MLPD – Basic Position on the Palestinian Liberation Struggle – for the ICOR

MLPD – Basic Position on the Palestinian Liberation Struggle – for the ICOR¹

1. The MLPD’s solidarity with the Palestinian people in the struggle for their social and national liberation is unconditional. Since its founding, the MLPD has realized this solidarity in word and deed. Vile denigration as “anti-Semites” or open attacks by the German state or Zionist-influenced groups such as the “anti-Germans” can never detract from this solidarity.

2. The policy of the Zionist, imperialist state of Israel is inhuman. Millions of Palestinians have been expelled from their land and live in foreign countries. In violation of international law, the Israeli state occupies the West Bank, including East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip (as well as the Golan Heights). It brutally expropriates and expels the Palestinian population from their land, destroys nature, and deprives people of their foundations of life and work. Leading representatives are targeted for assassination, regardless of numerous civilian casualties.

The West Bank is fragmented by Israeli settlements, walls and roads; fertile, water-rich land is illegally annexed to Israeli territory. Tens of thousands of workers from the Palestinian territories are forced to work under miserable conditions in Israel. A humanitarian catastrophe is developing in the Gaza Strip. 211 UN resolutions between 1967 and 2020 condemning Israel’s annexation policy as a violation of international law have been ignored by all Israeli governments.

3. Among the Palestinian masses, the longing and the justified struggle for national and social liberation is alive. Again and again there is an upsurge of struggles up to uprisings and armed struggles. They are put down by the state of Israel using terror and brutal force.

4. Israel is an imperialist country that has considerably expanded its independent role in recent years and decades. US imperialism, in alliance with reactionary Zionist circles, views Israel as its reactionary bulwark in the Middle East. Relying primarily on its sophisticated military, its highly armed intelligence service, and bolstered by its distinctive state-monopoly structures, Israel is an imperialist regional power (Revolutionärer Weg, vol. 36, The Crisis of Bourgeois Ideology and of Anticommunism, p. 127) and aspires to a regional leadership role in the struggle against new-imperialist Iran. Israel has 13 monopolies among the 2000 largest in the world; its military is the most powerful armed force in the Middle East. Israel has the world’s largest military budget per capita and is among the world’s 10 largest arms exporters. A new military alliance against Iran (MEAD) is being sought in the region under US leadership and together with Israel.

5. Marxism-Leninism and its leading representatives – beginning with Karl Marx and Frederick Engels and August Bebel’s fundamental speech at the 3rd Party Congress of the then still revolutionary Social Democracy – have always opposed anti-Semitism in a principled way.² We resolutely attack the anticommunist demagogy that defames legitimate criticism of the reactionary policies of the Israeli government as “left-wing anti-Semitism.” We are clear opponents of the reactionary ideology of Zionism, which the ruling reactionary circles in Israel use as an ideological basis to justify their imperialist policies and inhumane treatment of the Palestinians. Zionism has been rightly condemned by the UN as a form of racism and racial discrimination.³

6. We support the position on the establishment of the State of Israel taken by the then socialist Soviet Union under Stalin after the Holocaust by German Hitlerite fascism. The Soviet Union was the only country at that time to implement an exemplary socialist foreign policy in the spirit of friendship among peoples in an extremely complicated situation. The then Foreign Minister Gromyko said before the UN: “It would be unjustifiable to deny this right [to have a state of their own] to the Jewish people, particularly in view of all it has undergone during the Second World War. … Neither the historic past nor the conditions prevailing in Palestine at present can justify any unilateral solution of the Palestine problem, either in favor of establishing an independent Arab State, without consideration for the legitimate rights of the Jewish people, or in favor of the establishment of an independent Jewish State, while ignoring the legitimate rights of the Arab population.”⁴ After a joint Jewish-Arab state failed, the decision was taken in 1947 to divide the until then British Mandate territory into Israel and Palestine. In this situation, the then socialist Soviet Union supported this and was the first to recognize the State of Israel, which was the right thing to do.

7. “Workers of all countries, unite!” and “Workers of all countries and all oppressed, unite!” – this is our basic guideline also for the solution of the Palestine question.

“Workers of all countries, unite!” also applies to the Jewish and Arab working class and to the masses in Israel! In Israel there are also class struggle, trade union strike movements, as well as Palestinian-Arab parties with justified demands; initiatives and movements in Israel that stand up for a just peace, for the rights of the Palestinians, against the confiscation of homes, the building of settlements, or the racist nationality law. Of course, the decades of systematic Zionist influencing and hate-mongering have left their mark on the Israeli workers and masses. In patient persuasion and alliance work, the guideline of the working-class movement since Marx and Engels must be implanted here: “A people that oppresses another cannot itself be free.”

8. This road of struggle for national and social liberation of the Palestinian people in interaction with the class struggle and the struggle for socialism in Israel in connection with the anti-imperialist and antifascist united front is certainly a rocky road, but the only one that leads to the future. We fundamentally criticize the open betrayal of the interests of the Palestinians by the PLO leadership in the Oslo Accords and at the so-called Camp David Summit in July 2000, where the Palestinian delegation accepted Israel’s occupation and declared its willingness to relinquish 78% of the territory earmarked in the UN partition plan of 1947 and to renounce the right of return of expelled Palestinians.

Among the Palestinians there are also different interests. It is therefore fundamentally wrong, out of disappointment or skepticism towards the workers and the masses in Israel or due to nationalistic and reactionary influences, to place the Palestinian nationality over the class interests, to work together with reactionary and proto-fascist or fascist forces like Hamas or the “Jihad” organization or even (directly or indirectly) with the imperialist and fascist dictatorship in Iran, let alone view them as allies. Revolutionaries always must start from the proletarian class viewpoint!

9. We recognize the right of existence of the State of Israel. We criticize every form of anti-Semitism and anticommunism, also on the part of petty-bourgeois/bourgeois Arab circles, Trotskyists, and parts of the petty-bourgeois Left, which finds expression in criticism of Stalin’s foreign policy in the Palestine question. This does not at all imply recognition of the proto-fascist policy of the imperialist Israeli state, let alone of the Israeli occupation.

10. The MLPD sees the prospect for the future of the Israeli and Palestinian peoples in a joint democratic state where equality, mutual respect and trust, without discrimination, prevail. Ultimately, and with all it implies, today this can only be a socialist state. As possible, though now made clearly more difficult, intermediate step and transitional stage we advocate a “two-state solution” involving the return of the territories occupied by Israel. A democratic two-state solution as transitional stage is only achievable in the struggle of the Palestinian people for national and social liberation supported by the solidarity of the Israeli working class and international solidarity. This does not yet mean a fundamental solution to the problem, but it does improve the basis for the joint struggle of the workers and popular masses in Israel and Palestine for their road as part of the international socialist revolution.