Egypt: Release all detained workers and drop all charges!

Al-Sisi Regime Imposes Death Sentences on Muslim Brotherhood and Morsi
 
No to the death sentences! Abolish the death penalty!
On Tuesday, June 16th, an Egyptian court of the al-Sisi regime upheld the death sentences of deposed Egyptian President Morsi along with about 100 other Muslim Brotherhood supporters. Twenty one others were given life sentences. 90 others were given death sentences in abstentia. The “legality” of these sentences was upheld by the supreme religious authority, the Grand Mufti of Egypt. Nevertheless, we see these sentences and the conduct of the trials themselves as macabre political theater. It is possible that these grisly sentences will not be carried out because if there is one thing we know about the al- Sisi regime, it is sensitivity to the sensibilities of its backers, principally the U.S. and the EU (although China’s influence in Egypt is growing fast and in line with their desire to accept no criticism about their own human rights record, the Xi government is not likely to comment on al-Sisi’s troubles.) And troubles he has.

Al-Sisi and the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) need the diversion of political theater as much as they need repression of opponents. That the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) trials get all the headlines has to do with foreign consumption of the SCAF’s charge that the Muslim Brotherhood, only recently their partners in the state, are a “terrorist organization.” What the show trials cover for is the catastrophic economic performance of the military clique as a government. Daily News Egypt reported a balance of trade deficit of 26.7 billion Egyptian pounds for the month of March, an increase of 10.9% over March, 2015.

The CWG-US calls for the repeal of the sentences and for the immediate release of all Egyptian political prisoners. Morsi was tried and convicted by the wrong class and for the wrong reasons. The first of his death sentences is for his 2011 jail break, which never bothered the SCAF while Morsi was running for office or ruling as president with their blessing. It was only when the masses rejected rule by the Muslim Brotherhood that the SCAF decided to discover him as a criminal and to criminalize his government. We have no love of the MB and neither do we support any Islamist organization. But we see the headline trials camouflaging the wholesale attack on the trade union movement and its legal rights along with workers’ political organizations, whose leaders have been fighting the Protest Law and the draconian Article 77, which has been the basis of these trials.

SCAF has been the real power since 1952. Now and at various times in the past they have ruled by fear and they find it necessary to the return to this police state-type domestic regime as they display their economic ineptitude, which is multiplying the effects of the global capitalist crisis. Their great value to imperialism and the basis of the support they continue to enjoy is the rampart they provide against the Arab Revolution. Now in its fourth year of resumption, threatening to go permanent as a social layer of worker youth realize that the SCAF is the last bourgeois obstacle to the socialist revolution.

Among the charges against Morsi are the killings of protesters in 2012, which is ironic in the extreme, given that the self- same state forces that are trying Morsi carried out his commands and performed all the killing. We think only workers tribunals have a genuine right to investigate and pass judgement on who was responsible for the murders of everyday Egyptian people, workers and the urban poor. These tribunals would try the SCAF as well as Morsi and their entire suites of accomplices and all the monsters of the bourgeois regime. In the face of this massive repression workers need to organize their action committees and workers councils and militias on an underground basis in the present conjuncture, but we should remember the January/February 2011 experience and how quickly the political situation can change and Egyptian workers should prepare both to cope with the present misfortune and tomorrow’s revolutionary opportunities.

The Communist Workers Group stands for class political independence from all bourgeois forces in Egypt as elsewhere. We say today’s class-in-itself organizations must crystalize and produce class-for-itself revolutionary Marxist organizations. And such parties must come together and build a new workers international to fight the class enemy and drive them from power and abolish their system of wage-slavery on every continent.

• For international labor solidarity in action to defend Egyptian workers! 
• Defend freedom of assembly, the press and self-expression!
• Defend the right to strike! Organize the unorganized!
• Build factory workplace and neighborhood action committees!
• Build a revolutionary Leninist workers party!
• Victory to the Arab Revolution! 
• For Permanent Revolution in the Near East!

Communist Workers Group (US)

MENA: Yemen, Iran and the Arab Revolution

Yarmouk Camp, near Damascus, symbol of the Arab Revolution

Battle lines in the Middle East continue to be drawn between the US bloc and the rising China/Russia bloc over control of the hydrocarbon resources of the region. This has not become an open proxy war since the China, Russia bloc do not want to be drawn into a fight over oil in MENA (Middle East, North Africa) where the stakes are so high. At stake is the fate of Iran. Iran is in the camp of Russia and China. It has the 4th largest reserves of oil and 2nd largest reserves of gas in the world. Its immediate interests are to get the sanctions lifted and its own oil flowing. It has a stake in Iraq where the Shiite led regime and militias are driving back the IS forces in the north. It is the main force that is keeping al Assad in power in Syria.

In Yemen the latest front in a series of connected fronts has opened as the US bloc led on the ground by Saudi Arabia and a coalition of the US lackey states, lines up against the popular Houthi rebellion that has overthrown the US sponsored dictator who has flown the country. While the US bloc claims that the Houthi are armed by Iran, Iran denies this though the Houthi have links to Hezbollah another Iran proxy. Iran as part of the China/Russia bloc is clearly engaged in a struggle with the US bloc for control of MENA.

We advocate independent working class action in defence of the Houthi uprising without any political support to the bourgeois leadership or its proxy role aligned to the Russia/China imperialist bloc.

The Arab Revolution threatens both blocs

While the inter-imperialist rivalry underlies these wars in MENA, the real threat to both blocs is the unfinished Arab Revolution. In 2012 a year into the Arab Revolution re-opened in MENA we wrote a balance sheet in which the success of the revolution was clearly in the armed masses fighting against dictatorships. To the extent that uprisings were steered into parliamentary ‘solutions’ as in Tunisia and Egypt the revolutions were halted. Where these rebellions met overwhelming armed repression as in Bahrain they were aborted. Where they met armed repression but survived to arm a popular resistance movement as in Libya and Syria, the revolutions are still alive.

Most important, the Arab Revolution had to be joined up at Palestine from East, West, North and South. If the Syrian revolution did not join up militarily with the Palestinian struggle it would be doomed. If the Libyan and Egyptian Revolutions remained separated they would not succeed. Thus it was necessary for the revolution to remove the imperialist borders imposed by Sykes Picot in 1919 and turn the Palestinian struggle into a Pan Arab Permanent Revolution.

In those countries where the revolution succumbed to the siren songs of bourgeois parliamentary democracy, they failed to arm themselves and win over the ranks of the army. In Egypt the SCAF (Supreme Command of the Armed Forces) sacked the Muslim Brotherhood regime of Morsi and continued its historic role since Nasser as the military Bonapartist institution that is the backbone of the authoritarian state defending capitalist rule in Egypt, not only from the external enemy, but from the internal enemy, the populist Muslim Brotherhood and the Egyptian masses.

The most important task of this military regime is to isolate the Egyptian masses from the rest of the Arab states. One of the first acts of Al Sisi was to close the border to Gaza and to the uniting of Egyptian and Palestine revolutions. Today Al Sisi joins the Yankee coalition bombing IS in Libya and invading Yemen with Saudi planes and tanks to smash the rebellion as they did in Bahrain.

In those countries where the resistance armed itself, civil wars opened up against dictatorships like al Assad in Syria, al Maliki in Iraq, and the NTC in Libya. Yet in none of these countries has the armed resistance united across borders to join the Palestinian struggle. But neither have they been disarmed and destroyed. Every attempt has been made by both US and Russia/China blocs to isolate and destroy the popular resistance creating power vacuums in which other forces especially Islamic jihadist were able to fill the gap. In Iraq this has meant that the non-sectarian resistance to al Maliki has been overrun by the Sunni IS in the North while the Shiite militia from the South have become the dominant force in pushing the IS back. Similarly, in Syria the non-sectarian militias have become the target of not only al Assad but of the IS and its jihadist allies such as al Nusra. The IS has now moved against the Palestinian revolution attempting to take over the refugee camp at Yarmouk on the outskirts of Damascus.

Sectarian or imperialist wars?

So while the armed revolution advanced from 2011 to 2013, it has been overtaken by counter-revolutionary forces who may want to carve out Islamic states in much the same way that Israel carved out its Zionist state. These are the open enemies of the Arab Revolution. The result is that in both Syria and Iraq the dictatorships have aligned themselves with the counter-revolutionary Shiite forces against the Sunni masses in an attempt to turn what are potentially anti-imperialist and revolutionary wars into reactionary sectarian wars. It is the stalemate between these dictatorships and their Sunni opposition that has created the vacuum that the Islamic State has moved to fill. Yet the fundamental fault lines of the wars in MENA are not sectarian but imperialist.

Yemen demonstrates this exactly. Look who is driving the ideology of the anti-Shia, anti-Iran realpolitik; Israel and Saudia Arabia with the US providing the intelligence and supplying the weapons. Israel, the Zionist reactionary state has fought wars against Hamas and Hezbollah. Along with Saudi Arabia the home of the Wahabi Sunni sect and al Qaeda, both are client states of the US bloc armed by the US to the teeth, and backed up by not-so-secret Israeli nuclear weapons! But who joins in this god squad of mercenary states after a bloody purge of the leadership of the Muslim Brotherhood, Al Sisi and his secular Egyptian army that isolates Gaza on behalf of Israel. Turkey even chimes in from the sidelines fearful of a vacuum being filled on its borders by a Kurd nation that threatens its own territory.

Look to see who is backing the opposition. The Iraqi regime forces trained by the US are incapable of stopping the Islamic State. In Iraq, as in Syria, it is the Shia militia led by Iranian generals and backed by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards that are putting up the only opposition to the revolutionary democratic militias and the Islamic State. Iran is part of a military bloc with Russia and China. Russia has recently committed to supply S-300 missiles which are a defence against aircraft if not an Israel nuclear missile attack. Of course, both blocs are in the final analysis attempting to maintain stability of the whole of MENA against the revival of revolutionary uprisings that become linked into one united struggle.

For a United Front with Palestine!

There is only one force that can solve the crisis of war ridden MENA in the interests of the popular masses, those masses themselves. Revolutionaries recognise that the Arab masses are fighting a revolution against both imperialism and its national dictators, bought and paid for by imperialism. We give no support to fake anti-imperialist bourgeois war lords and jihadist mullahs who claim religious rights to steal the land that has been liberated by the masses’ struggles. If not the creations of one or other imperialist bloc, they are competing to create new bourgeois mini-states that do deals with one or both blocs for the franchise to pump oil or gas.

Against the counter-revolution in Syria, Iraq and Libya, the popular armed militias have to fight the dictators and their imperialist backers, and the jihadists who hijack the revolutions to create caliphates. This can only succeed as a common front with the Palestinians who have carried the burden of the Arab Revolution for generations. The key is Egypt the most powerful state in MENA that is the pivot between the Middle East and North Africa.

As we argued from the start of the ‘Arab Spring’ in Egypt the workers program against a military Bonapartism of Mubarak (and now Al Sisi) is clear. Re-activate the unfinished ‘democratic revolution’ as the Permanent Revolution. This means building a Marxist party that can raise a transitional program to mobilise the working class to build workers councils and militias to fight for the immediate demands of workers and poor peasants through strike action and a political general strike.

Such a program will challenge the Islamic fundamentalism of the Muslim Brotherhood youth who have come to the fore with the arrest of the old Morsi generation and who are no longer following the road of parliamentary reform. Drawing the masses behind such a program will force the hand of the SCAF to resort to an Al Assad type civil war. This will split the ranks from the SCAF officer corps and create the conditions for an armed insurrection.

The revival of the revolution in Egypt will draw the US and Israel in to defend the Al Sisi dictatorship at all costs. The loss of Egypt would allow the revolution in North Africa to link up to the Palestinian and Syrian revolutions. It would signal that the non-sectarian Arab forces can form a bloc from Libya to Iraq and a potential alliance with the Kurds.

The only solution is the Permanent Revolution where the proletariat, small traders and poor peasants led by a mass proletarian party overthrow the bourgeois state and build a workers’ state. The legacy of the reactionary Stalinist parties that entered popular fronts with the secular Baathists and Nasserites has to be replaced by the program of Permanent Revolution of a new Leninist Trotskyist International.

The Permanent Revolution in MENA requires a transitional program that begins with the struggle for basic democratic rights of assembly and speech. But nowhere in MENA are such rights possible without workers taking power. The semi-colonial state is the agent of imperialism in extreme crisis. Imperialism can only survive by using these client regimes to super-exploit and oppress the masses. There can be no reform of the existing state and society. A revolutionary insurrection is necessary based on workers, farmers, and soldiers councils defended by popular militias from Tunisia to Yemen.

For a Revolutionary Marxist party!

For the Permanent Revolution!

For a Union of Socialist Republics of MENA!

Class War Vol 2 No 3 November 2014

Revolutionary journal of the Communist Workers' Group, USA.

For a Socialist Palestine! Climate Change: Socialist Solution No Justice in Capitalist America Editorials US  Imperialists out of MENA! International Labor Defence Egypt, Mexico, Palestine, US. What We Fight For   Read More

FOR A SOCIALIST PALESTINE!

The events of the last weeks that saw a renewal of open hostilities between Israel and Hamas have an element of deja vu in them. Once more the Zionist state steps up its oppression of the West Bank and Gaza using as a pretext the killing of three Israeli youths. Once more the Palestinian masses rise up in resistance as Arab youth are killed and hundreds arrested. Yet we are not taken in by the arguments for or against renewed hostilities; they are a ritual exchange between the Zionist ruling class and the Palestinian bourgeois factions Hamas and Fatah to negotiate the division of Palestine. The two factions are using the Palestinian masses as no more than expendable pawns in their battle for supremacy. Lost in this exchange is the truth of what underlies this conflict between the Zionist oppressor state, and an oppressed occupied state. While both regimes negotiate with missiles the Palestinian masses pay the price in blood. Their leaders continue to sell out to Israel. In selling out they prevent the Palestinian struggle for self-determination from arming independent militias and uniting their forces with other armed struggles in the surrounding Arab states. We are for a revolutionary party and program for the defeat of the Zionist state and for a Socialist Palestine in a United Socialist States of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA)!

1) Down with the Zionist State!

Israel is a settler state that came into existence after United Nations (UN) resolution 181 in 1947 which was a fig-leaf for British and US imperialist backing of the Zionist colonisation of Palestine and its partition into two legitimate states. This was followed by a series of wars starting with the civil war followed by the First Arab-Israeli war in 1948, together called al-Nakba by the Arabs, that led to defeat of Arab forces and drove Arabs off their land to the point that today all of Palestine is either settled by Israelis or controlled by the Israeli military. Those parts of the West Bank and Gaza that are not permanently occupied by the military are no more than prison camps much as are the refugee camps that house millions of displaced Palestinians in Lebanon, Jordan and Syria. Israel justifies it’s right to occupy Palestine in terms of its Zionist claims to the ancient land of Israel. It is pre-occupied with completing its Zionist program of reclaiming its historic homeland which would not be possible without a massive military subsidy from the US. (See ‘Zionism: A Road Map to Hell’).

Israel is therefore not an imperialist economic power and only exists on the basis of US and EU imperialist support. It might be called ‘sub-imperialist’ in the sense of “sub-contracted to US imperialism”. It is an armed settler state with a theocratic Zionist regime no less ‘fundamentalist’ than its rival Islamic Republic of Iran, or the upstart rival Sunni Islamic State (ISIS), and certainly a nuclear armed ‘terrorist’ state. It is an affront not only to the Palestinians, but to Jews and to humanity as a whole that Zionist Israel exists, and so must be destroyed. (see Against Zionism).

Writing on The Jewish Problem in 1937, Trotsky foresaw the tragedy of Zionism as a reactionary solution to the national rights of Jews:

"But the facts of every passing day demonstrate to us that Zionism is incapable of resolving the Jewish question. The conflict between the Jews and Arabs in Palestine acquires a more and more tragic and more and more menacing character. I do not at all believe that the Jewish question can be resolved within the framework of rotting capitalism and under the control of British imperialism. And how, you ask me, can socialism solve this question? On this point I can but offer hypotheses. Once socialism has become master of our planet or at least of its most important sections, it will have unimaginable resources in all domains. Human history has witnessed the epoch of great migrations on the basis of barbarism. Socialism will open the possibility of great migrations on the basis of the most developed technique and culture. It goes without saying that what is here involved is not compulsory displacements, that is, the creation of new ghettos for certain nationalities, but displacements freely consented to, or rather demanded by certain nationalities or parts of nationalities. The dispersed Jews who would want to be reassembled in the same community will find a sufficiently extensive and rich spot under the sun. The same possibility will be opened for the Arabs, as for all other scattered nations. National topography will become a part of the planned economy. This is the grand historical perspective that I envisage. To work for international socialism means also to work for the solution of the Jewish question.”

2) Palestinian National Liberation

The struggle of the Palestinian masses against Israeli occupation is a national liberation struggle. To achieve Palestinian liberation the Zionist state must be destroyed. National liberation does not mean recognition of the state of Israel as legitimate nor the acceptance of a two-state solution. This is the position of one faction of the Palestinian bourgeoisie –Fatah. Nor does it mean the opportunist policy of the other bourgeois faction Hamas, i.e. military confrontation to recognise the de facto right for Israel to exist until it can be replaced by a theocratic Islamic State of Palestine. Between these two factions’ policies of dividing up Palestine with the Zionists there is no essential difference. Both are “bloody traps” for the Arab masses manipulated as pawns of the rival factions of the Palestinian bourgeoisie.

Much of the Western left also buys into a negotiated ‘peaceful’ solution such as the claim that Israel is an ‘apartheid’ state which can be reformed by pressure of international public opinion and more UN resolutions to go back to the partition of 1947. This is based on the belief that Jews have national rights in Palestine that can be peacefully resolved by recognising both Palestinian and Jewish rights. This is making Palestine liberation conditional on Jewish national rights as if they have an equal claim to living in Palestine. Not so. Trotsky argued that in the 1930s that Jews could claim national rights as an oppressed nation, but not at the expense of occupying Palestine.

“The attempt to solve the Jewish question through the migration of Jews to Palestine can now be seen for what it is, a tragic mockery of the Jewish people. Interested in winning the sympathies of the Arabs who are more numerous than the Jews, the British government has sharply altered its policy toward the Jews, and has actually renounced its promise to help them found their “own home” in a foreign land. The future development of military events may well transform Palestine into a bloody trap for several hundred thousand Jews. Never was it so clear as it is today that the salvation of the Jewish people is bound up inseparably with the overthrow of the capitalist system.” On the Jewish Problem.

The National rights of Jews therefore cannot be at the expense of the Palestinians. So the national liberation of Palestine means the defeat of Israel and the re-occupation of Palestine by the armed people of Palestine, with or without the support of militant Jews, and necessarily in conjunction with the popular revolutions that have begun in the other Arab states. The national rights of Jews will be realised in a democratic, socialist, multi-ethnic workers’ state in Palestine.

3) The Arab Revolution

Since 1948 the Palestinian revolution has been isolated (in effect quarantined) by the Arab states whose regimes professed support for Palestinian rights, but stopped short at limited wars to weakly contest the expanding borders of Israel. The surrounding Arab states condemned the Israeli state but in practice put their own separate interests before the defence of Palestine. They were rivals for leadership of the Arab states and could never agree on a unified strategy. In 1948 King Abdullar of Jordan backed by Britain, schemed with the Zionists to incorporate the US mandated Palestine into Jordan but was opposed by Egypt and Syria who had their own plans to annex Palestine. The outcome of the war was a victory for Israel and its expansion well beyond the UN partition borders (see map). 

The 1967 “Third Arab-Israeli war” between Israel and Egypt, Syria and Jordan also led to an outright Israeli victory and further incursions into Palestinian territory. Since that time the Arab states have collaborated with Israel. Egypt and Israel struck and agreement over Gaza. In Syria, the secular Baathist regime of Assad, father and son, co-existed with the theocratic Zionist state just as much as it collaborated with the Islamic Republic of Iran. The Arab and Israeli ruling classes were in agreement on their fundamental interest of keeping the Arab revolution divided and quarantined.

The Arab Spring changed that. Since 2011 the uprisings from Tunisia to Syria have forced the Arab regimes to actively suppress or co-opt the spread and synchronisation of these popular uprisings. In Syria Assad has starved and bombed the Palestinian camp of Yarmouk because the different leadership factions including Hamas that ruled the camp could not suppress the solidarity of the Palestinian masses with the Syrian Revolution. Moreover the revolutions continue in Libya and Syria where the armed resistance continues to fight the regime. The outbreak of a popular war against the Maliki regime in Iraq puts on the agenda not only the defeat of imperialism in MENA but also the defeat of imperialism’s puppet regimes in Iraq and Syria their Islamic State rivals. For the first time a Palestinian popular uprising has the potential to join forces with the Egyptian, Syrian and Iraqi revolutions and to link up the Palestinian masses in Lebanon and Jordan in a wider Arab revolution to overthrow imperialism and its national bourgeois puppets.

4) Role of Imperialism

There are no imperialist powers in the MENA. Israel and all the Arab regimes are semi-colonies of imperialism including the oil-rich Gulf States (and the non-Arab Iran). In the last analysis, Israel’s existence is not about land grabbing in the name of God, but its military role as the mercenary of US and EU imperialism in defending their interests in MENA against the emergence of the rival imperialist bloc of Russia and China. The Arab regimes act as agents of one or other, or both imperialist blocs, as they compete to win their favour and increase their share of the oil wealth exploited by imperialism. There can be no Arab Revolution unless it breaks with both imperialism and all the national bourgeois factions that rule over the masses on its behalf.

It is not possible to complete the national revolutions to defeat imperialism without overthrowing the national bourgeois factions that rule on behalf of imperialism. Hamas and Fatah in Palestine use the masses as military pawns to negotiate better terms with Israel for dividing Palestine. The Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and in Syria compete with the military al Sisi and Assad regimes, and secular bourgeois factions such as the Free Syrian Army (FSA), for popular support to win the backing of the US and/or China/Russia. All compete to prove they can contain the Arab Revolution and that it is not they but their rivals that are the ‘terrorists’ that must be smashed. Against such brutal regimes, the Arab revolution that is historically centred on Palestine must declare its political independence from all bourgeois factions and build popular armed militias based on the workers and oppressed. See “The Arab Revolution meets NATO/Zionism”.

5) For Permanent Revolution

The struggle for an independent, secular Arab revolution has to contend with a history in which the revolutionary Marxist party has been betrayed by Stalinist popular front politics. That is, Communist Parties in MENA have historically collaborated with ‘progressive’ national bourgeois factions such as Fatah and the Baath Party purportedly against imperialism. But such collaboration has never led to national independence only to the defeat of the masses. The Arab revolution has made important advances against such historic betrayals only by taking up the armed and independent struggle against imperialism and it bourgeois lackeys. The fighting masses need to take the leadership of the anti-imperialist struggle out of the hands of the national bourgeoisie and embarking on the road to socialist revolution.

So the Palestinian Intifadas threatened to break the masses from the control of Fatah and Hamas and the threat of popular revolution forced these bourgeois lackeys to negotiate with Israel to contain the revolution. In Libya the armed militias retain a dual power against the pro-imperialist post-Gaddafi regime despite the current US attempt led by its henchman General Khalifa Hifter to disarm the militias. In Syria the secular armed revolution is holding out despite terrible odds against both the regime and the Islamic State. In Egypt, the masses are now facing a military dictatorship that strips away all illusions that the military is ‘progressive’. What is lacking is the Marxist party and program for Permanent Revolution that spells out the necessity for the armed, independent struggle for socialist republics within a wider Federation of Socialist Republics of MENA .

6) Revolutionary Party and Program

Only a revolutionary Marxist party and program is capable of addressing the Palestinian revolution as part of the Permanent Arab Revolution and as part of a global revolution. This is because as we said above the Zionist state is a military settler state funded by US and EU imperialism as its mercenary in MENA. It is the key to US and NATO control of its MENA ‘assets’ both political and economic which is today a vital defence of the US blocs oil assets against those of its rival Russia/China bloc. It is also imperialism’s weakest link in MENA because its role as imperialist gendarme forces it to militarise its settler population. This means that all Zionism’s claims to national rights and democratic legitimacy are constantly exposed as extreme hypocrisy turning the oppression of the Palestinian people the flaming beacon of the Arab Revolution. The cry “We are all Palestinians” means that while the Palestinians are not free, no-one is free!

That is why the struggle against imperialism in the MENA cannot succeed without the defeat of Israel and the smashing of the Zionist state. While it exists it will play the role it has played since 1948 as the armed mercenary of US imperialism in MENA. Just as the US imperialism can only prevent its decline as the No 1 imperialist power, so Israel’s fate is dependent on its role of protecting its master in MENA. Only the revolutionary Leninist/Trotskyist Party can cut through the pacifist liberal confusion that holds out the possibility of a negotiated peace in Palestine and in the wider MENA. Revolutionary Marxism is uncompromising in leading such a revolution because it refuses to legitimise the Zionist state!

In response to the left-liberal cry ‘victory for the Intifada’ we say victory can only be the victory of a revolutionary war of national liberation that (1) overthrows the Zionist IDF, (2) defeats all intervention by imperialism or its proxies, Saudi Arabia, the Gulf States, Iran and Turkey, and (3) exposes and defeats the treacherous leadership of the national bourgeois agents of imperialism in Palestine, Hamas and Fatah!

We agree with Trotsky. In 1998 we wrote:

“A democratic multi-ethnic Palestine could only be achieved as a result of a socialist revolution based on workers councils and militias. It would also be part of a Socialist Federation of the Middle East. In that context not only Palestinians would have the right to return but also Arab Jews would have the right to return to Syria, Morocco, Iraq and other Arab countries. Kurds, Assyrian and other nationalities would achieve self-determination and equal rights.” Against Zionism.   

• That is why our program calls for the Egyptian working masses to build workers councils and militias to overthrow al Sisi and the military dictatorship, and to form a popular militia able to break down the walls and open the borders of Gaza to unite its people with the West Bank and Jordan! 

•  We call on the Palestinian masses in occupied Palestine and in Syria, Jordan and Lebanon to unite with the Syrian revolution to build workers councils and militias to smash both the Assad regime and the Islamic State (ISIS) and its allies Hezbollah and Iranian fighters.  

•  We condemn all self-proclaimed revolutionaries in the imperialist countries for failing in their duty to take action against their own imperialist ruling classes, whose defeat ultimately will enable the permanent revolution in MENA to be victorious. 

• We oppose all pacifist, individualist boycotts and appeals to United Nations negotiations as continuing the legitimation of imperialist rule in MENA and as barriers to the armed, independence of the Arab masses. 

•  We call on Israeli workers to take the side of Palestinian liberation, form workers councils and strike for the release of Palestinian political prisoners! 

•  We call on Israel conscripts in the military to refuse to obey orders to shoot or otherwise oppress Palestinians! 

• Defeat Zionism! We refuse to demand that the Zionist state frees its political prisoners, pulls down its walls and grants the right of return. We do not create illusions in Israel as we do not recognise its right to exist. The right of return will be enforced by Zionism’s defeat! 

•  We call on workers in the imperialist countries to mobilise in their unions to enforce bans on all diplomatic, military and trade relations with Israel! 

•  We call on the ranks of the military to mobilise against all imperialist occupation and intervention in the Arab states! 

•  We call on the unions to make political strikes against the US funding of Israeli occupation! We call on workers to build international brigades to fight alongside the armed, independent militias in Palestine, Syria and Iraq, and for weapons and medical aid to the Palestinian struggle! 

•  For a Socialist Palestine within a Federation of Socialist Republics of MENA!

References

Trotsky “On the Jewish Problem” http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1940/xx/jewish.htm

Against Zionism http://trotskyistinspain.wordpress.com/2008/06/27/against-zionism/

The Arab Revolution meets NATO/Zionism http://redrave.blogspot.co.nz/2012/12/the-arab-revolution-meets-nato-zionism.html

Zionism: A Road Map to Hell. http://redrave.blogspot.co.nz/2011/05/zionism-road-map-to-unending-conflict.html



14 July 2014

Communist Workers Group (Aotearoa/NZ)