WAR ON PALESTINE: Statement by the Organising Committee for the Reconstitution of the Fourth International

It is with emotion that the workers, youth and peoples worldwide deplore the thousands of civilian victims, especially the young people and children whose lives have been brutally snatched away in Israel and the Gaza Strip

“We are at war!”, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu has declared. In reality, war has been devastating the region for 75 years, it did not begin on 7 October 2023. For 75 years, the Palestinian people have been expelled from their land, driven from their villages and had their homes destroyed. For 75 years, they have been denied the Right to Return and have faced a settler colonisation that is devouring more and more Palestinian land. Subjected to a veritable apartheid regime of discrimination, oppression and humiliation, they have nevertheless continued to resist and fight back.

Today, representatives on all sides – particularly those of the “left” organisations and parties who speak in the name of the workers – are calling on the UN to open the way, they say, to a “just and lasting peace”.

However, the fact is that the current tragedy has its roots in UN Resolution 181, adopted on 29 November 1947. It was this agreement sealed at the UN between US imperialism – dragging with it British and French imperialism – and the USSR bureaucracy led by Stalin, which imposed the partition of Palestine, artificially dividing its territory into a “Jewish State” and an “Arab State”, the latter never having seen the light of day.

It is also a fact that in the 83 subsequent UN Resolutions devoted to Palestine, none of the modest demands made of the State of Israel was ever met — whether it was the Right of Return of Palestinian refugees (Resolution 194) or the withdrawal of the Israeli army from the territories occupied in 1967 (Resolution 242).

The only resolution that was to have the force of law was the one through which the major powers imposed partition on all the inhabitants of Palestine, Arabs and Jews alike. The Nakba of 1948 and all the massacres committed since then (whatever the religion or nationality of the victims) were a direct result of this partition.

Let us recall what the militant activists of the Palestinian section of the Fourth International wrote in September 1947 in their newspaper The Voice of the Class: “the proposal of the UN Committee is a solution neither for the Jews nor for the Arabs; it is a solution purely and exclusively for the imperialist countries. The Zionist policy-makers have avidly seized the bone imperialism threw to them. (…) What about the Communist Party of Palestine? It apparently is waiting for a ‘just’ UN solution. In any case, it continues to sow illusions regarding the UN, and in this way helps to disguise and implement imperialism’s plans.”

For Netanyahu and his government, today’s massacres and war have come at just the right time. Faced for several months with the biggest crisis the Zionist state has seen since its creation, this is the perfect opportunity for Netanyahu – who personally faces the threat of prison for corruption – to head a government of “national unity” with the very people who yesterday jeered at him in the streets.  The fact remains – and many Israeli Jews are becoming aware of this – that the recent events tragically confirm the warning issued in 2008 by the former Chairman of the World Zionist Organisation, Avraham Burg: “Israel, which was supposed to be a safe haven for Jews, has become the most dangerous place for them”.

For US imperialism, the immediate support given to Netanyahu – behind whom Macron, Sunak, Scholz, Meloni, Trudeau and Kishida have lined up like good little soldiers – is part of a context in which militarism and war against the peoples are becoming one of the main ways for imperialism to overcome the crisis of the capitalist system, based on private ownership of the means of production. After the devastation of whole regions of Africa and the Middle East, after the war in Ukraine, and at a time when US imperialism is no longer even concealing its preparations for war against China, a long-term war is now being waged in Palestine, with threats of its extension throughout the region and as far as Iran. This is what the workers and peoples see when Washington sends the aircraft carrier USS Gerald Ford – one of the biggest military vessels in the world – to the region, or when NATO Secretary General Stoltenberg declares on 12 October that “Israel is not alone”.

For all the imperialist governments, the current tragic events are yet another opportunity to try to achieve a Sacred Union behind them (1), to call into question democratic freedoms – freedom of expression, freedom of demonstration, and others – and also to try to use the current events as a tool to artificially divide workers and young people on religious grounds.

The downward spiral of war that continues to spread and become more widespread must be broken. And the only social force capable of breaking it is the workers of the world. Supporters of the reconstitution of the Fourth International, like many activists, groups and organisations in the international labour movement, believe that there is nothing more urgent than to demand

• an immediate halt to the bombing
• the lifting of the blockade of Gaza

Beyond these immediate demands, the supporters of the reconstitution of the Fourth International reaffirm that a democratic solution will have to be found in Palestine. It is of course up to the Palestinian people to decide the modalities for this.

For their part, the supporters of the reconstitution of the Fourth International reaffirm the position that our current has never abandoned; that is, the position affirmed by the Fourth International at the time of the UN vote in 1947: The Fourth International “will be the vanguard of the struggle against partition, for a united, independent Palestine, in which the masses will determine their own destiny on a sovereign basis through the election of a Constituent Assembly. Against the effendis and the imperialist agents, against the manoeuvres of the Egyptian and the Syrian bourgeoisie, who try to divert the struggle for emancipation by the masses into a struggle against the Jews, it will issue calls for the agricultural revolution, for the anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist struggle, which are essential driving forces of the Arab Revolution. But it can only wage this struggle with the possibility of success on condition that it takes up its position, unequivocally, against the partition of the country and the establishment of a Jewish state.” (Editorial in the review Quatrième Internationale [Fourth International], November-December 1947)

This position was affirmed by the Fourth International immediately after the Oslo Accords were signed (in September 1993): “The creation of this ‘self-government’ [the Palestinian Authority created by Oslo – Editor], which denies the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination, led Arafat to declare in his letter to the Prime Minister of Israel with regard to the Palestinian Charter on which the PLO was founded that, “the recitals  of the Charter that are contradictory to these agreements are henceforth null and void” (2). Let us repeat: For the major powers, led by US imperialism, this is not about peace and the rights of peoples, but about the imperialist order. Because this agreement is based on partition, on division, on the denial of the rights of peoples, on oppression and the denial of democracy, it creates all the conditions for new confrontations, new wars and new massacres.”

The fact is that the situation facing Palestine in 2023 was enshrined 30 years earlier in the Oslo Accords, which were welcomed at the time by a broad consensus of all the forces of the right and the “left” at the international level and in every country.

At the time, the Fourth International counterposed to the Oslo Accords the perspective of a “united and fraternal Palestinian nation (…) necessarily linked to the struggle for emancipation of all the peoples of the region in order to establish a union on an equal footing of the peoples and states of the Near and Middle East, liberated from imperialist oppression, liberated from the domination and exploitation of the landowning class and the bourgeoisie. It is through the struggle of the workers and the struggle of the peoples, in the realisation of their unity against imperialism, that a solution can be opened up for the whole of humankind. This is why the Fourth International faithfully follows the motto of the First International: “The emancipation of the working class must be the work of the working class itself.” As far as the Fourth International is concerned, it is for the workers, it is for the peoples to decide their own future.”

Who would dare say that these lines, written 30 years ago, have lost their force and relevance? These are our positions: we submit them for the consideration of all workers, activists and young people committed to the cause of peace, justice and social progress.

(1) Translator’s note: The union sacrée or Sacred Union was a political truce in France during the First World War, in which a significant part of the socialist movement agreed not to oppose the government or call any strike, in the name of patriotism. Germany had its own equivalent, the Burgfrieden, which the Social-Democratic parliamentary group declared in the Reichstag on 4 August 1914.

(2)  In 1969, the Palestinian national movement affirmed: “the Palestine National Liberation Movement solemnly proclaims that the final objective of its struggle is the restoration of the independent. democratic State of Palestine, all of whose citizens will enjoy equal rights irrespective of their religion.” In 1970, the Second World Congress on Palestine, organised by the Palestinian national movement, declared: “All Jews, Muslims and Christians will have the right to Palestinian citizenship”. These positions have been abandoned by all the Palestinian leaderships. As for Hamas, on 1 May 2017 they came out in favour of “a state within the 1967 borders”.