join_the_iww

If so, what did you think of it?

I'm curious about it, but I have too much other stuff I want to read first.

https://www.marxists.org/archive//draper/1948/07/israel.htm

I read this recently, and I was honestly kind of shocked because it's just so different from how leftists talk about this issue now.

Draper's ultimate proposal is one that we would probably agree still with today (socialist one state solution, Jewish and Arab workers united together, both groups overthrowing their bourgeois or feudal rulers), but a lot of the premises he endorses in the process of reaching that conclusion are just not things that you would hear supporters of Palestine say anymore today. For example:

• he is very supportive of the concept of Jewish self-determination
• he referred to the Arab countries that declared war on Israel as "semi-feudal oppressors" and "some of the most backward and reactionary kingships and dynasts of the world"
  • he writes further that "The attack upon the Jews’ right to self-determination comes from a deeply reactionary social class – the Arab lords – whose reactionary aims in this case are not alleviated by the fact that they themselves suffer from the exploitation of British imperialism (at the same time that they cling to that imperialism in order to defend their privileges against their own people)."
• he accuses the UK, and in particular the British Labour Party (which was the majority governing party at the time) of "propping up the Abdullahs and Arab landlord-princes of the Middle East against the Jewish state"
• he expresses support for "full recognition of the Jewish state by our own government; for lifting the embargo on arms to Israel; for defense of the Jewish state against the Arab invasion in the present circumstances"

This is all certainly a lot more charitable to Israel/Zionism than we are today. Now, Jewish Israelis are considered undeserving foreign invaders and settlers; it is believed that the state of Israel is an unambiguous creature of Western Imperialism and has always been such; and Arab opposition to the state of Israel is considered progressive instead of reactionary.

What should we make of this? Is this a good representation of how Marxists generally talked about this conflict at that time, or was Draper an outlier? At the time he wrote this, was he wrong about any of his judgments? Was he right to characterize the conflict in this way at the time, but just proven wrong by later history?

His punishment was he got suspended from the party for a little while and then reinstated with a warning not to say anything like that again for the next three years. So basically a slap on the wrist.

Let me also take a moment to say that the whole concept of indigeneity, constantly invoked by a certain species of pro-Palestine activist, is an utter waste of time. Neither side has any clear historical claim to being the first people there, as neither are descendants of the Canaanites described in the Torah. (The notion that Jewish people are indigenous to Palestine is denied by their own holy book - Abraham was from Iraq!) We will never, ever resolve the historical debates to anyone’s satisfaction. More to the point, though… rights do not stem from indigeneity. I understand that, to a large degree, academics essentially reverse-engineered the concept in order to give moral heft to the plight of the Native Americans, who were the victims of a largely-successful genocide. But the rights of the Native Americans did not depend on their indigenous nature, especially considering that like all people they came here from somewhere else. We shouldn’t have slaughtered them not because they had some sort of unique connection to the land that they were on but because they were human and in possession of rights. The same applies to Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs - they are there, they have the right to stay and to live in peace and prosperity. There is no lawyering our way out of this by pretending we know who was there first. The concepts of democratic rule, human rights, egalitarianism, and international law must be enough.

https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/can-the-liberal-democratic-project