Britain, Statement on the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict by the London and South-east England Region of the Anarchist Federation

We extend our warmest wishes to our comrades in the class struggle in both Unity and 
Anarchists Against the Wall. We condemn the killing of several hundred working class 
Palestinians by the Israeli Defence Forces. We anticipate a future where free associations 
will collaborate in a society without any artificial distinctions. We regard the notion of 
two distinct ?national identities?, both Palestinian and Israeli, as a myth designed to 
foster an alliance between a ruling elite and the mass of the peoples. ---- We reject the 
using of the global revulsion at the actions of the state of Israel as a method of 
persuading people to support Hamas. The resolution of the conflict will come about by a 
concerted effort of the working class of Palestine and Israel. ---- We applaud the direct 
action in impeding the ability of Israel to continue its campaign against Palestinians. We 
would like to draw attention to the repression of the Bedouin settlement in al-Araqeeb and 
express our solidarity with those trying to thrive there.

We whole-heartedly support the following statement of the anarchist-communist organisation 
that includes both Palestinians and Israelis.

Statement from Ahdut (Unity)
The Zionist colonization project, sponsored by the imperialist powers and at their 
service, has subjugated Palestine; it has persistently made every effort to displace the 
indigenous masses out of the area ruled by it, or at least to concentrate them in confined 
enclaves.

A section of the Palestinian people evaded the efforts to expel them and became citizens 
of Israel, suffering discrimination by law and customary practice. The State of Israel 
persists in measures aimed at dispossessing them. Lately these measures are focused on the 
Prawer Plan for the Negev, which evokes the 1970s plan of Judaizing the Galilee, and the 
events of Land Day (30 March 1976). Another section of the Palestinian people, in the 
territories occupied in 1967, live for the most part under military rule. The Israeli 
military authorities have much greater freedom of action in displacing the Palestinians or 
concentrating them in enclaves than is possible inside Israeli sovereign territory. As 
well as gradually seizing most of the Palestinians? land, Israel obstructs their 
individual and collective economic development; denies their freedom of movement, assembly 
and speech; and suppresses by various means their resistance to the ongoing colonization 
and occupation. However, it should be noted that in Palestine there are not two separate 
economies: the Palestinians in the 1948 areas are fully integrated in the Israeli economy 
? as discriminated wage workers and as residents of towns and villages suffering from 
under-development; and a considerable part of the Palestinians in the West Bank work for 
Israeli owners or for local business enterprises, which sell their produce in the Israeli 
market ? whether in the settlement projects in the West Bank or in the Israel?s official 
sovereign territory.

Most of the Palestinians driven out of the country and their descendants, as well as many 
of those who have evaded the waves of displacement and expulsion, live as refugees or 
internally displaced persons ? whether in the territories conquered in 1948 or 1967 or in 
the neighbouring countries.

Over the years, the Palestinians have resisted their displacement, oppression and 
exploitation. In their various locations, resistance takes various forms: some 
demonstrative or symbolic, some direct action; some armed, some non-violent, some violent 
but unarmed. Most acts of resistance do not involve cooperation with Israelis opposed to 
Zionist policy, but some do involve cooperation with such activists. The multifarious 
resistance of the Palestinian toiling masses over the years has mainly succeeded in 
retarding and curbing the processes of subjugation, but regrettably it has generally been 
unable to turn the clock back.

We do not share the illusion of some sections of the Palestinian and Israeli toiling 
masses that in the present sorry situation the ?two-state solution? must be accepted. 
Partition of Palestine into two states has been promoted for about a hundred years by 
world powers including Britain, France, the US and the USSR. This is part of their general 
meddling in the Middle East, which has condemned it to an impasse, to despotic regimes, to 
ethnic and religious hostility and warfare, stymieing the economic and political 
development craved by the region?s inhabitants. Establishing a Palestinian state, whether 
it will be allocated 15% or 25% of the territory of British-mandate Palestine, will not 
resolve the fundamental problems of the country, and will certainly not ?terminate the 
conflict?: at best it will be a compromise settlement between the Israeli capitalist elite 
and the collaborator regime of the Palestinian Authority; local agents will acquire a 
franchise for directly oppressing and exploiting the Palestinian population for their own 
benefit and for the benefit of foreign interests.
True, Israeli withdrawal from the territories occupied in 1967 would put a brake on the 
direct processes of dispossession and oppression of the Palestinians living there by 
Israel?s armed forces. It would presumably reduce the friction and confrontations between 
the inhabitants of the West Bank and Gaza Strip and the Israeli armed forces and settlers, 
as well as the Israeli military offensives, which inflame widespread hatred and reinforce 
nationalism among both conquerors and conquered. Such withdrawal may also make possible a 
limited return of refugees to the territory of the Palestinian state.
However, an accord establishing such a Palestinian state would bestow on Israel 
international legitimation of its conquests in the 1948 war and the nakbah ? the 
dispossession, uprooting and expulsion of hundreds of thousands (by now millions). Such an 
accord would also reinforce the political and economic separation between the two parts of 
the country, in both of which there are Palestinian inhabitants, as well as separation 
between the Hebrew and Arab populations. This would hinder the struggle for a just 
conclusion of the ongoing confrontation with the Zionist movement ? whose main victims are 
the Palestinian toilers, but which also harms in various ways the Hebrew toilers within 
Israel. So long as the refugees have not returned and retrieved what they had been robbed 
of; so long as the nationalist-Zionist Israeli regime ? which excludes, discriminates and 
oppresses its Palestinian subjects and citizens ? still exists, there will be no 
?termination of the conflict?.

Other sections of toilers, especially among the Palestinians, stand for establishing one 
democratic state for all the inhabitants of Palestine?Israel. Should a single democratic 
state be established, it could provide equal civil rights to all its citizens, and put an 
end to the official institutional discrimination against the Palestinians. It would quite 
probably enable the return of the refugees. Also, setting up such a state would require 
dismantling the State of Israel and the Palestinian Authority, in defiance of the aims of 
the imperialist powers. So this programme is based on a measure of hope rather than 
despair and acquiescence in the existing political order.

However, this hope is misguided, because so long as the capitalist-Zionist elite ruling 
Israel has not been defeated, the only single state that is attainable is the actually 
existing one. Even if the attempt to establish a single democratic state would succeed, 
let us not forget that states in general, and democratic states in particular, are 
political forms established and maintained by minority ruling classes, for maintaining 
oppressive and exploitative systems of social relations. The character of oppression and 
exploitation varies and becomes sophisticated in more developed countries, but its 
fundamental nature does not disappear even for one moment. In such a state the Palestinian 
and Hebrew toilers can look forward to living in a society like that of South Africa, 
where a small minority of white capitalists and their non-white junior partners possess 
most of the means of production and land, and multinational corporations enjoy ample 
freedom of action.

We reaffirm the conclusion reached by our predecessors in the struggle: defeat of the 
capitalist-Zionist ruling class and its project of colonization and dispossession requires 
a profound social revolution, not merely a political revolution but a transformation of 
the relations of production and all other fundamental social relations. Moreover, it is 
reasonable to assume that such a revolution will only be possible on a regional scale, in 
several neighbouring countries concurrently rather than separately in Palestine?Israel on 
its own. Only such a transformation will make it possible to construct a non-authoritarian 
society free from exploitation; in which liberty, equality and fraternity will really 
prevail; in which the accumulated nationalist hostility will dissipate.

Along with what has been said above, let us state the obvious: we shall participate, as an 
organization and individually, together with the Palestinian inhabitants of the West Bank 
and with Israeli and other activists, in the daily struggle against all aspects of the 
occupation and oppression in the 1967 occupied territories; we shall support and cooperate 
to the best of our ability with the struggle of the inhabitants of Gaza against Israel?s 
aggression and the Israeli?Egyptian siege; and shall be active inside the 1948 borders 
against the discrimination, oppression and dispossession of the Palestinian toilers who 
have Israeli citizenship.