On the Palestinian Question

Commentary

I HATE to write about the Middle East conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. Any half aware political person knows why without having to go into detail. Right? There are bad days with shots fired, hostages taken, rockets launched, separation walls built and tensions on both sides inflamed by their respective leaderships. Then it goes downhill from there. However in light of American President Bush’s ‘optimism’ about concluding a just peace and, moreover, some kind of peace treaty, before he leaves office a few words are in order.

The Israeli-Palestinian dispute is a classic example of the fate of interpenetrated peoples who both have the right to national self-determination but the exercise by one of which, however, in effect denies the other of its right. There are other such situations, like in Ireland, but today this conflict is the one that is front and center. I have mentioned at other times in discussing the right to national self-determination that it is not a supra-historic right but is rather a basic democratic right. Whether or when it is exercised depends on the state of the class struggle and whether it helps resolve the national question satisfactorily. And that, my friends, is the point. Socialist support the right to national self-determination in order to take the nagging national question off the agenda and put the class question to the fore. And that is basically all we ask of it. As a general proposition, self evident in the age of ‘globalization’, the nation state is obsolete as a political entity. However, they are easier to declare obsolete than to get rid of.

For the most the part in the year 2008 the national right to self-determination does no come up as a question for most states. Although no Zionist wants to hear this, in the context of the question of Israel’s right to national self-determination, in short its right to exist, is not seriously in question. There may be a great deal of bluster on all sides about this but when the deal goes down Israel is by far the dominant military power in the region and by that fact alone assures its continued existence. Moreover, the subject Palestinian people, despite their occasional military efforts to the contrary, do not represent any threat to the existence of the state of Israel.

That, dear reader, brings us back to President Bush’s, or for that matter any party’s, efforts today to ‘resolve’ the national question here. Let us be clear, we support measures that represent even a distorted expression of the Palestinian right to national self-determination like the bi-national state. However, at the risk of sounding utopian the hard reality is that the Israeli-Palestinian dispute is one of those that really cry out for a socialist solution that goes beyond the democratic question of national self-determination where the working people of the two countries create a bi-national state as part of a greater federation in the Middle East. Ya right, you say. Okay that does sound utopian today but YOU tell me another just and equitable way out. In any case, I forewarned you that I hate to write on this subject. Enough said.