Towards an Arab Workers’ Intifada….

The Palestinians have not the strength to liberate themselves. They do not even have the strength to achieve any serious reforms. They are not like blacks in South Africa, who have achieved very important reforms. They got rid of apartheid, they won the right to vote and they elected a black president. It is true that economic apartheid is still in place. Wealth is still concentrated in the hands of a tiny group of white people, now alongside a tiny number of rich blacks. The overwhelming majority of blacks are still in abject poverty. The blacks in South Africa are incomparably stronger than the Palestinians. First of all, there are five to six times more blacks than whites in South Africa, while the number of Palestinians is more or less the same as the number of Israelis (the majority of Palestinians are refugees). Secondly, black workers are at the heart of the South African economy while the Palestinians are very marginal to the economy. The South African trade union Cosatu is a massive trade union which played a crucial role in the smashing of apartheid. The Palestinians have no comparable trade union organisation.
If there is a situation where Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution applies perfectly, it is that of the Palestinians. His theory argues that no democratic demands, no national liberation can be achieved without the proletarian revolution. The key to the fate of the Palestinians and everyone else in the Middle East is in the hands of the Arab working class whose main centres of power are in Egypt, and less so in Syria, Iraq, Lebanon and other countries. Tragically the potential of the Arab working class has not become actuality because of the damaging effect of Stalinism which dominated the left in the Middle East for a long time. It was the Stalinists who opened the door to the Ba’ath Party and Saddam Hussain in Iraq, who brought Assad and the Syrian Ba’ath to power, who opened the door to Nasser and the subsequent Islamists in Egypt.
A revolution of the Arab working class would put an end to imperialism and Zionism. It is simple hypocrisy to claim that this will menace the Jews of the area. When the apartheid regime dominated South Africa the supporters of the regime claimed that the ANC stood for the butchery of the whites. Nothing of the sort has taken place.