The Palestine Conflict – Moshé Macover and Eli Lobel

The conflict in the Middle-East is primarily a Palestinian conflict, rather than a Judeo-Arab or Middle-Eastern one. It is primarily the problem of the Palestinian Arab people who have been deprived of their national rights and who are engaged in the fight for the reaffirmation of these rights.

Palestine is the country of two peoples: the Palestinian Arab people and the Israeli Jewish people. Therefore, the free expression of the national rights of both peoples has to be satisfied in the one country. We have to support the revolutionaries of both sides who fight for internationalist solidarity so that neither imposes its solution – a nationalist solution – on the other people. Zionism means Jewish domination over the Arab people; this is the present situation. Arab domination over the Jewish people is the goal of nationalist elements in the Arab world. We have to fight both forms of nationalism and social reaction.

We must consider that the only way to solve national problems is to surpass them, and the only way to do so is to fight for the right of each people to decide its own fate. In the case of Palestine, this means:

• The Israeli-Jewish people and the Palestinian-Arab people, or the Jewish and Arab peoples of Palestine (or Canaan?), cannot decide their own fate without taking into consideration the national rights of the other people;
• The creation, or rather subsistence, of a separate Jewish state – Israel – implies the negation of the national rights of the Arab people; any solution considering the creation of an Arab Palestine would mean the negation of the national rights of the Jewish people.
• The creation of a democratic Palestine, without ethnic or religious discrimination, whatever ethnic element is in the majority, is the only solution giving free expression to the rights of both people.

The right to decide its own fate is actually denied to the Palestinian Arab people, who have engaged in armed struggle for the achievement of their national rights. The Israeli Jewish people, though formally possessing its national rights, does so only through oppressing the other people, and is therefore not free itself. This means that the Israeli Jewish people are dominated by their nationalist, reactionary elements, closely linked and dependent on the World Zionist Movement, and Jewish capitalism, itself an ally, a part and tool of Western imperialism. The role imposed by world Zionism and local reaction on the Israeli workers is the choice between killing the Arab resistance fighter or in turn being killed.

Our aim ought to be to contribute to the emergence of a common revolutionary struggle of both peoples, being, under the given circumstances, the only way to ensure free expression of the rights of both people to decide their own fate. The armed fight engaged in by the Palestinian Arab people can be the first phase in this revolutionary process.

The correct and revolutionary solution to the Palestinian problem is of prime importance for the whole region. The popular armed struggle, to the extent that it surpasses national objectives and ideologies, and becomes a common struggle of both peoples, will further the anti-imperialist struggle within the Arab countries, and lay the foundations of the Union of Socialist Countries of the Middle East, which is the ultimate aim and the only stable solution to the national and social problems of the region, including the Israel-Arab conflict.