Jew World Order

Palestine: A Socialist Introduction was just published by Haymarket Books. The collection (which includes essays from Shireen Akram-Boshar, Omar Barghouti, Nada Elia, and others) argues that Palestine should be viewed as an important part socialism and socialism should be viewed as an important part of Palestinian liberation.

“This collection is a poignant and incisive engagement with the past, and possible future, role of the Left in the struggle for justice in Palestine,” writes historian Ilan Pappé. “From critical analysis of organizational matters to the very complex issues of gender and secularism, this book is a must read for anyone whose socialism has brought them to care and act on behalf of Palestine and the Palestinians. As a Left, we are at a crucial juncture of strategic contemplation in general and on Palestine in particular. This book offers ways forward that can re-energize the Left as a robust alliance of identification and solidarity for the sake of the liberation of Palestine as well as that of all the oppressed workers and peoples around the globe.”

Mondoweiss’ Michael Arria interviewed the books editors, Sumaya Awad and brian bean. Awad is a Palestinian activist and writer, and Adalah Justice Project’s Director of Strategy and Communications. bean is a socialist activist and writer. He is also one of the founding editors of Rampant magazine.

Michael Arria: In the introduction, you talk about this left/socialist movement that’s emerging in the United States. I think a lot of young people have been drawn to socialism as a result of domestic issues, whether it’s the way the pandemic has been handled, the Sanders campaigns, the explosion of DSA, etc. What would you tell someone who recently adopted these politics about why an internationalist framework is so important and why Palestine is such an important part of that framework specifically?

Sumaya Awad: Thanks, that’s a great question. So I think for any socialist movement that really wants to go up against capitalism, especially capitalism today and all it’s globalized networks, you have to have very strong and principled internationalist politics. And what I mean by that is a grounding and an understanding that our liberation will only become a reality if we’re all free. And I think for us here in the United States, there’s this burgeoning socialist movement that has a lot of power and a lot of potential and that’s growing very, very rapidly and has a lot at stake in terms of whether or not it’s going to come to terms with our role internationally and how it connects back back to domestic policy. Foreign policy is domestic policy.

So I think first and foremost, that just means acknowledging that the U.S. became a state through displacing and colonizing existing indigenous nations here that were here long before European conquest. And I think it’s especially important right now because we’re seeing every excuse under the sun being leveled against poor and working class people in this country for why they can’t have Medicare for All, for why they can’t have a $15 minimum wage, and a number of other things. The reason given is that there’s not enough funding, where are we going to get the funding from? You only have to look at the U.S. Defense budget, the bloated Pentagon budget. I mean, the U.S. spends more on defense than the next 10 countries combined. It’s billions and billions of dollars. And actually post 9/11, the whole “War on Terror” period that has lasted from then to now, the U.S. has spent over six trillion dollars on war, killing people overseas indiscriminately, and justifying all sorts of brutal regimes around the world.

However, here domestically we’ve just seen things get worse and worse. The infrastructure of this of this country is just rapidly crumbling. So I think that’s the first reason that I would give for why international politics is so important and why it’s it’s crucial that we understand that our liberation is tied to the liberation of the working class, beyond our borders, everywhere.

The second thing I would say, specifically for Palestine, is that the U.S. helps prop up Israel’s regime, both financially and politically. Israel gets $3.8 billion a year. That’s part ten-year deal that Obama and Biden signed back in 2018. In fact, Joe Biden actually flew to Israel to make sure that that agreement was approved by all the necessary parties. And this is military funding. And there’s a particular clause in this agreement that necessitates that a certain percentage of this military funding Israel has to spend on purchasing U.S. weapons. So this military funding that Israel is using to oppress, to colonize, to occupy Palestinians is also coming back here to hurt us, because it’s leading to the hyper-militarization of the police here, of our cities, of our schools, of campuses, et cetera.

So that’s one reason why Palestine is important. Also, what do we believe as socialists? What binds us together is our class politics. The working class together is what will build a new kind of world and a different system. And what that means is standing with the oppressed outside of our borders and with Palestine. It means listening and heeding the call of Palestinians to boycott Israel and apply pressure until it ends its occupation, until it allows Palestinians their right of return, until it dismantles its apartheid wall.

What this means is that we cannot cross that picket line. There’s a call to boycott. We need to listen to that call. We need to boycott until Israel is held accountable. We’ve seen in the U.S. this attack on the boycott movement in communities and schools, on the local and state and federal level, there’s this all out war on those who advocate for Palestinian freedom, and it doesn’t look like Joe Biden is going to change anything when it comes to that.

[Biden’s Secretary of State pick] Anthony Blinken has already made it clear that he is going to fight tooth and nail to ensure that Palestine advocacy is is criminalized or he’s going to attempt to criminalize it. I think that’s what we’re up against. And that’s why it’s so important here in the U.S. to to talk about this and fight for this. And I’ll just end by saying one of the one of the harshest, most violent crackdowns on socialist movements in the US was in the 50s with the attack on socialist organizers and communists. And it was during this McCarthy era that so much happened and we can actually see parallels today.

When you think about how the Palestine movement is being treated in the U.S., many have accurately said that the latest incarnation of McCarthyism is what we’re seeing with the Palestine movement from blacklists, smear campaigns, deportations, harassment, isolation, et cetera. So I think it’s really important to reckon with that and think about how this hurts all of our movements.

The Palestine movement doesn’t exist in isolation, so we need to stand up for it and integrate it into into our organizing for any system change to be possible in the U.S.

Labor Zionism was a pretty popular current of Zionism originally and antisemitism was no doubt a rampant problem throughout the world in 1948, so there was a confused and contradictory reaction to creation of Israel by progressive/left groups at the time. The beginning of your book covers some of this history Can you talk about the relationship between socialism and Zionism and share your thoughts on some of the contradictions at work there?

brian bean: I’m glad you asked this question, because on Twitter, where the magic happens, a lot of the Zionist attacks on the book have been to say, “But wait, Israel is socialist” and sort of that nonsense. And so it’s very much a live question, even though it’s a historical question as well. And so I’m glad that you ask it. And as you mentioned in the book, there’s two chapters that really go over this much more in depth.

I think that there is this left-wing gloss to the Israeli state, and that comes from the fact that the Labor Party and its forerunner, the Worker’s Party of the Land of Israel, were in name and lineage left wing. Both these parties and the Confederation of Hebrew Labor were instrumental in the founding of the Hebrew state, of the Israeli state. But of course, that founding was the violent ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people, the massacres, and the land theft of the Nakba.

And many of the major perpetrators of this atrocity came from the Labor Zionist movement, many officers in the Palmach, the Haganah militias who carried out these atrocities, and subsequently the IDF were members of the party. David Ben-Gurion, of course, is a name that people sort of know. He comes from that tradition and every Israeli prime minister before 1977 was a member of Labor. And so this tendency has its roots in the socialist tradition, despite the fact that it sort of gone tremendously off course, and some people sort of see it this way because of this long connection. The Labor Party is still in the Socialist International, for example.

The grim historical irony is that the growth of Jewish socialist currents are rooted in the oppression of anti-Semitism that was rampant. You mentioned the 1940s, but I think that its roots come from the rampant anti-Semitism, particularly in Eastern Europe, in the latter half of the 19th century. That experience generated a radical current of struggle that came to connect with the ideas of socialism as a means to try to end that oppression. The notion of Zionism was certainly not monolithic in that movement at all.

The Jewish Bund, which was the largest Jewish left-wing organization, was explicitly non-Zionist, as they considered it a retreat from the fighting of anti-Semitism. I think that is the key element.  There’s this whole underlying assumption that undergirds Zionism and that is that anti-Semitism is natural and eternal, that it can never be defeated. So it can only be remedied by withdrawing from society and forming a separate state. That’s really the underlying of assumption of Zionism.

And it’s important to note, like I mentioned, that this was for a long time a minority position within the Jewish movement. And Zionist figures like [Theodor] Herzl and [Chaim] Weizman wrote explicitly about how they saw the socialist movement as their competitor to the more formal Zionist movement. There’s this quote in our book where Herzl was meeting with the Russian tsar’s head of police and he was looking for the tsar’s help to get the Ottoman Empire to give them land. And he said, “Help me get land and the revolt will end sooner”, referring to the socialist movement that was threatening the tsar in Russia.

Basically, if you help help me get this land—he says–then I’ll try to detract from the connection of many Jewish radicals to the project of revolutionary socialism. So Labor Zionism is this defeatist approach to fighting oppression that says we can’t actually defeat it. We have to retreat from it and build our walls up. And those walls, sadly, are not figurative, but quite physical. This then is used to justify the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, because if one thinks, hey, we as a group can’t join together with our class to defeat our common enemies, then you get this situation that is quite bleak of an oppressed group being against oppressed group, and that is basically a right-wing position that requires racist justification.

And that’s what became of Zionism. There is this racist justification at its core too. So, for example, Ber Borochov, who’s considered the founder of Labor Zionism and has kind of symbolized its left-wing. His writings never referred to Palestinians as “Palestinians” or even as “Arabs.” He only called them “citizens of Palestine” because he argued that they “lack any national culture” and “purely adopt the national culture higher than them.” Those are direct quotes from him. These are racist positions that strip Palestinians of their identity and say they can’t have that.

And it’s these racist assumptions that are used to justify the ethnic cleansing that went on, carried out by a lot of people who considered themselves left-wing. And, of course, there’s another vision that we saw in Russia which in some ways is a key country for the Jewish socialist movement. While sections of Labor Zionism went with this defeatist road that I describe, you also saw the Russian Revolution that overthrew the Tsarist. The Bolsheviks did things like outlaw anti-Semitism and had a disproportionately high number of Jewish leaders, like Leon Trotsky.

I think that’s stunning when you think about how Russia was probably the most violently anti-Semitic of countries before the rise of the Nazis, where there were horrible pogroms that were carried out regularly by fascist gangs. And so the Russian Revolution showed a different sort of revolutionary path to fighting oppression. So there’s a lot more that can be said. But I think in closing on this question I’d say, Labor Zionism is in some ways a dead branch that it is has helped build a settler colonial state and there’s no such thing as Labor Zionism anymore. There’s only settler colonialism.

Many assume that the Biden era will be a repeat of the Obama years in many ways, but there seems to be a real distinction between where the left (and the pro-Palestine movement) was in 2008 versus where it is today. How do you envision the battle between the Biden administration and the more progressive voices playing out over next four years?

Sumaya Awad: Great question. So to start, it’s important to really underscore that Biden and certainly the cabinet that he’s forming, at least from what we know so far, are going to stray very little from the Obama years and what we saw and experienced under Obama. The slick boardroom Democrats that are out to ensure that the status quo is what we go back to. You’re right to point out that there is there is this growing left, I think, in the Democratic Party and whether or not it will continue to grow and what direction it will take, we have yet to see.

But I think there’s certainly a lot of potential and a lot of things that point to a real threat within the party. And there’s people like Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib, there’s people like Cori Bush, who just won from Missouri, and Jamal Bowman in New York. And then even on the local level, there are also a number of people running and many of them explicitly socialist, that are offering a different type of campaign, a different program that is anticapitalist and that does integrate internationalism, that does integrate a more critical foreign policy.

So I think that’s important to put out there. I think that in the U.S., because there’s this increased polarization that we’re seeing, that we certainly saw with the election, it’s going to mean that there’s going to be a lot of emphasis on these left-wing progressive figures in the party and what they will do and how far they will push for the agenda that they put forward, whether it’s a Green New Deal or cancelling student debt or ending US funding for Israel, et cetera.

But at the same time I think there’s a lot of power within the Israel lobby and different Zionist movements in the U.S. I think they’re thrilled that Biden won because it meant that he could reestablish the bipartisan consensus on Israel. And this was really key for them, because four years of Trump really helped the Palestinian movement begin to win the ideological war, showing what Israel is and what Netanyahu represents and just how ingrained racism is in Israel’s project and now they’ve invited back this situation where Democrats can talk about diplomacy while really just allowing Israel to continue to expand its occupation, to continue to indiscriminately kill Palestinians and get this blank check from the U.S.

It’s going to it’s pouring a lot of funds and a lot of energy into reestablishing a bipartisan consensus on Israel. But so much has changed in the last four years. And and these changes aren’t sudden. They’ve been building for decades, there’s been decades of Palestine organizing on the ground here in the U.S. and in Palestine. There’s been the growth of the boycott movement. And it means that the liberal base that the Democratic Party establishment has really relied on to bolster its support for Israel to continue sending these blank checks is starting to question why the U.S. supports Israel so uncritically. And it’s starting to make connections between the fight against racism that’s growing here in the U.S. and Israel, to connect foreign policy to domestic policy. It’s connecting different components of this left movement that’s burgeoning here in the U.S. Racism, sexism, immigration, climate change, health care and the list goes on. I think that’s really, really key.

It’s not going to be easy for us to just return to the status quo on on Israel/Palestine. There’s a number of examples that show how this is true. I think one of the best ones that just happened recently was AOC pulling out of an event memorializing former Israeli military general and Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin back in September.

This was pretty massive. She had said she going to go and then Palestinians called her out and said, “Wait. This is someone that helped orchestrate the 1948 Nakba. This is someone that participated in ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. This is someone that was very cozy with some of apartheid South Africa’s leaders. Why are we memorializing him at a time when we’re criticizing and tearing down statues of of all of these racist, violent figures of U.S. history?”

So I think the fact that she spoke to Palestinians and then said, OK, I’m going to pull out and sort of retracted her earlier statements is huge, having someone in that position say I was wrong and I’m listening to the people that are usually not listened to, that are usually sidelined, isolated and silenced and doing so publicly. And she got the wrath of the Democratic Party establishment for doing it.

That’s just one example, but there’s so many more. Cori Bush, who won her election in Missouri. She spoke openly out about the boycott movement while running. You really couldn’t talk about Palestine in general, but certainly not if you were running for office. It would usually be the thing that you just avoided completely. And now that’s changing slowly. I’m not saying that that means our work is done, far from it. But it means that things are slowly changing and that the decades of work, of organizing on the ground are are starting to pay off very slowly.

brian bean: I think all these things bring out contradictions between the Democratic party and its base, and at the same time it speaks to deeper questions about the Democratic party. The party, despite its base, is still a party that is run by big business. If wars are politic carried out by other means, then politics is economics carried out by other means. The ruling class and its capitalist backers still see Israel as key for maintaining imperialism. They still see the integration of the Arab state economies and Israel as a positive thing for business in the region and they want these things to continue. That means continuing the normalization. That means continual ostracizing of the Palestinians. In my opinion, changing that will also require a break that brings into question the capitalist, imperialist nature of the Democratic party.

There was a poll done by the University of Maryland last year that we cite a lot at Mondoweiss. It showed that almost 50% of Democratic voters who have heard of the BDS movement support it, at least somewhat. Can you talk about the importance of that movement in terms of solidarity with Palestine and how do you think we can expand its reach into more mainstream organizations, like labor unions?

brian bean: I think that the BDS movement is probably the most important factor in this sea change. I think it’s moved the question of Palestine away from where it was for years, which was basically a third rail of politics, it’s something that you didn’t talk about. But now I think because of the BDS movement, it is now seen in this list of progressive causes that people are fighting for, even though it’s still fiercely contested in some ways.

A large part of its importance is its framework. It’s based on the human rights situation of Palestinians and calls into focus the corporations and states that collude with, and even profit from these abuses. And it also provides clear demands to end the occupation, for the full legal equality of Palestinians, and the right of return.

I think people can connect with these demands easily and build campaigns around these central messages. As far as BDS shifting public opinion, I think that how much Israel communicates that it’s threatened by BDS reflects how powerful it is. The fact that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo visited an Israeli settlement last month and Trump’s official designation of BDS is anti-Semitic is not accidental.

And while externally the Israeli state sometimes tries to downplay the effect of BDS when they’re speaking among themselves, they’re quite clear that it’s seen as a threat. And the very fact that the Israeli state funds the social media campaigns and funds interventions on US campuses where BDS is the strongest, I think speaks to the fact that that the the movement’s [impact].

I think that we have a long way to go. The BDS movement in the United States, which I think is different than elsewhere in the world, has been, I think strongest on college campuses. But I think that to really expand it, trying to get it into labor unions is key. And I think internationally we’ve seen this has been done quite successfully. Places like in Scandinavia and France and in England, like the large National Trade Union Federations, have endorsed BDS. Farmer unions in India with millions of of members have backed BDS.

So I think that the U.S. is behind the ball and that I think it has some catching up to do. I think we just need to fight these campaigns and part of it is trying to fight to bring political fights into unions. I think because of the defeats that the American labor movement has taken over years, our unions just don’t fight as much as they do in other countries.

I think that’s changing. We have seen the wave of teacher revolts, we saw at the beginning of COVID, particularly in the health care and education sectors, people engaging in strikes and actions to try to make conditions safer. And so when when you’re able to fight around your own conditions, that’s the territory that you can begin to bring in more political fights. And that’s key. I think it’s not accidental that a union like the ILWU dockworkers in the West Coast was the union that called for a day long strike in solidarity with the black revolt against police violence this summer and one of the unions that refused to unload Israeli ships during Israeli attacks on Gaza.

So I think that the ability to politicize your work and to say, hey, this is not just about our wages, but this is about the fact that actually workers ourselves can have a say and can have the power to strike as a weapon, I think, are important things to bring into that. And I think one of the things that that will help is really political education. And this is something that we hope our book contributes to.

If you’re going to go into your workplace to argue that you should endorse BDS or break this contract where your your retirement or your pension is invested in an Israeli company or a U.S. corporation that profits from Israel, then you need to be able to to take on the argument of whether anti-Zionism is antisemitic, the one that’s often brought up as a counter. You need to be able to describe to people what’s going on and answer these key political questions that exist. So doing reading groups with your union comrades of our book and books like it, to help politicize the workplace as much as possible is, I think, seeding the ground to be able to carry out more intense specific fights on on getting BDS resolutions passed in unions.

Sumaya Awad: I think all of that is is one hundred percent true, and I think at the heart of it, the reason the boycott movement is so important and that the attack on it has been so vicious and so well-funded is because boycotts work and people know that boycotts work. History has taught us that in so many different ways. And in some ways a strike is a form of boycott. When workers are like, no, we’re not going to work, we’re not giving you a hard labor.

I think it’s one of the biggest threats to capitalism and I think that’s why when students want to pass a BDS referendum, it’s treated by its opponents as such an all-out attack. Some students are suspended. There’s a whole disciplinary thing that happens where it becomes a very big momentous thing.

I also want to point out that boycotting is demanding. The demands of the boycott are also very important because it’s not just saying we want to hold Israel accountable in some abstract sense. It’s saying, no, these are the things we’re demanding. brian listed the demands, but one I want to focus on is the right of return. And the fact that one of the demands is the right of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes, to their land is very, very important because that puts into question Israel as it stands right now. 

As far as the labor movement, one of the one of the main reasons that it’s just really weak in the labor movement is that the labor movement in the U.S. has been very weak for some time now. And so I think as the labor movement grows, it will also grow more internationalist and Palestine will be part of that framework and campaigns within it.

That said, there have been attempts by many, many Palestine and labor organizers in the U.S. to organize around boycotting Israel and around raising awareness and education about the role that U.S. unions play in helping to bolster and sustain Israel’s apartheid regime. And they have all been met with very vicious and violent attacks and people losing their jobs, people being completely sidelined and isolated. I think that’s really important. Although now we’re seeing this new generation of workers and this renewed passion and politicization in the labor movement that I think opens up a lot of new channels and opportunities.

We’ve seen the country gripped by  protests this year. By many metrics, the BLM protests were the most popular demonstrations in the history of the country. Can you talk about the parallels between what’s happening here and what’s happening in Palestine and the need for establishing those connections?

brian bean: The protests spoke to a core feature of this country, which is that this country is founded on and continues to operate off of anti-Black racism and that Black people in the country receive the sharpest edge of a U.S. state that operates in the interests of billionaires and violently maintains their rule however they see fit. The police presence in black communities is just the most glaring example of this

People are reacting to that and also to the situation around COVID. You saw complete federal inaction, allowing and still allowing hundreds of thousands of people to die of something that could have been prevented, and giving out trillions of dollars to maintain the profits of corporations. These contradictions that I think are made starkly apparent by the government’s response to COVID and by the everyday brutality that Black people face from the police.

This rottenness of the status quo is something that people obviously experience all the time to different degrees. And when people see that you can do something about it, it’s quite infectious. When the people in Minneapolis refused to stand down from police repression and light things on fire. People responded by saying, oh, we can actually fight back in our own communities. The protests around George Floyd obviously transformed the discussion of anti-racism and suddenly the notion of defunding the police is something that discussed in popular culture.

This is what happens when people begin to stand up and fight against systemic injustice. The protests that we saw over the summer are also connected in a way to things that happened internationally the year before. 2019 was a year of global protests. Sometimes those connections are lost a little bit because when COVID hit, basically most of them stalled. But there was this wave of protest from Chile to Haiti to France to Algeria to Sudan, Lebanon, Hong Kong that basically characterized all of 2019.

We thought, when will it come to the United States? And it did, but after some of the others were forced into submission by the pandemic. That is a really important context for one of the arguments that we make in the book, which is how the liberation of Palestine will be carried up by these mass uprisings, particularly of the Arab working class. That is the engine that will bring about the liberation of Palestine. 

We see the echoes of the future of what will be required across the globe, to force the hand to change the power dynamic and the status quo, not just inside of Palestine, but everywhere. Tthe wave of revolts that we saw in 2019 really originated in the Middle East with the revolution in Sudan and Algeria.  This of course was the second wave of the wave of protest of the Arab Spring, which, of course, next week is the 10 year anniversary of the self-immolation of Mohamed Bouazizi, which kicked that off.

Those protests of the Arab Spring were intimately connected to the Palestine movement. The organizing in Egypt began with solidarity demonstrations with the Palestinian people in the Second Intifada, along with the flags in the revolutionary squares of the countries where they were occurring there was the flag of Palestine. People saw the question of Palestine as being the most obvious example of Western and capitalist domination that their own despot’s that ruled their countries also represented. So I think the promise of that global mass revolt was that we exert change through this kind of struggle. I think that’s something that is important for us to grasp as people are continuing to protest, continuing to build mass organizations, and organizing with an antagonistic attitude towards the state.

Sumaya Awad: brian really said it all, but I’ll just add two things. The first is that I think this last period has really made it clear that people don’t trust their government and people don’t trust the status quo and see it for what it is. I think we see that more clearly than we have over last few years.

I think that the protests over the summer, the Black Lives Matter protest and the rebellion, coupled with the the revolts that we saw sweep the Middle East and North Africa in 2019, building off of the Arab Spring in 2011, all point to this wave that is leading towards some sort of system change. It’s not inevitable. And I think it’s really important to to underscore that, that it is not inevitable that we will win, that the left will win. But I think it certainly is possible. I think history has taught us that. The question is whether or not we win is connected to one of the issues we’re fighting, climate change. It’s a question of how far we will get before it’s too late and our planet ceases to exist in any way that allows us to survive. 

There’s also the question of the right. The right-wing movement is growing rapidly and is confident and not just in the U.S., but globally. At the same time, you have this growing left movement. Some of it is is characterized by socialism. In other places it’s not. But it is growing and it asserts itself every few years in different places across the world. And I think when the two come to head, which is happening in some places, there’s going to be a question of which will prevail.

I think making sure that we integrate internationalist politics in all of our organizing in the U.S., but elsewhere, any anywhere in the world where there’s a left and a progressive movement is key to ensuring that when we do reach this point where the two are up against each other, that the left will prevail. And I think making sure [the left is] connected [internationally] is the way to do that.