FOLLOWING last weekend’s 100,000-plus Palestine demonstration, the writer Michael Rosen opened up an interesting discussion which challenges the way the Palestine-Israel conflict is seen on the left and beyond.

Challenging the narrative which assumes that Israel’s main sponsors — the United States, the EU and Britain — hold in varying degrees different objectives from the zionist state, he writes: “But objectively, the US (and its allies) have gone beyond being complicit, collaborating, and supplying. The vast tonnage of bombs, the massive use of US aircraft, drones, munitions and high-tech back-up, can, to my mind, only be interpreted as the US (and allies including us) doing this for its own reasons. What is going on is the enactment of US policy.”

The political transformations at the centre of today’s controversies about Israel’s “right to exist” are illustrated by the sharp difference between the politics of the post-war period — when Israel was established by UN decision — and its present-day role as the geographically enhanced extension of US imperial power in the region.

On the left and in the Soviet Union the notion that an Israel settled by Jews fleeing the Holocaust might be an anti-imperialist bulwark against reactionary Arab regimes and the continuing influence of the Western imperial powers was not unchallenged, but had a wide currency.

This coexisted with ideas which were predicated on the assumption that the wartime anti-fascist alliance of Britain, France, the US, China and the Soviet Union could diminish or negate the contradictions between socialism and capitalism. 

In the US, the Communist Party, at the initiative of its general secretary Earl Browder, dissolved itself into a loose political association. In 1944 the British party leadership failed to make any criticism of this “Browderism,” while the party’s weekly World News and Views reprinted a key speech by Browder with an editorial note from a member of the party’s political committee attacking critics of Browder’s “abandonment of socialism.” 

In January 1945 the Daily Worker carried a piece by editor Bill Rust supporting Browder’s position, while later party leader Harry Pollitt gave qualified support to Browder in the “conditions as they exist” in the US. However, sharp criticism of the Communist Party leadership’s seeming acceptance of this essentially revisionist direction of thought emerged in the autumn of 1945 at the 18th party congress. 

Many of these misconceptions swiftly eroded with the more open resumption of class hostilities and the more active signs of anti-Soviet hostility as the war ended and the role of the communists in Europe’s resistance movements saw them enter government from France to Bulgaria and from Denmark to Yugoslavia. All emanations of Browderism swiftly disappeared, or at least went underground, after criticism from the immensely popular French Communist Party.

Labour’s 1945 election victory was overwhelming. Thus a chastened Communist Party leadership circulated a letter to all party members admitting that its proposal — that the wartime coalition government with the Tories should continue — was a mistake. In her official history of the party Noreen Branson records an East Midlands delegate arguing that his mistaken “policy of national unity” had disarmed the Communist Party at a critical time.

Parliamentary illusions also fed into a downgrading of the party’s workplace orientation and the dissolution of many of its factory cells.

From the pre-war period to the post-war era, political conceptions about the establishment of a national home for Jewish people went through several changes.

Willie Gallacher, Communist MP for the mining constituency of West Fife, in his memoir Rise Like Lions, recounts how the Labour zionists had high hopes for the post-war Labour government. In fact, Ernest Bevin, “as foreign secretary, lost no time in making clear that he stood for continuity of Tory policy.”

“Were they interested in the zionists? No, sir, they were interested in oil,” wrote Gallacher. 

Bevin told the Commons that Labour remained committed to a 1939 white paper, which limited the number of new Jewish immigrants into the British Mandate of Palestine to 75,000. 

Labour’s continuing submission to this imperialist mindset is illustrated by the resolution passed at the 1945 Labour conference. Gallacher reports: “This resolution called for the setting up of a Jewish state in Israel and the transfer of the Arab population to other Arabian territory.”

As the war in Europe ended, millions of Jewish people were on the move, away from their original countries from which they had been dispossessed of their property and, for six million, their lives.

Starving and homeless, many had lost their families, had no clothes other than their concentration camp uniforms and no refuge. As the colonial power administering the Palestine mandate, Britain conducted a sharp military war with Palestinian nationalists while limiting Jewish refugee migration as it conducted a war of repression against armed Jewish groups.

High in the calculations of the Foreign Office was the threat to oil interests of the growing movement for national liberation in the Arab countries — Egypt, Syria, Lebanon — with mass demonstrations for the removal of foreign troops. 

Recollect that in this tangle of competing imperialist interests — Britain and France had been at war over control of the Levant — the US was pressing hard on British influence in Iran, Iraq and the region generally.

In November 1945, Britain capitulated to US pressure and agreed to the establishment of an Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry into Palestine.

This was the context in which the 18th Communist Party congress agreed: “Congress believes that a just and democratic settlement of the problem of Palestine can only be achieved by the abolition of the mandate and the recognition of the national independence of Palestine under a democratic regime which assures the freedom and equal rights to Arabs and Jews.”

Optimism about the prospects of progressive change in the Middle East was reflected not only in the fact that the Soviet Union sponsored the UN resolution establishing Israel while the Czechoslovak government supplied arms and fighter aircraft to the new state. Some of Israel’s military and intelligence figures had fought in the Red Army or in the European resistance to fascism. 

In February 1947 a six-day Empire Communist Conference was organised in London with participation by representatives from British colonies and dominions. A delegate from the British mandate of Palestine reported: “The most dangerous weapon in the hands of imperialism is the policy of divide and rule dividing Jews and Arabs. This was aided by ‘Jewish chauvinist circles’ who wanted Palestine to become a Jewish state and, on the other hand, certain Arab chauvinists who demanded a ‘pure’ Arab state.”

A special statement on Palestine called for the “immediate withdrawal of British troops. The abrogation of the British Mandate and the creation of a free, independent and democratic Palestine state, which will guarantee equal rights of citizenship with full religious freedom and full opportunities to develop their culture to all its inhabitants, Arab and Jewish.”

Illusions that such a prospect was possible soon vanished with the forced exodus of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, for the Arab states a short and disastrous war, and the parallel expulsion of Jews from most Arab and Muslim states. 

By 1955 Czechoslovak arms were being supplied to a new Egypt led by the anti-imperialist Abdul Nasser. That year Labour Monthly carried a piece by Robin Page Arnot which reported that the election held in Israel saw an increase in votes to “parties that advocate a so-called ‘activist’ policy, that is a preventative war against Egypt.”

This swiftly came to pass in the 1956 Suez crisis when Britain, France and Israel went to war with Egypt over control of the Suez Canal.

Later the 1967 six-day war saw a further influx of Jewish refugees from Muslim countries. The conclusion of the 1967 war saw Israel occupy Palestinian territories as defined by the UN resolution and Gaza, which was administered by Egypt. It had earlier occupied the Sinai peninsula — in doing so it displaced Egypt. An extensive border area of Lebanon came under Israeli occupation as did Syria’s Golan Heights.

Far from the post-war model of a national home for Jews living alongside their Palestinian neighbours, Israel had enlarged its borders by force, imposed a military occupation over Palestinian territories and had begun an intensive and extensive settlement of areas from which Palestinians and Syrians had been driven.

Britain and the European Union are today the willing but subordinate partners to the US in the projection of imperialist power in the Middle East with Israel the more direct instrument of US policy.

Long-term security for the Israeli people — who now undeniably constitute a nation — is impossible while they remain the shock troops for imperialist intervention in their neighbourhood. And while their actions leave Palestinians no alternatives but to fight to recover the homes, lands and return their refugee families to their homeland.

At root, the problem is the projection of imperial power in the region and ending this is the essential precondition for establishing a Palestinian state and thus restoring the legitimacy of an Israeli state within the 1967 borders. 

The global balance of power is shifting and the US can no longer exercise unilateral power. It is a matter of time.