperialism and its outposts (whether the Sixth Fleet or the state of Israel), there can be no conflict between imperialism and the people of Israel. But on this point you equivocate by drawing a clearly false distinction between the “people of Israel” and the Israeli working class which, you agree, has an interest in ending imperialist oppression. To be consistent you must consider the Israeli working people as imperialist soldiers in the guise of workers. For if Israel is in reality an armed encampment of imperialism, a Trincomalee, one can hardly speak of classes or class struggle at all in regard to Israel, only of officers and enlisted men. And while some of the latter may perhaps desert, this is not class struggle within the imperialist fortress but, at best, mutiny. Further, one could hardly speak of the right to self-determination or any other rights for the Israeli people just as one does not speak of the right to self-determination for the British at Trincomalee. The only good one is a dead one.
In order to paint Israel as simply another Trincomalee you are forced to badly distort the reality of Israeli society. Thus we are told that Israel has “no unresolved bourgeois-democratic tasks,” that it is “without serious economic and social problems, “without balance of payments problems, problems of increasing debts.” But is this not the classless paradise of Zionist propaganda?
We read that, among other things, Israel has “no unresolved bourgeois-democratic tasks.” Of course if you consistently contend that Israel is another Trincomalee then Israel has no unresolved bourgeois-democratic tasks because it has no bourgeois-democratic rights (e.g., self-determination for the Hebrew-speaking people). However, you not only apply the right of self-determination to the Hebrew nation, you even claim that this right has existed since the beginning of the 20th century.
But prior to the mass migration of eastern European Jewry to Palestine in the 1930’s there was no Hebrew nation either in Eastern Europe or the Levant. Lenin insists throughout his writings on the national question that in Eastern Europe, where over half the Jews in the world lived, Jews constituted a caste and not a nation. In “Critical Remarks on the National Question” he writes:
“Of the ten and a half million Jews in the world, somewhat over a half live in Galicia and Russia, backward and semi-barbarous countries, where the Jews are forcibly kept in the status of a caste. The other half lives in the civilised world, and there the Jews do not live as a segregated caste.”
—Critical Remarks on the National Question, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1971, p. 14
and elsewhere:
“The Jews in Galicia and in Russia are not a nation; unfortunately (through no fault of their own but through that of the Purishkeviches), they are still a caste here.”
—Ibid., p. 17
Lenin himself did not even deem it worthwhile to ask whether the Zionist–Tolstoyan utopian communities in Palestine could be considered a nation. But at the Second Congress of the Comintern, when considering the application of the left-wing Zionist group Poale Zion to join the CI, the Congress emphatically rejected the conception that the Zionist settler-colony in Palestine could be considered a nation. However, there is no doubt that by the defeat of the Palestinian Arab Revolt in 1939, the Zionists had consolidated a closed Jewish economic community with 400,000 members that occupied a specific region of Palestine and could be considered a nation.
Yet, while claiming that there has existed a Hebrew nation with the right to self-determination since the beginning of the 20th century, you also state that Israel “is not the realisation of self-determination for the Hebrew nation.” By 1947 there existed a Hebrew nation in Palestine with the right to self-determination. Nonetheless, from the standpoint of the interests of democracy (much less those of the socialist revolution), the Hebrew nation did not have the right to exercise self-determination, i.e., to form an independent Hebrew-speaking political state at the expense of the Palestinian Arab nation. The SWP wrote in a Militant editorial following the first truce of the 1948 war:
“Haven’t the Jewish people the right to self-determination and statehood as other peoples? Yes—but even if we abstracted this question from its aforementioned social reality the fact remains they cannot carve out a state at the expense of the national rights of the Arab peoples. This is not self-determination but conquest of another people’s territory.”
—Militant, 31 May 1948
To this the Shachtmanites responded with an article by Hal Draper called “How to Defend Israel,” which characterized the SWP position in the following way:
“A dishonest reply. (1) It means that the Jews have a right to self-determination but no right to exercise it. This does not make sense. One may, as we said, advise against its exercise in favor of a different course; but it is pure fakery to grant the right and in the same breath denounce its exercise as ‘conquest of another people’s territory’.”
—New International, July 1948
This passage shows not how contradictory the “Cannonites” were, but rather how far down the path from Trotskyism to social democracy the Shachtmanites had traveled. From the standpoint of some sort of Wilsonian democracy, a right is right and everything else is subordinate. However, for Leninists:
“The several demands of democracy, including self-determination, are not an absolute, but only a small part of the general-democratic (now: general-socialist) world movement. In individual concrete cases, the part may contradict the whole; if so, it must be rejected.”
—Critical Remarks on the National Question, p. 132
In this particular case, the exercise of the right of self-determination by the Hebrew nation during 1947–48 contradicted the general interests of democracy and the socialist revolution in the Near East and therefore had to be rejected. Thus, we opposed the 1947 partition plan and the formation of the Israeli state. But while it is one thing to take these positions, it is quite another to deny that in 1947–48 the Hebrew nation did in fact constitute itself as a sovereign state.
Your attempt to hold at the same time that Israel is simply an “imperialist fortress” and that there exists within this fortress a Hebrew nation with the right to self-determination leads you to the following contradictions: (1) “ … it is necessary to consider the Jewish people of Palestine (Israel) apart from their Zionist overlords who are pliant tools of imperialism.” However: “There are no issues on which the anti-imperialist struggle is posed for the people of Israel.” (2) “… especially since the first decade of the 20th century there was the question of the self-determination of the Hebrew people.” And: Israel “is not the realisation of self-determination for the Hebrew nation.” But: “ … in this State of Israel there are no unresolved bourgeois-democratic tasks.” Thus the people of Israel are both oppressed and not oppressed by imperialism, they constitute a Hebrew nation whose national rights are unresolved in a state for which there are no unresolved democratic rights. This is indeed a “unique” and contradictory phenomenon.
If you contend that in this sea of backwardness, within its little “fortress,” imperialism has carried out a bourgeois-democratic revolution, then it indeed has performed a miracle in the land of miracles (and disproven the theory of the Permanent Revolution to boot). But if you accept the view that Israel is composed of peoples who, like all other peoples have a “right” to democratic rights, then Israel certainly has unresolved bourgeois-democratic tasks. To this a myriad of other peoples can attest: the deposed Palestinians of the East Bank, Gaza or the Syrian and Lebanese refugee camps; the Palestinian Arabs on the West Bank under military occupation; the 300,000 Palestinian Arabs in Israel; the so-called Black or Sephardic Jewry who make up a majority of the population of Israel and who suffer under racial and ethnic discrimination. Israel is a racist, clericalist, chauvinist state that has not even resolved such basic democratic questions as the separation of synagogue and state. Even for its “own” Jews Israel has not resolved many of the bourgeois-democratic tasks.
You state that Israel is “without serious economic and social problems.” Even if we accept that this country of three million is nothing but another Trincomalee, allowed to lap up the drippings from imperialist oil money, there still is at least one glaring social problem. This is the social problem that results from being an “imperialist fortress” in a state of continuous war mobilization, under the whip of “emergency regulations” that are the legacy of the British Mandate and under the yoke of 30 percent yearly inflation and the highest tax rate in the world. The fruits of being an “imperialist fortress” are the 2,500 Israelis killed in the October War, the continuous tension of being a besieged country and bearing the burning and justified hatred of the majority of the people in the surrounding area. Furthermore, if there are no economic and social problems, how are we to account for the massive strike waves that shook Israeli society (which according to Zionist mythology is supposed to be classless) in 1951, 1962 and 1970?
You also state that Israel is “free of imperialist exploitation.” Then what kind of society is it? Is it socialist? Does Israel exploit imperialism? Is this “unique phenomenon” some new kind of state whose economic life is one giant PX (army base store), subsidized by imperialism without being exploited by imperialism? Much is made out of the fact that Israel is a “schnorring” (Yiddish for begging) state, living off alms from world Jewry and German guilt money (now dried up) for the Nazi Holocaust. (This delightful and perfectly accurate description, “schnorring,” was coined by the cranky anti-Zionist Jewish cultural nationalist Moshe Menuhin in his Decadence of Modern Jewry.) There is no question that an advanced European capitalist order could not have been developed or sustained in the sea of backwardness which is the Near East without the unilateral capital transfers from schnorring. It should be pointed out that Israel is coming more and more to resemble an ordinary capitalist state as, for instance, more of this capital transfer consists of capital investment. Moreover, fruits and flowers are not the chief exports of Israel. In 1970 it exported $244.6 million in polished diamonds, $96.5 million in textile and clothing and only $88.6 million in agricultural products. Of all the capital transfers from 1949–1965, 51.5 percent came from World Jewry, 41 percent from German reparations and 7.4 percent consisted of direct aid from the U.S. Although the public sector (Histadruth and government) is still the biggest capitalist in Israel, there is a tendency toward denationalization and every encouragement is given to foreign investment. Of the domestic product as a whole, industry accounts for 25 percent, government and public services 19.5 percent, private commerce and services 18.5 percent and agriculture 8.2 percent.
Is Israel exploited by imperialism? Certainly. Even where foreign firms do not engage in the direct extraction of surplus value at the point of production, they get their cut through marketing or selling Israel raw materials (e.g., the British Diamond Trading Syndicate of London), or manufactured goods. (McDonnell Douglas does not donate Phantom jets for United Jewish Appeal fund drives; it sells them for hard cash.)
Of course, imperialism’s main interest in Israel is not its profitability in economic terms. One can make the same arguments in regard to Jordan which does not even have polished diamonds and which has as its primary exports potash, tomatoes, fruits and nuts. How is it that Jordan, a country of nomads and desert which has a per capita income of $280 per year (1969), manages to have an army equipped with the most advanced weapons, planes and tanks that the U.S. and British technology have to offer? How has Jordan maintained a trade imbalance every year since the June ‘67 War where imports are seven times greater than exports, without experiencing a balance of payments crisis? (For Israel imports are traditionally twice as great as exports.) Just as the major portion of compensation for the deficit in Israel’s trade balance comes from world Jewry, so the major contribution to making up the difference in Jordan’s trade balance is from the oil kingdoms and sheikdoms. Another portion consists of direct aid from the U.S. to which even the Ford Foundation pays a small contribution. The rest is made up by so-called “development loans” of which the main lenders are AID, IDA, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and West Germany. Imperialism is no more interested in Jordan solely for her potash, tomatoes, fruits and nuts than it is interested in Israel for its polished diamonds, fruits and textiles. Imperialism allows itself to be “exploited” by both Jordan and Israel—it allows both these states to “schnorr” upon it—because they both serve common functions: as “outposts” and “client states of imperialism” and as part of the balkanization of the Near East.
An examination of the history of the area bears out the aptness of the description of an “outpost,” “armed encampment,” or “fortress” of imperialism as applied to Jordan. How is it that the sons of the dynastic rulers of nomadic tribes in the Hijaz of Western Arabia, the Hashemites, came to occupy the thrones of Jordan and, until 1958, Iraq?
In the Balfour Declaration the Zionists were promised a “homeland” in Palestine in order to mobilize Jewish public opinion behind the Allies during World War I and provide for British imperialism a means of balkanizing the Ottoman Empire and “a very effective guard for the Suez.” During the same period, similarly, in the Hussein-McMahon agreement, the British promised to Faisal and Abdullah, the sons of Sharif Hussein of Mecca, “independent” Arab kingdoms (restoration of the Caliphate) if they would mobilize their tribes against the Turks. (This is the irregular warfare romanticized in Lawrence of Arabia.) But in the Sykes-Picot treaty (1916) the British agreed to give Lebanon and Syria to France. When Faisal went to Damascus to crown himself king of “Greater Syria,” the French drove him out. As consolation Britain gave Iraq to Faisal and carved out a completely new entity, Transjordan, from Palestine and gave it to Abdullah. In 1925 Ibn Saud, the ruler of Eastern Arabia, drove Hussein Ibn-Ali out of Hijaz and consolidated all of Arabia into one kingdom, Saudi Arabia, the only country in the world named after its ruler. The center of the Hashemite Dynasty was simply switched to Jerusalem, Baghdad and Amman. Faisal’s descendants ruled Iraq until the 1958 republican rebellion. The grandson of Abdullah, Hussein, still rules what has become the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan.
The Transjordan Army, or Arab Legion, was raised, trained, equipped and officered entirely by the British and until 1950 was under the command of the British Middle East Forces. During World War II the Arab Legion participated with the British in the suppression of Rashid Ali’s uprising in Iraq and in campaigns against Vichy Syria. The Arab Legion was used along with British forces to police Palestine and participated in the breaking of the 1936 Palestinian Arab general strike and in the suppression of the subsequent guerilla warfare.
Where are to be found, through World War II, the confrontations between the “feudo-capitalist rulers” (the Hashemites of Iraq and Transjordan) and imperialism? The kingdoms of Iraq and Transjordan were artificially carved out of the dismembered Ottoman Empire and given to the sons of desert tribal chieftains who roamed, pillaged and occasionally ruled what is now Saudi Arabia. These “kingdoms” were superimposed upon peoples who had suffered already hundreds of years under the yoke of foreign rule which had created artificial political entities exacerbating real ethnic, national and religious differences. (Thus the Kurdish peoples were divided between Iran and Iraq. The elite Arab Legion was entirely recruited from Bedouin tribes whose tyranny was bitterly resented by the pastoral and farming population in Palestine and on the East Bank.) In the case of Transjordan, this elite army became the only imperialist raison d’être for the state; its chief “industry” was and continues to be the Arab Legion. Here, what Y. Rad says of the Haganah in his article on the 1948 war, and which you quote in your letter to Robertson, can also be said of the Arab Legion:
“This army had experience that had been acquired at the time of the suppression of the ‘Arab revolt’ and at the time of the second imperialist war. Most of its commanders were simply former British army officers.” (your emphasis)
—quoted in “Letter to Robertson”, p.14
What of the 1948 Arab-Israel war of which you claim “that what the Arab masses, including the feudalists and bourgeoisie were seeking in 1948 was to demolish the ‘imperialist fortress’ of Israel and that it was on their side an anti-imperialist struggle”? As every historical commentator has asserted, Abdullah and his Arab Legion entered the 1948 war not to demolish the “imperialist fortress” of Israel but to extend the “imperialist fortress” of Transjordan to those parts of Palestine allotted to the Palestinian Arabs by the UN partition. In particular, Abdullah wanted to annex the West Bank and crown himself “king of Jerusalem.” The entire course of the 1948 war was predetermined by agreements worked out in meetings between Abdullah and Golda Meyerson (Meir). Both the Zionists, represented by Meir, and Abdullah agreed that their greatest enemy was an independent Palestine and their common goal was its destruction. Abdullah made it quite clear that he had no intention of attacking those areas allotted to Israel under the mandate; he wanted to rule over only those areas allotted to the Arabs. The agreement broke down over who was to get Jerusalem which was supposed to be “internationalized” under the UN partition scheme.
The importance of Jerusalem was not just symbolic or mystical. Prior to the development of oil extraction, Saudi Arabia’s major source of income was the taxation of the Muslim pilgrimage to Medina and Mecca. Jerusalem, as the center of three religions, offered the promise of a lucrative pilgrim-tourist business which, next to agriculture, was the mainstay of the Jordanian economy prior to the 1967 war. Nonetheless, one should never underestimate the role that religious obscurantism and fanaticism play in these things. The Saudi king, for example, gave as his main reason for launching the recent oil boycott not striking a blow against U.S. imperialism or even against its “fortress” in the Levant but regaining the “third most holy city of Islam,” Jerusalem, for the Arabs.
Although the other Arab League forces (Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and Saudi Arabia) entered the 1948 war to counter Abdullah’s ambitions, since Abdullah’s Arab Legion was the only modern, effective fighting force in the Arab League, he was able to dictate battle strategy. The Arab League intervention was therefore subordinated to Abdullah’s desire to annex the West Bank and, principally, Jerusalem.
Can it be said that the 1948 war was an “anti-imperialist struggle” on the side of the Arab Legion? Were the dismemberment and destruction of the Palestinian nation and the annexation of the West Bank and half (the “Old City”) of Jerusalem blows against imperialism in the Near East? To portray the Arab Legion’s intervention into Palestine in 1948 as anti-imperialist and therefore to call for its military victory (a position of revolutionary defensism), then one must “enjoy” the spoils of that victory, the reconstructed “Hashemite Kingdom” over the Palestinian dispossessed.
And are we to support the intervention of the “fraternal” Hashemite Kingdom, Iraq, which was the most bellicose (if least effective) of the Arab League forces in 1948? As we point out in our article on the 1948 war in WV No. 45, within the Arab League “… the Iraqi prime minister Salah Jabr … was the most radical in his rhetoric and proposals, calling for immediate armed intervention. Jabr knew he was sitting on a volcano of social unrest at home and needed the diversion a ‘Holy War’ against Zionism would bring.” Here is one description of what Iraq was like during this period:
“The nation’s three million fellahin continued to till their soil as unimaginatively, and as unproductively, as their father before them. Several thousand rural families, pouring into Baghdad each spring to escape the Tigris floodwaters, lived in mud huts or wretched encampments on vacant lots. No one bothered to tend to their needs. Those responsible for the nation’s welfare were less than a thousand tribal sheikhs, who owned two thirds of the land and virtually controlled the parliament.”
—Europe Leaves the Middle East 1936–54, Howard N. Sachar, New York, 1972, p. 430
What we did not have space to discuss in our article and what is left unsaid by the bourgeois historian quoted above, is that Iraq had the most class-conscious proletariat in the Arab East. According to the Stalinist Soviet Encyclopedia (1947), the Iraqi Communist Party (ICP) controlled 18 unions with 38,000 members, though this figure is probably exaggerated. But even anti-communists, like Laqueur (in his Communism and Nationalism in the Middle East, New York, 1956), accept the fact that the ICP-Controlled such strategic unions as the railway workers with 1,500 members in the period 1946–48. In 1946 the ICP led a total general strike in Kirkuk which was ruthlessly suppressed by the police and army. This was followed by strikes of the rail workers, postal workers and printers. The government dissolved the unions, persecuted the ICP members and finally arrested the entire ICP leadership in January 1947.
The January 1948 rebellion, while sparked by the Portsmouth Treaty signed with the British, was actually a renewed upsurge of months of sharp social struggle and resulted in the bringing down of the Jabr government. Various nationalist parties participated in the January demonstrations and strikes but the Stalinists played a leading role. The resignation of the hated Jabr and the rescinding of the Portsmouth Treaty momentarily suppressed a situation bordering on the pre-revolutionary, only to resurge in March with a nationwide rail strike which paralyzed communications and which was joined by a sympathy strike of Baghdad students.
None of the Arab League members including the Hashemite “brother kingdoms” of Transjordan and Iraq, were able to commit the bulk of their forces to the “anti-imperialist” struggle against the Israeli “fortress” because they were busy suppressing genuinely anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist struggles at home. Both the Kirkuk general strike and the demonstrations against the Portsmouth Treaty were seen by the entire population as blows against British imperialism. Most political parties joined with the Stalinists in both actions. Social upheaval continued at home throughout the Arab League intervention in Palestine-Israel.
Are we to support the ICP-led strike wave and anti-British agitation even if it cut across the mobilizing, support and participation of the Iraqi Army in besieging the “imperialist fortress”? If one must choose between the struggle against an “outpost of imperialism” and a mere “client state of imperialism” (Iraq), shouldn’t one subordinate the [latter to the former]? Of course we would both agree with the Leninist formulation that “the main enemy is at home.” And we must also agree with Trotsky when he writes:
“Imperialism is a highly powerful force in the internal relationships of China. The main source of this force is not the warships in the waters of the Yangtse Kiang—they are only auxiliaries—but the economic and political bond between foreign capital and the native bourgeoisie.”
—”The Chinese Revolution and the Theses of Comrade Stalin,” (1927), reprinted in Problems of the Chinese Revolution, Ann Arbor Paperbacks, 1967, p. 21
The main source of the force of imperialism in the Near East is neither the warships of the Sixth Fleet in the waters of the Mediterranean nor the “imperialist outpost” of Israel; it is the economic and political bond between foreign capital and the native bourgeoisie. In the same article Trotsky writes:
“A workers’ strike—small and large—and agrarian rebellion, an uprising of the oppressed sections in city and country against the usurer, against the bureaucracy, against the local military satraps, all that arouses the multitudes, that welds them together, that educates, steels, is a real step forward on the road to the revolutionary and social liberation of the Chinese people.”
—Ibid., p. 22
Might not Trotsky have written the same thing of the Kirkuk general strike, the demonstrations against the Portsmouth Treaty and the continuation of anti-British, anti-capitalist social struggles throughout the 1948 war? The defeat of the Egyptian armies led to a destabilization of the Farouk regime and to the 1952 Free Officer coup that threw out the King and the British. But this is a vindication of the position of revolutionary defeatism more than anything else. Jordan is the only Arab regime which one could call victorious in the war. It is ruled by the hated, reactionary Hashemites to this day.
One can say regarding all the Arab regimes: for them the 1948 war was not an anti-imperialist struggle but a diversion of the anti-imperialist struggle. Each country was facing a severe threat to its own internal stability. This is the viewpoint of every serious commentator on the 1948 war.
As you know, we have previously held the position of military support for the Haganah against the Arab League forces on the grounds that the war posed the question of national survival for the Hebrew nation. Under more careful examination of the historical facts of the 1948 war, an examination to which the excellent article by Y. Rad (WV No. 35) was an important contribution, it became clear that our belief that an Arab League victory would have meant the destruction of both the Palestinian Arab and Hebrew-speaking nations was erroneous.
Given the Meyerson–Abdullah agreements, the co-equal strengths of the Haganah and the Arab League forces at the start of the 1948 war in May and the Haganah’s rapidly acquired superiority, it became obvious that, despite all the “drive the Jews into the sea” rhetoric, the Arab League had neither the capacity nor the intention to drive the Jews into the sea. As there was no basis for revolutionary defensism on the side of the Haganah, we could only have been defeatist.
It is important to point out that the change in our understanding represented the acquisition of additional historical material—not a change in methodology. If the survival of the Hebrew nation were indeed threatened, then our position toward the forces of the “armed encampment” of imperialism would be revolutionary defensism. And this must be your position if you accept that the people who constitute the Zionist “outpost of imperialism” also constitute a nation with the right to self-determination. This must include the right to fight for their own survival under the gun of an irredentist and genocidal war.
The only nation for which the question of national survival was placed on the agenda by the 1948 war was the Palestinian Arab nation. The 1948 war was a war for territorial aggrandizement in which armies of both sides struggled to occupy that portion of the territory allotted to the Palestinian Arabs under the UN partition scheme of November 1947. To support either side in 1948 is to support them against the Palestinians—not against imperialism. Had the Palestinian Arabs been able to launch an independent military force, we would have called for revolutionary defensism and military support against both the Arab League and the Haganah. From the standpoint of both democracy and socialist revolution, this would have been the only just war.
Due to the treachery of the Palestinian effendis (who fled after the UN voted for partition), and the double treachery of the Palestinian Stalinists (who for twenty years had tailed after the Palestinian effendis only to swallow the Moscow line in 1947 and come out for the UN partition scheme), the Palestinian masses were left leaderless. As a result there was no independent Palestinian Arab military force to defend. The Palestinian Arab population simply fled before Haganah-Irgun-Stern Gang terror.
We must examine the relationship of Israeli and Arab forces to British and American imperialism. Nowhere does Y. Rad in his article claim that the “1948 Har on the side of Israel was ‘anti-imperialist’ (British imperialism).” In fact he states just the opposite when he writes:
“Anti-imperialist war means to retreat—on the orders of American imperialism—from the one battle Zionism conducted against British imperialism, as can be seen from the terminating of the fighting in the Sinai.”
—WV No. 35, p. 8
But this does not mean that continued Jewish immigration and consolidation of the Israeli state did not come into conflict with British imperialism. Following the 1936–39 “Arab Revolt” in Palestine (which, allow me to repeat, was suppressed by both the Jordanian Arab Legion and Haganah as well as British forces) the British and Zionists had a falling out. As we wrote in “Birth of the Zionist State, part 1”:
“Twenty years of British imperialism in the Near East had, on the eve of World War II, turned many Arab governments pro-Axis. In order to shore up their shaky Arab support the British were quite willing to jilt their faithful Zionist servants. In 1939 they issued another “White Paper’’ which restricted Jewish immigration to 75,000 for the next five years and thereafter made it conditional on the consent of the Arab majority.”
—WV No.33, p. 7
In addition to restricting immigration, the 1939 “White Paper” imposed restrictions on that other pillar of the Zionist effort to consolidate statehood: land purchases. During and after World War II the British did everything possible to enforce the White Paper of 1939. The ports and borders of Palestine were closely patrolled by the British forces to stop illegal immigration. Illegal immigrants, most of whom had escaped the Nazi concentration and death camps, were placed in British concentration camps in Cyprus, when caught. When the British navy captured one of the wretched, unseaworthy ships carrying Jewish refugees, it was either forced to return to its point of origin or ruthlessly sunk.
After World War II, the concentration and death camps passed into the hands of the “Allies.” Instead of facilitating the transit of these victims of Nazi barbarism to strengthen the “imperialist fortress” in Palestine, the concentration camps were rechristened “displaced person” camps and the desperate Jewish survivors from genocidal Nazism were subjected to “democratic” imperialist incarceration. Neither the U.S. nor England would offer sanctuary to these Jews, who probably numbered at most 250,000, and could readily have been assimilated into either country. As Bevin put it, Truman probably came around to the scheme to have these Jews sent to Palestine not so much from the pressure of the Zionist lobby, nor from military considerations (the military establishment was opposed to U.S. support for Zionist statehood as they believed it cut across U.S. penetration into the Arab countries), but because Truman wanted to remove an embarrassing problem from U.S.-occupied Germany and he did not want these Jews in New York. Bevin adamantly opposed Jewish immigration to Palestine not because he had suddenly become an Arab nationalist, but because war-weakened British imperialism could not afford the additional costs of suppressing heightened Palestinian Jewish-Arab intercommunal strife that would likely result from further immigration.
After World War II, Zionist conflict with British imperialism intensified. As we pointed out in our article on the 1948 war, a state of civil war existed between British and Zionist forces from 1945 through the British departure in May 1948. Blowing up the King David Hotel, British military headquarters, was merely the most spectacular incident. This was hardly the behavior of an “imperialist fortress.” To assert that Zionism, because of its “unique” character, can never come into conflict with imperialism, or that Zionist raison d’état can never be in contradiction with its imperialist sponsor, is to disregard entirely the actual history of Palestine from 1945–48. Even Maxime Rodinson, who could never be accused of Zionist sympathies, is forced to admit that during the period of British withdrawal from November 1947 to May 1948:
“It is true that the Arab armies enjoyed some British support on various levels. But this support, which was clandestine and non-official, was also limited…. Many decisions on a local level favored the Arabs. In a series of cases, the English soldiers warned the Arabs of imminent English evacuation of a garrison, thereby (often) permitting the Arabs to seize it. Numerous British weapons seem to have found their way into the hands of the Arabs in such cases.”
Further Rodinson writes:
“The very day after the partition plan was announced, on November 30, 1947, at dawn, Arab attacks announced the Arab refusal to accept the Jewish state. The guerrilla struggle began right away, in the presence of the British soldiers, who observed a neutrality that was somewhat partial to the Arabs.”
—Israel: A Colonial Settler State?, Monad Press, 1973, pp. 71–72
This is certainly not the proper way to treat one’s “imperialist outpost.”
The Arab League was very much the agent of British imperialism during this period. It was sponsored by the English in 1945; its meetings were regularly attended by leading British officers and representatives of the Colonial Office. Its armies were officered, equipped and trained by the British. Adopting your analysis one cannot account for the fact that the Zionists and the Arab League clashed in 1948 unless one claims that the Arab League was anti-imperialist. In that case—which imperialism? Imperialism does not exist in the abstract as a disembodied oppressive force emanating from the West. Imperialism is a specific economic relationship between specific countries; it is the bond between foreign capital and the native bourgeoisie, to use Trotsky’s expression. Similarly, it is inexplicable that in 1967 the Jordanian Army, which was just as much a tool of American imperialism then as it was of British imperialism before the Korean War, clashed with Israel, also the tool of U.S. imperialism, unless one claims that the Jordanian Army in 1967 was anti-imperialist, simply and solely because Israel was on the other side. And one must hold these positions regardless of the results of these wars. In the case of 1948 the result was the destruction of the Palestinian nation and its annexation by Jordan and a smaller part [by] Egypt as well as by Israel. The 1967 defeat destabilized the Hashemite throne and led to the 1970 Civil War in which the “anti-imperialist” Hashemites of 1948 and 1967 proved themselves as the gravediggers of Palestinian resistance. Here, what was said of Israel in our resolution on the 1967 war reprinted in Spartacist No. 11 can be said of all the Arab states involved in the 1948 war: they are not mere puppets or “outposts” of imperialism but weak allies which act in conjunction with imperialism for their own interests. Of course, the weaker and more dependent on imperialism these countries are, the less room to maneuver and the more subservient they will be. (In this category Israel and Jordan, each carved out of Palestine, are really a pair. While other states, with valuable resources and somewhat more viable economies can pursue somewhat more independent paths. Examples of the latter would be Iran, Iraq and, to a much lesser degree, Saudi Arabia.)
The fact that the Zionists came into conflict with British imperialism in the period following World War II does not convert Zionism into an anti-imperialist force. Nor does it mean that we should have supported the Zionists militarily during this period. The same is true in Ireland where the Ulster Unionists frequently come into conflict with British imperialism. For example in the recent Ulster Unionist general strike against the British-sponsored Ulster Executive, we could certainly not have supported the Unionists. As Lenin pointed out in “A Caricature of Marxism and Imperialist Economism”:
“Hence, it is not every struggle against imperialism that we should support. We will not support a struggle of the reactionary classes against imperialism; we will not support an uprising of the reactionary classes against imperialism and capitalism.” (emphasis in original)
—Collected Works, Vol. 23, p.63, Moscow, 1974
Just as a Unionist victory over British imperialism can only lead to reactionary pogroms and inter-communal warfare in Ulster, so the Zionist “victory” over British imperialism could only set the stage for the expulsion of the Palestinian people from their homeland.
I believe that you hold that Zionism could never come into conflict with imperialism. It is important to stress that the Zionists, for their own vital self-interests, did come into conflict with British imperialism (e.g., over the question of immigration). But this conflict was by no means progressive.
I believe that you hold that any conflict with imperialism (e.g., the recent Arab oil boycott) is inherently progressive.
“U.S. imperialist interest was explicitly spelled out in a study done by a government interdepartmental committee (Navy, Army, Commerce, Interior, State) entitled ‘U.S. Petroleum Policy.’ The policy as stated was to:‘…seek the removal or modification of existent barriers (legal, contractual or otherwise) on the expansion of American foreign oil operations and facilitate the entry, or reentry of private foreign capital into countries where the absence of such capital inhibits development’.”—quoted in Limits of Power, Joyce and Gabriel Kolko, 1972
Prior to World War II the Near East was primarily a British “sphere of influence.” The “barriers (legal, contractual or otherwise)” referred to above were presented by the British. The postwar history of the Near East is one of the successful replacement of the British by the penetration of U.S. capital and “influence.” For example, prior to World War II, U.S. firms controlled 10% of the oil resources in the Near East and British firms 72%. By the June 1967 Israeli-Arab War, U.S. firms controlled 59% and the British 29%. The U.S. systematically replaced the British in Greece and Turkey in 1947, in Palestine in 1948, in Iran in 1951 and Jordan in 1957. Saudi Arabia has been a battleground of inter-imperialist rivalries between the U.S. and the British, with the U.S. dominant, since 1943.
Y. Rad’s characterization of the 1948 war as an “imperialist war” does indeed seem to be incorrect. In our article on the 1948 war we write:
“While the imperialist powers certainly had an interest in and intervened to shape the outcome of the conflict, it is not possible to consider the struggle on either side as anti-imperialist. Thus the Israelis were aided by the U.S. and the USSR (diplomatically and, at least indirectly, militarily), while the Egyptians, Iraqis and Jordanians all received British military aid. (On the other hand, not only the Israelis but each of the Arab countries involved was assiduously pursuing its own national aims, so that it is likewise impossible to reduce the war to a simple great power conflict.)”
—WV No.45, p. 11
One last point on the 1948 war must be mentioned. Your position, that on the side of the Arab League forces it was an anti-imperialist struggle and therefore we should take a revolutionary defensist position towards the Arab League forces, is a position which is in fundamental conflict with the position held by the Trotskyist movement at the time.
Both before the entry of the Arab League forces into Palestine/Israel, when the fighting was between the Haganah on one side and Kaukji’s Arab Liberation Army irregulars (financed and under the command of the Arab League) backed up by Palestinian Arab partisans on the other side, and after the Arab League forces had entered the conflict on 15 May 1948, the position of the Trotskyist movement was revolutionary defeatism on the Arab as well as the Zionist side. For example, an article written before the entry of the Arab League forces entitled “Against the Stream” (reprinted in Fourth International, May 1948 as “The Trotskyist Position on Palestine”) adamantly and explicitly argues against the conception of this war as anti-imperialist on any side:
“Each side is ‘anti-imperialist’ to the bone, busy detecting the reactionary—in the opposite camp. And imperialism is always seen helping the other side. But this kind of exposure is oil on the imperialist fire. For the inveigling policy of imperialism is based upon agents and agencies within both camps. Therefore, we say to the Palestine people in reply to the patriotic warmongers: Make this war between Jews and Arabs, which serves the end of imperialism, the common war of both nations against imperialism!
“The only way to peace between the two peoples of this country is turning the guns against the instigators of murder in both camps.”
—Fourth International, May 1948, p. 88
Likewise, after the Arab League forces had entered the war, the SWP wrote in an editorial in the 31 May 1948 Militant:
“The present Jewish-Arab war, far from enhancing reactionary Zionism or imparting to it a progressive mission, exposes in glaring manner that the program of a Jewish state in Palestine and the Jewish war for this end—is reactionary and bankrupt from beginning to end…. Neither are the Arab rulers conducting a progressive struggle for national independence and against imperialism. They are, by their anti-Jewish war, trying to divert the struggle against imperialism and utilizing the aspirations of the Arab masses for national freedom, to smother the social opposition to their tyrannical rule. That is why their war against the Jewish state lacks the progressive characteristics of a national war against imperialism and does not deserve the support of class conscious workers.”
Just because the official position of the FI in 1948 towards the Arab–Israeli conflict was revolutionary defeatism on both sides, does not make that, ipso facto, the correct position. But it is worthwhile to compare the position taken by the FI in 1948 in the Arab–Israeli conflict of that year to the position taken by the United Secretariat towards the 1967 Arab–Israeli war. In comparing the two wars, it should be recognized from the outset that if revolutionary defensism is inapplicable toward the Arab side in 1948, then most certainly it is inapplicable in 1967. While the 1948 war destroyed the Palestinian nation and brought into being the Israeli state through a series of reactionary annexations, the 1967 war was simply and solely one of territorial aggrandizement, a struggle to annex and oppress the remainder of the Palestinian Arab people and nation on the part of both the Israelis and the participating Arab countries, especially Egypt and Jordan. Therefore, while not in itself conclusive, it is significant to recognize that the position of the FI before its decisive Pabloite degeneration, when it was still attempting to view world events from a proletarian perspective, was that of revolutionary defeatism on both sides in the 1948 war. In fact, I am not aware of any tendency within the FI at that time which held your position of giving military support to and calling for the victory of the “anti-imperialist” Arab League. On the other hand, in 1967 the Pabloite United Secretariat, after it generalized the Algerian and Cuban experiences into a petty bourgeois nationalist and guerrillaist perspective for (at least) the colonial world, adopted with much less justice a position of revolutionary defensism on the side of the Arab states in 1967. As far as I am aware, this position was opposed by no one within the United Secretariat at the time though we are aware of your protests against the excesses to which the USec position was carried. However, I would contend that these excesses, namely the slopping over of military defense into political support, and the claim that at least Syria was some sort of “progressive” and even “revolutionary” regime, followed from the position of military defense in this case. The 1967 war was a war between states for territory which belonged to none of them. Only if one contends that one side was inherently and fundamentally more progressive than the other side (i.e. the USSR and Finland in 1940) could one argue for revolutionary defense in the 1967 war.
While we share the same programmatic conclusion concerning the 1956 war in the Near East, namely revolutionary defensism on the side of Nasser, your attempt to defend your conception of Israel as a “unique phenomenon” and as an “imperialist outpost” leads you to make rather peculiar statements about this war.
“It is an extraordinary course of conduct for a very small country of less than 2 million people to get on the side of imperialist giants in military operations against Egypt when, at the time, Egypt had given no cause for Israel’s action. And moreover, Israel was ready to identify itself with what was unqualified and naked imperialist aggression by UK–French imperialism against Egypt and that in the year 1956, not in the 18th or early 19th century.” —”Letter to Robertson”, 9 February 1974, IDB No.3
The classic phrase to describe the role of imperialism in Africa, Asia and the Near East is balkanization. The whole history of the Balkans, from the Congress of Berlin of 1878 (a Congress which, by the way, might very well be said to have marked the beginning of the epoch of imperialism) has been a history of very small nations getting on the side of imperialist giants in various military operations. For example, Trotsky, in “The Balkan Question,” wrote:
“The mere existence of Austria-Hungary, this Turkey of Middle Europe, blocks the way to the natural self-determination of the peoples of the South East. It compels them to keep constantly fighting against each other, to seek support against each other from the outside, and so makes them a tool of the political combinations of the Great Powers.”
—reprinted in War and the International, 1915, Young Socialist Publication, 1971
The Congress of Berlin was to the Balkans, to European Turkey, what Versailles was to the Near East, to Asian Turkey. In the epoch of imperialism there are countless examples of such alliances; they are, in fact, the norm. To mention just one: the very small country of New Zealand which took the side of the imperialist giant, the U.S., in its military operations in Vietnam. What cause did North Vietnam provide for New Zealand to enter the unqualified and naked imperialist aggression against it? Perhaps New Zealand is also an “outpost of imperialism.”
In dealing with the 1967 Arab–Israeli war, I would like to return to a point I made earlier. Between 1948, when the Trotskyist movement had taken a revolutionary defeatist position on both sides of the conflict, and 1967, when the United Secretariat took a position of support to the Arab side, the organized Trotskyist movement had undergone Pabloite degeneration. (As I shall demonstrate, neither their position on 1967, nor the Healyites’ position, should be confused with revolutionary defensism.)
Of particular importance was the revisionist response to Cuba, and, even more importantly, Algeria. It was Pablo’s conception of Algeria as a piecemeal and irreversible structural transformation into some sort of workers state which was transposed to the Near East. In particular, a tendency crystallized around Maitan expressing the viewpoint that Egypt, and especially Syria, were undergoing a “cold revolution,” i.e. a peaceful, piecemeal, gradual transformation towards some sort of working-class property relations and “revolutionary state.” This position was to the right of even Pablo’s Algerian position for it stated that this transformation was supposedly taking place without even the bonapartist mass mobilization and military confrontation that occurred in Algeria and Cuba. Not only did this transition from “state capitalism” to “revolutionary state” to workers state occur without the breaking up of the old capitalist state apparatus, it was claimed that this transformation took place under the direction and leadership of the old state apparatus, especially the officer corps of the old bourgeois army (“military socialism”). While the more extreme positions of Maitan on Syria and Egypt were partially rejected at the 1965 World Congress of the USec, the Pabloite methodology—the search for another class, another leadership, another “dynamic,” other than the class struggle, to carry out socialist revolution—has been carried over into the 1967 USec position on the 1967 war. The USec resolution, “Fourth International Calls for Support to Arab Cause,” ends with the following slogans:
“Long live the Arab revolution! Long live the revolutionary conquests of Syria and Egypt! Down with the Zionist State of Israel and its imperialist partners and allies!”
—reprinted in World Outlook, 30 June 1967
A revolution is usually directed at a specific political entity, i.e., the ruling class of a specific state. But here we are presented with a revolution which appears to be a linguistic-cultural rather than a political entity (like calling for a “Hispanic Revolution” in Latin America or a “pan-Slavic revolution” in the Balkans). What does such a slogan mean to the 70 million people of the Near East who do not speak Arabic and who constitute a majority of the population of the area? What does “Arab Revolution” mean to the Kurds, South Sudanese Blacks, etc.? Furthermore, unlike the Cuban and Algerian Revolutions which actually occurred and therefore provide a material possibility for a long or short life, the “Arab Revolution” has not occurred, unless one identifies what has occurred in the bonapartist-militarist “republics” of Syria, Iraq and Egypt (and more recently the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen) with “Arab Revolution.” Of course, “Arab Revolution” in the rhetoric of the Ba’athist and Nasserite regimes, like the catchword “African Socialism,” is simply obscurantist-nationalist demagogy and raison d’etat.
A later FI statement, “Fourth International Resolution on the Middle East Conflict,” was even clearer in its equation of “Arab Revolution” with the “revolutionary conquests of Syria and Egypt.” This resolution states:
“The fundamental feature of the June 1967 conflict was the confrontation between a capitalist state with very specific sociological and ideological traits, integrated in the imperialist system on a regional and world scale, and an ensemble of countries of colonial and semicolonial structure, in which the most dynamic element was represented by states that had at different stages adopted spectacular anti-imperialist measures.
“The imperialist forces, … utilized the occasion to deliver a blow to the Arab states, particularly Egypt and Syria, in order to force back the freedom movement and postpone the settling of accounts in certain crucial instances.”
—reprinted in World Outlook, 14 July 1967
The document goes on to mention “the gradual consolidation in Syria of a government in the vanguard of the progressive movement” and further:
“The perspective of the Arab revolution, in general, can only be that of a very hard and prolonged struggle which will probably take the most diverse forms, ranging from new military conflicts between states to guerrilla actions and a genuine people’s war.”
—reprinted in World Outlook, 14 July 1967
Clearly the USec position had nothing in common with revolutionary defensism, which poses that the proletariat, while maintaining their complete political independence, enter into a temporary military bloc to crush a common enemy (e. g. CCP–KMT against the Japanese). Nowhere in the resolution is there a hint of proletarian political independence through the building of Trotskyist parties in the Near East as the crucial task on the agenda. Instead, it is precisely those regimes which have crushed any working-class organizational independence (Egypt and Syria) which are hailed for their “revolutionary conquests” and their “spectacular anti-imperialist measures.” (Except for the nationalization of the Suez Canal, with compensation, the latter simply do not exist.) The USec saw the petty-bourgeois bonapartist castes of the old bourgeois army leading the “Arab Revolution,” not the Arab proletariat. As Ronald Segal, a commentator not unsympathetic to the Arab side, has noted: the USec’s “vanguard” of the progressive Arab movement was “a Syrian regime of passionate revolutionary pretensions but with so tenuous a revolutionary content that the arming of the populace could scarcely have been contemplated for a moment….” (Whose Jerusalem: the Conflicts of Israel, p. 61, Bantam, 1974). Thus the USec’s maximum program of “people’s war,” à la Algeria, was not even a possibility. The armed people would have “turned their guns the other way,” i.e. against the bonapartist-military regimes, leaving only the minimum USec program of “conflicts between states.”
Let us examine the USec resolution more closely. To begin with, is not the “ensemble of countries of colonial and semi-colonial structure” referred to in paragraph 1 (which includes everything from the Hashemites to Ba’athist colonels), also capitalist? Do they not also have “specific sociological and ideological traits” (namely a fellahin which is disenfranchised and whose emiseration grows in direct proportion to the enrichment of the “new” capitalist class, recruited from families of the military, the old “aristocracy” and the state bureaucracy)? Is not their “colonial and semicolonial structure” a direct product of their integration into the imperialist system on a regional and world scale? But of course the resolution obscures these very questions with sociological jargon and vague formulations. Its justification for support of the Arab side leans on the revolutionary transformation of the Arab states on the one hand and the designation of Israel as simply a tool of imperialism on the other.
It is interesting to note that the Healyite response to the June 1967 conflict was to discover, along with Maitan and Pablo, the “Arab Revolution.” But this position was adopted only after the June conflict. Immediately prior to the Six Day War, the SLL’s Newsletter stated:
“In the same way that Nasution and Suharto used the confrontation with Malaysia to strengthen the Indonesian army against the Communists, so too in Egypt the ultra-reactionary officers entertain similar ambitions against the trade unions and the land hungry peasants. Israel is a good diversion, provided it isn’t carried too far, is their motto.
“The corrupt and reactionary Arab bourgeois of Cairo, Baghdad, Damascus, Jeddah, Amman and Beirut hope to utilize the crisis as a bargaining lever to get concessions from the US imperialists in the form of loans, technical assistance and tariff cuts—not to mention surplus food deliveries.
“That is why they resort to the most reactionary methods in the conduct of their campaign against Israel: The calling of a ‘holy war,’ which was made by the leader of the Palestine Liberation Army, Shukairy, in Cairo, reveals the wretched and bankrupt policy of the Arab rulers today.
“…The only way to unify the Arab homeland is not by ‘holy wars,’ but by social revolution…. Let us hope that if the war is not prevented by revolution, then at least the war will be followed by revolution.”
—Newsletter, 3 June 1967, “Middle East Crisis, US Shows Its Hand”
However, in the very next issue of the Newsletter, dated 10 June 1967, a front page “Statement by the Political Committee of the Socialist Labor League” is headlined: “Hands Off the Arab Revolution.” Here we read that “On Monday morning, June 5, 1967, the third round of the Arab Revolution began as Israeli and Egyptian jets screamed across the Arabian sky and tanks rattled across the desert.”
Thus “holy war” is converted into a revolutionary war. In a companion article by Michael Banda, also on the front page of this issue, we learn that the Nasser who was last week compared to Suharto and placed at the head of the “ultra-reactionary officers,” is this week compared to Sukarno, Nkrumah and Ben Bella and his overthrow “will be a significant victory for imperialism in the Middle East.”
As we mentioned elsewhere, the adaptation of Healy–Wohlforth simultaneously to Arab nationalism, Maoism and Vietnamese Stalinism, represented their definitive break with genuine Trotskyist continuity. The fact that the USec and the Healyites are the waste products of the Pabloite degeneration does not mean that we can place a minus wherever they place a plus and come up with the right position. Nonetheless, one should examine very carefully how this decisive political event united the entire spectrum of Pabloism and the Healyites in a fundamental revision of the 1948 Trotskyist position.
We are aware of the objections you raised at the time to the USec resolutions. In particular you objected to their characterization of Egypt and Syria as “progressive” regimes, their failure to point out that the national bourgeoisie are incapable of carrying out a consistent and effective struggle against imperialism, and their failure to denounce Stalinism for using Arab anti-imperialist struggles as pawns in the game of “peaceful co-existence.”
In the case of the USec, it was a failure because they claimed that the national bourgeoisie could consistently and effectively carry out the struggle against imperialism. Your objection to their failure to criticize the Soviet Union assumes that the 1967 war was a struggle against imperialism, as in Vietnam, and therefore the Soviets were remiss in not lavishing even more military hardware on the Nasserite and Ba’athist regimes. Our position is that Soviet military aid to the Nasserite and Ba’athist regimes is not different from Soviet aid to the Bandaranaike and Gandhi regimes, that is, “aid” to prevent the real struggle against imperialism which is first and foremost a struggle against those regimes by their respective working classes.
The only conceivable analysis consistent with support to the Arab regimes in the 1967 war is the analysis of USec–Healy that the bourgeois-nationalist regimes had in fact taken up the struggle against imperialism and for national liberation and therefore imperialism needed to strike back at these regimes through its “imperialist outpost” Israel. In 1956 we had a concrete anti-imperialist act to defend, the nationalization of the Suez Canal. In 1967, what was there to defend but the “revolutionary conquests” of bonapartist statification (not at all threatened by Israel which has a highly statified economy itself), and a vague promissory note co-signed by the Pabloites to “settle accounts in certain crucial instances”?
In your critique of the USec resolution you state: “It is imperative for revolutionary Marxists to state categorically that, while the Arab People’s struggle to get back their territory, wrested from them by military aggression by Israel must be supported, that we do not deny the right of Jewish people to self-determination.”
But, in the main, the territory wrested from the Arab people by Israel’s military aggression was land wrested by some other Arab people, namely the Arab people of Egypt and Jordan, from the Arab people of Palestine. We are opposed to the Israeli annexations and raise the imperative and unconditional demand of “no annexations; Israel out of the occupied territories.” But we do not support the “Arab people’s struggle to get back their territory” in the abstract, that is, the struggle of the Arab regimes of Jordan and Egypt to re-annex Palestine. We support only the right of the Palestinian Arabs to get back their territory and reconstruct their nation, not the Hashemite throne or the Egypt of the Mamelukes or the Syria of Nebuchadnezzar.
I would like to discuss now the ideological role that the characterization of Israel as an “imperialist outpost” played in the Palestinian nationalist movement which rapidly grew in response to the defeat of the Arab regimes in the 1967 conflict. Prior to the September 1970 civil war in Jordan, the entire Palestinian nationalist/guerrillaist movement shared a common outlook toward the relationship between imperialism and Israel, on the one hand, and Palestinian national liberation, on the other. For example, the main political document of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, the Habash group states:
“The battle of liberation is directed firstly against Israel as a political, military and economic entity trying to mobilize approximately 2.5 million people to defend its racist-aggressive-expansionist entity and prevent the Palestinians from regaining their land, freedom and rights.
“…Through Israel, imperialism can fight the Arab revolutionary movement which aims at exterminating the imperialist presence in the Arab homeland. Thus Israel becomes a base and a power through which imperialism defends its presence and interests. Such a situation generates an organic unity between Israel and the Zionist movement on the one hand, and world imperialism on the other….”
—”The Political, Organizational and Military Report of the P.F.L.P.,” February 1969, reprinted in Basic Political Documents of the Armed Palestinian Resistance Movement, Kadi, ed., pp. 185, 186
What follows from this characterization is a conception of Israel and imperialism as the “main enemy,” the “primary contradiction.” The reactionary Arab regimes are the “secondary contradiction” which can be dealt with only after Israel is destroyed. Israel is pictured as a society without conflicts with imperialism or internal social conflicts (e.g. class struggle), a uniform society commanding the unquestioning obedience of its inhabitants in its dirty work for the imperialists. Therefore, imperialist Israel can only be defeated the way that the U.S. army was defeated in Vietnam, through “protracted people’s war,” which, before September 1970, never advanced further than irregular partisan or guerrilla war. But it was “Arab reaction” in the guise of the Hashemite throne which crushed the Palestinian commando movement, not “imperialism and Zionism.”
Following the June 1967 war, a situation of “dual power” is said to have existed in Jordan. The Hashemite throne was totally discredited, the country was bankrupt due to the loss of the West Bank and the flight to Jordan of hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees. In fact, Palestinians came to make up a majority of the population of Jordan. Following the September massacre of 2,000 Palestinian commandos and 20,000 civilians, by Hussein’s army, the Democratic Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a left split from the PFLP led by Nayef Hawatmeh, published two scathing critiques of the Palestinian resistance movement. One was entitled “September: Counter-Revolution in Jordan” and the other was a speech by Hawatmeh before the General Union of Palestinian Students in Iraq, March 1971. I quote from the latter speech:
“The resistance movement program of the ‘unpoliticized gun,’ and of fighting only Israel under the slogan of ‘no interference with the internal affairs of the Arab states’ led to its turning its back to developments in the region and to the masses of the East Bank and the Arab region. Its slogan of making the primary contradiction with Israel and imperialism take precedence over the secondary contradiction with the reactionary regime in Amman would have been correct had the reactionary regime agreed to abide by the necessities of this contradiction and accept it in order to build a united front against imperialism, Zionism, colonialism and the state of Israel…. Reaction could not and would not tolerate opposition to imperialism and Zionism. It could not and would not tolerate a national liberation movement. Reaction itself is tied flesh and blood to imperialism…. We all remember the strike against and repression of the ‘Sumou’ uprising, we remember the tens and hundreds of commandos who were in Jordanian prisons the morning of June 5, 1967. We remember that the first martyr of the Palestinian resistance was killed in the hands of the repressive forces not in Israel but in the Central Prison of Amman. We remember that the attempts to strike against and squash the resistance started right after June of 1967. Reaction has historically refused to co-exist with the resistance and it gave the secondary contradiction the precedence over the primary contradiction. It insisted on solving the secondary contradiction first. That is, it attempted the liquidation of the resistance and the national movement first without thinking for a minute of fighting Israel and colonialism.”
“Reaction itself is tied flesh and blood to imperialism” is the poignant cry of truth from this Palestinian commando leader. Even within the narrow, petty nationalist, two-stage revolution framework, Hawatmeh came to realize that for the reactionary regime in Amman there is no conflict with imperialism, but there is a total and irreconcilable conflict with the national aspirations of the Palestinians. His throne was just as much created out of the dismembered Palestinian nation as was the Zionist state. Where, then, was the conflict with imperialism in 1970 between this feudo-capitalist regime (“exploited” by imperialism) and imperialism and its “outpost”?
Because they view Israel as an “imperialist outpost,” the Palestinian nationalist groups, including the DPFLP, their most left-wing expression, have written off the possibility of an alliance with the Israeli working class. Since “Arab reaction” can only betray, the other Arab regimes are weak and unreliable and Israel is militarily strong and backed by imperialism, Hawatmeh concludes his speech on a note of profound pessimism: Israel, the impregnable fortress, cannot be destroyed by assault from without; assault on the Zionist fortress from within is impossible. Therefore, his group has moved rapidly to the right, adopting individual terrorism which they once repudiated in their split with Habash as their main tactic. Their hope is merely to pester Israel and dramatize to the rest of the world that the Palestinian problem still exists so that they may be squeezed into the peace table at Geneva and have a voice, if not a vote, in the game of big power politics. Further, the DPFLP has recently agreed to the “Bantustan” solution to the Palestinian question: a bifurcated Gaza–West Bank mini-state. Thus, the conception of Israel as an “outpost of imperialism” has been a major roadblock to even the most left wing Palestinian petty bourgeois nationalists finding their way to a proletarian perspective for the Near East.
I would like to deal briefly with the character of the other Arab states and the Permanent Revolution in the Near East. First, we have states like Jordan, which are, at least as much as Israel, “armed fortresses” of imperialism in the Near East, in the analogous sense I mentioned earlier. These are states which came into existence under the direct sponsorship of imperialism and can only survive in the service of imperialism. Jordan, like Israel, was created out of the dismembered Palestinian nation. It was Jordan, not Israel, which physically liquidated the first independent mobilization of the Palestinian people for their national emancipation since the 1936 general strike. Of course both Israel and the U.S. would have willingly intervened if Jordan had proven unable to carry out the job. The Jordanian army is totally equipped by American and British imperialism and partially financed by American and German imperialism. Its army is led by U.S. military “advisors” who play the same role that the British officers played in the Arab Legion. Today the Jordanian Royal Army is in Oman, fighting beside Pakistani and Iranian troops, suppressing the rebellion led by the Popular Front for the Liberation of the Occupied Arab Gulf (PFLOAG).
You contend in your reply to Robertson that the recent oil boycott “assumed the character of an anti-imperialist (U.S.) confrontation.” Twenty-three percent of the known world reserves of oil are in Saudi Arabia as against 10.5 percent in Kuwait and 9 percent in Iran. Therefore, one could say that Saudi Arabia led the so-called “oil boycott.” Saudi oil is completely controlled by the Arabian–American Oil Co. (Aramco), which in turn is owned by Standard Oil of California, Esso, Texaco and Mobil as well as the Saudi Arabian government. All of these oil firms are in turn American owned and had record profits after the so-called “oil boycott.” How can you claim that the “oil boycott,” which reaped enormous profits for the U.S. oil trusts, was a confrontation “with U.S. imperialism? U.S. imperialism is Socal, Esso, Texaco, Mobil, in short, it is Aramco (i.e., the “economic and political bond between foreign capital and the native bourgeoisie”).
Saudi Arabia has a rather closed “native bourgeoisie”; it consists of the 500 princes who are members of the royal family. Occasionally there are minor “conflicts” between imperialism and members of the royal family. When Ibn Saud died in 1953 he was succeeded by his son, Saud, who attempted to assert some meager independence by circumventing Aramco and signing an agreement with the Greek billionaire and shipbuilder, Onassis, to build a Saudi-owned tanker fleet. The U.S. government immediately squashed the deal and launched an investigation into Onassis’ investments in the U.S. Saud was dethroned as “incompetent” and replaced with his brother Faisal. In 1960 Saud formed an alliance with some other disenchanted members of the royal family around Prince Talal, who called for a constitution and elections, and Abdullah Ibn Tariqi, who was the first Minister of Petroleum and Minister of Resources and who called for Saudi control of oil production, transport and marketing. By 1962 Talal was sent into exile, Tariqi was replaced with Harvard-educated and U.S.-favored Sheik Ahmed Zaki Yamani, who is Minister of Petroleum to this day. By 1964 even King Saud had been exiled. (He went to Cairo where he broadcasted pro-Nasser propaganda.) Faisal was then restored to the throne. As far as I know, the aborted contract with Onassis and the intra-palace rivalry between Saud and Faisal are the only recorded “conflicts” with U.S. imperialism engaged in by these feudo-capitalist rulers.
A plan called “participation,” where the Saudi government was gradually to acquire control of Aramco, was actually fostered by U.S. imperialism and the oil trusts in order to make the royal family junior partners of imperialism. As Sheik Yamani said in an interview:
“I think we have a mutual interest in dealing with each other. The U.S. is the biggest market and we are the biggest supplier. That is why I proposed a special privilege for Saudi Arabia in the U.S. market, a privilege that will subsequently guarantee a continuous flow of our crude into that market…. We are thinking in terms of economic co-operation. Once you establish a mutual relationship between countries in the economic field, you immediately establish a very solid political relationship.”
—quoted in Newsweek, 20 November 1972
Thus, the strategy of U.S. imperialism, as expressed through its handpicked and carefully groomed and educated Saudi broker Sheik Yamani, is to increasingly integrate the Saudi government (i.e., the Saudi royal family) into the various aspects of oil production and marketing in order to: (1) recycle oil royalties back into the oil industry as capital investment and (2) further ensure a steady supply of oil resources to the imperialist countries in which the Saudi family, with an interest both in marketing as well as extraction, have an increasing stake. Thus, “participation” has become an important component of the imperialist struggle for consolidating a monopoly of raw materials by integrating the native bourgeoisie directly into foreign capital.
The “oil embargo,” which strengthened the competitive advantage of U.S. imperialism against Japan and Europe (which are more dependent on Near East oil than the U.S.), also strengthened U.S. imperialism’s grip on the Near East. The enormous oil profits accruing to the feudal sheiks and kings will not, in general, be invested into the sheikdoms and emirates. These sheiks and kings are dependent on economic backwardness because they are dependent on pursuing their highly repressive and oppressive societies based on nomadic Bedouin tribes. Saudi Arabia was the last country in the world in which chattel slavery was enshrined in the legal codes. Now, while no longer “legal,” the practice continues. The instruments of this repression are a 36,000-man regular army “advised” by a 141-man U.S. military mission, a 3,500-man air force (the core of which are pilots recruited from the British RAF), a “White Army” recruited from pro-Saudi Bedouin tribes used for internal repression, a Royal Guard which defends members of the royal family, a regular police force and a religious police force which enforces the Koran and the additionally strict rites of the Wahhabis. Further, Saudi Arabia has a huge air “defense” system supplied by British and American firms and manned by a mainly British “civilian” team of 2,000.
Where are the confrontations with imperialism between the Saudi feudo-capitalist rulers and imperialism? The fact is that the Saudi army is used to defend imperialism in the Arab states—not just in Saudi Arabia but also in the oil-rich emirates, Yemen and the Sultanate of Oman. These Arab feudal kings are not adversely affected by imperialism, they are completely dependent on imperialism. How is it, in the 20th century, that the Arabian peninsula is still ruled by desert kings, nomadic “warriors” and the obscurantism of the Koran?
Retaining these countries in a state of economic backwardness is essential to the survival of the royal families. For them the billions in oil profits create a dilemma. They cannot be invested in the sheikdoms and emirates without upsetting the fragile infrastructure of social backwardness upon which they are dependent. Such profits must be invested in the imperialist countries. The real result of the “oil boycott” was the channeling of foreign exchange from countries without oil resources back to U.S. banks and U.S.-owned oil companies via the sheikdoms. Here the worst off were precisely the colonial and neo-colonial countries of Africa, Asia and South America.
These backward countries of the Near East cannot move out of their state of economic stagnation without sweeping away all of the feudal institutions, eliminating the sheiks and shahs, the emirates and sultanates which are not “exploited” or “adversely affected” by imperialism, but which are essential components of imperialist domination within the region.
Certainly it is imperative that Marxists support such anti-imperialist actions as the Cardenas oil nationalizations and Nasser’s nationalization of the Suez Canal in 1956. But the 1973 “oil boycott” is not such an anti-imperialist action. It can be contrasted to Mossadegh’s nationalization of Iranian oil in 1951 which rapidly assumed the character of confrontation with British imperialism and as such was initially supported by the U.S. However, when Mossadegh refused to sign agreements which would have paved the way for Iran to become an American sphere of influence, the U.S., through the CIA, directly aided the August 1953 coup which restored the Shah. Soon thereafter, Iranian oil concessions, traditionally dominated by the British, were restructured to give the U.S. a 40 percent interest and on 3 November 1955 Iran joined the Baghdad Pact. And who is this Shah, this “King of Kings” and “light of the Aryans”? He is the son of Reza Khan, a Cossack commander who was given the Persian throne for his military support to the British-backed coup of 1921. Where are his confrontations with imperialism? He was handpicked by the CIA to succeed the slightly more nationalist Mossadegh. In 1973 alone, the Shah spent more than $3 billion on military hardware including laser-guided bombs and KC-135 aerial tankers to refuel his fleet of 144 Phantom jets. His 160,000-man army is equipped with 800 Chieftain tanks and 600 M-47 tanks, the largest hovercraft fleet in the world and so on and so forth. Are these weapons being obtained for a final confrontation with imperialism, or are they being obtained to guard for imperialism the Strait of Hormuz through which passes 65 percent of Europe’s oil and 80 percent of Japan’s? No doubt the Shah has aspirations to become an imperialist power in his own right (the Brazil of the Near East), but as a late starter in the race to become an imperialist power he can really hope only to become a junior partner of another imperialism.
For these regimes there is a state of interdependence, not conflict, with imperialism. As an “imperialist fortress,” Iran, which can pay for its own huge military apparatus, is much more important to U.S. and world imperialism than the little schnorrer Israel. It is not Israel which is putting down the rebellion in Dhofar, but Iran, Jordan and Pakistan. To maintain its credentials among the Moslem nations, Iran does not give Israel diplomatic recognition. But the SAVAK, Iran’s ubiquitous 60,000-man secret police force, is trained by Israeli as well as American police officers and is equipped by Israel as well as the U.S. “military-industrial complex.” At the same time, the U.S. military mission in Iran trains Israeli as well as Iranian pilots on the latest Phantoms.
Where are the anti-imperialist actions and confrontations carried out by the Pahlevis, Hashemites and Saudis? Every genuine anti-imperialist action or confrontation sweeps these fragile regimes aside as so much dust. How are they adversely affected by imperialism? Quite the contrary, they are as completely dependent on imperialism as are the Rockefellers and the Rothschilds. Of course they struggle to get the best deal from imperialism, but this “struggle” takes place within clearly defined guidelines established by imperialism during the real confrontations such as the Mossadegh nationalization.
But there is jihad, the holy war against Israel, a war which supposedly turns these feudo-capitalist rulers into “anti-imperialist” forces. This poses a fundamental question. If, after the October 1973 war, U.S. imperialism is richer, its position in the Near East is even more secure, it lavishes economic assistance and even promises nuclear reactors to Egypt as well as to Israel, and yet Israel suffered a partial military defeat, what was the “anti-imperialist” character of the war? Prior to the war, the Sadat regime was bankrupt, it was rocked by massive workers’ strikes (e.g., at the Hewan steel plant) and huge student demonstrations. Now all of this has been dissipated in war-chauvinism. Was this not the real motivation behind Egypt and Syria’s launching the 1973 war? What blow against imperialism has been struck by the fact that the “imperialist fortress” relinquished (under U.S. pressure) a piece of the Golan Heights and a strip of the Sinai Desert? Did thousands of Arab soldiers die so that Nixon could march triumphantly through the streets of Cairo?
Events since the October War, culminating in the Nixon junket, have only underlined our position of revolutionary defeatism in this conflict as well as 1948 and 1967. Israel’s partial military victory has only facilitated the re-entry of U.S. imperialism into Egypt and Syria. Egypt yearns to become an “outpost” of U.S. imperialism: kicking out the Soviet Union, carrying out a campaign of “de-Nasserization,” in order to facilitate the re-entry of U.S. capital and begging for U.S. military aid. The Sadat regime has been stabilized at the expense of the Egyptian class struggle in contrast to Israel, where the regime has been shaken by the October War and class struggle renewed. (Notice the dispute between the Histadruth and the government over cost-of-living wage increases.)
The characterization of Israel as the “fortress of imperialism” in the Near East, claiming that Israel is qualitatively more reactionary than Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Iran, can only serve to divert the real struggle against imperialism, the struggle against one’s own bourgeoisie, into periodic holy wars against Israel.
These “little” holy wars, among little states, threaten to become a very big war among the “super powers.” Kissinger’s comparison of the Near East to the Balkans is both instructive and ominous, coming from this Metternichian. The role of the Soviet Union in the Near East is indeed treacherous. Not because it does not wish to carry the war against Israel to its conclusion, but because it has become a captive of its attempt to turn “revolutionary nationalist” Arab regimes into “non-aligned, neutral” nations through military bribery as part of its world strategy of “peaceful co-existence.” In order to defend these “outposts” of non-alignment, its client states, it may very well be dragged into a nuclear confrontation with the U.S. In order to defend these reactionary, anti-communist, anti-working class regimes, the Soviet Union may very well spark World War III. And it is for this reason that your comparison of the 1948, 1967 and 1973 Israeli–Arab wars, with Vietnam, is most unfortunate.
The crystallization of a Trotskyist nucleus in Israel is a very important development. The creation of a bi-national Palestinian–Israeli workers party on both sides of the Jordan, committed to replacing both the Zionist and Hashemite regimes, could break the deadlock of suppressed social struggle and petty wars among small states. A democratic and socialist solution to the balkanization of the Near East must begin with the realization that the Zionists have indeed created a “state like any other capitalist state.” It is a state which must be smashed from within, by its “own” working class, led by a revolutionary party. Such a party can be built only if it strives to reach out to the Palestinian masses, both the workers in Israel and Jordan and the dispossessed in the refugee camps, as champions of their national emancipation. Such a party contains the possibility of unlocking the situation and opening the road to a Socialist Federation of the Near East.
Fraternal Greetings,
Reuben Samuels