The Only Path to Peace in Palestine: One Democratic State

 Introduction

On 15 January 2025, Qatar’s prime minister announced that Israel and Hamas had agreed to a three-phase Gaza ceasefire deal including an exchange of captives, and it would take effect on 19 January. As Israel’s bombing of Gaza continued unabated and the Israeli cabinet delayed ratifying the deal, well-informed commentators predicted that Benjamin Netanyahu and his extremist allies would make sure that the ceasefire would collapse after the first phase.[1] Indeed, ‘Netanyahu stressed that the ceasefire was “temporary” and Israel reserved the right to resume strikes in Gaza’.[2] Despite such uncertainties, however, the ceasefire deal could provide an opportunity to move towards a just and peaceful future. 

On 25 October 2024, Forensic Architecture released an interactive cartographic platform entitled ‘A Cartography of Genocide’ along with an 827-page text report entitled ‘A spatial analysis of the Israeli military’s conduct in Gaza since October 2023,’ providing conclusive forensic evidence of genocide in Gaza.[3] On 5 December 2024, Amnesty International released a report which concluded that the Israeli state was committing genocide in Gaza in the strict legal sense of the term.[4] On 19 December 2024, Human Rights Watch released a report on the Israeli state’s intentional deprivation of access to water, a necessity of life, from the population of Gaza, and concluded that this amounts to an act of genocide.[5] These reports confirm analyses by dozens of Holocaust and genocide scholars, the South African government’s testimony before the International Court of Justice, and the court’s own rulings.

In fact, what we have been seeing in Gaza is the inevitable consequence of the model of European colonialism chosen by the original Zionists: not just occupying a colony and dominating it, not even the apartheid form of settler-colonialism that needed the indigenous people’s labour, but the model of settler-colonialism that wanted the land without the people, as in the Americas and Australia. Their plan to create an ethno-religious Jewish state in a land where only 8 percent of the population was Jewish in 1914 required the remaining 92 percent of Palestinians to lose their homeland.[6]

Raphael Lemkin, who lost 49 members of his family in the Nazi Holocaust and who coined the term ‘genocide,’ had studied the phenomenon historically, and found that settler-colonialism which engaged in what was then called forced displacement and is now called ethnic cleansing inevitably entailed genocide. Because how do you clear the land of the people living in it? By massacres and the threat of massacres, by taking away people’s homes and livelihoods and herding them into ghettos, by subjecting them to conditions that make life impossible, and finally by killing those who remain: exactly what has been happening in Palestine since 1948.[7]

The ‘two-state solution’

Britain handed over the mess it had created by promising a Jewish national home in Palestine, which resulted in ‘an organized campaign of lawlessness, terror and sabotage’ by Zionist terrorist groups since the beginning of 1945, to the UN General Assembly in 1947. The UNGA accepted the Jewish Agency’s request to be heard, despite the fact that non-governmental organisations had not previously been allowed to present their positions. The Palestinian delegation withdrew from the proceedings in protest against being relegated to a position inferior to that of the Jewish Agency; their position was ‘The destiny of Palestine cannot be decided by outsiders. It is against the Charter. The destiny of Palestine shall be decided by its own people…’ The Palestinian viewpoint was thereafter represented by the Arab delegations, which deplored the deletion of references to a Palestinian state in the terms of reference of the Special Committee set up to look into the issue, while David Ben-Gurion stated the Zionist view that the whole of Palestine belonged to the Zionists.[8]

The Special Committee was unable to agree on recommendations, with the majority of it in favour of partition (the two-state solution), a minority in favour of an independent federal state of Palestine. When the two plans were placed before the UNGA in August 1947, there was strong opposition to partition, and not only from Arab delegates. Rabbi Judah Leon Magnes, a leader of Reform Judaism and President of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, wrote prophetically that ‘partition would not stop the terrorist activities of Jewish groups, and that having secured partition through terror, they would attempt to secure the rest of the country for the Jews in the same way’. The Pakistan delegate said, ‘In effect, the proposal before the United Nations General Assembly says that we shall decide – not the people of Palestine, with no provision for the self-determination, no provision for the consent of the governed…’ Thirteen delegations spoke against partition and only eleven in favour. Yet in the final vote on 29 November 1947, there were 33 votes in favour including the USSR and other Soviet Socialist Republics, 13 against, and 10 abstentions.[9]  

How was this result obtained? ‘Chaim Weizmann, the senior Zionist figure in London and Washington, asked Truman to intervene. “I am aware of how much abstaining delegations would be swayed by your counsel and the influence of your government,” he told the president. “I refer to China, Honduras, Colombia, Mexico, Liberia, Ethiopia, Greece. I beg and pray for your decisive intervention at this decisive hour.” The Philippines, Cuba, Haiti, and even France were also on the list of countries that needed a push. “We went for it”, Clark Clifford, Truman’s special counsel, said later. “It was because the White House was for it that it went through. I kept the ramrod up the State Department’s butt.” Herschel Johnson, the deputy head of the US mission at the UN, cried in frustration while speaking to Loy Henderson, a senior diplomat, head of the State Department’s Office of Near Eastern Affairs and strong opponent of the establishment of a Zionist settler state in Palestine. “Loy, forgive me for breaking down like this,” Johnson said, “but Dave Niles called us here a couple of days ago and said that the president had instructed him to tell us that, by God, he wanted us to get busy and get all the votes that we possibly could, that there would be hell if the voting went the other way.”’[10]

This is how the Philippine delegate ended up voting for partition after having earlier strongly rejected the partition proposal, saying, ‘The Philippine Government has come to the conclusion that it cannot give its support to any proposal for the political disunion and the territorial dismemberment of Palestine. We have assessed the legal arguments and found that they are not the decisive factors in shaping a just and practical solution. Whatever the weight we might choose to assign to the arguments of the one side or the other, it is clear to the Philippine Government that the rights conferred by mandatory power, even if subsequently confirmed by an international agreement, do not vitiate the primordial right of a people to determine the political future and to preserve the territorial integrity of its native land.’ The Lebanese government protested vehemently against the tactics being used to arm-twist delegates into voting against their conscience, and pressed its delegation to resist them: ‘I can also imagine how you have resisted all these attempts in order to preserve what we hold dearest and most sacred in the United Nations, to keep intact the principles of the Charter, and to safeguard democracy and the democratic methods of our Organization. My friends, think of these democratic methods, of the freedom in voting which is sacred to each of our delegations. If we were to abandon this for the tyrannical system of tackling each delegation in hotel rooms, in bed, in corridors and ante-rooms, to threaten them with economic sanctions or to bribe them with promises in order to compel them to vote one way or another, think of what our Organization would become in the future. Should we be a democratic organization? Should we be an organization worthy of respect in the eyes of the world? At this supreme juncture, I beg you to think for a moment of the far-reaching consequences which might result from such manoeuvres, especially if we yielded to them …”’[11]

Indeed, far from stemming the violence, the UNGA resolution to partition Palestine, achieved by corruption and sordid self-interest, merely provided a fig-leaf for escalating violence that has led inexorably to genocide. Despite widespread references to the so-called ‘two-state solution’ even today, it was evident from the beginning, as David Ben-Gurion made clear at the UN partition discussion referred to above, that the Zionists had no intention of allowing a Palestinian state to be established on even a small fraction of Palestinian territory. The goal of establishing the Israeli state over the entirety of Palestine has been expressed more openly in recent years, with Benjamin Netanyahu displaying a map of the region in the UN in September 2023 with no vestige of Palestine.[12] The ‘two-state solution’ was finally laid to rest by Israel’s Knesset voting overwhelmingly (68:9) on 18 July 2024 that Palestinian statehood would pose ‘an existential danger to the State of Israel,’ making it clear that so long as the Israeli state exists, there will be no Palestinian state.[13] Indeed, according to Finance Minister Belazel Smotrich, the Israeli state should encompass not just Palestine but also extend into Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, Egypt, Iraq and Saudi Arabia.[14]

Given that around 95 percent of the land controlled by Israel has been acquired through the forcible expulsion of the original Palestinian population, it is not surprising that it rejects both international law and UN principles, which would rule out such a course of action. The participation and complicity of Western leaders in such violations enabled the descent of ethnic cleansing into genocide. For example, while the Israeli bombardment of Gaza after the Hamas attack of 7 October 2023 was targeting civilians and slaughtering thousands of children, these leaders justified it by citing ‘Israel’s right to defend itself,’ trying to provide credibility to the flagrant lie that Hamas was the only target. In any case, ‘To suggest that the thief has any kind of “right” to “defend” stolen property is ludicrous. The right belongs to the person fighting for its return, as the Palestinians have been doing every day since 1948. Beyond the 5-6 percent the Zionist land purchasing agencies actually bought before 1948, the Israelis are living on and in stolen property. They will defend it but they have no “right” to defend what by any legal, moral, historical or cultural measure belongs to someone else.’[15]

The only just and moral solution: one democratic state

So long as the Israeli state exists, its attempts to eliminate Palestine will continue, and so will its bombing, invasion and occupation of neighbouring states like Lebanon and Syria. The war with Hamas will also continue, because resistance to genocidal settler-colonialism is inevitable, and if non-violent resistance is crushed, there will be violent resistance. Israel has murdered peaceful demonstrators in the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza,[16] and Zionists in powerful positions in other countries have tried to shut down the non-violent BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) movement.[17] They have arrested and beaten peaceful pro-Palestine demonstrators including Jews, and punished people expressing support for Palestine by taking away their jobs or university places. In their zeal to crush non-violent support for Palestine, Zionists have teamed up with neo-Nazis like the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD, Alternative for Germany), putting Jews in danger of their antisemitic violence.[18]

Israel has never been a democracy; no ethno-religious or ethnic state – whether Jewish, Christian, Islamic, Hindu, Buddhist or other – can be a democracy, because those who do not belong to the dominant group will not have equal rights. At best it will be an apartheid state, at worst a genocidal one. In the past, however, Jewish citizens of Israel enjoyed a fair range of democratic rights, but these have been drastically eroded as Israel descended from ethnic cleansing to genocide. Ofer Cassif, the only Jewish Member of the Knesset from the left-wing Hadash Party, says, ‘alongside genocide, ethnic cleansing, war crimes, atrocities, occupation, and persecution of Palestinians in their territories, there’s also fascism growing stronger in Israel by legislation and by the persecution of citizens, arresting people, beating people, etc. Israel is on the verge of a full-fledged fascist regime.’[19] The Israeli state has become a menace even to its own Jewish citizens.

The solution proposed by the One Democratic State Initiative (ODSI) is a democratic, inclusive Palestinian state in the whole of Palestine, ‘from the river to the sea,’ in which all citizens would have equal rights regardless of ethnic or religious identity.[20] ‘By identifying Zionism’s politicization of identity and Israel’s nature as a state exclusive to Jews as the root issue of the suffering and injustice in Palestine, the “One Democratic State” solution clearly defines liberation as the dismantling of the apartheid, settler-colonial state and the establishment of one democratic state in its stead.’ It thus identifies its twin goals as decolonization and democratization.

Why should it be called a ‘Palestinian’ state? ‘For the same reason why Theodor Herzl, Arthur Balfour, the World Zionist Organization, the British Mandate and the League of Nations called it Palestine, why the “Jewish Agency for Israel” was originally called the “Jewish Agency for Palestine”, why they considered naming the Jewish state “Palestine” (and only dropped it in anticipation of partition), and why Shimon Perez and Golda Meir held Palestinian citizenship: Because “Palestine” has been the land’s name for over 2500 years. Unlike the Hebrew word “Israel”, which is exclusive to Judaism and therefore exclusive of non-Jews, “Palestine” refers, not to an Arabic or Islamic identity, but to the geographical area where a democratic state can treat all its citizens equally, regardless of how they choose to identify.’

Wouldn’t this mean the ethnic cleansing or genocide of Israeli Jews? Not at all. ‘Although there is no universal consensus on the conditions that define one’s belonging to a society, the principles of jus soli (“right of soil”, the right of an individual born in a territory to be a citizen of its state) and jus sanguinis (“right of blood”, the right of an individual to hold their parents’ citizenship) are commonly applied… In accordance with the above, …Palestinian citizenship will be extended to all native Palestinians, including all who were expelled over the past century and their descendants.’ The new state would also extend ‘Palestinian citizenship to all Jews who have broken free from Zionism and who wish to remain in it as Palestinians.’ In other words, Israeli Jews who wish to remain in Palestine as Palestinian citizens would have the right to be citizens of the new democratic state on the basis of equal rights.

Doesn’t the state of Israel have the right to exist? ‘The Zionist project has disregarded the basic democratic rights of the (Jewish and non-Jewish) population of Palestine by effecting, with essential British colonial help, the mass immigration of non-Palestinians to Palestine prior to 1948 and by establishing a “state exclusive to Jews” in Palestine in 1948 with no democratic mandate to do so. The continued existence of a state exclusive to Jews rather than a democratic state of all its citizens means that the trampling of these democratic human rights is ongoing and is therefore not “right”. A transition to a democratic state of all its citizens would right this century-old wrong and would be a historic step in achieving just and lasting peace in Palestine and the Middle East.’ Not even members of an oppressed community have a ‘right’ to oppress others, and the existence of the state of Israel is premised on its supposed ‘right’ to oppress Palestinians.

In addition, this would be:

‘A democratic state, a state for all its citizens with no discrimination on the basis of religion, ethnicity, culture, language, sex or gender, thus preserving the distinctiveness of the Palestinian heritage in its cultural, religious, and ethnic diversity; not a duplicate of capitalist colonial models, but a state, i.e. a functional administrative tool, whose society actively takes part in politics and through which its society expresses its political will and chooses how to administer its affairs.

A secular state, that separates religion from politics, claims no religious legitimacy, safeguards the freedom of belief, the right to profess and practice religion, and all fundamental rights, and refuses to grant or deny rights on the basis of one’s religious, ideological or cultural background, in full rupture with Zionism and its sectarian nature.

A socially just state, whose institutions are built on the principle of economic and social equality between segments of society and that builds a pluralistic, free and progressive society as an aspect of liberation. A state that frees popular classes from poverty, unemployment and marginalization and guarantees free quality education, social security and workers’ rights.’

Is the establishment of a democratic state in place of Israel antisemitic? ‘Claiming that a democratic solution is antisemitic implies that Judaism is antidemocratic, and that is antisemitic… Zionism has used Judaism to justify its settler colonial project… and has effectively conflated Judaism and Jewishness with colonialism in the eyes of Jews and non-Jews alike. It is noteworthy that although Zionism is the only ideology to have succeeded at establishing a state for one identity over others in Palestine, the ODS solution does not single it out as the sole ideology to aim at doing so, and is also opposed to the creation of a state exclusive to Arabs, Muslims, or any other identity.’ This is an important clarification: ODS is as much opposed to an Arab or Muslim state as it is to a Jewish state.

Indeed, none of what has been suggested above is antisemitic according to the definition proposed by hundreds of Jewish scholars in the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism, provided that ‘the same norms of debate that apply to other states and to other conflicts over national self-determination apply in the case of Israel and Palestine.’[21] Thus, for example, one would have to apply the same norms of debate that apply to Ukraine’s struggle against Russia for self-determination to Palestine’s struggle against Israel for self-determination.

ODSI suggests that supporters of Palestine carry on doing what they are already doing – taking part in demonstrations, educating themselves and others about what has been happening in Palestine for over a century, participating in the BDS movement, and so on – but, in addition, emphasise that One Democratic State is the goal, and coordinate their efforts with others who share that goal.[22] Among them is the Palestinian National Initiative (Al-Mubadara) led by Mustafa Barghouti, which is trying to unify Palestinians around the goal of decolonisation and the establishment of a democratic Palestinian state.[23]

Moving towards justice and peace

Anti-Zionist Jews who live in Israel need to retain Israeli citizenship in order to continue their struggle, but those who live in other countries have found another way: renouncing their Israeli citizenship. In the words of Nadav Gazit, ‘Modern Zionism, which emerged in the 1800s, is an unethical, immoral, and evil settler-colonial project, held together by lies, racism, propaganda, and the support of world superpowers with their own interests in the resource-rich region. It cannot provide a “safe haven” for Jews, and Zionism is antithetical to Jewish values… Every moral and ethical part of my bones, flesh, and soul leaves me with only one viable option: to unequivocally renounce my Israeli citizenship.’ He also said he was moved to tears after posting his letter of renunciation on social media, when he ‘received heartfelt messages from Palestinians inviting me to their homes and families,’[24] reminding us that among the admirable qualities displayed by Palestinians in this dark time is their incredible generosity.

Another renouncer, Avi Steinberg, explains, ‘Citizenship, of the kind I hold, has been a material piece of a long-standing genocidal process. The Israeli state, from its inception, has relied on the normalization of ethnically determined supremacist laws to bolster a military regime whose clear colonial goal is the elimination of Palestine.’ He criticises his parents, who ‘managed to become both American liberals who opposed the U.S. invasion of Vietnam, while also acting as armed settlers of another people’s land,’ and for being proponents of ‘a “peace” in which the original sin of the state, the ongoing process of ethnic cleansing, would remain firmly in place’. He believes that Jewish liberation is inseparable from broad social movements, and says that ‘As a traditional Jew, I believe the Torah is radical in its contention that Jewish people, or any people, have no right at all to any land, but rather are bound by rigorous ethical responsibilities… The only entity with sovereign rights, according to the Torah, is the God of justice, the God who despises the usurper and the occupier. Zionism has nothing to do with Judaism or Jewish history… Zionist colonization cannot be reformed or liberalized: Its existential identity, as expressed in its citizenship laws and repeated openly by those citizens, amounts to a commitment to genocide.’ Hence, decolonization is ‘both the path and the destination.’[25]

Preventing and punishing Israel’s genocide in Palestine is a priority right now; the sadistic cruelty of what the Israeli state has been doing constitutes an assault not only on the human rights of Palestinians, but also on the whole edifice of international law, and on humanity itself. 153 countries have ratified the Genocide Convention but it is considered to be binding even on those countries which have not done so, and political leaders in all of them are under an obligation to prevent Israel from resuming the genocide by imposing full sanctions on it, and punish all those involved in it, from the Israeli political and military leadership down to every soldier. Failing this, they would be guilty of complicity with genocide, which is also a crime under the Genocide Convention.[26] Countries which have been colluding with Israel’s genocide owe reparations to the Palestinians, including compensation to the families of those who have been killed, payment for medical treatment and rehabilitation to those who have been injured, trauma counselling for all survivors, especially children, and rebuilding of all infrastructure and buildings that have been destroyed or damaged, along with re-equipment of hospitals, schools, universities, etc.

It is worth pointing out that although the United States and most Western countries have been most obviously supportive of Israel in its genocidal onslaught on Palestine, the BRICS+ countries, especially China, Russia, India and the UEA, have also been collaborating with it. Brazil and even South Africa, which has taken the commendable step of bringing the genocide case against Israel to the ICJ, have continued to supply oil and coal to Israel.[27] Therefore we, the peoples of all these countries, who have been watching in anguish the carnage which Holocaust survivor Gabor Maté compared to Auschwitz,[28] are under an obligation to put maximum pressure on our political leaders to abide by the Genocide Convention, while campaigning for boycott of and divestment from not just Western companies but all companies which have been colluding with the genocide, including China’s Hikvision and India’s Adani. Crucial to a just peace is an alternative vision of the ultimate goal in Palestine: From the river to the sea, freedom and democracy.

(This essay was published by New Politics on 20 January 2025 and is available at https://newpol.org/the-only-path-to-peace-in-palestine-one-democratic-state/ )

---

Notes

[1] Gideon Levy and Mouin Rabbani on Ceasefire: “Netanyahu Will Do Everything Possible” to Kill It Later, 2025, Democracy Now. https://www.democracynow.org/2025/1/17/israel_ceasefire_gideon_levy_mouin_rabbani

[2] Tom McArthur, ‘Netanyahu issues warning ahead of Gaza ceasefire,’ BBC News, 19 January 2025. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cp8qyq24qljo

³ Forensic Architecture, 2024, ‘A Cartography of Genocide: Israel’s Conduct in Gaza Since October 2023.’ https://forensic-architecture.org/investigation/a-cartography-of-genocide

[4] Amnesty International, 2024, ‘Amnesty International investigation concludes Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza.’ https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2024/12/amnesty-international-concludes-israel-is-committing-genocide-against-palestinians-in-gaza/

[5] Human Rights Watch, 2024, ‘Extermination and Acts of Genocide: Israel Deliberately Depriving Palestinians in Gaza of Water.’ https://www.hrw.org/report/2024/12/19/extermination-and-acts-genocide/israel-deliberately-depriving-palestinians-gaza

[6] Interactive Encyclopedia of the Palestine Question, ‘Demography and the Palestine Question (I).’ https://www.palquest.org/en/highlight/294/demography-and-palestine-question-i ; Rohini Hensman, 2023, ‘The Political and Legal Underpinnings of the Palestine-Israel Conflict,’ New Politics. https://newpol.org/the-political-and-legal-underpinnings-of-the-palestine-israel-conflict/

[7] Rohini Hensman, 2023, ‘South Africa is Right to Invoke the Genocide Convention Against Israel’s War on Gaza,’ Jacobin. https://jacobin.com/2023/12/biden-administration-israel-gaza-war-ethnic-cleansing-genocide-convention ; Michael A McDonnell and A Dirk Moses, ‘Raphael Lemkin as historian of genocide in the Americas,’ Journal of Genocide Research 7(4), 2005, pp.501-529.

[8] United Nations, ‘Origins and Evolution of the Palestine Problem: Part II (1947-1977)’ https://www.un.org/unispal/history2/origins-and-evolution-of-the-palestine-problem/part-ii-1947-1977/

[9] United Nations, ‘Origins and Evolution of the Palestine Problem: Part II (1947-1977)’ https://www.un.org/unispal/history2/origins-and-evolution-of-the-palestine-problem/part-ii-1947-1977/ The final vote was as follows: In favour: Australia, Belgium, Bolivia, Brazil, Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic, Canada, Costa Rica, Czechoslovakia, Denmark, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, France, Guatemala, Haiti, Iceland, Liberia, Luxembourg, Netherlands, New Zealand, Nicaragua, Norway, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Philippines, Poland, Sweden, Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, Union of South Africa, Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, United States of America, Uruguay, Venezuela.

Against: Afghanistan, Cuba, Egypt, Greece, India, Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Turkey, Yemen.

Abstained: Argentina, Chile, China, Colombia, El Salvador, Ethiopia, Honduras, Mexico, United Kingdom, Yugoslavia.

[10] Jeremy Salt, 2024, ‘Not October 7 or any other date – This is all about 1948 now,’ Palestine Chronicle. https://www.palestinechronicle.com/not-october-7-or-any-other-date-this-is-all-about-1948-now/

[11] United Nations, ‘Origins and Evolution of the Palestine Problem: Part II (1947-1977)’.

[12] Brett Wilkins, 2023, ‘Netanyahu shows map of “New Middle East – without Palestine – to UN General Assembly’. https://www.commondreams.org/news/netanyahu-map

[13] Al Jazeera, 2024, ‘Israel’s Knesset votes to reject Palestinian statehood.’ https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/7/18/israels-knesset-votes-to-reject-palestinian-statehood

[14] The New Arab, 2024, ‘Israel’s Smotrich calls for Israeli conquest of Middle East “bit by bit” from Jerusalem to Damascus.’ https://www.newarab.com/news/smotrich-calls-bit-bit-israeli-expansion-damascus

[15] Jeremy Salt, 2024, ‘Not October 7 or any other date – This is all about 1948 now’.

[16] UN Human Rights Council, 2019, ‘Report of the international commission of inquiry on the protests in the Occupied Palestinian Territory.’ https://www.ohchr.org/sites/default/files/Documents/HRBodies/HRCouncil/CoIOPT/A_HRC_40_74.pdf

[17] BDS movement, ‘What is BDS?’ https://bdsmovement.net/what-is-bds

[18] ‘In a first, Germany criminalizes BDS (Boycott, Disinvest and Sanction) Movement against Israel, says its “Anti-Semitic”’, in Latest Laws, 19 May 2019. https://www.latestlaws.com/international-news/germany-criminalizes-boycott-disinvest-and-sanction-movement-against-israel ; Lena Obermaier, ‘Far-Right Parties in Europe Have Become Zionism’s Greatest Backers,’ Jacobin, 8 September 2021. https://jacobin.com/2021/09/germany-afd-zionism-antisemitism-israel-nationalism

[19] Ofer Cassif, interviewed by Marcus Barnett, 2024, ‘Anti-Zionist Israeli MP: “I Will Never Surrender,”’ Tribune. https://tribunemag.co.uk/2024/11/anti-zionist-israeli-mp-i-will-never-surrender

[20] One Democratic State Initiative, ‘One Democratic Palestine, From the River to the Sea.’ (The quotations that follow are from https://odsi.co/en/#faqR and https://odsi.co/en/statements/declaration-tomorrows-palestine/ )

[21] The Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism. https://jerusalemdeclaration.org/

[22] ODSI, ‘A call to Action’. https://odsi.co/en/call-to-action/

[23] People’s Dispatch, ‘The unity of our struggle: Mustafa Barghouti on the role of the Palestinian diaspora in the struggle for liberation,’ 25 May, 2024. https://peoplesdispatch.org/2024/05/25/the-unity-of-our-struggle-mustafa-barghouti-on-the-role-of-the-palestinian-diaspora-in-the-struggle-for-liberation/ ; Interactive Encyclopedia of the Palestinian Question, ‘The Palestinian National Initiative Movement – Al-Mubadara, 2002-present.’ https://www.palquest.org/en/highlight/31163/palestinian-national-initiative-movement-al-mubadara

[24] Nadav Gazit, 2023, ‘Why I am renouncing my Israeli citizenship,’ Prism, https://prismreports.org/2023/11/30/why-i-am-renouncing-my-israeli-citizenship/

[25] Avi Steinberg, 2024, ‘Israeli Citizenship has Always Been a Tool of Genocide – So I’m Renouncing Mine,’ Truthout. https://truthout.org/articles/israeli-citizenship-has-always-been-a-tool-of-genocide-so-i-renounced-mine/ 

[26] United Nations, 1948, ‘Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.’ https://www.un.org/en/genocideprevention/documents/atrocity-crimes/Doc.1_Convention%20on%20the%20Prevention%20and%20Punishment%20of%20the%20Crime%20of%20Genocide.pdf

[27] Shireen Akram-Boshar, 2024, ‘China’s ties with Israel are Hindering the Palestinian Struggle for Freedom,’ Truthout. https://truthout.org/articles/chinas-ties-with-israel-are-hindering-the-palestinian-struggle-for-freedom/

[28] Gabor Maté, ‘It’s like we’re watching Auschwitz on TikTok,’ Middle East Eye. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hFOTBAiTHZA

Ending Israel's Genocide in Palestine

On 5 December 2024, Amnesty International released a report which concluded that the Israeli state is committing genocide in Gaza in the strict legal sense of the term.[1] On 19 December 2024, Human Rights Watch released a report on the Israeli state’s intentional deprivation of access to water, a necessity of life, from the population of Gaza, and concluded that this amounts to an act of genocide.[2] These reports reinforce the opinions of dozens of Holocaust and genocide scholars, the South African government’s testimony before the International Court of Justice, the court’s own rulings, and ‘overwhelming evidence – photos, videos, and eyewitness accounts – documenting the destruction of essential conditions for life’.[3]

In fact, what we are seeing in Gaza today is the inevitable consequence of the model of European colonialism chosen by the original Zionists: not just occupying a colony and dominating it, not even the apartheid form of settler-colonialism that needed the indigenous people’s labour, but the model of settler-colonialism that wanted the land without the people, as in the Americas and Australia. Their plan to create an ethno-religious Jewish state in a land where only 8 percent of the population was Jewish in 1914 required 92 percent of Palestinians to be removed from their land.[4]

Raphael Lemkin, the Holocaust survivor who lost 49 members of his family in the Nazi genocide and who coined the term ‘genocide,’ had studied the phenomenon historically, and found that settler-colonialism which engaged in what was then called forced displacement and is now called ethnic cleansing inevitably entailed genocide. Because how do you clear the land of the people living in it? As he knew from experience, by massacres and the threat of massacres, by taking away people’s homes and livelihoods and herding them into ghettos, by subjecting them to conditions that make life impossible, and finally by killing all those who remain: exactly what has been happening in Palestine since 1948.[5]

Despite references to the so-called ‘two-state solution,’ it was evident from the beginning that the Israeli state had no intention of allowing a Palestinian state to be established on even a small fraction of Palestinian territory. The intention of establishing the Israeli state over the entirety of Palestine has been expressed openly in recent years, with Benjamin Netanyahu displaying a map of the region in the UN in September 2023 with no vestige of Palestine.[6] The ‘two-state solution’ has finally been laid to rest by Israel’s Knesset voting overwhelmingly to reject Palestinian statehood on 18 July 2024, making it clear that so long as the Israeli state exists, there will be no Palestinian state.[7] Indeed, according to Finance Minister Belazel Smotrich, the Israeli state should encompass not just Palestine but also extend into Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, Egypt, Iraq and Saudi Arabia.[8]

Given that around 95 percent of the land controlled by Israel has been acquired through the forcible expulsion of the original Palestinian population, it is not surprising that it rejects both international law and UN principles, which would rule out such a course of action. The participation and complicity of Western nations in these violations ensured the descent of ethnic cleansing into genocide. For example, while the Israeli bombardment of Gaza after the Hamas attack of 7 October 2023 was targeting civilians and slaughtering thousands of children, these leaders and the mainstream media justified it by citing ‘Israel’s right to defend itself,’ trying to provide credibility to a flagrant lie. In any case, ‘To suggest that the thief has any kind of “right” to “defend” stolen property is ludicrous. The right belongs to the person fighting for its return, as the Palestinians have been doing every day since 1948. Beyond the 5-6 percent the Zionist land purchasing agencies actually bought before 1948, the Israelis are living on and in stolen property. They will defend it but they have no “right” to defend what by any legal, moral, historical or cultural measure belongs to someone else.’[9]

So long as the Israeli state exists, its genocide in Palestine will continue, and so will its bombing and occupation of neighbouring states like Lebanon and Syria. The war with Hamas will also continue, because resistance to genocide is inevitable, and if non-violent resistance is crushed, it will be violent. Israel has murdered peaceful demonstrators in the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza,[10] and Zionists in powerful positions in other countries have tried to shut down the non-violent BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) movement.[11] They have arrested and beaten peaceful pro-Palestine demonstrators including Jews, and punished people expressing support for Palestine by taking away their jobs or university places. In their zeal to crush non-violent support for Palestine, Zionists have teamed up with neo-Nazis like the AfD in Germany, putting Jews in greater danger of their antisemitic violence.

Israel has never been a democracy; no ethno-religious or ethnic state – whether Jewish, Christian, Islamic, Hindu, Buddhist or other – can be a democracy, because those who don’t belong to the dominant group will not have equal rights; at best it will be an apartheid state, at worst a genocidal one. In the past, however, Jewish citizens of Israel have enjoyed a fair range of democratic rights, but these have been drastically eroded as Israel descended from apartheid to genocide. Ofer Cassif, the only Jewish Member of the Knesset from the left-wing Hadash Party, says, ‘alongside genocide, ethnic cleansing, war crimes, atrocities, occupation, and persecution of Palestinians in their territories, there’s also fascism growing stronger in Israel by legislation and by the persecution of citizens, arresting people, beating people, etc. Israel is on the verge of a full-fledged fascist regime.’[12] The Israeli state has become a menace even to its own Jewish citizens.

The solution proposed by the One Democratic State Initiative (ODSI) is a democratic, inclusive Palestinian state in the whole of Palestine, ‘from the river to the sea,’ in which all citizens would have equal rights regardless of ethnic or religious identity.[13] They answer the question of why it should be called ‘Palestine’ by saying, ‘For the same reason why Theodor Herzl, Arthur Balfour, the World Zionist Organization, the British Mandate and the League of Nations called it Palestine, why the “Jewish Agency for Israel” was originally called the “Jewish Agency for Palestine”, why they considered naming the Jewish state “Palestine” (and only dropped it in anticipation of partition), and why Shimon Perez and Golda Meir held Palestinian citizenship: Because “Palestine” has been the land’s name for over 2500 years. Unlike the Hebrew word “Israel”, which is exclusive to Judaism and therefore exclusive of non-Jews, “Palestine” refers, not to an Arabic or Islamic identity, but to the geographical area where a democratic state can treat all its citizens equally, regardless of how they choose to identify.’

Wouldn’t this mean the ethnic cleansing or genocide of Israeli Jews? Not at all. ‘Although there is no universal consensus on the conditions that define one’s belonging to a society, the principles of jus soli (“right of soil”, the right of an individual born in a territory to be a citizen of its state) and jus sanguinis (“right of blood”, the right of an individual to hold their parents’ citizenship) are commonly applied… In accordance with the above, …Palestinian citizenship will be extended to all native Palestinians, including all who were expelled over the past century and their descendants. Citizenship will also be extended to all who were born in Palestine and who wish to become citizens of the new democratic Palestinian state… At no point shall religious, ethnic, cultural or other identity be a criterion for granting or denying citizenship or residency.’ In other words, Israeli Jews who were born in Palestine, or have parents who were born in Palestine, would have the right to be citizens of the new democratic state on the basis of equal rights.

Doesn’t the state of Israel have the right to exist? ‘The Zionist project has disregarded the basic democratic rights of the (Jewish and non-Jewish) population of Palestine by effecting, with essential British colonial help, the mass immigration of non-Palestinians to Palestine prior to 1948 and by establishing a “state exclusive to Jews” in Palestine in 1948 with no democratic mandate to do so. The continued existence of a state exclusive to Jews rather than a democratic state of all its citizens means that the trampling of these democratic human rights is ongoing and is therefore not “right”. A transition to a democratic state of all its citizens would right this century-old wrong and would be a historic step in achieving just and lasting peace in Palestine and the Middle East.’

Is the establishment of a democratic state in place of Israel antisemitic? ‘Claiming that a democratic solution is antisemitic implies that Judaism is antidemocratic, and that is antisemitic… Zionism has used Judaism to justify its settler colonial project… and has effectively conflated Judaism and Jewishness with colonialism in the eyes of Jews and non-Jews alike. It is noteworthy that although Zionism is the only ideology to have succeeded at establishing a state for one identity over others in Palestine, the ODS solution does not single it out as the sole ideology to aim at doing so, and is also opposed to the creation of a state exclusive to Arabs, Muslims, or any other identity.’  

Indeed, none of what has been suggested above is antisemitic according to the definition proposed by hundreds of Jewish scholars in the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism, provided ‘the same norms of debate that apply to other states and to other conflicts over national self-determination apply in the case of Israel and Palestine.’[14] Thus, for example, one would have to apply the same norms of debate that apply to Ukraine’s struggle against Russia for self-determination to Palestine’s struggle against Israel for self-determination.

ODSI suggests that supporters of Palestine carry on doing what they have been doing – taking part in demonstrations, educating themselves and others about what has been happening in Palestine for over a century, participating in the BDS movement, and so on – but, in addition, emphasising that One Democratic State is the goal, and coordinating our efforts with others who share that goal.[15]

Ending Israel’s genocide in Palestine is a priority right now. 153 countries have ratified the Genocide Convention but it is considered to be binding even on those countries which have not done so, and political leaders in all of them are under an obligation to prevent Israel from committing genocide by cutting off all relations with Israel and imposing full sanctions on it, and punish all those involved in it, from the Israeli political leadership down to every soldier. Failing this, they would be guilty of complicity with genocide, which is also a crime under the Genocide Convention. We, the peoples of these countries, who have been watching in anguish the carnage which Holocaust survivor Gabor Maté compared to Auschwitz,[16] are under an obligation to put maximum pressure on our political leaders to abide by the Genocide Convention. The Indian National Congress government of newly-independent India made absolutely the correct decision when it voted against the partition of Palestine and establishment of Israel in November 1947, and India should reclaim that moral high ground. 

(This article was published by The India Forum on 29 December 2024, and is available at https://www.theindiaforum.in/politics/ending-israels-genocide-palestine  

 

---

Notes

 

[1] Amnesty International, 2024, ‘Amnesty International investigation concludes Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza.’ https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2024/12/amnesty-international-concludes-israel-is-committing-genocide-against-palestinians-in-gaza/

[2] Human Rights Watch, 2024, ‘Extermination and Acts of Genocide: Israel Deliberately Depriving Palestinians in Gaza of Water.’ https://www.hrw.org/report/2024/12/19/extermination-and-acts-genocide/israel-deliberately-depriving-palestinians-gaza

[3] Kaushik Jayaram and Melissa Munro, 2024, ‘Genocide in Gaza: Revenge, retribution, or a means to an end?’ The India Forum. https://www.theindiaforum.in/politics/genocide-gaza-revenge-retribution-or-means-end

[4] Interactive Encyclopedia of the Palestine Question, ‘Demography and the Palestine Question (I).’ https://www.palquest.org/en/highlight/294/demography-and-palestine-question-i ; Rohini Hensman, 2023, ‘Palestine and Israel: Political, Legal and Moral Issues,’ The India Forum. https://www.theindiaforum.in/history/palestine-and-israel-historical-legal-and-moral-issues

[5] Rohini Hensman, 2023, ‘South Africa is Right to Invoke the Genocide Convention Against Israel’s War on Gaza,’ Jacobin. https://jacobin.com/2023/12/biden-administration-israel-gaza-war-ethnic-cleansing-genocide-convention

[6] Brett Wilkins, 2023, ‘Netanyahu shows map of “New Middle East – without Palestine – to UN General Assembly’. https://www.commondreams.org/news/netanyahu-map

[7] Al Jazeera, 2024, ‘Israel’s Knesset votes to reject Palestinian statehood.’ https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/7/18/israels-knesset-votes-to-reject-palestinian-statehood 

[8] The New Arab, 2024, ‘Israel’s Smotrich calls for Israeli conquest of Middle East “bit by bit” from Jerusalem to Damascus.’ https://www.newarab.com/news/smotrich-calls-bit-bit-israeli-expansion-damascus

[9] Jeremy Salt, 2024, ‘Not October 7 or any other date – This is all about 1948 now,’ Palestine Chronicle. https://www.palestinechronicle.com/not-october-7-or-any-other-date-this-is-all-about-1948-now/

[10] UN Human Rights Council, 2019, ‘Report of the international commission of inquiry on the protests in the Occupied Palestinian Territory.’ https://www.ohchr.org/sites/default/files/Documents/HRBodies/HRCouncil/CoIOPT/A_HRC_40_74.pdf

[11] BDS movement, ‘What is BDS?’ https://bdsmovement.net/what-is-bds

[12] Ofer Cassif, interviewed by Marcus Barnett, 2024, ‘Anti-Zionist Israeli MP: “I Will Never Surrender,”’ Tribune. https://tribunemag.co.uk/2024/11/anti-zionist-israeli-mp-i-will-never-surrender

[13] One Democratic State Initiative, ‘One Democratic Palestine, From the River to the Sea.’ (The quotations that follow are from this url: https://odsi.co/en/#faqR )

[14] The Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism. https://jerusalemdeclaration.org/

[15] ODSI, ‘A call to Action’. https://odsi.co/en/call-to-action/

[16] Gabor Maté, ‘It’s like we’re watching Auschwitz on TikTok,’ Middle East Eye. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hFOTBAiTHZA

How the Abandonment of Democracy and Socialism has Decimated the Socialist Movement

Abstract

This paper looks not at workers’ struggles, which had their ups and downs over the last two hundred years, but specifically at the revolutionary socialist movement, which aims to eliminate capitalism. While there have been contributions to the vision of a classless, stateless society by utopian socialists and anarchists, the paper concentrates on Karl Marx and Frederick Engels and their legacy. It identifies three bifurcation points in this particular revolutionary socialist tradition where a substantial part of the movement abandoned democracy, internationalism, or both, and argues that this has had a disastrous effect on the movement and needs to be reversed.

A useful roadmap with a few misleading directions

In the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels stated that:

The Communists do not form a separate party opposed to the other working-class parties.

They have no interests separate and apart from those of the proletariat as a whole.

They do not set up any sectarian principles of their own, by which to shape and mould the proletarian movement.

The Communists are distinguished from the other working-class parties by this only: 1. In the national struggles of the proletarians of the different countries, they point out and bring to the front the common interests of the entire proletariat, independently of all nationality. 2. In the various stages of development which the struggle of the working class against the bourgeoisie has to pass through, they always and everywhere represent the interests of the movement as a whole.

The Communists, therefore, are on the one hand, practically, the most advanced and resolute section of the working-class parties of every country, that section which pushes forward all others; on the other hand, theoretically, they have over the great mass of the proletariat the advantage of clearly understanding the line of march, the conditions, and the ultimate general results of the proletarian movement.[1]

It is evident, therefore, that when they talk of the “conquest of political power by the proletariat,” they mean the whole proletariat, not any particular party. Their commitment to democracy is affirmed when they say “the first step in the revolution by the working class is to raise the proletariat to the position of ruling class, to win the battle of democracy”; as Engels confirmed, “The Communist Manifesto had already proclaimed the winning of universal suffrage, of democracy, as one of the first and most important tasks of the militant proletariat.”[2] Their commitment to internationalism (“the common interests of the entire proletariat, independently of all nationality”) is also evident. What was meant by these two values can be gleaned from accounts of the International Working Men’s Association (IWMA, also called the First International), established in 1864, in which Marx and Engels were active participants. Its 1867 rules reiterated that “the emancipation of the working classes must be conquered by the working classes themselves.” As an association of workers’ unions and proto-unions, it stood for freedom of association, expression and peaceful assembly, all of which are necessary for successful workers’ struggles. It also worked for manhood suffrage and called for the abolition of war, in which workers of different countries killed each other in the interests of their bourgeoisies, and support for the Irish struggle for independence from England, the Polish struggle for independence from Russia, and the 1865 Black uprising in Jamaica.[3]

Clear principles to guide the movement, although the implementation of some of them (like women’s equality, an element of democracy) was less than perfect. But this roadmap also included a couple of misleading directions. What were they thinking when they wrote “Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution”[4] at a time when the proletariat was a small minority in Europe and an even more minuscule minority worldwide? In 1850, Marx proposed that when the petty bourgeoisie in alliance with the peasantry (the majority) attempted to end the revolution by installing “a democratic form of government,” it was the task of the armed workers “to make the revolution permanent” until the propertied classes in all the leading countries of the world were “driven from their ruling positions.”[5] In 1859, he suggested that when “From forms of development of the productive forces the relations [of production] turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution”[6]: somewhat more realistic, but still without any hint of how the revolution would take place in the colonies or, indeed, whether they would be part of it at all.

The impression that the revolution is imminent is strengthened by Marx’s references to the “dictatorship of the proletariat.” Even if we concede that “dictatorship” at that time didn’t have the authoritarian connotations it has now and simply meant “rule,” Sartre has dismissed as “absurd” the idea that a whole class, with all its internal divisions between active groups and passive serialities, can wield state power,[7] although working people are certainly capable of self-government, to use the helpful distinction suggested by Engels.[8] Both Marx and Engels suggested that the Paris Commune was an example of the dictatorship of the proletariat. As a government, the Paris Commune was a wonderful experiment, which we can even see as prefiguring the administration of a classless socialist society. But as a state, it was a failure: the “armed people,” as Marx called them, were no match for the standing army of their enemies. The Commune was crushed, the Communards slaughtered.

In any case, what did it even mean? In his “Critique of the Gotha Programme”, Marx says that “Between capitalist and communist society lies a period of revolutionary transformation from one to the other. There is a corresponding period of transition in the political sphere and in this period the state can only take the form of a revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat;” but a few sentences on he says that “vulgar democrats, who see the millennium in the democratic republic… have no inkling that it is precisely in this final state form of bourgeois society that the class struggle has to be fought out to a conclusion.”[9] So on the one hand the transition to socialism takes place under the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat, while on the other the class struggle is fought out to a conclusion (socialism) in the (bourgeois) democratic republic. Trying to make sense of this fifteen years later, Engels comes to the logical conclusion that “The working class can only come to power under the form of a democratic republic. This is… the specific form for the dictatorship of the proletariat”;[10] in which case, it makes sense to see the democratic republic as the ground on which the battle to abolish the bourgeois state as well as capitalist production relations must be fought.

Marx cannot be blamed for the fact that so many of his followers have treated every tentative remark he made as the last word on the subject. But it would have saved innumerable grievous setbacks to revolutionary socialism if it had been made clear that the transition to a worldwide socialist society would take centuries, and that establishing and defending democratic republics was a necessary condition for such a transition. Even today, those lessons need to be reiterated.

Internationalism betrayed: the first bifurcation

The Communist Manifesto states, “The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains”,[11] but thanks to successful organizing and struggle by trade unions and Social-Democratic parties of the Second International, workers in Europe had a great deal more to lose than their chains by the early 20^th century. The fact that these gains were rooted in the nation-state resulted in the growth of nationalism, especially among the leaders of these parties, leading to identification with and support for the imperialist aims of their own bourgeoisies in World War I. This catastrophic abandonment of internationalism led to a definitive split between the nationalist-imperialist parties and revolutionary socialists who continued to uphold the value of internationalism.

It is worth inquiring how this could have happened, because it entailed a shift far more serious than a simple craving for the high standard of living which the “labour aristocracy” could expect in an imperialist state. Reinhart Kössler observes that in the early 20^th century, the German state made no attempt to conceal its genocidal policies in German South West Africa (now Namibia) but in fact advertised them with pride, and Social-Democratic leader August Bebel, who died in August 1913, strongly condemned the slaughter of the indigenous people as barbaric and bestial.[12] How is it possible that anyone who identified themselves as “socialist” could support a state that was guilty of such horrific racist oppression? Other European imperialist states committed similar atrocities in their colonies. 

V.I. Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg were among those who split away from the Second International, seeing its support for the bourgeoisies of the imperialist countries as a betrayal. Lenin goes beyond Marx and Engels in arguing that socialists in imperialist countries must support struggles for national liberation in their own colonies, seeing this as part of the struggle for democracy:

The socialist revolution is not one single act, not one single battle on a single front; but a whole epoch of intensified class conflicts, a long series of battles on all fronts, i.e., battles around all the problems of economics and politics, which can culminate only in the expropriation of the bourgeoisie. It would be a fundamental mistake to suppose that the struggle for democracy can divert the proletariat from the socialist revolution, or obscure, or overshadow it, etc. On the contrary, just as socialism cannot be victorious unless it introduces complete democracy, so the proletariat will be unable to prepare for victory over the bourgeoisie unless it wages a many-sided, consistent and revolutionary struggle for democracy.

It would be no less mistaken to delete any of the points of the democratic programme, for example, the point of self-determination of nations, on the ground that it is “infeasible,” or that it is “illusory” under imperialism…

The domination of finance capital, as of capital in general, cannot be abolished by any kind of reforms in the realm of political democracy, and self-determination belongs wholly and exclusively to this realm. The domination of finance capital, however, does not in the least destroy the significance of political democracy as the freer, wider and more distinct form of class oppression and class struggle…

Russian Socialists who fail to demand freedom of secession for Finland, Poland, the Ukraine, etc., etc. – are behaving like chauvinists, like lackeys of the blood-and-mud-stained imperialist monarchies and the imperialist bourgeoisie.[13]

The second bifurcation: democracy undermined

Lenin’s uncompromising championship of internationalism helped to preserve the revolutionary tradition, but his assaults on democracy, assisted by Leon Trotsky, completely abandoned the principles he had proclaimed in 1916. There are plenty of examples, but I will cite just three. One is the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly when it became clear that although it was overwhelmingly socialist, the Bolsheviks were a minority of about 25 percent. Many Bolsheviks opposed the hostility of their party leaders to the Assembly. Prior to the election, five members of the Bolshevik Central Committee resigned in protest against plans to cancel it, saying in a statement that “We cannot assume responsibility for this ruinous policy of the Central Committee, carried out against the will of a large part of the proletariat and soldiers.” Five Bolsheviks resigned their commissariats, stating, “There is only one path: the preservation of a purely Bolshevik government by means of political terror. We cannot and will not accept this.”[14] Thanks to these protests, the election was allowed to go through, but before the Constituent Assembly opened on 18 January 1918, a peaceful demonstration in support of it was dispersed by firing, and the following day, Lenin announced that the Constituent Assembly had been dissolved. Socialist writer Maxim Gorky was appalled:

For a hundred years the best people of Russia lived with the hope of a Constituent Assembly. In the struggle for this idea thousands of the intelligentsia perished and tens of thousands of workers and peasants.

On 5th [18^th] January, the unarmed revolutionary democracy of Petersburg – workers, officials – were peacefully demonstrating in favour of the Constituent Assembly. Pravda lies when it writes that the demonstration was organized by the bourgeoisie and by the bankers. Pravda lies; it knows that the bourgeoisie has nothing to rejoice in the opening of the Constituent Assembly, for they are of no consequence among the 246 socialists and 140 Bolsheviks. Pravda knows that the workers of the Obukhavo, Patronnyi and other factories were taking part in the demonstrations. And these workers were fired upon. And Pravda may lie as much as it wants, but it cannot hide the shameful facts.[15]

The second example is the crushing of the Kronstadt uprising. The demands of the Kronstadt rebels were clearly democratic, including new elections to the soviets by secret ballot with freedom to campaign among workers and peasants; freedom of speech and press for workers, peasants, anarchists, and left socialists; and freedom of assembly for labour unions and peasant organizations. Yet their rebellion was crushed by the Red Army in a bloody battle, after which thousands of prisoners were shot or sent to forced labour camps. The slaughter of comrades who were guilty only of adhering to the original aims of the revolution disgusted Emma Goldman so much that she decided she would have nothing to do with the Bolsheviks in future.[16]

The third example is Lenin’s and Trotsky’s merciless disparagement of trade union leaders Mikhail Tomsky and Alexander Shlyapnikov for their attempts to prevent unions from being subordinated to the one-party state. Shlyapnikov wanted unions to take charge of economic planning and production, while Tomsky had the less ambitious aim of ensuring a degree of workers’ control over management that would ensure health, safety, and decent working conditions. Trotsky, especially, was egregiously insulting to them, insisting that trade unions should abandon fighting for better conditions for workers and focus exclusively on raising productivity.[17]

This is clearly a second bifurcation point, where things could have been different if the Bolshevik leaders had safeguarded democracy instead of forcibly suppressing dissidents. But it is not a simple bifurcation. Luxemburg was very critical of these actions, and consistently spoke up for democracy. Yet on the issue of what was to happen to the Tsarist colonies, she vociferously opposed granting them the right to national liberation (a democratic right), whereas Lenin, having started out with a position very similar to hers, was persuaded by Marxists from those colonies that they should have a right to independence from Russia if that is what they wanted.[18] Shlyapnikov participated in shutting down the Constituent Assembly[19], and Tomsky, packed off to Tashkent as a disciplinary measure, was more sympathetic to ethnic Russian settler-colonists than to indigenous Muslims evicted from their land.[20] All of them, in their different ways, fell short of a whole-hearted defence of democracy.

The third bifurcation: Stalin’s counter-revolution

The undermining of democracy under Lenin and Trotsky created the conditions for Stalin’s counter-revolution, but it would be a mistake to see this as simple continuity rather than a qualitative break. While Lenin was alive, the situation was still fluid, it was possible to fight against authoritarianism and sometimes even to win. Tomsky and Shlyapnikov might have been derided and subjected to disciplinary procedures, yet they could also be reinstated in positions from which they could continue to fight for workers’ rights. Among the anti-colonial influences on Lenin was Mirsaid Sultan-Galiev, the pioneering Bolshevik theorist of imperialism, national liberation and socialism, who saw national liberation and the modernization and democratization of Western and Tsarist colonies as necessary steps in the socialist revolution.[21] Above all, Lenin himself began to understand that far from accelerating the transition to socialism, his insistence on a minority Bolshevik government bolstered by the persecution of dissidents and use of the police against them had allowed the most authoritarian, backward elements in the party to take control of it as well as the state apparatus; but he died before he could fully analyze what had happened and reverse this trend.[22] In his book From Lenin to Stalin, Victor Serge – who was by no means an uncritical acolyte of Lenin or Trotsky – writes, ‘Everything has changed, everything is changing.’[23]

From the February Revolution in 1917 to the aftermath of Lenin’s death in 1924, the struggle for democracy was never coherent, nor seen as a priority by the majority of Russian socialists. People who opposed one authoritarian measure would often support another. And hovering in the background was submissiveness to “the party” as well as the idea that defending what were seen as “bourgeois” democratic rights, freedoms and institutions was unnecessary – even reactionary – at a time when what they believed was a socialist revolution was in progress. It is possible to envisage a different outcome if there had been a united force mounting a principled defence of democracy.

The lack of such a force helped Stalin to consolidate his own repressive state apparatus and use it to devastating effect as the opposition floundered. In December 1928, the Politbureau appointed five Stalin supporters to the trade union presidium, and when trade union delegates objected, threatened them with arrest. Realising he had lost control, Tomsky resigned from his post. A campaign of vilification against him intensified while hard-liner Kaganovich oversaw a massive purge of trade union bodies from top to bottom. Wages dropped by half, and working conditions plummeted. In August 1936, learning that he was going to be arrested, Tomsky committed suicide to avoid being coerced into implicating himself and others in fictitious crimes at a show trial.[24] Shlyapnikov was purged from the party in 1933 and executed in September 1937.[25] Not just in Russia but throughout the Soviet Union, workers lost the right to form or join a union of their choice and elect their own trade union leaders.

In May 1923, while Lenin was incapacitated by a stroke, Stalin arrested and expelled Tatar Bolshevik Mirsaid Sultan-Galiev, and from 9 to 12 June subjected him to a show-trial – the first show-trial of a Bolshevik – based on fabricated evidence. Other Muslim delegates were too afraid of being arrested or shot to defend him. But Zinoviev, Kamenev and Trotsky were still in a position to speak up for him, yet failed to do so; Sultan-Galiev was forced to recant in order to stay alive, creating a precedent for other socialists to be treated the same way in the Great Purges.[26] He was rearrested in 1928 and sentenced to ten years of hard labour, sentenced to death in 1939, and shot in 1940. Equally important in this case was Stalin’s drive to reverse Lenin’s progressive policies in the former colonies of Tsarist Russia, stripping them of equality and autonomy and Russifying them ruthlessly.[27] Raphael Lemkin, the Holocaust survivor who coined the term “genocide,” argued that in some cases, including Ukraine and Muslim-majority republics like Crimea, this treatment amounted to genocide.[28]

The final blow was Stalin’s doctrine of “socialism in one country,” first put forward in December 1924.[29] Defining an increasingly brutal totalitarian, imperialist state as “socialist” and “communist” made these terms appear to be the opposite of democracy, something that had not happened under Lenin. The corollary of this argument – that henceforth the primary task of communists around the world was to defend Russia and carry out the commands of its “communist” state – redefined internationalism as Russian nationalism. In a perceptive essay, George Orwell says that among other things, “nationalism” in the rather unorthodox sense in which he uses the term means “the habit of identifying oneself with a single nation or other unit, placing it beyond good and evil and recognizing no other duty than that of advancing its interests.” He continues that in Britain, “Among the intelligentsia, it hardly needs saying that the dominant form of nationalism is Communism ­– using this word in a very loose sense, to include not merely Communist Party members but ‘fellow-travellers’ and russophiles generally. A Communist, for my purpose here, is one who looks upon the U.S.S.R. as his Fatherland and feels it his duty to justify Russian policy and advance Russian interests at all costs.”[30]

In other words, “Communism” here means Russian nationalism. While “Communists” who advanced Russian interests at all costs declined in number and the Sino-Soviet split complicated allegiances, sympathy for Russia still infects an astonishing range of people around the world. That a substantial portion of the self-professed left can echo the propaganda of Putin, who openly expresses nostalgia for Tsarism and a desire to reverse the Russian revolution, shows how pervasive this hangover from Stalinism remains today.

What made “socialism in one country” so persuasive was the prevailing confusion about the character of the Russian revolution, shared by most of those who opposed Stalin. In his panoramic survey of Western Marxism and the Soviet Union, Marcel van der Linden presents a plethora of theories and observations. Most participants in the debate agree that pre-revolutionary Russia had a nascent or backward capitalist economy and absolute monarchist state, but disagree about what came after Stalin rose to power. Of the three possibilities discussed – state capitalism, a degenerated workers’ state and bureaucratic collectivism or some other hitherto-unknown mode of production – arguments for the first are strongest.

In 1917, capitalists were dispossessed and workers’ councils formed, but the workers couldn’t run production as a whole. A minority in society, further decimated by the war, and without much experience of democratic discussion and debate due to the repressive tsarist state, how could they? The state had to step in and take over, with a degree of centralisation that varied over time. In 1932, Friedrich Adler suggested a form of state capitalism had developed to carry out primitive accumulation, and this accounted for the subordination of workers and imposition of sacrifices on them.[31] Indeed, the dispossession of the peasantry and their conversion into wage-labourers – achieved in the Soviet Union by collectivisation – was also a characteristic of primitive accumulation. None of the Western Marxists mentioned the imperialist character of Soviet Russia prior to World War II, but this was emphasised by Mirsaid Sultan-Galiev, whose writings in many ways recalled Marx’s descriptions of Western capitalism’s depredations in Asia, Africa and the Americas during its period of primitive accumulation.[32]

In the 1940s, Raya Dunayevskaya and C.L.R. James characterised Russia as state capitalist on the grounds that production relations were essentially capitalist, since workers were exploited by having surplus value extracted from them and accumulated through the expansion of production without improving their standard of living.[33] They quoted Marx –  who had stated that if the capital of a whole country was centralised in the hands of a single capitalist or corporation it would not cease to be capital[34] – to argue that capital was still capital if centralised in the hands of the state. In 1948 Tony Cliff, a Palestinian Trotskyist originally called Ygael Gluckstein, began arguing that Stalinist Russia was state capitalist, and dealt with the objection that there was no competition either within Russia or on the world market with the argument that international competition took place in the production of armaments.[35]

However, the most powerful argument that what existed in Russia was state capitalism comes from Lenin. In 1918 he argued for progress to state capitalism in his polemic against the Left Communists:

 Yesterday, the main task of the moment was, as determinedly as possible, to nationalise, confiscate, beat down and crush the bourgeoisie, and put down sabotage. Today, only a blind man could fail to see that we have nationalised, confiscated, beaten down and put down more than we have had time to count. The difference between socialisation and simple confiscation is that confiscation can be carried out by “determination” alone, without the ability to calculate and distribute properly, whereas socialisation cannot be brought about without this ability…

 

[S]tate capitalism would be a step forward as compared with the present state of affairs in our Soviet Republic. If in approximately six months’ time state capitalism became established in our Republic, this would be a great success and a sure guarantee that within a year socialism will have gained a permanently firm hold and will have become invincible in our country…

 

No one, I think, in studying the question of the economic system of Russia, has denied its transitional character. Nor, I think, has any Communist denied that the term Socialist Soviet Republic implies the determination of Soviet power to achieve the transition to socialism, and not that the new economic system is recognised as a socialist order…

 

At present, petty-bourgeois capitalism prevails in Russia, and it is one and the same road that leads from it to both large-scale state capitalism and to socialism, through one and the same intermediary station called “national accounting and control of production and distribution”.[36]

 

Lenin clearly detaches the capitalist economy from “Soviet power,” which is attempting to bring about a transition to socialism, stating that the economy never ceased to be capitalist, and the only guarantee that it would move towards socialism lies in the character of the state, which at this point he seems confident is working-class. However, by December 1922 he admits that “the [state] apparatus we call ours is, in fact, still quite alien to us; it is a bourgeois and tsarist hotch-potch and there has been no possibility of getting rid of it in the course of the past five years without the help of other countries and because we have been ‘busy’ most of the time with military engagements and the fight against famine.”[37]

The elephant in the room throughout most of this debate is the issue of substitutionism. If a dictatorship is exercised by a party substituting itself for the proletariat, what is there to prevent it from becoming a dictatorship over the proletariat? The Bolsheviks were certainly supported by a section of the working class in 1917, but only a minority, which constituted an even smaller minority of working people in the country. In 1919, the Menshevik internationalist Julius Martov described the paradoxical way in which the Bolsheviks, instead of seeking the atrophy of the repressive functions of the bourgeois state, now sought the hypertrophy and resurrection of state institutions typical of the bourgeois era:

The shrewd people continue to repudiate democratic parliamentarism. But they no longer repudiate, at the same time, those instruments of State power to which parliamentarism is a counterweight within bourgeois society: bureaucracy, police, a permanent army with commanding cadres that are independent of the soldiers, courts that are above control by the community, etc. In contrast to the bourgeois State, the State of the transitional revolutionary period ought to be an apparatus for the “repression of the minority by the majority.” Theoretically, it should be a governmental apparatus resting in the hands of the majority. In reality, the Soviet State continues to be, as the State of the past, a government apparatus resting in the hands of a minority.[38]

 This model of revolution diverges sharply from the model envisaged in Engels’ interpretation of Marx: “The working class can only come to power under the form of a democratic republic.”[39] Lenin never lost his affection for Martov and admiration for his clarity and integrity; one of his last wishes (never fulfilled) was that Stalin, the party secretary, should forward funds to Martov, who was dying of tuberculosis in Berlin, so that he could get better medical care.[40] His own last writings indicate a growing recognition that Martov might have been right in his criticisms of repressive Bolshevik rule.

Implications for the twenty-first century

Revolutions claiming to abolish capitalism are almost unheard-of in recent decades, but if we shift our attention to struggles for democracy, then the 21^st century has seen many. Contrary to dire predictions about declining unionism and the end of strikes, there have been numerous unionization drives as well as strikes. There have been democracy uprisings against authoritarian states in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Iraq, Sudan, Algeria and Sri Lanka, multiple uprisings against the militarised theocracy in Iran including the amazing one led by women and girls, the farmers’ uprising in India, and resistance by Ukrainians, Belarusians and Russians to Putin’s genocidal war on Ukraine. Working people exploited by capital – a broader category than the “proletariat” as defined by Marx and Engels – participated in all of them, and they can be seen as “the first step in the revolution by the working class.” Of course, these uprisings have encountered murderous violence from the state and far right, but that also highlights my other point: the urgent need for socialist internationalist solidarity with all struggles for democracy, everywhere in the world.

Is the notion of “bifurcations” theoretically justified?

The assumption underlying the notion of “bifurcations” is that events in a particular conjuncture could have taken a different direction. This opens it up to the charge of being a counterfactual account of history: “This is how it happened, but this is how it could have happened.” How do we know? Obviously, we can’t. On the other hand, to say “This is how it happened and this is how it had to happen” is a deterministic view, depriving the human beings involved in the situation of the agency to act in any other way.

Marx tackled this problem in “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte” when he said that “Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.”[41] In 1917, Lenin and the Bolsheviks could do nothing about the fact that Russia had a backward capitalist economy, an absolutist state, and a working class which had never enjoyed democratic rights; these were “circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.” However, the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly and firing on unarmed “workers and employees” who came out with “red banners” to support it was not a circumstance inherited from the past but an instance of a violent and repressive history being made.[42] The Bolshevik Party was not a monolithic machine – as we have seen, there were plenty of disagreements within it – and it would have been possible for it to participate in the Constituent Assembly. We cannot know exactly what would have happened if they did, only that a violent and repressive incident would have been avoided and democracy would have been upheld.

We cannot change what happened in the past, but unless we learn from it, our capacity to move towards a socialist society in the present and future is severely constrained. I believe we are at another bifurcation point today. People who could shut their eyes to Russia’s history of racist, genocidal imperialism during the Tsarist and Stalinist periods[43] as well as its imperialist exploitation and oppression of various African countries in the 21^st century[44] found it somewhat harder to justify its naked aggression against Ukraine in 2022. It therefore becomes easier to convince revolutionary socialists that principled opposition to the heinous crimes committed by Western imperialists and their barbaric, authoritarian allies is compatible with – indeed demands – equal opposition to the heinous crimes committed by anti-Western imperialists and their barbaric, authoritarian allies. Self-professed socialists who fail to do so undermine their own moral authority and credibility when they condemn Western imperialism.[45]

If a thorough critique of neo-Stalinism is made, it would be possible to reverse the current decline of the left. This would include going all the way back to the Communist Manifesto and making it clear that a socialist society was nowhere on the horizon at that point and will even now remain elusive unless there is a concerted effort to fight for democracy and human rights in all countries. Failing that, a section of the left will continue to converge with the far right, the largest part of it will take inconsistent positions, and only a small section will consistently support struggles for democracy around the world, knowing that their success is a necessary condition for a socialist transition.

(This paper was published in the International Labor and Working-Class History journal, Volume 106, October 2024, pp.365–377, and is available at https://doi.org/10.1017/S0147547924000279 )

 

---

 

Notes

[1] Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, “Manifesto of the Communist Party” [1848], The Revolutions of 1848, tr. David Fernbach (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1973) 67–98: 79–80.  

[2] Frederick Engels, “Introduction to Marx’s Class Struggles in France” (1895).  https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1850/class-struggles-france/intro.htm

[3] Wilhelm Eichoff, “The International Working Men’s Association: Its Establishment, Organisation, Political and Social Activity, and Growth” (1869). http://marxengels.public-archive.net/en/ME9000en.html

[4] Marx and Engels, “Manifesto of the Communist Party”, 98.

[5] Karl Marx, “Address of the Central Committee to the Communist League” (1850). https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/communist-league/1850-ad1.htm

[6] Karl Marx, “A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy” (1859).  https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1859/critique-pol-economy/preface.htm

[7] Jean-Paul Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, tr. Alan Sheridan-Smith (London: Verso/NLB, 1982), 662.

[8] Frederick Engels, Anti- Düring. Herr Eugen Düring’s Revolution in Science [1877–1878] (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1947), Chapter 24.  https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1877/anti-duhring/ch24.htm

[9] Karl Marx, “Critique of the Gotha Programme” [1875], The First International and After, tr. David Fernbach (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1974) 339–359: 355, 356.

[10] Frederick Engels, “A Critique of the Draft Social-Democratic Program of 1891” (1891). https://marxists.catbull.com/archive/marx/works/1891/06/29.htm

[11] Marx and Engels, “Manifesto of the Communist Party”, 98.

[12] Reinhart Kössler, “Entangled history and politics: Negotiating the past between Namibia and Germany,” Journal of Contemporary African Studies, 26(3), July 2008, 313–339.

[13] V.I. Lenin, “The Socialist Revolution and the Right of Nations to Self-Determination” (1916). https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1916/jan/x01.htm#bkV22P151F01 

[14] John Simkin, “1917 Constituent Assembly in Russia,” Spartacus Educational (1997, updated 2020). https://spartacus-educational.com/RUSassembly.htm

[15] John Simkin, “1917 Constituent Assembly in Russia”.

[16] Emma Goldman, My Disillusionment in Russia (New York: Doubleday, Page & Company, 1923), chapter 27.  https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/goldman/works/1920s/disillusionment/ch27.htm    

[17] Charters Wynn, The Moderate Bolshevik: Mikhail Tomsky from the Factory to the Kremlin, 1880–1936 (Leiden: Brill, 2022), 81–101; Barbara C. Allen, Alexander Shlyapnikov 1885–1937: Life of an Old Bolshevik (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2016), 182–190.

[18] Rohini Hensman, “Socialist internationalism and the Ukraine war,” Historical Materialism blog, 2022. https://www.historicalmaterialism.org/blog/socialist-internationalism-and-ukraine-war

[19] Barbara C. Allen, Alexander Shlyapnikov, 106–107.

[20] Charters Wynn, The Moderate Bolshevik, 136–144.

[21] Rohini Hensman, “Mirsaid Sultan-Galiev, the Pioneering Bolshevik Theorist of Imperialism, National Liberation and Socialism,” Logos Journal 22, no.3 (2023). https://logosjournal.com/article/mirsaid-sultan-galiev-the-pioneering-bolshevik-theorist-of-imperialism-national-liberation-and-socialism/

[22] Moshe Lewin, Lenin’s Last Struggle, tr. A.M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Random House, 1968).

[23] Victor Serge, From Lenin to Stalin (New York: Pioneer Publishers, 1937), 55. https://www.marxists.org/archive/serge/1937/FromLeninToStalin-BW-T144.pdf

[24] Charters Wynn, The Moderate Bolshevik, 297, 302–11, 361–65, 388.

[25] Barbara C. Allen, Alexander Shlyapnikov, 320–29, 363.

[26] Stephen Blank, “Stalin’s first victim: The trial of Sultangaliev,” Russian History/Histoire Russe, 17(2), 1990, 155–178: 162–63, 168, 170–172, 175.

[27] Sergei Lebedev, “Sandarmokh. When the Graves Speak” (2023). https://swiatsybiru.pl/en/sandarmokh-when-graves-speak/

[28] Rohini Hensman, Indefensible: Democracy, Counter-Revolution, and the Rhetoric of Anti-Imperialism (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2018), 35–38, 55.

[29] E.H. Carr, Socialism in One Country 1924–1926, Volume 2 (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1970), 45–61.

[30] George Orwell, “Notes on Nationalism,” Polemic, 1945. https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/essays-and-other-works/notes-on-nationalism/

[31] Marcel van der Linden, Western Marxism and the Soviet Union (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 53–54.

[32] Mirsaid Sultan-Galiev, “Two articles by Mirsaid Sultan-Galiev, 1919” posted by Joshua Alexander on 08/08/2016. https://web.archive.org/web/20200629112952/https://anti-imperialism.org/2016/08/08/two-articles-by-mirsaid-sultan-galiev-1919/

[33] Raya Dunayevskaya, “The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics is a Capitalist Society” (written 20 February 1941 and published in the Internal Discussion Bulletin of the Workers’ Party). https://www.marxists.org/archive/dunayevskaya/works/1941/ussr-capitalist.htm ; C.L.R. James, State Capitalism and World Revolution, written in collaboration with Raya Dunayevskaya and Grace Lee, 1950 (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr Publishing Company, 1986). https://files.libcom.org/files/State%20capitalism%20and%20world%20revolution%20-%20CLR%20James.pdf

[34] Karl Marx, Capital Volume 1 (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1976), 779.

[35] Marcel van der Linden, Western Marxism and the Soviet Union, 119–124.

[36] V.I. Lenin, “Left-Wing” Childishness,” 1918.  https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1918/may/09.htm

[37] V.I. Lenin, “The Question of Nationalities or ‘Autonomisation’,” 1922.  https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1922/dec/testamnt/autonomy.htm

[38] J. Martov, The State and the Socialist Revolution, tr. Integer (New York: International Review, 1938), 19. https://archive.org/details/TheStateAndTheSocialistRevolution/page/n9/mode/2up 

[39] Frederick Engels, “A Critique of the Draft Social-Democratic Program of 1891”.

[40] Harold Meyerson, “My Man Martov,” The American Prospect, 7 November 2017. https://prospect.org/world/man-martov/

[41] Karl Marx, “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte,” 1852.  https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/18th-brumaire/ch01.htm

[42] Maxim Gorky, cited by Paresh Chattopadhyay, Socialism and Commodity Production: Essay in Marx Revival (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2018), 12–13.

[43] See Sergei Lebedev, “Sandarmokh. When the Graves Speak.”

[44] Greg Mills, Ray Hartley and John Gowing, “It’s time to remove the Wagner killers from Africa,” Daily Maverick, 2023. https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2023-06-29-its-time-to-remove-the-wagner-killers-from-africa/

[45] Rohini Hensman, Indefensible, 283–284.