Ask yourself: How goes the war for greater Israel launched in 1967?


I understand that the posting of material at Kasama does not necessarily indicate support for the positions put, but any fair-minded reader of Kasama would draw a reasonable inference that Mike in posting this material without any disclaiming comments or critical imput whatever was intending to put the article forward as a positive contribution to understanding the events of that time. The article is anything but that; and is rather the sort of unreadable drek that is churned out by what Mao referred to as lazy bone dogmatists.


I have numbered the 25 paragraphs and will confine my exposure to the main points. Due to time constraints I must spread the work over a series of posts.


1 Just when Israel was squeezing its hardest to regain control over Gaza, as a central element in the Annapolis plan for American hegemony in the Middle East, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians – as much as half of Gaza’s 1.5 million population – broke free. It was a great week in Rafah, a sight that delighted people all over the world. But then the sunny, cold weather gave way to drenching rains and the roads turned to mud, and some harsh truths about the wider world began to sink in.


The most important points to get clearly into people’s mind is that ‘…Israel was [NOT] squeezing its hardest to regain control over Gaza and there is no ‘…Annapolis plan for American hegemony in the Middle East…’ much less the Israeli government attempting this on behalf of “it’s master”, or ‘…as a central element…’ in this non existent plan.


The “Little Satan and the Great Satan” are actually in retreat from the failed war for greater Israel launched in 1967! Gaza is not going to be re-occupied; and while it did for these 41 years and still does resemble a giant prison, even since the Zionists withdrew from all of Gaza and the Philadelphi route; prisons simply do not work when they are controlled by the prisoners and have a virtually open, or even partially open back door. It is now August and still there are holes in the prison wall! http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1008697.html


Whatever happens there will be a politically controlled border. Hamas must by virtue of having thrown a coup play it’s part on it’s side of the border. The hated Egyptian government of Muberak (tyranny won’t stay their forever either did anyone notice the price of food angering the masses) must play it’s part. We have not entered some Anarchist fairyland. And incidentally activities of the Al Qaeda sorts and other criminals and enemies of all decendents of the enlightenment still have to be governed against. Borders must be acknowledged as real issues for maoists because we accept that the world is in the era when ‘Nations want liberation, Countries want independence and the people want revolution.’


Finally Hamas will have to deal with elections and the reformed Fatah. It must end it armed takeover and comply with the democratic constitutional arangements or gradually loose support.


I don’t believe that the small numbers of revolutionary communists in Palestine would in anyway object to a return to political processes throughout the whole of the new Palestinian state.


The war for greater Israel is going very badley for the zionists. Where are the settlements and the settler only roads in Gaza or Sinai now??; so don’t expect them to be in the West Bank for much longer either.


The fundamental truth that must sink in is that the war for greater Israel is coming to an end in defeat. The Palestinian victory is looming and this desire on the part of the U.S. to stop funding and supporting the Zionist occupation reflects the changing interests of the U.S. ruling-elite since the policy reversals after 9/11. For example GWB is the first U.S. president to declare that the West Bank is occupied territory all the rest referred to it as disputed territory.


American hegemony in the Middle East is just not possible in the 21C. When the Egyptian tyranny falls (and it will) the Muslim Brotherhood will form the new government after democratic elections. Just as Hamas will play an important but lesser role in a reformed Fatah led Palestine; and Hezbollah in Lebanon; and the Dawa party in Iraq. The U.S. ruling- elites are hated (by the peoples and virtually all the political parties they throw up) throughout the region.


The alternative US ruling elites, can’t prop up the autocrats and tyrants as they used to and they can’t prevent the emergent bourgeois democracies as they used to, so the role of hegemon is out for their country. No one else can do it either!


Think of the British trying to be the hegemon in India, or the Russians trying to play hegemon in any part of Germany or Ukraine for that matter. The era when all this imperialism made sense is gone with the wind. Bankrupt superpowers sliding out the back door don’t get to play regional hegemon! Keap your eye on Russia and the problems Putin is delivering down in Georgia. This is not Russia re-establishing it's international standing as a 'superpower'; it more closely resembles second time as a farse.


The basic fact that brought on this article was that Hamas decided to dramatically end the ‘siege’ of Gaza and began by preparing public opinion in all nearby countries with large numbers of Palestinian refugees. Hamas then blew up the border and sytstematically mobilised the masses to make for the border and cross in vast numbers. This was no spontaneous mass uprising but a well planned event led and managed from the start by Hamas in a co-ordinated effort with their allies in the fraternal Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood.


The article “spins” on this and has a distinctly offensive flavour in totally down-playing the reality of right-wing Hamas leadership supported by the Gazan masses. People the world over are at whatever level of understanding they are at, and the fact is that vast numbers of the masses in the Middle East are religious types with some very backward attitudes to women, homosexuals etc and that can only change through struggle not pretending political forces that are leading at any one point are somehow not really leading but following.

19 The Gaza jailbreak was beautiful because despite whatever role Hamas played in organizing the breaching of the wall, what shone through was the possibility of the Palestinian masses to take their own initiative, their hunger to do so, and the way that such initiative could begin to change the whole equation. It may be too soon to conclude that it killed the Annapolis process, as some people would like to believe, but it did show that a whole different kind of dynamic process far more favourable to the people’s interests could arise.


What really shone through was just how serious Hamas are in pushing forward the Palestinians national struggle as they think best. The Egyptian agreements with Israel over how the border was to be managed were from this point undeliverable. The Egyptian people would dispense with Mubarak if he ordered his soldiers to try to put things back the way they were. Indeed the soldiers would not do it and Mubarak knew this.


2 When Palestinians in Gaza first marched to the border … a reporter called it “a seismic and unstoppable reordering of the facts of the Middle East.” (The Observer, 27 January)


That MSM reporting is more to the point! Consider events that have unfolded since. Israel’s leadership has done deals with the Lebanese and with Hezbollah in particular; they are doing a deal with Syria over the Golan heights and they have been under constant pressure from the Bush administration to do the deal with Abbas and then negotiating with Hamas over the Quiet and made deals with Hamas over prisoner/hostage swaps and so on.


5….When the mass uprising known as the second Intifada began in 2000…


There were political leaders involved. The most important was Marwan Barghouti I’ve predicted that Israel will release Marwan Barghouti on the 25th August. I don’t know of anyone else making this prediction (let alone anyone claiming to be a revolutionary communist). At least we won’t have long to wait to find out!


20 But the Palestinian people are out in dangerous waters. Israeli, Egypt, Hamas and Fatah are already manoeuvring, in various ugly combinations, to find some way out of this crisis at their expense…


A bourgeois democratic Palestinian state is coming into being and this will reasonably quickly trigger a similar revolution in other countries throughout the region. Marwan Barghouti and the thousands of other Palestinian prisoners from Fatah and Hamas some of whom have spent many years in prison deserve a far more sympathetic approach from left and western commentators.


13 Everyone might know that, but exactly why this is so is a complicated and multi-layered question. One dimension is that even if a Palestinian “mini-state” comes into existence – and there are reasons to doubt it – Israel intends to subjugate and carve up Palestine even further.


This article is saying that Israel intends to continue the failed war for greater Israel; yet how goes this war? Who funds this war? What price did the Israeli leaders pay just to get back 2 bodies? Even the writer of this article now knows that Syria and Israel are also in discusions about the withdrawal from the Golan Heights.


The whole article has the flavour of sect propaganda - that behaviour is being dissected in other threads at Kasama and good thing too. But better to tie such discussions into analysis of real world events rather than the entrails of sect rule books. Lemingist sects produce lemingist articles like this that don’t even stand up six months later.


The beauty of this article is that events will quickly unfold (and continue to unfold over the next few years) that will prove if the Palestinian people have said “so far and no further” and are now in the final stages of winning the war launched against them in 1967. It seems we have ‘believers’ and past believers debating minutae while they both still agree with policy positions that abandon the Palestinian masses in the Middle East and in practice not trust them to generate their own political programme!


The world has changed a lot since 1967 but according to AWTW– Israel intends to subjugate and carve up Palestine even further.


I think that the Geneva Accords are essentially the limits to a do-able deal and this is well known on both sides. I believe that it is correct for the Palestinians to have a democratic constitution that enables atheists like me to form communist political parties if I choose, and function politically and organizationally. In Gaza that constitution must be returned to.



I am glad that any deal will eventually have to be agreed to in a referendum and that people will peacefully campaign to pass the proposal or reject it. That’s again up to the Palestinians.


I can’t think of why the tone of rabid hostility to these Palestinian prisoners and political leaders from AWTW. They are mostly honourable political opponents who are not trying to shoot communists or atheists and who have spent years in liberation struggle and or prison.



While revolutionary communists are free to organize we remain dedicated to honouring the democratic process. As Mao points out it would not be us communists that break from united-fronts designed to achieve democracy. Bourgeois democracy is well overdue throughout the entire region and it’s a bit shameful to have to mention it!

Not exactly part of this post, but somewhat related since this has happened in the last few days. I just posted something on K. Threads/News--"Palestinian Poet" because Darwish was so revered, outspoken, etc. So in case anyone is interested you can find his obituary at

//z11.invisionfree.com/Kasama_Threads/index.php?showtopic=216

I understand Mike’s general point that not all articles require his input and that ideas are put before people who will do with the material what they will, nevertheless I have not come across articles that are reposted to political web sites that are intended as negative examples that are not in some way identified as such.


But all this is a diversion and so I shan’t apologize to all for my poverty of style but rather hope that readers will look to the content that I am presenting. Only Mike can tell us if he was posting the article as an example of a positive contribution to understanding events at the time or not. I think it obvious that he was but I have to agree that I could be wrong. If Mike won’t speak to the issue others will have to judge for themselves.


My purpose in critiquing this article is not just to expose the ideas involved directly in the article as important and foundational as that is; nothing could be achieved without that; but the direct ideas involved are easier to deal with than the unstated premises that could or might lead to such mistaken thinking, and I think these premises have to be dealt with as well.


Articles of political analysis do not ‘drop from the sky’ ‘they come from social practice’ and bear the stamp of the time and experiences of the writer.

As they say “if the only tool you know about is a hammer everything looks like a nail”. Whether I correctly identify what those premises are in this case is for others to judge but it is important that people feel free to express opposition to an article (and the underlying thinking that could produce it) without their style of opposition being the focus of any response. That focus degenerates quickly into the method known as ‘shooting the messenger’ and the whole purpose of the work is lost. That method is routinely resorted to by members of sects whether religious or secular and it should be identified and avoided.


The ongoing exposure of the degeneration of the RCP into quite blatant sect behavior that is proceeding well on other threads is very useful, but for me it still has a little of the flavor of the life of Brian stadium skit about it.


People that have recently broken with the RCP sect will have fresh experience of being “messengers shot at” so they may want to hold fire on other messengers who even thirty years ago were not impressed with what was on offer from that source and rejected it. As is being pointed out in those other threads the intervening years have not been kind to the various campaigns and activities of the RCP.


Tolerance, without slipping into liberalism, is required in abundance in any period where theory has become primary in the face of an obviously stalled practice, and it’s very interesting for a Maoist like me to see the range of comments over the RCP from Kasama regulars; some broke with them last year, some five years ago, others ten and twenty years ago and still others who were never involved and yet who have maintained a revolutionary stand with no reference to that political tendency are happy to join in.



All are happy to gather at Kasama and offer their views as to what is the way forward for revolutionary politics in the 21C and do so in a comradely manner. Most of the old disputes that brought on the timing of their various parting of the ways with the RCP are if not swept away put aside now, in what appears to me to be a genuine desire to deal with the creation of new theory.


A breakthrough in left-wing revolutionary theory is IMV seen to be required in the face of the continued collapse of left politics since the last high tide of the early 1970s.


Indeed anarchists and environmentalists are part of the new milieu, as are pacifists and conspiracy theorists that are tolerated if mostly ignored but still make up the numbers, and for me it’s not difficult to see what is holding “it” all together. ‘Anti-war’ type activities have become the current unifying issue of large numbers of people who are convinced that their stand to date has been on the progressive side of politics, irrespective of the realistic consequences of their policy proposals if they were ever implemented.


But the Palestinian issue and the analysis displayed in this peculiar article ought to disturb the migratory herd as it’s gathered here, and I think that the concrete examination of this issue can better expose the generalized sect mentality, or at any rate this is an activity that ought to proceed simultaneously to the exposure on those other threads.


Specifically identifying THE sect behavior and methods employed by THE sect to protect itself from exposure or to maintain the leadership is best left to those who were caught up with it. My purpose is to expose the ideas of left sect thinking generally so that mistakes that have been made across the spectrum are identified and broken with.


Like the picture of the old lady / young woman, once you see both you can never go back to not knowing that there are two pictures. Those that see only the one can swear to what they saw, but they are wrong.


Hitchens can write far more eloquently than I, nevertheless he was caught up in similar left sect thinking and opposed the collective defense of the Kuwaiti people in 1991. He has now repudiated his former stance and supports the independence of Kuwait. He has faced up to the practical consequences of what would be the situation if his former policy prescriptions had been implemented and this honest policy ownership is vital. He is glad that he lost! He does not call himself a Maoist but has accepted that the country of Kuwait wants independence in the era when ‘nations want liberation, countries want independence and the people want revolution.’



On the question of Palestine here is what I wrote at the same time that the article that I am now dealing with came out

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Today is the 25th of January 2008 and the TV news is well worth recording. The lastsuperpower analysis of what is going on in the Middle East, not brought on by the policy reversal of the Bush administration, but sped up by those new policies, is now the last argument standing. No other argument put forward still holds up in the face of unfolding events. From Palestine to Pakistan bourgeois democratic norms are being struggled for and are being genuinely supported by the U.S. The U.S. has swapped sides and progress is becoming apparent.


Western leftists are confused and starting to fall silent as their former positions become untenable, whilst still claiming the political position of progressive.

Pseudo-leftists, utterly bankrupted as the world has been turned upside down, continue to rant like Dalek demanding that unarmed masses take on powerful Baathist armies (because that’s the way it must be done). He may as well be shouting ‘exterminate yourselves’. Why pseudo's think that the U.S. ought not be at least partially responsible for draining a lot of the swamp that their old policies helped create, or continued to sustain, is utterly beyond me.


Not for Dalek any WW2 contribution to human progress by the imperialist armies of the U.S. and Britain. Not for him any liberation of the country of Kuwait. Not for him any strange dictatorship of Sunni Arabs over the remaining 80% that has now been turned upside down, with the disarming of the powerful forces that were opposed to the liberation of the Iraqi masses. Not for him free and fair elections as a complete reversal of U.S. policies implemented in Vietnam. Not for him a legitimate and worthy Iraqi government that is fighting the most viciously racist enemies on the face of the planet alongside the COW, and thankful of the western assistance. Not for him a new Iraqi army that can now fight on from a position of strength. It’s all just a re-run of the Vietnam War.


Everywhere in the ME armed struggle has been part of the mix as reactionaries have fought back and opposed the transformation. Everywhere there are messy united front's forming up, and both unity and struggle within these messy political arrangements. Nothing is pure or simple. Consider the position of the Pakistani masses as that revolution unfolds. Whole regions of Pakistan have to be brought under central government control. The bin Ladenists will have to be militarily crushed not lived with.


A bourgeois democratic revolution is now unfolding in the Middle East and though exciting days like this are both inspiring and instructive and well worth working for (revolutions are both messy and dramatic ruptures with the status quo) at the same time the protracted nature of this revolutionary transformation ought to be apparent to all western supporters of it. Dramatic days are followed by periods of consolidation.


This long after 9/11, all illusions of any easy progress for the locals against their local opponents be they Zionists, Baathists, Jihadists, Shia or Sunni sectarian theocrats, autocrats, feudalists, militarists or outright criminal thugs, ought to have been completely ‘cast away’ by their supporters in the west.


I’m sure the locals never doubted what a hard task they were up against. That's why when they formed a government in Iraq they never called on the COW to withdraw at once but rather were happy to see increased troop levels arrive with the Surge. Did I mention that the struggle in Iraq is going well? Good news all round really. But still no coherent western left re-emerging. Never mind the pseudo's are running out of time and support.

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Rather than accept articles that do not add up and snow jobs to excuse them, we ought to instead ask “How goes the war for Greater Israel? I say it is ending in defeat for the Zionists. What’s more I say that U.S. policies in the Middle East have changed and that Kasama readers have never dealt with the communist argument put for the overthrow of Baathism and the abandonment of the War for Greater Israel.


Here is the sort of article that I say ought to but has never been debated by participants at Kasama. http://strangetimes.lastsuperpower.net/?p=97