File spoon-archives/aut-op-sy.archive/aut-op-sy_2001/aut-op-sy.0106, message 37


Date: Sun, 03 Jun 2001 12:03:29 +0200
From: Ilan Shalif <gshalif-AT-netvision.net.il>
Subject: Re: AUT: back to crisis theory


Hi People
Some people who are in one way or another Zionist apologetics
use leftist jargon to twist facts. They try to take advantage of
insufficient knowledge of readers.

Sharon wrote:

> > And we see them heating up all over again. Refugees from camps in the Gaza
> > Strip are sent off and bomb working class Middle Eastern Israeli targets
> in
> > Hadera.

Of course Israeli working class suffer from the fact that the Palestinians
do not accept willingly the efforts of Israel to get rid of them.
However, the Israeli working class are not an innocent victims.

Most of the Israeli working class improved immensely their life conditions
from the settler colonialist project of Zionism.

Most of them are families immigrated from much lower level of economic
development. They know they gained a lot from this. They know they
still gain a lot from the deprivation of the Palestinians.

The extremist fundamentalist Muslims who do most of the bombing
are people who have lot of grudge stemming from Zionist atrocities.
They do not search working class people especially.....
And the victims of the last bombings were mostly from among the newer Zionist
recruit from ex-USSR.


> > During the Gulf War most of the Scuds fell on Shchunat HaTikva, a
> > poor neighborhood in Tel Aviv (and one I lived in for 2 years.)

I wonder why twisting the facts. The majority of Scuds were not there.
The few who were injured or killed were mostly in better off streets.
As if the Iraqi were especially after Israeli working class.

> > Those
> > apartments were poorly constructed, they wouldn't prevent water from
> seeping
> > through in the winter every time it rained.

Of course not all Israelis gain the same from Zionism, but to pick the
slums as the rule is misleading.

> > Imagine what would have happened
> > if chemical weapons were used.

Not much... as a bio-chemistry professor of the anti Zionists camp
explain us.

> > And meanwhile the Israeli bourgeoisie were
> > busy driving down to Eilat, or flying out of the country.

The majority of the participating in the exodos were wage slaves.
Of course the higher waged could afford it more than the lower strata,
but the main area target was in the better of part of the Tel-Aviv central
region.

> > And above all it is the Superpowers who benefited most from the famous
> "Arab
> > Israeli Conflict".

It is of course so... otherwise they would not subsidize heavily the Zionist
project, help it to robe the palestinians home land, and empower Israel
against the return of the transfered Palestinians.

> > I remember a Marxist Prof of my from Tel Aviv U., Avishai
> > Erlich, once said that neither the Israelis nor the Arab States would have
> > had the resources to continue the "Conflict" on their own for more than a
> > decade. It was funded and escalated by the Arms Race and the Cold War.

I am sure the citation taken from an Israeli libertarian communist - who was
many years active in Matspen, was not all that he told. The presentation
of the conflict as mainly an Arms Race and the Cold War miss the main
job of Israel in the region to protect the Imperial needs of the UK till the
US replaced it and from then on the protection of the Saudi oil.

> > Here's a perfect example of how imperialism combines with nationalism, and
> > nationalist conflicts, to turn the working class on all sides not only
> into
> > wage slaves indefinitely, but into canon fodder for war toys and the
> > military industrial complex.

Nice picture, but fruit of imagination. The Israeli palestinian conflict
is not a common example as some who want to cover the settler
colonialist nature of Israel. For sure the libertarian-communist system
that will be here one day will improve immensely the lot of the working
people... However, as long as the global capitalist system is ruling here,
you will not see lot of working class people who prefer to share
equally with the palestinians.

> At the same time, you have to recognize that the divisions are never
> symmetrical.  All of capital's divisions involve assymetrical power
> relations, so that Jewish workers in Israel have access to certain benefits
> or privileges (I don;t exactly like those terms, but I am not coming up with
> anything else at the moment) relative to Palestinians.

You can find an equivalent in the white working class people in the time
of apartheid in South africa.

> Much as whites have
> advantages relative to Black people in the US or Protestants to Catholics in
> Northern Ireland or "Americans" relative to Mexican people.  This assymetry
> means that particular forms of oppression such as racism or national
> chauvinism depend on one section of the working class accepting the meager
> (and in the long term, self-destructuve and self-defeating) privileges, in
> return for silence about or active collusion in the suppression of another
> section of the working class, in which neither are defined in class terms,
> but as some other that blurs class and provides a cross-class identity
> between some of the ruled and the rulers (hence, the white race, men, etc.).

The comparison of this with the Israeli-Palestinian thing is misleading.
It is more similar to other places settler colonialism was (and still) active.

> As a result, workers accepting this rotten deal not only appear as part of
> the enemy of the oppressed group, but actually take the side of the
> exploiters, of capital, in the name of a fetishized, non-class identity.

It was long years real common interest. Only when the majority of
the palestinians accepted a solution that do not include the driving
away of the Jewish immigrants, there become an option of the Israeli
working class (and the capitalist class) finding a way out of the settler
colonialist project. It seems that a big minority of about 30% are already
ready for this.

> This means, however, that the ball is often legitmiately in the court of the
> "privileged" sections to reject that privilege in action, not just as
> individuals, but in collective action.

Do not count on benevolence of the privileged. In Israel the shift
is starting because of real interest. When the continuation of the
Zionist project will become too costly for all to see, things will change.

When a not too costly solution seemed to be possible, you could find
that the nationalist ideology do not hold too much in most of the Israelis.

> Palestinian nationalism may be a
> dead end politically, but it is an understandable response to a certain kind
> of oppression and has a certain appeal, in so far as a possible class
> response is muted by a lack of confidence that class solidarity will be
> returned by those Israeli workers siding with their masters on issues of
> Palestinian oppression.

Palestinian nationalism with all its faults was the main thing that prevented
them from the fate of the native americans of the US.

> This is what opens up a path to escaping this dilemma, which I think
> autonomist Marxism can do better than Ortho politics.  It allows us to
> understand the way the oppression develops, to see it as part of the
> fetishization of reality based on the separation of the producers from the
> means of production, rather than treating the issue in terms that basically
> take nations, nationalism, the state, etc for granted as valid categories.

I am not sure that the only reason was our libertarian communist /
Marxist-autonomist analyzes that did it, but we started the
educational offensive during and after the 1967 war with 30 activists
years before the Communist Party started to hesitantly do this.

The first communications and meetings between Israeli activists and Palestinians
ones were of our members and the left of the Palestinian movement.

Just my few agorot.
Ilan
EMAC (East Mediterranean Anarchist Collective in construction)
http://www.shalif.com/anarchy/
http://www.shalif.com/psychology/
Tel-Aviv 61132 ISRAEL (Occupied Palestain)

Please visit http://www.matzpun.com/



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