Editor’s note: With the stated aim of attacking Hezbollah, Israeli forces have killed over 3,500 people in Lebanon and wounded thousands more, displacing nearly a quarter of the country’s population, battering its healthcare system, and severely damaging infrastructure needed for daily life. In conjunction with opposing Israel’s attacks on the population and its false self-justification, it is crucial to confront the real state of the resistance and its contradictions. Hezbollah is Lebanon’s strongest political party and maintains a military force rivaling the national army, while the revolutionary Left is very weak. It is worth grappling with how the failed Lebanese revolution of the 1970s devolved into a ruinous civil war and set the stage for today’s social and political terrain. Dunayevskaya wrote this piece as #6 in her 1976 series of Political-Philosophic Letters. It is included as chapter 7 in Crossroads of History: Selected Writings on the Middle East by Raya Dunayevskaya.
August 1976
Cruelty, like every other thing, has its fashion, according to time and place. Caesar, the accomplished scholar, candidly narrated how he ordered many thousands of Gallic warriors to have their right hands cut off. Napoleon would have been ashamed to do this. He preferred dispatching his own French regiments, suspected of republicanism, to Santo Domingo there to die by the hands of blacks, and the plague. The infamous mutilations committed by the Sepoys[1] remind one of the practices of the Christian Byzantine empire.
—Karl Marx, September 16, 1857
Dear Friends:
A look at the Tel al-Zaatar refugee camp, August 12, 1976. Photo: Claude Gluntz, CC BY-SA 4.0
No act of barbarism seems to be beyond the degeneracy of our times that have disgorged World War II, the Holocaust, the U.S.’s dropping of the A-bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and today we need add abysmal cynicism to the butchery and savagery of the Lebanese Christian Right. As if the murderous 52-week siege, climaxed also by the cut-off of water, of the Palestinian refugee camp, Tel al-Zaatar, were not enough, the unsavory son of the infamous fanatical neo-fascist Lebanese Interior Minister Camille Chamoun—Danny—continued to slaughter, in cold blood, the Palestinians who were streaming out of the camp with white flags of surrender.
Told that the son of the “moderate” Rightist head of the Phalange, Pierre Gemayel, had agreed to let the Red Cross arrange the evacuation, these were the words Danny Chamoun spewed out: “There might have been an agreement between Gemayel and the Palestinians, but how much of the front does the Phalange hold—85 yards?”[2]
It is hard to conceive of anyone to the Right of the Phalange, but in the Christian Right in Lebanon you have both the gunman president Suleiman Franjieh and his son who head a private army, and Chamoun’s “Tigers” who thereupon descended upon the Palestinians like wolves and looters. When the carnage was over, the bulldozers pushed the corpses into mass graves. Back in 1958 it was the wily father who trumped up the bogus issue of the imminence of the Palestinians “seizing power,” whereupon U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower was all too happy to rush in U.S. Marines. In 1976 the gunman son indulges in outright genocide. The grisly end to Palestinian Resistance at Tel al-Zaatar will not bring to an end the civil war between rulers and ruled, Muslim, Christian and other.
It is true that the civil war that erupted 16 months back— on April 13, 1975, to be exact—was sparked by Palestinians against the Phalange massacre of a busload of Palestinians who were returning from a meeting of the “Rejection Front.”[3] And it is true that Muslim reprisals to such massacres are not without their atrocities. It is not true that it is a religious war between Palestinian Muslims and Lebanese Christians. Rather, it is a class war between Lebanese masses—Christian as well as Muslim and those who profess no religion—and the exploitative, racist, sexist rulers who have been enriching themselves ever since the Egyptian revolution in 1952, climaxed in 1956, that expelled Western imperialism and Lebanon became the finance and mercantile center for Middle East Arab oligarchs as well as Western imperialists.
Not only is it a civil war between masses and rulers, both Lebanese, but the Palestinian Left who have helped have played a most ambivalent role both in a class struggle sense and in a global context. It therefore is necessary to probe the dialectic of developments these past 16 months from both the obvious phases—Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) leader Yasir Arafat’s waffling, Syria’s complete turnabout and actual occupation (not unrelated to Israel’s, Russia’s and the U.S.’s seeming bystander roles)—to the not so obvious shrouded acts of the whole Left, from the Nasserists and “Left” Ba’athists to the Communists, Trotskyists and independents, all under the umbrella of Kamal Jumblatt’s socialism.[4]
I. PLO’s Crucible
The Lebanese masses were so definitely winning the battle with the rulers that the latter “accepted” truces as well as parliamentary compromises that would allegedly cede the people rights, both political and economic. Though none of the contending forces unfolded a banner for total emancipation, no one feared that Arafat would not allow a genuine revolutionary force to come to power. None seemed disturbed by his ambivalence and limiting the Palestinian fighting alongside Muslim Left, depending on his ambitions to get to the Geneva Conference on Palestine as sole representative of the Palestinians fighting for a state of their own. Between the spring and fall, 1975, no one in Lebanon doubted that the issue was Lebanon, and that it would never again be the undisputed stronghold of the Christian Right rulers.
When Syria first marched in to aid the Left, it was under the guise of its own Palestine Liberation Army (PLA), As-Sa’iqa, which, moreover, was supposedly under the control of the PLO.[5] That was not only the view of Arafat, but his erstwhile opponent from the Left, Nayef Hawatmeh, head of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP), who so assured Le Monde in a special interview: “I want to make it clear that the PLA is under control of the PLO, and there were no regular army troops under Syrian command, as claimed.”[6]
So confident was Arafat both of gaining a whole country as a base against Israel, and for a seat at a new Geneva Conference for a Palestinian State, in the winter, 1975, that he was following the events at the UN more than the actual developments in Lebanon. Above the machine gun fire in Lebanon where the fratricidal war was continuing, he was ordering the PLO representative at the UN regarding the Arab-sponsored Resolution on “Zionism Is Racism” to “analyze” the Lebanese war itself as but a “conspiracy,” a war initiated by “international Zionism.”[7] Having thus burdened the UN Declaration of a “Decade for the Elimination of Racism” that was to have been fought against South Africa and Rhodesia, with the “Amendment” that “Zionism Is Racism,” Arafat had to face the startling reality that not only was Syria out to cut the PLO down to size, but evidently Syria was aided by some Arab kingdoms, Saudi Arabia especially, and actually collaborating with Christian Right rulers.
Above all, what was gnawing at all the people was: would Syria have made so total a U-turn without at least tacit agreement with the U.S.? To call Syrian President Hafez al-Assad a “traitor” at this late stage will hardly change the course of the war under Arafat’s leadership. The point is: where to now that the victories of 1975 are worse than Pyrrhic? Now that the counter-revolution has been extended into 1976, and there is no end in sight?
The last tragic denouement was, after all, preceded by sharp alternatives if one were not blinded totally by the narrow single-issue goal of extinction of Israel, which is, when all is said and done, the only unifying force of all Arabs. There was still time in the spring of 1976 to choose between Assad (who had by now openly sent in the regular Syrian Army “to stop the bloodshed”) and Kamal Jumblatt, who had resisted Assad’s “compromises” as the actual shoring up of Christian Right rulers and thus saving them from the wrath of the masses. In an interview with Eric Rouleau,[8] Jumblatt still viewed the future optimistically:
“Lebanon will become a lay state, our Christians will end up by abandoning the Maronite caliphate, the Arab world must be Westernized and rid of an antiquated clericalism which is keeping it chained down.” He then spoke of the future as a “Socialist Republic,” adding: “Civil war may seem stupid today, but one day people will recognize that it opened the way to the Lebanese people’s, even the whole of the Arab world’s spiritual renaissance.”
We will return to Jumblatt as the socialist umbrella of some ten Left organizations. Here what is crucial is that Arafat then chose, not Jumblatt, but Assad, after which he waffled long enough to have Assad refuse him entrance to Syria. Arafat did manage to convene an emergency meeting of the Arab League where, for once, he didn’t mince words:
You, the 20 members of the League, are sitting here either in silence, or paying lip service to the Palestinians’ cause while the Palestinians are being slaughtered. Palestinian blood is cheap to you…There are 3,850,000 Palestinians living in your countries. You cannot destroy us. I warn you that if you try you will not get away with it.[9]
If the implication is supposed to be that a genuine social revolution would sweep over the feudal kingdoms, Arafat is more obtuse than he has any right to be to think that that wasn’t precisely the fear that swept over the rulers, and hence their affinity, not with the Arab masses, but with Christian Right oppressors. The Arab-Israeli confrontation is the “distorting lens”[10] with which to view what is happening in Lebanon, and has rendered meaningless the designations of “Left” and “Right” in all Arab countries. It is time to turn away from all these narrow nationalisms, and see what it is that does recognize, in theory, what are class divisions, and ask that Left why it has done nothing but tailend the PLO?
II. The Strange Antecedents and Very Narrow Nationalism of the New Left
V.I. Lenin. Author: Thespoondragon, CC BY-SA 4.0
The very narrow nationalism of the New Left cannot be understood, much less fought, outside the revolutionary international context, and the totally contradictory types of nationalism that emerged out of World War I and World War II. This is due not alone to different historic periods, but totally different philosophies of revolution. No academic nonsense motivated V.I. Lenin’s return to Hegelian dialectics at the outbreak of World War I. Rather, it was the dialectics of liberation at a time when the betrayal of the Second International urged workers patriotically to slaughter each other across national boundaries. What Lenin called “the bacillus” for proletarian revolution came, instead, from the Irish Easter Rebellion, 1916.
Because Lenin’s revolutionary concepts of internationalism and the philosophy of national self-determination, as inseparable, both preceded and followed the Russian Revolution, there never was a time when national liberation was ever reduced to nationalism, as it was with Stalin once power was won. On the contrary. Lenin’s last struggle against Stalin was, precisely, against Great Russian chauvinism that Stalin displayed in his native Georgia. As the Georgian Communist Tsertsvadze put it: “It is true that Marx wanted the union of the proletariat of the whole world, but he never claimed that all Russians ought to unite at Tiflis.”
Because the ideology of Stalinism, i.e., national Communism, went hand in hand with the first workers’ state as it became transformed into its opposite—a state-capitalist society—the replacement of the class struggle by Cold War “anti-Westernism” came “naturally,” and though sides had changed during the war,[11] narrow nationalism had not. In any case, by the 1950s, Stalinism found in itself a new affinity with the Arab Middle East.
I do not mean to say that what we see in the Middle East owes its origins to Russia. No, it is indigenous enough. The encounter with Stalinism is no mere matter of “politics making strange bedfellows.” It has had revolutionary elements not only in its anti-Westernism, but positively with the overthrow of King Farouk by Nasser in 1952. But it also is a hybrid. The “end of ideology” that came with the defeat of Nazi Germany had a strange new birth. In 1953, in Syria, the Ba’ath (Arab Socialist Renaissance Party) resulted from a merger of two groups, one that so hungered to free itself from Western imperialism that it had participated in the pro-Axis Rashid Ali revolt in Baghdad in 1941,[12] and the other was socialist. Indeed, the first Renaissance grouping was headed by Michel Aflaq, who was in the Syrian Communist Party.[13]
Finally, in Lebanon, where even now there is a greater variety of political tendencies than anywhere else in Arab lands, the Communist Party of Syria and Lebanon, headed by Khalid Bakdash, antedated the time Lebanon gained its independence from France in 1943. From underground existence it made its appearance in the open and kept up its Moscow ties when Bakdash appeared at the 19th Russian Communist Party Congress (1952), the last which Stalin attended. Khalid Bakdash, who is probably under house arrest in Syria, may not have had as much praise for the Syrian nationalists as he had for Stalin, but he made it quite clear that the Syrian Communist Party was not really Communist; he wanted the country to be nationalist, not a Communist Syria. And now when no doubt the Lebanese Communist Party is the largest in any Arab country, its General Secretary, Georges Haoui, stated this June 27:
Click on the image to order a copy
We don’t force our reforms on the country. We are ready to talk with all our opponents including the Phalangists, for patriotism is not a monopoly of the Left.[14]
And the New Left, born in the 1960s, so disdainful of theory (which it forever thinks it can pick up “en route”), has a strange attitude toward imperialism. It is as if imperialism were not the natural outgrowth of monopoly capitalism, but was a “conspiracy, organized by a single imaginary center, rather as the Nazis used to refer to the Judeo-Catholic-Masonic Alliance, or Communists under Stalin to the conspiracy of the Trotskyists and Rightists in league with the imperialist secret service.”[15]
It is such an attitude to imperialism, along with the theoretic void that has pervaded the Movement since the death of Lenin, that has led revolutionaries to collude with narrow nationalism on the ground that it is “anti-imperialist” though purely nationalist. Evidently nationalism of the so-called Third World is of itself revolutionary even when it is under the banner of a king, a shah, or the emirates. Thereby they canonize nationalism, even when it is void of working-class character, as national liberation.
It is not that class is the sole characteristic of national liberation movements that revolutionaries can support. It is that the working-class nature is its essence and it is that the revolutionary and international impact emerges from masses in motion.[16]
I have no time for the Old Left like present-day Trotskyism[17] that tailends all, including the Arab variety of Stalinism. What is important to note is the most original derivative of national Communism—with the most “uninterrupted” r-r-r-revolutionary phrasemongering—Maoism. Yet, with its very first separate international development when the Sino-Soviet world was still in orbit rather than in conflict—the 1955 Bandung Conference[18]—its pure nationalism, but with global reach, likewise plunged into the Arab League lands’ “sub-imperialist” enfoldment.[19]
The point is that, in the present circumstances of purely nationalist anti-imperialism with a global reach (not to mention the two actual nuclear global contenders for single world domination—U.S. and Russia), we cannot bury our heads in the sand. That not only blinds you, but also robs you of revolutionary reason. All it leaves you with is the narrowness of only one enemy—whether that be Israel, or Israel’s oppressive nationalism which attempts denying the very existence of Palestinian national consciousness, not to mention the right to self-determination, or China’s obsession with Russia as Enemy Number One. Our nuclear state-capitalist world is far more dangerous than the old imperialism of endless division and redivision of the world by the Big Powers. Once it is nuclearly armed, the Damocles sword puts into question the very survival of civilization as we have known it.
This does not mean that we give up the struggle for self-determination, Palestinian especially.[20] It is that we do not narrow our vision of the revolutionary struggle for a totally different world, on truly new Humanist foundations, the first necessity of which is the unity of philosophy and revolution.
Otherwise, long before “the final day,” we will not only be confronted with impotent hijacking, to which Dr. George Habash’s Committee is already reverting, but to such tragic wars as Lebanon, which is more agonizing than a repeat of that bloodbath in Jordan in 1970. It is much too late in the day. It includes not only Palestinians, but Lebanese revolutionaries. And, in the civil war no less than ten Left groups are gathered under Jumblatt’s banner.
When history and theory get into each other’s way, and philosophy and revolution get separated, there is no exit from counter-revolutionary consequences.
[1] It isn’t that Marx excused the acts of torture committed by the Sepoys even though the 1857 India Mutiny was an anti-imperialist act against Britain. It is that Marx was stressing—and not only in that September 16, 1857, report for The New York Daily Tribune—that appalling acts of cruelty come both from exploitative societies and holy religions: “With Hindus, whom their religion has made virtuosi in the art of self-torturing, these tortures inflicted on the enemies of their race and creed appear quite natural.” As against racism, straight or inverted, Marx was deepening his theory of proletarian revolution as the only road to freedom.
[2] Newsweek, August 23, 1976. (The Phalange is a far Right Lebanese political-paramilitary party whose main base is Maronite Christian. —ed.)
[3] In this instance the Rejection Front is not yet the one related to the Sinai Agreement, which was not to take place till September, but to negotiations with Israel and any idea for a Palestinian State out of the West Bank and Sinai.
[4] Kamal Jumblatt led the Progressive Socialist Party and also the Lebanese National Movement, a front of socialist, Communist, pan-Arabist and nationalist groups in the civil war, including the PSP. In 1977 he was assassinated, and the Syrian government was suspected to have had him killed. —ed.
[5] As-Sa’iqa, a Ba’athist Palestinian organization controlled by Syria, is a constituent member of the PLO. It collaborated closely with the Syrian-controlled PLA in the Lebanese Civil War and again in supporting Bashar al-Assad’s counterrevolution against the Syrian Revolution beginning in 2011. —ed.
[6] The interview, “At Last a Real Cease-fire” by Frances Cornu, was published in the Le Monde section (dated January 25, 1976), of The Guardian, dated February 1, 1976.
[7] See Political-Philosophic Letter No. 1 (“The UN Resolution on Zionism—and the Ideological Obfuscation Also on the Left,” chapter 6 of Crossroads of History —ed.).
[8] M. Rouleau also holds that “Assad’s Calculated Risk”—the invasion of Lebanon—would not have been undertaken without consultation with the U.S. Guardian, June 4-5, 1976, in Le Monde section.
[9] The report of the closed session was evidently made to Henry Tanner by an Arab source, The New York Times, July 14, 1976.
[10] “Lebanon: The Insane War,” by James M. Markham, The New York Times Magazine, August 15, 1976.
[11] This appears to be a reference to the Cold War between the U.S. and USSR, in which various countries including Mao’s China took shifting or ambivalent positions. It may also hark back to World War II, which began with the 1939 Hitler-Stalin pact and the subsequent division between them of Poland, followed in 1941 by Hitler’s surprise attack on Russia, causing a major shift in alliances. —ed.
[12] The Axis refers to the World War II alliance led by Nazi Germany, imperial Japan, and fascist Italy. In the Rashid Ali revolt, four Iraqi nationalist army generals staged a coup against the pro-British regime, with help from Germany and Italy. —ed.
[13] See both “The Arab Socialist Movement,” by Genran Majdalany, a leading theoretician of Ba’ath, and “Syria: Nationalism and Communism,” by W. Z. Laqueur, as well as a Soviet View, “The Growth of National Consciousness among Arab Peoples, 1945-1955,” in The Middle East in Transition, edited by Walter Z. Laqueur. Though the material is dated 1958, it contains a substantial variety of views.
[14] This quote is from a review of Fred Halliday’s new work, Arabia without Sultans, in New Left Review, #95, January-February 1976, by Maxime Rodinson. Nearly any work by this great scholar will give the reader the most comprehensive view possible on the Middle East.
[15] This too is quoted from Rodinson’s review. —ed.
[16] Frantz Fanon was profoundly conscious of the contradictory types of nationalism facing the African revolutions. See especially the chapter, “The Pitfalls of National Consciousness,” in The Wretched of the Earth. Rosa Luxemburg, who hardly had any sympathy for the “National Question,” being totally absorbed in internationalism, did, however, profoundly grasp imperialism’s oppressive domination of non-capitalist lands: “Though imperialism is the historic method prolonging the career of capitalism, it is also a sure means of bringing it to a swift conclusion” (Accumulation of Capital).
[17] That present-day Trotskyism flies in the face of the Trotsky legacy both historically and theoretically, I have shown in Political-Philosophic Letter No. 1. (See “The UN Resolution on Zionism—and the Ideological Obfuscation Also on the Left,” chapter 6 of Crossroads of History —ed.) The latest developments on Lebanon and Israel further expand their opportunism. See especially the interview with a Lebanese Trotskyist in Paris, Intercontinental Press, July 28, 1976, as well as the latest issue on Israel (August 1976).
[18] An interesting new view is in Israel, the Korean War and China, by Michael Brecher, Jerusalem Academic Press.
[19] The expression regarding Iran is Fred Halliday’s in Arabia without Sultans. See footnote 14.
[20] See Noam Chomsky, “The Interim Sinai Agreement,” in New Politics, Winter 1976. Also Israel and the Palestinians: A Different Israeli View by Uri Avnery, and the endless PLO statements. The Left’s authentic representative, the head of the Lebanese Arab Army, Ahmad al-Khatib, who has always been Al Fatah, complained: “It is difficult to make a revolution in Lebanon; there is too much money around.” The trouble is that oil money, and not only from “Left” Iraq and Libya, but also from Saudi Arabia, bankrolls the PLO.
Was Dunayevskaya a zionist? She notably never criticised zionism as such, celebrated the foundation of Israel, and at salient moments opposed initives in support of Palestinian rights – like the UN vote on zionist racism. She never appeared to explore the absolute contradiction between zionism and marxism on fundamental principles. She notably, even traumaticly split from convinced anti-zionist marxists such as Trotsky and Cliff, even after initially collaborating with them.
Dunayevskaya in fact did openly criticize Zionism and made it clear that she was not a Zionist and that she did not consider Zionism to be compatible with Marxism. As she wrote in “Need for a Total Uprooting: Down with the Perpetrators of the Palestinian Slaughter”:
“How quickly forgotten (if, indeed, Begin or Irgun ever knew them) are the true origins of the idea of an ‘Israeli nationality.’ The Nazi Holocaust, which they invoke today for reactionary purposes, is the fact of history that changed the position of Marxists who had always been for cultural assimilation to the point where nothing deviated from straight socialist goals. (See Leon Trotsky’s articles on why, though still fully opposed to Zionism, he now—i.e., 1937—had to be for a ‘homeland for the Jews.’ That was the Marxist position on Israel, on the question of national self-determination.)”
This is a reference to these pieces from Trotsky from 1937 (plus a bit from 1938 and 1940): https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1937/02/therm.htm and https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1940/xx/jewish.htm
Breaking with Trotsky and Cliff had nothing to do with anyone’s position on Zionism. The record is clear that her break with Trotsky was over his insistence that the USSR was still a “workers’ state” at the time World War II broke out and the Hitler-Stalin pact was in effect, and his conclusion that the workers of the West must still “defend” the USSR. And she did not “break” with Tony Cliff, but rather criticized some of his writings, over the narrowness of his concept of state-capitalism, his sexism, and his downplaying of Lenin’s philosophical reorganization after the Second International collapsed. None of that had to do with Zionism. Similarly, criticizing the UN resolution on “Zionism is Racism” had nothing to do with opposing Palestinian rights. Her letter on that resolution makes that clear—in fact, she opposed that resolution because she thought that it was not actually helping the Palestinians, or the revolution then happening in Lebanon, or the cause of Black South Africans fighting apartheid, or the post-revolutionary government of Angola that was fighting counterrevolutionaries supported by apartheid South Africa. I will quote some of it below. There is a section of the Left that assumes that the only way to support Palestinian liberation is uncritical support for whatever Palestinian resistance tendency is currently dominant, but that is an abdication of responsibility for revolutionary theory and practice.
From “The UN Resolution on Zionism – and the Ideological Obfuscation also on the Left” (keep in mind that this was written in 1976, when Israel was already oppressing the Palestinians but it has become much worse now):
“It may seem foolhardy to try to single out the new in a situation that is so fraught with contradictions which, overnight, transform things into their opposite. It would indeed be an impossible task were it not for the fact that in the Arab Middle East, the unifying force—anti-Israel—cuts across the myriad contradictions. Thus, as if Lebanon wasn’t disintegrating in a fratricidal war between Christian and Moslem, Arafat feels no compunction about shouting, over machine gun fire, the thousands of dead bodies, and the rubble, that this all is an Israeli ‘conspiracy,’ a war initiated by ‘international Zionism.’
“By thus blaming Israel *and* extending Zionism into an international arena, he has set the line for the PLO representative, Farouk Kaddoumi at the UN Security Council: Disregard the actual ongoing war in Lebanon. Speak not of Moslem in general but of the Palestinians’ right for self-determination. And speak of it as if none of that involved the dissolution of any other state.
“All this is said with a straight face regarding the Arab Middle East, where all states are theocratic, and where Lebanon, an artificial state which does have Christians and Moslems, can’t escape the *class* divisions, and is at this very moment steeped in civil war. Those Lebanese Moslem Left, who are fighting a genuine revolutionary class struggle against its rulers, Christians mainly but Moslem, too, are being kept in check. The overriding order is never to forget that Israel is *the* enemy. Lebanon, 1975-76, is in danger of replaying the slaughter in Jordan, 1970-71. Will Syria enter, or the PLA under its control? The PLO allows its adherents anything except a revolutionary class struggle within ‘the Arab nation.’ Whether that will be made ‘law’ by the PLO under Arafat’s leadership, or by the PLA under Syria’s sponsorship, or by the other Palestinian groups in the umbrella organization, PLO, the governing idea will remain twofold: 1) Israel is Enemy No. 1 and 2) no genuine revolutionary force will be allowed to achieve its goal….
“Rather than concerning ourselves with the UN vote on the Resolution equating Zionism with racism—72 for, 35 against, 32 abstaining—we can get more illumination on whether that Resolution is but the latest form of anti-Semitism or a genuine struggle against racism by turning to the second event that followed the vote—the breakup of the OAU meeting in Ethiopia, January 8….
[Here Dunayevskaya goes into detail on the independent African countries’ sudden break from their previous united opposition to apartheid South Africa. Suddenly, the counterrevolutionary organizations in Angola, which were supported by South Africa, were finding some support at the Organization of African Unity, and “Not one word was spoken against the African’s new rich ‘friend,’ Saudi Arabia, that was funnelling money to these puppets….It was only as the revolution in Portugal was developing along proletarian lines, and Portugal declared it would be no port of call either for NATO or U.S. ships bound for war in the Mideast, that the U.S. began clandestinely to support the ‘pro-Western’ factions, i.e., those supported by apartheid South Africa….Once the U.S. and Russia’s struggle for single world domination enters the cockpit, be it the Middle East or Africa, the whip of the counter-revolution takes over….”]
“No doubt the Africans were pleased at the Arab nations thumbing their noses at the U.S., but that was hardly the point of dispute on the UN Resolution on ‘Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination,’ any more than the vote for it by China along with its ‘Enemy No. 1,’ Russia, whom China designates as ‘the new Tsars,’ was of the same nature as the Africa vote. Nevertheless, the African countries’ disregard of, say, the Black intellectuals’ fear that the anti-Zionism amendment was diversionary from the original resolution on racism, which the African nations had sponsored and which projected a Decade for the Elimination of Racism, had come home to roost. The breakup of the OAU meeting over the question of Angola brought out the near-fatal divisiveness in a field that is nothing short of the global struggle of the big powers for a redivision of the world.
“It is impossible to see what one does not want to see. The oil-rich kingdoms can hardly be considered an integral part of the poor Third World, the world that has suffered most from the quadrupling of oil prices, which followed the Arab-Israeli war of 1973. If there is any possible affinity of ideas between the oil kingdoms and the independent African nations, that affinity surely lies elsewhere. The ideological disarray is, rather, like the one that’s pervading much of the Left who, knowing well the feudal class structure of the Arab theocracies, hungering for a socialist alternative to the capitalistic structure of Israel rather than any relapse to feudalism, much less mistaking Israel and apartheid South Africa as one and the same, nevertheless parrot the UN Resolution on Zionism….
“One obvious consequence of the UN Resolution that I.F. Stone does recognize is that it was a victory not just for its sponsors, but ‘also a victory for the Zionist hardliners.’ What greater boon could right-wing Zionism have wished for than the fact that revulsion against anti-Semitism that independents saw in the UN Resolution led thousands of non-Zionists (and, indeed, many were non-Jews) throughout the world to wear buttons proclaiming ‘I am a Zionist.’ What more could they have wished for than that the Israeli opponents of their own rulers—the Israeli Left engaged in class struggles and in fights against their country’s foreign policy, especially to Israel’s nonrecognition of the Palestinians as a national entity entitled to self-determination —should suddenly pause in their struggles, with worry over whether at the other end of the spectrum lurks that perennial manifestation of degeneracy, anti-Semitism?
“Despite all this, Stone, using the ground of the UN Resolution for argument, states that 1), since the Palestinians in Israel are treated as second-class citizens, the UN Resolution has ‘an element of truth’; 2) talks of it as if it were no more than an ‘answer to the Sinai disengagement.’ He acts as if there were only one way to be for a ‘viable Arab state,’ and there were no rich history from Marx through Lenin to Trotsky on the question of self-determination, and as if Marx’s humanism wasn’t precisely what had been taken out of the ‘archives’ and made into an ongoing historic revolutionary movement in our day, precisely in East Europe, fighting for freedom from Russian totalitarianism and racism, i.e., anti-Semitism, as witness Czechoslovakia in 1968.
“Not that racism is only anti-Semitism, or only against Blacks, be that in South Africa or the U.S.A, or just a Middle East phenomenon. Racism, after all, arose in the heart of West Europe. Because racism is integral to all class exploitative societies and reaches its most vitriolic expression during hard times, it is imperative to look at it comprehensively, focusing on why at any time it takes this or that specific form. Why is it that, where in the turbulent near-revolutions of the 1960s even so reactionary a Council as the Vatican felt compelled to issue its landmark ‘Declaration on Jews,’ proclaiming ‘a new era of interfaith dialogue’ and condemning *some* root causes of anti-Semitism, whereas, in the 1970s, the ‘New Left’ aligns in a veritable ‘jihad’ against ‘Zionism.’
“For whatever reasons the UN’s eyes presently are turned only to Israel, racism is in fact reaching a most virulent phase in France where one million French workers and 100,000 immigrant workers have been thrown into the unemployed army. In the case of the immigrant workers, whom the French government had lured there and confined to the dirtiest work at the lowest pay, as well as herding them into the most barbaric living quarters, there racism has reared its ugly head as France tries to herd them out of the country, whether they came from the Middle East or Portugal, from Algeria or Black Africa.
“Clearly, above everything else hangs the world economic recession at a time when decadent capitalism brings out the worst, be it apartheid South Africa mercenaries fighting in Angola—and bringing disarray into the OAU—or France expelling immigrant labor and bringing racism on the face of it to a very different point and yet connecting with it. When Albert Levy, Secretary of the Movement Against Racism Anti-Semitism and for Peace, declared ‘France has become the most murderously racist of countries,’ it did indeed direct attention to the depth of degeneracy of Western ‘civilization,’ the type signaled by the outbreak of World War II and the fact of the collapse of France without a fight. The problem cannot be narrowed to what one sees in UN corridors….
“It is high time not to take either Arab or Israel’s ground for argumentation, or, for that matter, what can best be called ‘the middle of the road’ (which has always been the best place to get run over). It is high time to strike out for totally new ground, the total philosophy of human liberation Marx called ‘a new Humanism.’…
“The pogrom on top of the ghettoization, economic, political and social persecution of the Jews, gave rise to Zionism at the end of the 19th century. As a national movement, revolutionary internationalists rejected it. On the whole, Marxists considered the Jewish Question to be a ‘cultural’ one, felt sure that socialism would solve all questions of racial or religious persecution, and therefore urged total assimilation. What changed the attitude on the whole ‘National Question’ was the outbreak of World War I, which revealed how national rebellions can aid the undermining of imperialism. With the Irish Revolution against British imperialism right in the midst of war, when workers were slaughtering each other across national boundaries, the ‘National Question’ assumed an urgency and impetus to proletarian revolution which brought a schism within Bolshevism. Lenin alone made the most profound as well as concrete analysis of the revolutionary aspects of the ‘National Question.’ Moreover, these continued beyond the victory of the proletarian revolution in Russia with the accession to power of the Bolsheviks. By the time of the defeat of the 1919 German Revolution, upon which both the extension of the Russian Revolution to a world scale and the very life of the Russian Revolution depended (no one then thought of any such mirage as ‘socialism in one country’), Lenin raised a totally new aspect to the relationship of the National Question and world revolution: ‘If not through Berlin perhaps through Peking.’
“Whatever changes had in the meantime occurred in Zionism’s projection of a ‘Jewish homeland’ seemed to be of no concern to revolutionary Marxists since they were still confident the world revolution would win.
“Everything totally changed with the Great Depression, and the rise of Nazism, accompanied by such manifestation of anti-Semitism also in the ‘degenerated workers’ state’ that Trotsky changed his position on the Jewish Question. The density of today’s Trotskyists in not grasping either theoretically or practically what happened shows itself clearest in their positions today which have nothing whatever to do with Trotsky’s principled statement, be that on the question of permanent revolution or the Jewish Question. Not having the slightest conception of what is the dialectical relationship of the objective to the subjective situation—what is the dialectics of liberation when more than one national movement arises—they simply hide both the fact of the change and *why* Trotsky, as the great revolutionary he was, changed his position. It is imperative that we study the principal points Trotsky made in the last three years of his life on this question, if we wish to understand the new vantage points necessitated by the rise of Nazism, and that he alone of the leaders of the Russian Revolution lived to confront. Stalin had killed off the ‘General Staff’ of that revolution in the greatest Frame-Up Trials in history, reeking of anti-Semitism as well as of total counter-revolution. Indeed, they were followed by the Hitler-Stalin pact. Here, then, are Trotsky’s writings on the Jewish Question for the years 1937-1940.
“First, Trotsky contrasts the *historical* developments of the 1930s with those of his youth when he believed that ‘the Jewish Question would disappear in a quasi-automatic fashion… decaying capitalism has everywhere swung over to an exacerbated nationalism, one part of which is anti-Semitism.’
“Secondly, since the Jews have created their own press, have a distinct language, ‘One must reckon with the fact that the Jewish nation will maintain itself for an entire epoch’. It isn’t that he didn’t perceive the conflict between the Jews and the Arabs in Palestine, nor that he thought that Zionism was any answer. But, this fundamental conflict could not be judged outside the objective context:
“1) The reappearance of anti-Semitism in Russia, ‘the Thermidorean reaction has stirred up all that is low, dark and backward—and in this agglomeration of 170 million people.’
“2) At the same time the rise of fascism occurred in the very heart of Western Europe. Therefore, ‘the next deve1opment of world reaction signifies with certainty the physical extermination of the Jews.’
“This, let us remember, was said before the outbreak of World War II, before the ovens of Auschwitz and Dachau were fully exposed, before the actual extermination of six million Jews.
“Trotsky’s conclusion was that the ‘Jewish Question as such is still acute and demands adequate measures from a world federation of workers’ states.’ Naturally, he called upon the Jews to join the Fourth International, which had been the first to warn about fascism.
“World War II had totally changed the objective situation. The creation of the state of Israel changed it still further for the Middle East. Two realities, thereupon, were new: the existence of Israel, and with that success, the creation of another national consciousness—the Palestinian people. Their right to self-determination can no more be decided from above, be it via the many Arab kingdoms and emirates, or the PLO claiming sole spokesmanship—much less through a UN command. Let the Palestinian people speak for themselves. Naturally, Zionism in power, like the ideology of all ruling classes, be they Jewish or Moslem or Christian—or the big powers themselves, West and East, is exploitative. *Which is why, precisely why, the main enemy is always in one’s own country.* The Israeli masses will fight that battle. Far from encouraging such action, the UN Resolution equating Zionism with racism—while the PLO representative shouts: Zionism differs ‘in no way from apartheid in South Africa’—cannot but remind one of the Big Lie.
“Unfortunately, even that is not the worst of it. The worst of it is that it does, indeed, reflect the actual state of the disarray of the world, not only in the economy and politics, but also in the void in its thought.
“Clearly, the Arab-Israeli question is not just Arab-Israeli; the Middle East is not just the Middle East—Saudi Arabia is not just oil-rich kingdom underwriting PLO actions against Israel, but also South African white mercenaries and its Black puppets in Angola. Nor is it just Africa that is being torn apart—the Portuguese revolution is also being put under the whip of counter-revolution. Once again, the global struggle for single world domination between the U.S. and Russia, with China considering Russia Enemy No. 1, contaminates everything. And through it all, racism and anti-Semitism is at its height also at the heart of ‘Western civilization’—France. In a word, the euphemism of ‘Zionism’ for anti-Semitism cannot but recall the degeneracy Western civilization reached in 1940 with the collapse of France without a fight: ‘Paris is not for burning.’ For the Left to countenance, nay, to aid in such ideological obfuscation cannot but smooth the way for the counter-revolution. A necessary first step to turn matters around is to clear up our heads so that the history of revolutions, the dialectics of liberation becomes the path for their actualization.”