Response to Camfield and Post on “What would it take to win in Palestine?”

I found the article “What would it take to win in Palestine?” by David Camfield and Charlie Post a real missed opportunity to discuss the current conjuncture. In many ways, it reads as if it could have been written forty or fifty years ago.

I don’t see a possibility of breaking any section of the Israeli Jewish working class from the Zionist order, any more than it was possible to win over sections of the white working class in South Africa. While you acknowledge that in the article, the piece does still quote Moshe Machover approvingly that Zionism cannot be overthrown without the participation and consent of a section of Jewish workers. How do you square this circle?

I also worry about the notion that Palestinians should avoid harming Jewish Israeli non-combatants. These non-combatants are settlers in Palestine ‘48 (Israel) and in the occupied territories, serve in the Israeli occupation force; thus, they  are part of the state machine involved in committing genocide. They are hardly civilians. In fact, the one major group not involved in the colonial armed forces are Orthodox Jews, whose leaders call for the expulsion of all Palestinians (and worse).

Clearly, you are correct in arguing for a regional revolutionary strategy, and, yes, the role of the Arab working class in Egypt and elsewhere is crucial, but Marxists have argued that for years. Moreover, it is likely that renewed working class struggle in the Arab metropolises will shift opinion among the settler community even further to the right rather than leading to a fracturing of the settler working class.

We are currently in the midst of the largest popular movement in my political lifetime, at least in Britain, at the center of which are hundreds of thousands of young people and in which Palestinians and people of color, particularly young women, are playing a leadership role. Yet the article has no Palestinian voices, other than from the past. There is no engagement with the debates in the current movement about the way forward, no sense of the anger and passion on the streets and the role this movement can play in weakening the resolve of the rulers of the imperial heartlands who are backing genocide.

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