Re: [Marxism] Israel continues murderous bombing of Gaza as cabinetprepares "cease-fire"

["Fred Feldman" <ffeldman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Lueko submitted:
On Sat, 17 Jan 2009 19:57:17 -0500, Fred Feldman wrote:

> I am not attracted to the idea of a one-state Israel where all
Palestinians
> have the vote. I do not consider this necessarily an advance on the
> two-state non-solution or transitional step reflecting Palestinian
strength
> in certain areas. 

What do you mean by that? 

I have told for years any pro-Israel person that if they were interested in 
democracy, they would -- besides tearing down all Ghetto walls and fences 
and withdrawing the Israeli armed forces behind the 1948-67 border and 
lifting all restrictions of movement which are in place for Arab
Palestinians 
-- that they should recognize all people having their permanent home in 
historic Palestine and all UNRWA-registered Arab Palestinian refugees the 
right to vote in a constituend assembly which then would establish the 
foundations of a real democracy in Palestine. 

This is of course always being rejected because such a state would not be 
ruled by a colonial ethnocracy. 

Fred responds:
Lueko finds a democratic way to express the idea of a unitary Palestinian
state and then identifies it with the advocacy by some -- not many -- of the
supporters for a one-person, one vote unitary Israeli state in the whole
territory of Palestine.

He says:
This is of course always being rejected because such a state would not be 
ruled by a colonial ethnocracy.

All I can say is I have less confidence than Lueko seems to in the workings
of pure "majoritarian" bourgeois electoral democracy. I don't believe the
one-person, one-vote, one-Israel (former Palestine) solution guarantees that
at all. 

It does not abolish the IDF. It guarantees not a single inch of territory to
the Palestinian people. It does not put an end to the domination of the
Zionist capitalist ruling class and its political and economic institutions.
And it clearly implies the Palestinians as an unarmed people, with no
military institutions or arms of their own except insofar as they are
permitted to be integrate into the Israeli armed forces and police.

What is the framework of the one-state solution (by the way few of the
intelligentsia who talk about this say anything about the right of return)?
The framework is the Palestinians as a defeated people. The conquest of all
the territory of Palestine by the Israeli state is now complete. The battle
for any Palestinian territory, let alone a real Palestinian state, is now
hopeless.

This being the case, the Palestinians must fall back on a purely civil
struggle for one-person, one-vote.

Maybe this is my narrow nationalism of the oppressed again, but I am opposed
to accepting this conclusion, although I advocate the Palestinians fighting
against any and all denial of rights.

Of course the Israelis also oppose a unitary Israel including all the
territory of Palestine, with voting rights for all Palestinians as the
compensation for the loss of all the territory and the acceptance of the IDF
as the army of the Jewish, but liberal-minded, state they imagine.

The fight for a Palestinian state has not been decisively defeated. Israel
has not absorbed all (or even, in the struggle perspective) ANY Palestinian
territory

Like the establishment of a Palestinian state on territory from which the
Israeli state has been forced out, the attitude toward one=person, one-vote
is whether it advances the struggle to abolish  the racist Jewish state and
regime and advances toward the united, multi-ethnic, and multi-confessional
Palestine. 

>From that standpoint, there is no basis that I see that arguing for the
one-person, one-vote Israel is an advance over the fight that is still
taking place on the ground for a Palestinian state on whatever portions of
Palestine can be kept out of Israeli hands.



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