On the Palestinian Question, Opportunism Has a Long History

June 1, 2024

By Stephen Gowans

Le Monde Diplomatique is running a review of Moscow’s stance on the Palestinian question in this month’s (June, 2024) issue, presenting a history that begins with the twists and turns of Soviet policy.  

The Soviet Union’s initial position on the Palestinian question, likely formulated under the influence of the Comintern and definitely under the influence of Marxism, was that there ought to be in Palestine an independent, non-national, democratic state, in which all citizens are equal, regardless of their ethno-religious identity.

This is the same view which was initially taken up by the PLO, and is the stance of those who today “support the dismantlement of Israel’s racist structures and laws and advocate for one decolonised state, from the river to the sea, in which everyone living within it is equal before the law and does not benefit from any racial, ethnic, or religious privileges,” as Joseph Massad recently put it.

In early 1947, R. Palme Dutt, writing on behalf of the communist parties of the British Empire, demanded “the creation of a free, independent and democratic Palestinian state, which will guarantee equal rights of citizenship with full religious freedom and full opportunities to develop their culture to all its inhabitants, Arab and Jewish.”

It seems odd that a little over one year later, the USSR recognized “the state of Israel, three days after its founding,” and equally odd (or disappointing if not repugnant) that less than a year earlier it had backed the UN partition plan, which granted Jewish settlers in Palestine, who made up one-third of the population, over one-half of the Palestinian’s country.

One body, the UN General Assembly, at the time dominated by imperialist and settler colonial states, pledged more than half of the country of one nation to Jewish settlers who said they made up another. The UN General Assembly had no legal or moral authority to partition Palestine.

Worse still, Moscow was recognizing a state that had no intention of even adhering to the legally and morally invalid UN plan, having taken territory by force slated for an Arab state, and expelling 800,000 Palestinians.

It gets worse. Stalin then sent arms via Czechoslovakia to the Israeli army, and dispatched “hundreds of Jewish officers from the Red Army,” to help put down the resistance of the Palestinians and their Arab compatriots to the theft of their land and expulsion.

Soviet support helped “Israel defeat the Arab countries, then seen as British allies by the Soviets.” In the settler-native war of 1948, the Soviets were clearly on the side of the settlers and against the oppressed. Moscow’s appeal to the oppressed to join hands with workers around the world under Soviet leadership, must have seemed to be, for good reason, a bad joke.

Why did the Soviets abandon a position of opposition to settler colonialism in favor of one supporting Zionism? Raison d’etat. Realpolitick. Moscow saw advantage for the Soviet state in backing a movement it saw as against British influence in the Middle East. Since the Zionists had engaged in a war of terrorism with the British mandate authorities, and London controlled Egypt, Iraq, and Transjordan, Stalin thought that support for Jewish settlers in Palestine would deal a blow to British influence in West Asia and North Africa.

It didn’t. The British continued to wield influence in the region and Israel looked to the West for support. Soviet influence in subsequent years remained limited to a few Arab nationalist states—Syria, Iraq, Libya—which had turned to the Soviets for aid against the British and Americans, who objected to their economic nationalism.

Even then, these states were wary of getting too close to Moscow for fear of being turned into Soviet vassals. Given Moscow’s capacity to sacrifice principle in pursuit of realpolitik and its immediate political aims, their fears were not without foundation.

Moscow’s shift from endorsing a decolonized Palestine to supporting Zionist settler colonialism was an instance of opportunism—sacrificing principal and fundamental goals to short-term advantage. Lenin railed against the opportunism of the Second International; on the Palestinian question, Stalin practiced it.

Of course, it could be quibbled that the Marxist notion of opportunism is specific to working class interests, not those of an agrarian people despoiled by settler colonialism.  The reply, if we confine ourselves to the Marxist canon, is to paraphrase the words of Marx. No people can be free who help enslave another. Clearly, the Soviets, at Stalin’s direction, helped Zionists figuratively enslave the Palestinians.

It is said, though the story may be apocryphal, that Stalin later recognized his error and apologized. If true, we must ask ourselves—what did he apologize for? His opportunism, or the fact that he failed to obtain even an opportunistic advantage in his abandonment of principle?

In later years, the USSR would support the two-state solution, as do some previously Soviet-aligned communist parties today, for example, the Communist Party USA, the Communist Party of Canada, and the KKE. So accustomed to blindly following the Moscow line with all its twists, turns, opportunism, and raison d’etat, the leaders of these parties long ago lost the power of independent thought, if they ever had it to begin with. So, they ape what the Soviet position was in its final years, and one suspects without the foggiest idea of what they’re supporting or why.

The two-state solution has a practical problem. Exactly where is the Palestinian state to be located, now that the building of Jewish settlements in the West Bank has effectively denied the Palestinians territory on which to build a viable state? And why should Palestinians be crammed into an insignificant slice—or many insignificant, incontiguous, slices—of their own country?

But the practical problems of the two-state solution pale in comparison to the moral problem. A Palestinian state alongside Israel means the continued existence of a Jewish supremacist apartheid state, whose origin is found in settler colonialism, the theft of the Palestinians’ country, and ethnic cleansing.  

Moreover, two-states concedes the legitimacy of Zionism, a racist, antisemitic, doctrine which holds that:

• The Jews are a nation, rather than a religious community;
• Dismisses activism against antisemitism as futile (because Zionists believe antisemitism is ineradicable, built into the DNA of non-Jews); and
• Favors, as antisemites do, the emigration of Jews from the countries in which they live to Israel.

Strange that no one with even a single progressive bone in their body would have accepted anything less than the complete dismantlement of apartheid South Africa, and the creation, in its place, of a single, unitary, non-national, democratic state in which all people, settlers and natives, were equal. And yet many of the same people, including communists, continue to support a two state solution in Palestine–the companion South African arrangement to a state for whites and Bantustans for blacks.

In 1973, Louis Eaks interviewed the historian Arnold Toynbee on the Palestinian question. Eaks began by outlining what, at the time, now largely forgotten, was the dominant Palestinian goal, “a unitary and democratic state” in all of historic Palestine. Eaks observed that this would offer, “both for the Jewish settlers in Palestine and for the Palestinians, safeguards for their existence in Palestine and for their civil rights.” He lamented, however, that “there doesn’t seem to be any kind of debate about the merits of the Palestinian plan.”

Toynbee opined that the plan “has two merits. It would produce the greatest possible amount of justice, with the least possible amount of suffering for everybody. Nobody would be turned out of his home.” Then Toynbee turned to what he saw as the plan’s weakness. It is “recognized to be politically impracticable. I don’t think that the Israelis would ever agree voluntarily, and I don’t think that America would be willing to compel them to agree to this. Therefore, I don’t think it is possible to carry out this plan.”

Eaks objected. “You say that it is a plan which is now almost impossible to achieve, but the United Nations solution [of cutting the Palestinian baby into two ethnic national states, one Jewish and one Arab] seems equally impossible to achieve, and particularly that aspect which the Palestinians must consider to be the most crucial paragraph, which concerns the right of the refugees to return.”

Eaks, of course, was right. A half century later, the two-state formula remains as much an unrealizable fantasy as it was in 1973, indeed as much as it was in 1947, when it was first proposed as the UN Partition Plan. It has been rejected in deeds and in some cases words by all parties involved ever since.

Eaks continued: “Do you think it is wise in the long run to compromise with Zionism, which is based very much on racial discrimination? Do you not see any future threat to the East if one accepts this kind of racialist state.”

 “Yes,” conceded Toynbee, “I think a racialist state is as bad and as dangerous in the Middle East as it is in southern Africa.”

Eaks wasn’t finished. “It seems to me,” he continued, pressing the point, “that no one who says that apartheid is wrong would say that South Africa is here to stay, and that therefore the African states should accept it and recognize it. Yet many people who say that Zionism is evil and wrong, claim that Israel is here to stay and that we must accept it. Why is there this contradiction between the attitudes towards Zionism and towards apartheid?”

As for China, the capitalist giant which occasionally sings rhapsodies to Marx to excite its gullible communist supporters in the West, its president Xi Jinping “recently reiterated his support for a two-state solution”, which is to say, for the continued existence of a Jewish supremacist state based on settler colonialism, ethnic cleansing, and racist institutions.

As Xi rejects a two-state solution for China—where two independent Chinese states, Taiwan and the PRC, could live side by side, in peace—he endorses a two-state model for the Palestinians. The Chinese, in his view, deserve better. They won’t concede a part of their country in the name of peace—as Xi expects the Palestinians to do.

Xi cares about China, tout court, not the global south and not the Palestinians, any more than Stalin did. As leaders of major states, Stalin then and Xi now, pursue as their priority the interests of the states they lead; everything else is secondary, available to be sacrificed in pursuit of raison d’etat, realpolitik, and opportunism.

Follow-up

In his critique of the KKE’s endorsement of the two-state solution, Jorge Martin makes many of the same arguments I do, but develops some themes more fully. Here are what I think are the parts of his analysis that are particularly relevant to my discussion above.

“[T]he two-state solution has been proven to have been impossible in practice, as we have explained in detail elsewhere. The Oslo Accords of 1993 were seen precisely as a road map towards a two-state solution by the Palestinian leadership. In fact, they were a complete betrayal and sell out of the Palestinian struggle. Israel kept control of a large section of the West Bank and of the external borders, Jewish settlers were allowed to remain in the Palestinian territory and settlements have continued to expand. 

“Meanwhile, the questions of the right of return and the state of East Jerusalem were postponed to be discussed in the long distant future (read: never) and in exchange a pitiful Palestinian ‘Authority’ with no real power was created with the sole aim of subcontracting the policing of the Palestinian masses to the rotten leadership of the PLO. 

…

“So as long as the capitalist state of Israel exists, the Israeli bourgeoisie will never accept the existence of a genuine viable Palestinian state as it considers it a threat to its ‘national security’. This has been proven, not in theory, but in practice. Since the Oslo Accords, the number of Zionist settlements in the West Bank has continuously increased, while Gaza remains completely blockaded by the state of Israel. Israel’s military interventions in Gaza, as well as in the West Bank, have become increasingly frequent and violent, undermining the very existence of even the limited Palestinian entity that is the Palestinian Authority. 

“Furthermore, it is difficult to see how a capitalist state of Palestine would be viable in the territory of the 1967 borders, side-by-side with a powerful imperialist capitalist state of Israel. Such a capitalist Palestine, if it were possible, would be economically dominated by its powerful neighbor and remain at best its semi-colony. 

“It is the practical experience of the last 30 years that has led a majority of Palestinians to reject a two-state solution. In September this year, a poll by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research found that 67 percent of Palestinians reject a two-state solution, with only 32 percent in support. The same poll shows that “71 percent believe the two-state solution is no longer practical due to settlement expansion”. A separate poll conducted by the Arab World for Research and Development on 15 November found that 74 percent of Palestinians are in favor of one state, while only 17 percent want a two-state solution. An overwhelming majority of Palestinians reject the Oslo Accords altogether. 

“Incidentally, even if one were to accept the idea of a two-state solution, why should a Palestinian state be established ‘on the 1967 borders’ (presumably what the KKE means is the pre-1967 war borders) which represented only 22 percent of historic Palestine? Why not go back to the 1947 UN partition plan borders, where a Palestinian state represented 44 percent? The 1967 borders represent not only accepting partition itself but also the further territorial conquests by the State of Israel in the period after it. 

…

“In 1947, the Soviet Union backed the partition plan at the United Nations. This was not done in solidarity with the Jewish people .. but rather in an attempt to undermine the position of British imperialism in the Middle East. [My note: It could have been done for both reasons.] The USSR was the first country to recognize the newly created State of Israel and Stalin supplied the Zionists with weapons via Czechoslovakia. Soviet support for the setting up of the State of Israel in 1948 was a betrayal with catastrophic consequences for all the communist parties throughout the Middle East and beyond. Such a position cannot be justified and made the USSR complicit in the crime that was committed against the Palestinian people.”