This year, within the space of a few weeks, two great events in the contemporary history of the Jewish people will be commemorated - the thirtieth anniversary of the Warsaw ghetto up rising and the twenty-fifth anniversary of the proclumation of the state of Israel. The coincidence is not accidental, for the two historic dates are intimately related. One symbolises the way in which the fate of the Jews came to represent the human condition under Nazi barbarism. The other is explainable by these sufferings; it took Auschwitz to push the Jewish masses - and with them Western public opinion - into the Zionist camp.
But at the same time, what a contrast! In the Warsaw ghetto the survivorsol the genocide against Polish Jewry embodied the dignity of humanity, resisting oppression, even without immediate hope of success; a revolt that ennobled all humanity, a tragic epic that prefigured the victories of the Indochinese revolution which, under different and more favourable Stanley's for the ceremony inaugurating the drcumstances, was able to triumph over bestial imperialism.
But the creation of the state of Israel, on the other hand, symbolises the spiritual degenerahas become the colonial oppressor in Arab lands, as 1891, predicted Palestinian resistance. In tion of this same Jewish community, which reducing = whole people, the Palestinians, to exile, poverty, and powerlessness.
The militants of the young 'socialist movements, who, at the sides of their comrades of the Jewish workers" movement, led the Jewish Combat Organisation in the Warsaw ghetto from beginning to end, realised, in action, the great historic role of the Jewish spirit in the modern world. The Spinozas, the Freuds, the Einsteins, sons of a community embedded like a hinge between various cultures, undertook the critique of established values. The Marxes, the Rosa Luxemburg, the Trotskys brought this process to its culmination by forging the ideology and the instrument of the proletariat's struggle, pointing out in the particularities of the Jewish condition the road to the emancipatiot of humanity the revolutionary action of the conscious workers. The insurrection of the survivors of the Warsaw ghetto (as well as those of other ghettos, unjustly unrecognised) is part of this proud tradition, It belongs to the most glorious pages of history; it constitutes The dispossession of the Palestinians, a nec the Promethian dimension of the Jewish tradition. It taught its generation that man strugeles and nevor gives up.
NO HEIRS There is no longer any Jewish community in ghetto, The bureaucratic Warsaw regime has reactionary anti-Semitism to try to quel the social rage of the shipyard workers, which was unleashed in the wake of the revolt in the Baltic ports.
The Warsaw ghetto insurrection will not be commemorated by a single Jewish daily in the Soviet Union; since the deportation of Jewish writers in 1952, the Jewish community in the Soviet Union has been deprived of its own cultural life, subjected to subtle and varied forms of discrimination that push it toward emigramonies will strike a false note; the official leaders of the Jewish community are closely associated with the existing regimes - too busy organising the pro-Israeli lobby to botber about the traditions of the revolt, too well integrated into the cogs of the system of exploitation to recognise the lines that bind the Warsaw ghetto revolt to the revolution. Their camp is not that of humanity in struggle for its dignity.
In Israci the monument crected to the glory of the commander of the ghetto insurrection, Mordechai Anile wicz, is located in the kibbutz whose name evokes his memory: Yad Mordechai. This socialist' village was founded along the (1948) borders as a military outpost.
Today, its economic existence is based on the exploitation of the wage-abour of Palestinian refugees in the Gaza Strip, and capecially on the wage-labour of school-age children. What a symbol! What a mockery!
CONSTANT FEATURES This, in a nutshell, was the Zionist programme: to construct a Jewish state in Palestine, which implied refusal to fight anti-Semitism wherever it arose, and instead involved the exaltation of Jewish chauvinism as a counter-weight to prevailing racism. It necessarily presupposed the dispossession of the inhabitants of the Promised Land. This was well understood by Theodore Herzl, theoretician of the Zionist movement, when he wrote in his 'diary" (on June 12, 1895) that it would be necessary to try to transter the poorest section of the [indigenous l population to the other side of the border without conflict, by offering them work in the neighbouring countries and denying them any employment in our country.
On the same day he also entered in his list of things to do: prepare a special helmet like colonisation'. Some enlightened spirits warned the Zionists against the consequences of their undertaking; such as the writer Akhad Ha'am, an advocate of a Jewish 'spiritual" centre (but not a political body) in Palestine, who, us early 1936, Dr. Ruppin, a well-known sociologist and a workhorse in the Zionist couse, admitted that becuuse of the Palestinian masses hostility, a "state of continuous war with the Arabs was inevitable.
The openly fascist-like wing of the Zionist movement, headed by Jabotinsky, had understood things immediately. There were no basic differences, Jabotinsky explained, between vegetarian" Zionism and 'carnivorous Zionism. The only thing to discuss was whether it would be necessary to rely on British bayonets to colonise the country or whether it would be preferable to directly arm the colonists. And, from his point of view, he was right. Back in 1940, Joseph Weitz, a leader of the Zionist agricultural colonisation, and a 'socialist" Zionist, had come to the conclusion that there is no other way than to transfer the Arabs from here to the neighbouring countries, to transter all of them: Not one vilinge, not one tribe, should be left." (Bavar, 29 September, 1967.)
essary precondition for Zionist profit, is being continued today by colonisation in the occupied territories. As Moshe Dayan put it, with the brutal frankriess for which he is known: "During the last 100 years our people have been in the Poland to pay homage to the monument of the process of building up the mation, of expansion, of getting additional Jews and settlements in orpurged the country of Jews, relying on the old der to expand the borders. Let no Jew say that we are near the end of the road.' (From a speech given on the "liberated" Syrian Golan Heights and reported in Maariv, 7 July, 1968)
RESULTS Such was the programme on which the Zionist leaders based themselves when they proclaimed the birth of the Zionist state twenty-five years ago in Tel Aviv, As for the aftermath, bere are the findings of a report distributed by De. Israel Shahak, president of the Israeli Human Rights League -since 1948, within the borders of the tion. And in the West, the commemorative ccre- state of Israel, the following Arab villages have been destroyed and the tribes expelled:
Districts Arab villages Arab villages in 1943 destroyed Jerusalert B thlehern Ramich Lydda Jenin Saint Jean d Acte Nazareth BELGIn *Ten tribes located here have desppeared. In addition, in the Beersheba district, where on the eve of the birth of the Jewish state there were five tribes comprised of seventy-three subtribes, three-quarters of the population was expelled.
hostilities, and was preceded by the machinegun massacre of women and children perpe trated by the notorious Unit 101" of the Israeli Even the Druzes, a Palestinian religious community that has collaborated with the Zionist regime - they supply a large part of the foottroops for the notorious frontier police" - have not been spared: 60 per cont of their land has been expropriated (according to Haarers, B February, 1971).
WILL GO ON This development will roll on fatally, because Isracli capital is desperately searching for new markets in the occupied territory. Hence the authorisation granted to the Jewish National Fund (the organ of Zionist colonisation) to acquire land in the West Bank, The question for the Zionist leaders therefore 15 whether to move to a complete annexation, which would involve instituting some form of apartheid (already, at Nahriya, separate maternity facilitics have been constructed for Jews and Arabs), as the Dayan plan envisages, or to annex the maximum amount of territory conLebanoni PaniC Jewish State under the 107 Syria _ Territories taken hy larsel Turnsarin token by bran Mediterranean Sea Egypt Jordan Egypt Saudi Fied Sea Map shows steady expansion of the Zionist state since UN portition resolution in 1947. laining a minimum number of inhabitants, as the "Allon plan' recommends.
Even calculating on the basis of a massive Jewish immigration (50,000 per year), in 1982 the proportion of Arabs, because of their higher birthrate, would still be very significant if a total annexation of the occupied territory takes place.
It is therefore understandable that the 'socialist"
General Yitzak Rabin is an advocate of creating conditions for a massive displacement of Pales tinians and that General Yadin (also a 'socialist Zionist) expresses his approval for what he actually dares to call the final solution to the problem. (Maaris, 16 February, 1973.)
THOSE RESPONSIBLE Such is the cynical reality of the real face of Zionism - neither the national liberation of the Jewish people, nor the sell-determination of the Israeli i masses, but the institutionalisation of Israeli hegemony over the Arabs, a process of capitalist exploitation in a specifically colonial context.
Are they liberated, the israclis in their Fort Chabrol-type superghetto? Are they liberateu, the Oriental Jews crushed by discrimination?
Are they liberated, the Israeli workers under the yuke of a greedy capitalist class, aided by its labour hureaucracy that serves up anti-working class measures? It is to the creation of thes colonial bastion, this imperialist bridgchead in the Arab world, that the United States - which has diverted thousands of millions of dollars into the coffers of the Zionist state - bus com mitted itself, in consistent imperialist fashion. But the first atate to recognise Israel was the Soviet Union. And it was at Stalin's command that Czechoslovakia delivered armaments and Measerschmidt aircraft to the new state in 1948, Thus, the Soviet bureaucracy is fully responsible for the tragedy of the Palestinian people and this was well before the revisionist Krushcher came to power, comrade Macists! Anyway. why should Khrushchev take offence at the tate of the Palestinian people, when the Crimean Tartars, deported en masse by the Father of the Peoples, are still not allowed to return to their native lund? The Stalinist degeneration has its own Palestinians!
A TRADITION From the moment of the partition of Palestine in 1947 - and this is no idle boast the Fourth International has been the daly tendency in the whole workers' movement to struggle ceaselessly against Zionist colonialism, a struggle that it has never stopped waging in a consistent way. just as it has alwuys been in the forefront of support to the Arab revolution, especially during the Algerian w'at.
Today, we can say — and of this we are proud that the very existence of an anti-Zionist front within the Israeli population is the result of the continuity of our presence there, embodied in Israel by the action of our Jewish and Arab militants who came out of the old Palestinian Trotskyist group.
Nothing in histary is lost. The rise of s new vanguard in the ranks of Isracli youth is the harvest of seeds that we have been patiently sowing for years, since all the anti-Ziomst groups in Israel originated from Matzpen, whose theoretical achievements are a reflection of the work of our comrades. And because any Marxist analysis of the Jewish question must take as its point of departure the remarkable work of our comrade Abram Lenn.
Irside the Hebrew bastion, the struggle has only just begun, with much larger forces and a much more solid organisation than before - and a much more hardened one as well with our comrades, organised in the Matzpen-Marxist group, directly confronting the oppressive Zionist apparatus at its hases.
In the Arab states, our nuclei and sections are working to build a revolutionary-Marxist vanguard, fighting a hard struggle aimed at forg ing the basis of a single party of the Arab world (transcending all ethnic and religious divisions), uniting Arabs and national minorities in a com mon struggle against imperialism and its local allies, both Zionist and Arab, and against ill varieties of reaction.
If we are to find in the Middle East today the legitimate heirs of the Warsaw ghetto fighters, il is in the ranks of the Palestinians in struggle that we must look — and also arong the Isracli anti Zionist militants who have taken on the heritag of generations of Jewish thinkers and millancs who opposed obscurantism and institutionalised disorder, In struggling ugainst the stream, against the wor chauviniam - their own country's - these com rades are upholding the great democratic Jewish tradition which has contributed so much to the progress of the working class and of humanity.
(La Gauche.)
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In the case of the el-Azazmeh tribe, the expul- sion dates from 1953-54, well after the end of