Palestine and Israel: Historical, Legal and Moral Issues

On 7 October 2023, Palestinian militant group Hamas launched a massive attack on Israeli territory, killing over 1300 people, many of whom were civilians; the Israeli state has responded by bombing the Gaza Strip, in which Hamas has its headquarters and over 2.3 million civilians have their homes, starving inhabitants of food, water, medicines and fuel. But why did this happen? And what can be done about it? On these questions, there is no agreement whatsoever.

Mirsaid Sultan-Galiev, The Pioneering Bolshevik Theorist of Imperialism, National Liberation and Socialism

The first show trial of a Bolshevik

Given his prominence as a high-ranking Bolshevik, Mirsad Sultan-Galiev is very little known. This is partly because he was cut off early in his career by persecution and ultimate execution in Stalin’s purges and his writings suppressed for decades, but also due to distortion and lack of comprehension of his arguments even by many anti-Stalinists. This is a pity, because there is much we can learn from his writings as well as his practice even today.

Socialist Internationalism and the Ukraine War

How do the working people of the world transform themselves from a plethora of groups waging a multitude of scattered struggles for survival and dignity to a revolutionary force capable of ending capitalism, governing the earth, and taking over production? They have innumerable tasks before them, but one of the most important is to overcome divisions among themselves resulting from ethnic supremacism and nationalism. Marxists have been debating this issue from the beginning, but it still plagues us today. The war in Ukraine offers a good opportunity to examine it more closely.

The Russian Revolution and Russian Imperialism

Lenin’s anti-imperialism

Unlike Western imperialism, which colonised overseas territories, the Tsarist empire expanded by annexing adjacent territories from the Arctic Ocean in the north to the Black Sea in the south, from the Baltic Sea in the west to the Pacific Ocean in the east. In the Preface to Lenin’s Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, he explains that in order to evade censorship, he had in 1916 substituted Japan for Russia, and Korea for ‘Finland, Poland, Courland, the Ukraine, Khiva, Bokhara, Estonia or other regions peopled by non-Great Russians’ (1). As a genuine anti-imperialist, he was as opposed to Great-Russian imperialist annexation of the territories of non-Great-Russian peoples as he was to Western imperialism.

However, many of Lenin’s colleagues opposed his policies favouring the right of Russia’s colonies to national liberation. After Finland’s independence was recognized in 1917, no other nation received the same treatment; but the larger nations of Ukraine, Belorussia, Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan became independent Soviet republics, while smaller nations within the boundaries of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (including the Central Asian nations) became autonomous republics and autonomous regions responsible for matters of local government, education, culture and agriculture. A range of policies aimed at promoting the national, economic, and cultural advancement of the non-Russians was pursued: priority to the local language, a massive increase in native language schools, development of national cultures, and staffing the Soviet administration as far as possible with local nationals.

Lenin did not arrive at this position entirely on his own; indeed, in the early 20^th century, his position and that of the Iskra current to which he belonged was extremely unsympathetic to national liberation struggles in the colonies of the tsarist empire. Eric Blanc shows that it was non-Russian Marxist parties in the empire’s periphery – especially in Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, Ukraine and the Caucasus – who were arguing the positions subsequently articulated by Lenin. These parties, despite being committed in theory and practice to opposing ethnic nationalism and building proletarian unity across national divisions, emphasized the need for national independence as well as the autonomy of their own parties in relation to the Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party (2). Lenin was also influenced by the Tatar Bolshevik Mirsaid Sultan-Galiev, who argued that the socialist revolution could not succeed without the participation of the colonised peoples of the East (3).

Introduction to a Special Issue of the Journal of Gender Studies on Gender and Nationalism

 

This issue of the Journal takes up the problematic relationship between gender and nationalism. The ambiguity of this relationship derives mainly from the two-sided character of nationalism. The feminist struggle is one for liberation from gender oppression; to the extent that it stands aside from other struggles against oppression (bourgeois feminists who ignore class oppression, white feminists who ignore racism), it becomes limited and partial: that is, it fails to recognise the gendered ways in which racial and class oppression operate, and thereby accepts the oppression of some women. Similarly, foreign domination and ethnic oppression also affect women in specific ways, and a feminism which stands for the liberation of all women cannot be neutral: it has to take a stand against oppression and for liberation.

However, nationalism is not simply about liberation from foreign domination or ethnic oppression; indeed, this dimension is not even present in most forms of nationalism (British nationalism being an obvious example), whereas all forms of nationalism are about the establishment and perpetuation of state power – an inherently authoritarian and hierarchical institution – over a certain area of the earth’s surface. Where this is the only dimension in nationalism (where it is imperialist and racist, for example), there is no dilemma for feminists: they can unambiguously be opposed to it. It is when the liberationist element is also present that the problems arise. This is the grey area where a struggle may be against foreign domination or ethnic oppression but also may be fundamentalist or otherwise oppressive to women, or stand for its own form of ethnic oppression, or in other ways seek to establish a totalitarian state power. Where should feminists stand when the goals of nationalism diverge from those of feminism?