Theses on the Palestine-Israel Question 

Palestine was an Arab-Israeli country, with religious minorities, Arab Jews and Christians¹.

The Jewish question is not only a "religious question", Judaism is not only "a religion". With the development of capitalism, the Jewish question became a national question*1.

2) Jewish Nation

When political Zionism was formulated at the end of the 19th century, it was not possible to speak of a Jewish nation worldwide. In most countries the Jewish population lived as an oppressed national minority. In individual countries, however, such as Poland, Ukraine and Belarus, the formation of Jews into a nation was most advanced.

3) Political Zionism

Political Zionism is Jewish nationalism and at the same time a reaction to anti-Semitism. This nationalism is used by the imperialists for their purposes.

Political Zionism has two sides: a just one, with which it opposes the national oppression of the Jews and wanted to free itself from it by establishing its own Jewish state. On the other side, it has an aggressive, colonialist character. With its program "A land without a people for a people without a land", it ideologically/politically denies the existence of the indigenous (autochthonous) Arab people in Palestine and practically organizes their expulsion.

4) Jewish Nation in Palestine

Zionist immigration, anti-Semitism that resulted in the Holocaust², and Jewish people fleeing Nazi fascism played a crucial role in the formation of the Jewish nation in Palestine. After the end of World War II, the Jewish population in Palestine was about one-third of the total population. Measured by the Marxist criteria of a nation (territory, culture, language, economy, and historical community), the Jewish population in Palestine largely constituted a nation at the end of World War II. The right of the Jews to a state in Palestine was thus a given. A solution for the peaceful coexistence of both peoples would be a dual democratic state in which both the Arab and Jewish populations live together on an equal footing. However, decades of imperialist activity had ensured that a partition of Palestine into a Jewish and an Arab state was on the agenda.

5) Solution of the Palestine question 1945-1948

When the Palestine question came on the agenda in the UN (United Nations), the socialist Soviet Union advocated the creation of an independent, united democratic common state in which Arabs and Jews would live. When it became clear that this could not be achieved, it advocated the two-state solution, i.e., establishing an Arab and a Jewish state in Palestine.

The UN partition plan of 1947 was supported by the Soviet Union because it defended the right of self-determination of both peoples living in Palestine and their right to national, state independence, and included the withdrawal of British colonial power and an end to the imperialist mandate. It was progressive and democratic. The plan envisaged an economic union of the two states with the aim of enabling a voluntary union of the Jewish and Arab states in the future.

This was a solution to ease the charged situation and create a better starting point for the formation of an independent, democratic Arab-Jewish state. The SU's stance was and is correct, even in retrospect.

6) Establishment of the State of Israel - Al Nakba of the Palestinian People.

The imperialists, the Zionists and the Arab reactionaries prevented the two-state solution. The Zionists announced the unilateral establishment of the State of Israel. The Arab League states, also as the alleged representatives of the Palestinian people, with the support of some imperialists, started a war against the newly established state of Israel. In this war, the "Al Nakba", the "great catastrophe", the systematic brutal expulsion of the Palestinian people from their land took on immense dimensions.

7) Zionist State of Israel

Israel is a special case because of its particular historical development and current situation. Israel has a right to exist in Palestine. But it is founded on the deprivation and denial of the right of self-determination and the prevention of the formation of a state of the Palestinian people.

Israel is a capitalist developed country dependent on imperialism and has expansionist, colonialist imperialist features towards the Arab nation and states.

The state of Israel is Zionist, highly racist, thoroughly militarized and fascist towards the Arab population in the occupied territories of Palestine (2011 Gaza and West Bank). Israel's form of rule in the occupied territories is fascist. The Israeli state's form of rule in Israel is bourgeois-democratic with a fascist structure of rule against the Palestinian Arab minority. The Zionist state draws a wall around "its annexed land" as well as through the West Bank, much of which it colonizes. In Jerusalem, Palestinians continue to be displaced and dispossessed. Against Gaza, the Israeli state wages war, walls Gaza and imposes blockades.

8) Solving the national question

Under capitalism, there is no just solution to the national question and there can be no lasting peace. Nevertheless, as communists we have to relate to it even today under imperialism. Today, under the capitalist imperialist conditions, we support as a transitional solution the establishment of two states on the basis of the UN Partition Decision No. 181 of November 26, 1947. This solution is the only viable way under capitalism. Special attention must be given to the adjustment to current conditions (population increase, territories). In addition, the right of return of Palestinian refugees must be guaranteed.

9) Current solution

The end of the war in Palestine and a peace agreement between Arab Palestinians and the state of Israel is the precondition for the development of the class struggle in Israel and Palestine. This is possible under today's conditions only in an imperialist peace. The demand of the PLO (Palestine Liberation Organization) to establish a Palestinian Arab state within the borders of June 4, 1967, in which all Jewish settlements are dissolved, can be a step towards temporary peace. Such a solution offers both the Palestinian masses and the Jewish toilers in Israel an improvement in their situation and conditions of struggle.

But this is not a decisive, forward-moving demand for the Palestinian cause. The 1967 solution is at all the most minimal but difficult to achieve even under Zionist occupation, which in no way realizes the right of the Palestinian nation to self-determination and is not a truly democratic solution to the national question in Palestine.

10) Real solution

The real solution lies in the revolutions in Israel and in Palestine under the leadership of the proletariat with the goal of socialism/communism. In Palestine, the struggle against the Israeli Zionist occupation plays the main role in the revolution.

11) Methods of struggle

"Suicide bombings" as carried out by Hamas and Jihad, aimed at the indiscriminate murder of Jewish population, we reject as a means of political struggle, since they do not serve the liberation struggle but harm it. They ultimately serve the Zionist state and Arab reaction. At the same time, we condemn all hypocritical condemnations of suicide bombings that work to take the fascist occupation of the Zionist state out of the line of fire.