On Sat, Oct 17, 2009 at 6:09 AM, Bhaskar Sunkara
<[email protected]>wrote:

> "The project to found Israel as a settler state was and still is “a crime”,
> said comrade Conrad. But that crime has resulted in the coming into being
> of
> an Israeli Jewish, or Hebrew, nation and a working class solution must
> recognise this reality. While comrade Conrad could envisage the necessity
> of
> expelling recent Israeli settlers from the West Bank as part of an agreed
> democratic settlement, it was out of the question to talk about uprooting
> the Israeli Jewish people as a whole. The Israeli Jewish nation, like any
> other, has the right to self-determination, so long as it is not exercised
> at the expense of the oppression of other peoples.
>
>

Did the Afrikaaner community have the right of self-determination? Lenin
advocated this slogan for *oppressed* nations. It is a means to convince the
oppressed that the working class movement of the oppressor nation supports
their struggle, even if it includes separation. It is not a feel good
slogan.

If the Israeli Jews are offered self determination after the coming
socialist revolution, what form will that take? Won't it be a Jewish state
in Palestine - where the Palestinians would want their state? But the Jews
already have such a state, so why do they need a revolution? This would do
nothing to break away the Jewish working class from Zionism. On the
contrary, it is an unprincipled concession to it, one that the Palestinians
could never support. Any leftists advocating it would earn for themselves
distrust.
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