I was reasonably well disposed toward Peter Ross until I reached the part of his latest letter on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in which he accuses me of “national chauvinism.” Now I see red.
Ross gets a few things right in his Jan. 6 contribution, but a great deal wrong. He makes a thorough hash of the national question, for instance, by confusing nationalism with national independence, equality, and self-determination. The first is an ideology that is at odds with socialist internationalism and which Marxists therefore abhor — completely and absolutely. The second is something we support because we oppose imperialism and believe that colonial peoples are entitled to the same democratic rights as the rest of the world. That is why we supported Indian independence in 1947, Algerian independence in 1962, and equal rights for the Palestinians.
Simultaneously, however, we believe that self-determination is only possible under conditions of international socialist democracy. Hence, we oppose bourgeois nationalists no matter how anti-imperialist they claim to be – not merely because they “are hostile to the working class and will betray them in favor of a domestic capitalism the moment they come to power,” as Ross puts it, but because they are incapable of achieving true national development and will therefore leave such societies in a truncated, semi-developed form. This is why bourgeois nationalism in Algeria led to authoritarianism, one-man rule, anti-Berber discrimination, and an Islamist civil war beginning in 1992 that ended up costing more than 100,000 lives. It’s why India saw a continuation of the caste system – some would say its deepening – plus bloody intercommunal violence, Hindu chauvinism, and yawning social disparities. Bourgeois nationalism is incapable of achieving true national liberation. Marxists compete against its supporters because we believe only a socialist working class can accomplish that goal.
So we do not “oppose all forms of nationalism, even those of the oppressed,” as Ross puts it. To the contrary, we oppose nationalist ideology, but support national independence in the colonial world, national development, and national self-determination, all the while arguing that socialist internationalism is the only way to bring such things about.
Ross’s errors go on. “Is he [Lazare] … against armed resistance in general, as the phrase ‘there is no military solution’ would imply? If it is the latter, his position is nakedly reactionary and would have put him on the other side of the barricades in essentially every anti-colonial struggle of the last century.” But the sentence was not intended as a general statement, but, rather, was clearly aimed at the Middle East. As my initial Dec. 15 letter stated (and my Dec. 28 reply reiterated), “There is no military solution in Israel-Palestine” (emphasis added). Moreover, such a statement should be obvious from the point of view of any unprejudiced observer. It’s why Zionism has never been able to eliminate the Palestinian resistance after a century of warfare, and why Palestinian nationalism has never been able to eliminate Zionism. Besides killing hundreds of Israeli civilians, it’s why Oct. 7 achieved nothing other than to bring down a hail of destruction on the defenseless people of Gaza. How long can this go on before people figure out that there has got to be a better way?
Marxism’s attitude toward violence in general is precisely the same as a surgeon’s is to a scalpel. We use it when necessary, avoid it when it’s not, and, above all, do not fetishize it or regard as an end in itself. Lincoln tried to avoid violence in 1861 while Bolsheviks used a minimum in 1917 only to have violence thrust upon them during the Russian Civil War. As for the Palestinians, they certainly have a right to protect themselves. But the aggressive terrorist violence with which Hamas is now associated has been entirely counterproductive – and I dare Ross to prove otherwise.
There is nothing “ultimatistic” or “abstentionist” about such an approach. No Marxist says to the so-called liberation movement, “conduct your fight by our principles, or we will have nothing to do with you,” as Ross suggests. To the contrary, our goal is to engage with such forces and the masses they claim to represent – to argue with them, confront, agitate, etc. in order to demonstrate why our principles are progressive and theirs are not. We form “temporary” alliances with such elements solely for the purpose of winning over the working class and peasantry. Lenin’s point in his 1920 Draft Theses on National and Colonial Questions cannot be stressed too strongly: “The Communist International must enter into a temporary alliance with bourgeois democracy in the colonial and backward countries, but should not merge with it and should under all circumstances uphold the independence of the proletarian movement even if it is in its most embryonic form.” The goal above all else is to transform an embryonic proletarian movement into something more.
“Zionism justifies its assault on Gaza by presenting Hamas as a criminal syndicate from which the Gazans need to be liberated,” Ross writes. “Hamas and Islamism are equated with any form of armed resistance in order to discredit the national liberation struggle and obscure its anti-colonial character with the label ‘religious extremism.’” Quite right. But has it occurred to Ross that the Oct. 7 atrocities might have made Zionism’s task a trifle easier?
“[T]he methods of Hamas are not due, in the first instance, to religious ideas,” he continues. “Rather, it was compelled by the development of the mass movement itself to take up methods of armed struggle. Its ideas are shaped by its social environment, by the material realities of the occupation. This should have been obvious to a Marxist. To speak of Hamas primarily in religious terms, as Lazare does, as a group bent on ‘a medieval religious crusade,’ is to detach Hamas from its historical origins and flip causes on their heads in a manner worthy of a liberal commentator.”
This is nonsense. Of course, the social environment acts on Hamas. But Hamas acts equally on the social environment. This is what the dialectic is all about, i.e. the mutual interaction of historical forces. As I pointed out in my Dec. 28 letter, Hamas is a political party with roots going back to the 1920s. It has demonstrated enormous staying power over the years in a wide variety of countries and is thus anything but an epiphenomenon created by a momentary historical conjunction, as Ross’s one-sided depiction suggests.
As for speaking of Hamas “primarily in religious terms” and thereby exaggerating the religious role, it’s not just me who speaks this way, but Hamas itself. “In the name of the most merciful Allah,” its founding 1988 Covenant begins. “Israel,” it continues, “will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it.” Closing one’s eyes to religious obscurantism will not make it go away. To be sure, the group switched from quietism to violence in response to stepped-up Zionist repression and the collapse of the PLO. But its long political history helped shape the course such violence took. Ross refers to Hamas’s “2017 Charter, which … has a strikingly different orientation than the 1988 Covenant, with Hamas, among other things, affirming ‘that its conflict is with the Zionist project not with the Jews because of their religion.’” Correct again. But Hamas did not repeal the old document when it unveiled what was in fact merely an addendum. To the contrary, Mahmoud al-Zahar, a co-founder and member of its senior leadership, informed Reuters that “there is no contradiction between what we said in the [2017] document and the pledge we have made to God in our [original] charter.” So the 1988 Covenant remains as valid as ever in terms of the insight it offers into Hamas’s political character.
“With the Palestinian working class excluded from the Histadrut, the racist federation of Israeli ‘trade unions,’ and held down as a permanent underclass of hyper-exploited workers, there was no possibility of a joint struggle against Israeli capital,” Ross says. “In these circumstances, it was inevitable that the Palestinian masses turned to militant nationalism.” But it was not inevitable at all. With proper leadership, Palestinian and Israeli socialists could have mounted a campaign for day workers from the Occupied Territories to be admitted into Histadrut (which, by the way, has thousands of Arab members). Failing that, they could have organized separate unions and then pressed for amalgamation with the same labor organization. Needless to say, Hamas is the last organization on earth to lead such a campaign since it rejects unions, socialism, and all that goes with them. Indeed, the bombing campaign it initiated during the Second Intifada was clearly likely at preventing any such movement since the all-too-predictable outcome was that Palestinian guest workers would be dismissed and sent home. Hamas succeeded all too handsomely in locking up Palestinian workers in Gaza away from jobs and competing political influences.
So, yes, if you embrace defeatism, then Hamas is pretty much what you wind up with, not to mention Netanyahu, Smotrich, Ben-Gvir, and so on. Socialist internationalism is every bit as vital in Israel-Palestine as it is anywhere else in the colonial or semi-colonial world. In fact, it’s more so.
Further on Lenin and the right to self-determination:
It is for that right, and in a struggle to achieve sincere recognition for it, that the Social-Democrats of the oppressor nations must demand that the oppressed nations should have the right of secession, for otherwise recognition of equal rights for nations and of international working-class solidarity would in fact be merely empty phrase-mongering, sheer hypocrisy. On the other hand, the Social-Democrats of the oppressed nations must attach prime significance to the unity and the merging of the workers of the oppressed nations with those of the oppressor nations; otherwise these Social-Democrats will involuntarily become the allies of their own national bourgeoisie, which always betrays the interests of the people and of democracy, and is always ready, in its turn, to annex territory and oppress other nations.
Needless to say, slaughtering innocent civilians is not exactly the best way of effectuating a merger of two proletariats living side by side.
-Dan Lazare
