From: Nestor Miguel Gorojovsky <nestor-AT-sisurb.filo.uba.ar>
Date: 	Mon, 16 Mar 1998 09:12:12 +0000
Subject: M-I: Ireland (I got personal)


List,

It's a pity the world revolves the way it does, it allows Gary 
MacLennan to answer our tender Jim H and Becky P  before I wake up.

Well, the issue is Ireland, so I guess he has a right to do so, and 
the rotation of the Earth just helps him.

So, since Gary has said all that is worth saying while keeping 
objective, I will turn personal.

I will tell a story, part of my own personal story, and so try to put 
some light within the darkness of both James and Rebecca.  

And perhaps even _they_ will understand what I 
mean when I call them pro-imperialists (I do not expect them to 
agree, just hope they will see what I mean).

When I was much younger than today I was a left-wing Zionist.  I was 
an Argentine young Jewish boy, brought up in a low, slowly 
impoverishing, petty bourgeois environment.  By those times
the sectarian side of Zionism was not as clear as it is now,
there were many Left tendencies recruiting young non-religious Jewish girls 
and boys like me.  We were told to go to Israel and fulfill the
Jewish national destiny and fight for socialism there.  

The winds of the Russian Revolution of 1917 still blew, however 
faintly, in those messages.  Particularly in Argentina, late sixties 
and early seventies:  a pre-revolutionary milieu, families with 
collections dating back to the years of the Russian Revolution, and 
so on. 

And at the Zionist youth center I was invited to there were 
some very beautiful (though, alas, I later discovered, quite stupid) 
girls. I was not looking for philosophy, anyway, so that their 
stupidity did not represent much of a problem.  Later on, when I 
discovered that there were plenty of intelligent _and_ beautiful 
girls in the world outside, it was a great discovery.  But, remember, 
I was young, just beginning to sense life.

Well, the fact is that I was honestly convinced that as a Jew it was 
my duty to go live in Israel and fight for revolution there.  This 
was at odds with some of my deepest feelings, which I came to 
discover while living in Israel on a program for the preparation of 
Zionist youth leaders.  I may have been one of the most expensive 
failures in that program, because my own Argentine envirnoment and 
upbringing, as well as the realities of a (keep in mind) still 
Labor-governed, but chauvinistic, sectarian, and imperialistic state 
clashed with what they tried to teach us.

Things went wrong almost from the very beginning.  It took at most a 
couple of months for me to feel further away from Jewish Israelis 
than from the  Palestinians.  I _discovered_, repeat, 
_discovered_  them there:  we had no idea of Palestinians in Argentine 
Zionist Left, and I may add the Left in general still was markedly 
cold towards their case, and so did many 
the gang of Argentine young girls and boys who were taken to Israel 
with me for indoctrination.  We had a vague still strong feeling that 
something called imperialism existed. We knew that there were 
exploited peoples, dependent and dominated countries, class struggle 
across the borders (as Jim Blaut says) and some of us began to feel 
that there could even exist class struggle across the 
non-mappeable borders of Palestine, a non-entity by those years.

We knew all that from our own experience in Argentina.  The middle 
class was already being crushed down (it was just the beginning, we 
thought nothing could be worse and ah, how wrong we were), and many 
of us were discovering things.  We discovered, for example, that,
though clad in the robes of Democracy and the Left, 
most of our parents had opposed the claims of Argentine 
labor and lower petty bourgeoisie for the return of Perón (who was in 
exile since 1955) as "fascism", but they had in fact been working for 
their own destruction (what is the ultimate capitalist success of a petty 
bourgeois, if not becoming a full bourgeois? this is what Peronism 
had proposed to petty bourgeoisie, this is what they did not see) and 
for the sake of Imperialism, against Democracy and the Left. We did 
not know that sound and simple dictum by Marx: "Want to know where 
the Left is?  Look at the workers";  workers in Argentina were 
not Left, they were Peronists, what did that mean?  Were Argentine workers 
"fascist"?  Were they idiots?  Imperialism answered yes to both 
questions, and did so from the Left and from the Right.

Well, I was strongly surprised (many of us were) when I heard Israeli Leftists speak of 
the Arab world and the Palestinians in much the same terms people who 
I was beginning to distrust spoke of Argentine workers.  "Primitive 
people", contemptuously they would sum up.  "Not still apt for 
socialism", Stalinistically would a self-appointed admirer of Trotsky 
add (this I will never forget, by those days I had begun to read 
Deutscher's works on Trotsky and when I heard this wonderful piece of 
antidialectical thought I was just learning of Trotsky's struggle 
against the "stages" theory of Stalin). 

And so on.  They were sincere Left people.  I mean, they could 
bleed for the Vietnamese while in Israel though not necessarily 
fight to overthrow the Dayan-guided Israeli government (national 
defense would not allow this), they would also sincerely bleed for exactions imposed 
on abstract workers by abstract capitalists the world over, they 
would have been outraged if accused of pro-imperialists.

Just as our JH and RP do.

But they would close ranks with the Israeli government against the 
Palestinians.  

They would have denounced Arafat, if need be, or Nasser, as 
"bourgeois" or "petty bourgeois" reactionaries, as in fact they did.

This reminds me of JH and RP on the Sinn Fein.  

Those Israeli leftists would let it pass unspoken the clear ties between 
Israel (Labor Israel, please keep in mind) and White Racist South 
Africa, they would secretly support the Shah of Iran, they would just 
dismiss us when we asked them the meaning of some unbelievably 
reactionary positions taken by the lowest ranks of Jewish Israeli 
labor.  I recall this answer we got once we were collecting onions somewhere in Northern 
Israel together with some Moroccan Jewish agricultural female workers 
(the lowest of the lowest, if you know what I mean) when, amazed by 
their strong support of Menahem Begin, we asked them why it was so: 
"Because he will cut the Arabs in little pieces", they said.

All of this comes to my mind when I read JH and RP call Adams the 
mainstay of imperialism in Ireland.  Excuse me if I am so personal.

This was the result of Leftist pro-imperialism.  I do not know if JH 
or RP understand what I mean here.  I am sure Gary and every 
Irishperson will.

Behind the truisms of JH, mere imperialist 
petty bourgeois sophistry, lie heavy truths of flesh and blood.  Only 
it usually is other people's flesh and blood.  Oh, Jim H, don't say 
this is mere bombast.  Can't you do better than that?

Regards to all,

Nestor.


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