June 1, 2024
By Stephen Gowans
Le Monde Diplomatique is running a review of Moscow's stance on the Palestinian question in this month's (June, 2024) issue, presenting a history that begins with the twists and turns of Soviet policy.
The Soviet Union's initial position of the Palestinian question, likely formulated under the influence of the Comintern and definitely under the influence of Marxism, was that there ought to be in Palestine an independent, non-national, democratic state, in which all citizens are equal, regardless of their ethno-religious identity.
This is the same view which was initially taken up by the PLO, and is the stance of those who today "support the dismantlement of Israel's racist structures and laws and advocate for one decolonised state, from the river to the sea, in which everyone living within it is equal before the law and does not benefit from any racial, ethnic, or religious privileges," as Joseph Massad recently put it.
In early 1947, R. Palme Dutt, writing on behalf of the communist parties of the British Empire, demanded "the creation of a free, independent and democratic Palestinian state, which will guarantee equal rights of citizenship with full religious freedom and full opportunities to develop their culture to all its inhabitants, Arab and Jewish."
It seems odd that a little over one year later, the USSR recognized "the state of Israel, three days after its founding," and equally odd (or disappointing if not repugnant) that less than a year earlier it had backed the UN partition plan, which granted Jewish settlers in Palestine, who made up one-third of the population, over one-half of the Palestinian's country.
One body, the UN General Assembly, at the time dominated by imperialist and settler colonial states, pledged more than half of the country of one nation to Jewish settlers who said they made up another. The UN General Assembly had no legal or moral authority to partition Palestine.
Worse still, Moscow was recognizing a state that had no intention of even adhering to the legally and morally invalid UN plan, having taken territory by force slated for an Arab state, and expelling 800,000 Palestinians.
It gets worse. Stalin then sent arms via Czechoslovakia to the Israeli army, and dispatched "hundreds of Jewish officers from the Red Army," to help put down the resistance of the Palestinians and their Arab compatriots to the theft or their land and expulsion.
Soviet support helped "Israel defeat the Arab countries, then seen as British allies by the Soviets." In the settler-native war of 1948, the Soviets were clearly on the side of the settlers and against the oppressed. Moscow's appeal to the oppressed to join hands with workers around the world under Soviet leadership, must have seemed, for good reason, to be a bad joke.
Why did the Soviets abandon a position of opposition to settler colonialism in favor of one supporting Zionism? Two words: Raison d'etat. Realpolitick. Moscow saw advantage for the Soviet state in backing a movement it saw as against British influence in the Middle East. Since the Zionists had engaged in a war of terrorism with the British mandate authorities, and London controlled Egypt, Iraq, and Transjordan, Stalin thought that support for Jewish settlers in Palestine would deal a blow to British influence in West Asia and North Africa.
It didn't. The British continued to wield influence in the region and Israel looked to the West for support. Soviet influence in subsequent years remained limited to a few Arab nationalist states—Syria, Iraq, Libya—which had turned to the Soviets for aid against the British and Americans, who objected to their economic nationalism.
Even then, these states were wary of getting too close to Moscow for fear of being turned into Soviet vassals. Given Moscow's capacity to sacrifice principle in pursuit of realpolitik and its immediate political aims, their fears were not without foundation.
Moscow's shift from endorsing a decolonized Palestine to supporting Zionist settler colonialism was an instance of opportunism—sacrificing principal and fundamental goals to short-term advantage. Lenin railed against the opportunism of the Second International; on the Palestinian question, Stalin practiced it.
Of course, it could be quibbled that the Marxist notion of opportunism is specific to working class interests, not those of an agrarian people despoiled by settler colonialism. The reply, if we confine ourselves to the Marxist canon, is to paraphrase the words of Marx. No people can be free who help enslave another. Clearly, the Soviets, at Stalin's direction, helped Zionists figuratively enslave the Palestinians.
It is said, though the story may be apocryphal, that Stalin later recognized his error and apologized. If true, we must ask ourselves—what did he apologize for? His opportunism, or the fact that he failed to obtain even an opportunistic advantage in his abandonment of principle?
In later years, the USSR would support the two-state solution, as do some previously Soviet-aligned communist parties today. So accustomed to blindly following the Moscow line with all its twist, turns, opportunism, and raison d'etat, the leaders of these parties long ago lost the power of independent thought, if they ever had it to begin with. So, they ape what the Soviet position was in its final years, and one suspects without the foggiest idea of what they're supporting or why.
The two-state solution has a practical problem. Exactly where is the Palestinian state to be located, now that the building of Jewish settlements in the West Bank has effectively denied the Palestinians territory on which to build a viable state? And why should Palestinians be crammed into an insignificant slice—or many insignificant, incontiguous, slices—of their own country?
But the practical problems of the two-state solution pale in comparison to the moral problem. A Palestinian state alongside Israel means the continued existence of a Jewish supremacist apartheid state, whose origin is found in settler colonialism, the theft of the Palestinians' country, and ethnic cleansing.
Moreover, two-states concedes the legitimacy of Zionism, a racist, antisemitic, doctrine which holds that:
- The Jews are a race, rather than a religious community;
- Dismisses activism against antisemitism as futile (because Zionists believe antisemitism is ineradicable, built into the DNA of non-Jews); and
- Favors, as antisemites do, the emigration of Jews from the diaspora to Israel.
Strange that no one with even a single progressive bone in their body would have accepted anything less than the complete dismantlement of apartheid South Africa, and the creation, in its place, of a single, unitary, non-national, democratic state in which all people, settlers and natives, were equal. And yet many of the same people, including communists, continue to support a two state solution in Palestine--the companion arrangement to a state for whites and Bantustans for blacks in South Africa.
As for China, the capitalist giant that occasionally sings rhapsodies to Marx to excite its gullible supporters in the West, its president Xi Jinping "recently reiterated his support for a two-state solution", which is to say, for the continued existence of a Jewish supremacist state based on settler colonialism, ethnic cleansing, and racist institutions. Yes, indeed—China really is leading the global south.
As Xi rejects a two-state solution for China—where two independent Chinese states, Taiwan and the PRC, could live side by side, in peace—he endorses a two-state model for the Palestinians. The Chinese, in his view, deserve better. They won't concede a part of their country in the name of peace—as Xi expects the Palestinians to do.
Xi cares about China, tout court, not the global south and not the Palestinians, any more than Stalin did. As leaders of major states, Stalin then and Xi now, pursue as their priority the interests of the states they lead; everything else is secondary, available to be sacrificed in pursuit of raison d'etat, real politik, and opportunism.
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