Only he is a Marxist who extends the recognition of the class struggle to the recognition of the dictatorship of the proletariat. This is the touchstone on which the real understanding and recognition of Marxism is to be tested. V. I. Lenin 
Economic & Philosophic Science Review 
Subscriptions (£25 p a.) & circulation:  078679 96074       www.epsr-marx-lenin.co.uk   [P&P Bulletin Publications PO B0X 50, London SW 17 9NL] [ Post Office Regd.] 
No 1148 August 13 2002                                                                                                                            25p                                                                                                                                       

Amended version to remove a name by request

Growing Jewish doubts about their "right" to ANY part of what for centuries has been the homeland of the Palestinian people, reveals how the impossible contradictions of imperialist crisis pressures all round, are forcing REVOLUTIONARY thinking and consciousness of all kinds onto the agenda. Collapse haunted imperialist warmongering tyranny cannot fail to boot the Third World so hard that a REVOLUTIONARY response will be forced forward everywhere. And because of the symbolism, for Western domination, of the Palestine question, - and because of the real value for imperialist global exploitation of maintaining total control over the Middle East,-- this issue of intolerable Zionist colonialism could turn into US warmongering tyranny's terminal disaster. Fake-'left' spinelessness about Zionism's fascist colonialism sums up the entire doomed history of 'reformist' rottenness. The idiotic "condemnation" of terrorism will see Trot and Revisionist 'left' posturing to its grave, as all reformism's fake 'victories', like desegregation and anti-racism, etc, fall apart under the degenerate filth of capitalist crisis. History's development itself is re-establishing that REVOLUTION is the only real progress.

The ever-sharpening imperialist-system crisis (of economic collapse and warmongering bluster to cover up the evidence), centred on the Middle East, is now causing a challenge to the most basic prejudices of the West's world-domination, - exactly as the EPSR has argued must happen (in polemicising against the fake-'left' whose class-collaborating servility makes them tail-end the liberal bourgeois pipe-dream 'solution' of a "two-state settlement for Palestine" to get them all off a difficult hook).

The degenerate and cowardly nonsense of saying "O.K." to just(!) 78% of Zionism's hideous, reactionary, and out-of-date colonisation of the homeland of the Palestinian Arab nation, just to dispose of awkward matters which none of the faintheart Trot and Revisionist "left reformists" have the stomach or the understanding to face, sums up the rotten retreat from Marxist revolutionary science since Lenin's death.

In the present intimidating climate of American fascist militaristic domineering, all grasp of history's eventual progress towards what is just and rational via dramatic revolutionary transformations (when ripe) has been abandoned completely by the fake-'left'.

A better understanding of the great revolutionary processes now driving the Palestinian nation forward towards total and undying resistance to Zionist colonisation of ANY PART of their homeland, can be found in the confused or shamefaced admissions of the capitalist press or bourgeois circles rather than in the dilettante petty-bourgeois sects of fake-'left' posturing around the Alliance or the CP/SLP factions.

The Western Zionist religious freemasonry's "right" to be militarily colonising the Palestinian Arab homeland at all has at last become the subject for discussion. The EPSR explained from the start that in this epoch of irresistible anti-colonial liberation, the deepening of the imperialist-system global economic crisis could not fail to force monopoly-capitalist domination everywhere into ever-nastier repression as the miraculous post-1945 world-trade boom finally petered out.

As a result, exploited communities throughout the Third World were bound to be forced into increasingly UNPRECEDENTED revolutionary development.

Anticipating that the viciously exploited and brutally tyrannised Palestinians (uniquely still utterly humiliated and denied all nationhood rights unlike the proud and talented Arab peoples all around) would be driven to resist persecution more ferociously than almost any other community, - did not require massive perception.

It was equally easy to guess that these particularly arrogant and fascist-minded "chosen race" Zionist colonisers would be demented in their savage repression, and that the US imperialist "international upholders of fairness, justice, and democracy" would back this savagery all the way (because of the especially priceless control over the whole Middle East that Washington got from having this ruthless and ferocious Zionist colonising expansionism on its side).

The historic conditions had been created for a classic, all-or-nothing, revolutionary conflict.

Precisely because the whole idea of "a national home for the Jews" is no more than the sickest and most old-fashioned colonial conquest (in spite of all the loony "chosen race" bogus religious rhetoric), Zionist 'Israel' cannot survive in any form at all unless TOTAL defeat over the Palestinians is maintained for evermore.

And equally, there is no way that the Palestinian people can EVER win for themselves the slightest serious nationhood self-respect until they have regained their sovereignty over the WHOLE of their homeland from the Jordan to the sea, every square yard of which is still a fond image in the memory of the LIVING older generations of the 7-million-strong Palestinian nation, and each family history still fiercely kept alive by the younger generations, - all kept going in exile by very little else.

Any GENUINELY equal state strength for the Palestinians (under the cop-out reformist pipe-dream of a "two-state solution") would NEVER let the Zionist colonisers sleep peacefully in their beds.

But even the very best of all the totally inadequate "two-state" fobbing-off of the Palestinians with just 22% of their original homeland donated back to their "control" (but all carved-up into pocket handkerchief sized bits, here and there, with total continuing Zionist state domination looming over, still, at every point) would never remain anything else for this proud and talented Arab people but a constant humiliating reminder of all that they had lost, and of what a uniquely cowed and defeated spectacle they would always make almost alone among the Third World peoples.

At the same time, even weightier historical matters than these are riding on this question of who will prevail, the old-fashioned Zionist colonial empire building or the Palestinian national-liberation and self-determination movement, - matters which cannot possibly be denied ABSOLUTE resolution one way or the other.

EITHER the world is in for another whole epoch of TOTAL imperialist militarised domination and exploitation (in reality, effectively speaking, regardless of how much things are dressed up as 'UN-guaranteed democratic equal rights for all nations' etc).

OR this degenerate chaos of total worldwide economic anarchy, destructive exploitation, and periodic collapse-mayhem and warmongering bluster-tyranny (as now) will become no longer tolerable to the contemporary people of the world (now all so relatively modernised and equalised by the global technology market itself into no longer being able to put up with being mere wage-slaves, endlessly class-discriminated-against and nationaly-discriminated-against by an international monopolist militarist system universally hostile to all ordinary people).

There will be no longterm American retreating from the degenerate warmongering bullying threats by which these current wretched bar-room thugs like Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld are brazenly daring to give orders to the whole  world.

It can only get worse, longterm, as this terrifying economic crisis deepens still further towards a dollar collapse itself, and total US ruling class humiliation, and loss of all their sweet power.

The appalling aggressive fascist Zionist behaviour represents this worsening IN ADVANCE.

Because of the theoretical possibility of unforeseen quirks or confused and ill-managed timing by desperately-sick and worried imperialism, there MIGHT still be a temporary compromise halfway-house 'settlement' in Palestine while imperialism's main warmongering focus moves elsewhere.

But it is overwhelmingly likely that sticking-up for Zionist tyranny will symbolically suit US imperialism down to the ground THROUGHOUT the long crisis ahead, epitomising the ruthless kicking-of-arse that Washington's continued world-domination means lies ahead for EVERYONE on earth who refuses to kow-tow inside the American imperialist camp.

The US ruling class could not give a damn about the Zionists as such; but the Zionist cause is seen as a very convenient 'politically-correct' figleaf for Washington's championing of military blitzkrieg-tyranny METHODS for dealing with anti-imperialist revolt everywhere.

And that is also how the rest of the world is beginning to see the Palestine tragedy too. Either a stand is made against this tyrannical US Zionist arse-kicking, or else bullying fascist-militarism will run away with things henceforth.

In the light of the ever-deepening imperialist system global economic crisis which has no solution, - then unquestionably it is the warmongering aggression that is set to continue.

The reformist peace movement whinges for 'restraint' and 'compromise', etc, etc, are ludicrously out-of-touch with the epoch being entered.

There IS only one alternative route for civilisation now, and that is the path of REVOLUTION.

The sensational pressures which have forced the Palestinian Intifada to these scarcely credible acts of heroic self-sacrifice and bravery of deliberately suicidally blowing themselves up in order to destroy the Zionist tormentors, - are set to continue.

One of their next steps is to begin to formulate in the minds of the Palestinian nation (and in the understanding of the rest of the world too) the idea of the TOTAL PALESTINIAN REVOLUTION which will, as best it can, engage in NON-STOP all-out war until either the Zionist colonisation can take no more or else the Palestinian nation will have been genocidally nullified to all intents and purposes, (as happened to the Indian nations of North America at the hands of earlier Western imperialist colonists).

Everywhere evident, now, in the Palestinian tragedy are the SPONTANEOUS beginnings of what must eventually become a CONSCIOUS Palestinian REVOLUTION against the fate which the imperialist world (backed by liberal-reformist brainrot and fake-'left' posturing) earmarked for this Arab people of PERMANENT humiliating capitulation to NEVER-ENDING Zionist domination, - at best the so-called two-state solution"; - in reality the acceptance of established Zionist colonial victory, and the status of repressed and exploited SUBJECTS for the Palestinians for the rest of time.

Far from this being merely wishful thinking on the part of over-excited 'catastrophists', such a revolutionary development, or things like it elsewhere, would correspond entirely with the broadest brush Marxist traditional expectation of how a late period imperialist crisis might proceed (see the Communist Manifesto).

With the EPSR having argued for a long time now how profoundly this imperialist crisis would stir things up, overturning almost every Western-world prejudice on the way,- it is interesting to now see the 'right' of a Zionist state to exist AT ALL on occupied Palestinian territory being finally questioned, and by the most respectable Western 'politically correct' opinion at that. The following appeared in a letter to the Guardian:

We are Jews, born and raised outside Israel, who, under Israel's "law of return", have a legal right to Israeli residence and citizenship (Real lives, G2, August 7). We wish to renounce this unsought "right" because:
1) We regard it as morally wrong that this legal entitlement should be bestowed on us while the very people who should have most right to a genuine "return", having been forced or terrorised into fleeing, are excluded.
2) Israel's policies towards the Palestinians are barbaric - we do not wish to identify ourselves in any way with what Israel is doing.
3) We disagree with the notion that Zionist emigration to Israel is any kind of "solution" for diaspora Jews, anti-semitism or racism - no matter to what extent Jews have been or are victims of racism, they have no right to make anyone else victims.
4) We wish to express our solidarity with all those who are working for a time when Israel, the West Bank and Gaza Strip can be lived in by people without any restrictions based on so-called racial, cultural, or ethnic origins.

We look forward to the day when all the peoples of the area are enabled to live in peace with each other on this basis of non-discrimination and mutual respect. Perhaps some of us would even wish to live there, but only if the rights of the Palestinians are respected. To those who consider Israel a "safe haven" for Jews in the face of anti-semitism, we say that there can be no safety in taking on the role of occupier and oppressor. We hope that the people of Israel and their leaders will come to realise this soon. 

Michael Rosen, Ian Saville, Prof Irene Bruegel, Michael Kustow, Mike Marqusee, Prof Steven Rose, Leon Rosselson and 38 others

One of the academics involved went even further in a subsequent Radio Four interview and questioned why a Jewish state should have been implanted in Palestine at all. Follow-up correspondence in the Guardian raised even more interesting points from equally-respectable areas of intelligent middle-class opinion:

The 40 or so Jews who wrote to say (Letters, August 8) that they disdained Israel's offer of citizenship and "right of return" on the grounds that Palestinians do not have that right are surely a little late. Why haven't they made this gesture before?

The basic racism of the state of Israel has been going on since 1948, and we didn't hear any repudiation of the offer of open citizenship to all Jews until recent events gave Jews in the diaspora cause to be ashamed instead of proud of Israel.

Your recent article about rabbis rushing to Peru to convert the Indians and turn them into settlers (How 90 Peruvians became the latest Jewish settlers, G2, August 7) is the only good joke to come out of Israel for some time. They must be absolutely desperate to populate the West Bank. In my time in Israel, people who wanted to convert were treated as pariahs by the rabbis. Conversion, when it happened, took at least a year. This is a cynical battening on to poverty-stricken peasants, rendering them "kosher" in two weeks and shipping them over to the settlements, providing they'll agree to say that Palestinians have no rights. If I had a laugh left, I'd be knocking myself out at the irony. 

Lynne Reid Banks Beaminster, Dorset

{By request a letter printed in the bourgeois press has been removed. It stated Palestinian “terrorism” is a fight to recover stolen land and therefore fundamentally different to the Jewish 1940s terrorising which stole the land. The name and address details were supplied. Ed} 

The monstrous ethnic cleansing scandal of the shipped-in colonists, transferred into the occupied territories BY IMPERIALISM (or with the West's say-so, or blind-eye-turning) just so as to crush Palestinian revolutionary resistance to the 'Israel' empire-building stunt, and without even the slightest semblance of justification even within the lunatic "a home for the Jews" nonsense that began this imperialist-domination villainy,--was owned up to by the capitalist press itself (although gently spun and castrated so as not to raise too much outrage against this rancid racist colonialism):

The miracle of the creation of this community of new Jews has to be chalked up wholly and exclusively to the credit - or debit - of the chief rabbinate of Israel. At the order of the Ashkenazi chief rabbi, Israel Meir Lau, a delegation of rabbis travelled to Peru. During their two weeks in the country, they converted 90 people to Judaism, most of them of Indian origin.

"We found a small river between Trujillo and Cajamarca and everyone immersed in it. We took the people from Lima to be immersed in the ocean and then we also had to remarry them all in a Jewish ceremony according to the halakha [Jewish religious law]," says Rabbi Eliyahu Birnbaum, a judge in the conversion court and a member of the delegation.

The rabbis converted only those who said they were willing to emigrate to Israel immediately. "We laid down that condition because in the remote areas where they live, there is no possibility of keeping kosher and it was important for us to ensure that they would live in a Jewish environment. In fact, there was no need for the condition because they were in any ease imbued with a love of the land of Israel in a way that is hard to describe," says Rabbi David Mamo, the deputy president of the conversion court.

"Because we saw their enthusiasm for the land of Israel, we understood that conversion was part of a complete process including aliyah [immigration to Israel], so we told them: just as you live in a community here, you should join a community in Israel too' says Birnbaum. "Rabbi Mamo and I both live in Gush Etzion [a group of settlements south of Bethlehem] and we believe that when it comes to community oriented settlements, there are none that can compare with Alon Shvut and Karmei Tzur [both in Gush Etzion], which said they would be willing to absorb the new immigrants."

The 90 new immigrants, comprising 18 families, were taken straight from the airport to the two settlements. Leah Golan, director of the Jewish Agency department responsible for immigration, says: "We, as the Jewish Agency, bring to Israel anyone who has been defined as being entitled to aliyah - that is, anyone who has been recognised as a Jew by the chief rabbinate or the interior ministry.

"Generally, the potential immigrants are in touch with our aliyah emissaries and are given very reliable information about housing, employment and education possibilities in Israel. But in Peru, we do not have an emissary: there is only a small Jewish community of about 3,000 people there, so we only have an office in Lima that is staffed by a local woman. Therefore, the Jewish Agency was not involved in any way in the decision about where these new immigrants would live or what kind of work they would do. All the decisions on those subjects were apparently made by the rabbis. "Theoretically, the new Jews had the option of joining the Jewish community in Peru, but that was ruled out.

"How can I put it without hurting anyone?" Birnbaum says. "The community in Lima consists of a certain socio-economic class and did not want them because they are from a lower level. There was a kind of agreement that, if they were converted, they would not join the Lima community, so there was no choice but to lay down the condition that they immigrate to Israel." 

The new Jews have not encountered similar difficulties in the settlements, where they have been integrated smoothly. "Now, thank God, we live where the patriarch, Abraham, the number one Jew, roamed" says Ephraim Perez, who until two weeks ago, in Trujillo,  Peru, was known as Nilo.

"We are of Indian origin," says Nachshon BenHaim, formerly Pedro Mendosa, "but in Peru, in the Andes, there is no Indian culture left. Everyone has become Christian, and before we became Jews, we also were Christians who went to church."

Nevertheless, they are fired with a historic sense of their right to this land.

What made you come to this settlement? "The Absorption Ministry told us to go here and thank God they sent us here; says Mendel. "This is the land of the patriarch, Abraham, and the people here are very nice."

According to Ben-Haim, "the idea that there are Palestinians here at all is a lie. The Palestinian people never existed and only when the Jews leave their country, the Arabs come in and try to take over and prove they have a right here. But we cannot agree to that because the Lord gave the land to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob for all time, and all the Jews will be united and love the Lord with all their heart, and then all the problems will be solved."

What is the solution? "In Peru I thought that all the Jews in Israel were religiously observant; says Mendel. "It was only when I came here that I heard that almost 30% of the Jews are not religious, and that broke my heart."

Is that what you were told, I ask - that the majority of the Jews in Israel are religious? "Yes, the majority but not everyone. But if they all become fully religious and unite, the Messiah will come and the problems with the Palestinians will be solved because they will get out of here."

You only became a member of this nation a few months ago; and have been in the country less than two months, I say. Do you know that there are Arabs whose families have lived here for hundreds of years?

"But God said that whomsoever becomes a Jew with a full heart and observes the commandments - only to a Jew like that will He give the land for generation unto generation."

Ben-Haim is not bothered by the fact that by being sent to a settlement, he has also been effectively recruited to a particular political group: "We knew we were coming to a place that is called 'territories' because people we know immigrated earlier and are living in the settlements in the territories. But I have no problem with that because I do not consider the territories to be occupied territories. You cannot conquer what has in any case belonged to you since the time of the patriarch, Abraham."

Ben-Haim says that after he finishes the Hebrew course, he may join the army, "because I wasn't in the army in Peru and that is something I lack, and also because I want to defend the country and if there is no choice, I will kill Arabs. But I am sure that Jews kill Arabs only for self-defence and justice, but Arabs do it because they like to kill."

He bases this belief on his scientific view of Judaism: "The Arab has the instinct of murder and killing like all gentiles, and only Jews do not have that instinct - that is a genetic fact."

This is an edited extract of an article which first appeared in the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz.

This is a further classic example of how it is the repressive lying tyranny of the imperialist system itself which will carry on driving the victims of colonialism and neo-colonialism ALL THE WAY to total revolution, as unlikely as that outcome may currently seem to all faintheart fake-'lefts' everywhere.

The bullying injustice WILL CONTINUE to become ever more sickening and intolerable, not simply because this 'free-world' fascist militarism has lost all sense of proportional judgement, or because it has no sensitivity to the offence it is causing, - but BECAUSE this arrogant Western class and national domination genuinely feels it has some 'RIGHT' to be bossing things.

And the viciousness of this conceited global exploitation will grow ever worse, - in how offensively it strikes the majority of people on earth, but also in the increasing amounts of absolute damage the imperialist system is going to cause to the world.

Listen to these further capitalist press admissions, revealingly reporting the debilitating doubts and fears which are driving this whole rotten Zionist colonisation to the brink of despair and disaster, but simultaneously trying to gain sympathy for an "innocent Israeli family, unjustly caught up in evil mayhem", etc, etc.

Despite a dim awareness that the whole 'Israel' colonial venture is WRONG from every aspect and should be historically aborted, the Western conceitedness prevails and imperialism's gun-law is signed up to in the end.

Severely edited, the gist of the WEAKNESS of the Zionist position reads as follows:

I have always been a reluctant Israeli. In fact, I don't think of myself as Israeli at all. I'm British, but I have an Israeli passport because I married an Israeli. From the moment I landed in Israel nine years ago I felt an enormous surge of empathy for the Palestinians and Israeli Arabs; not just from a political standpoint (my belief that it is only right that the Palestinians have their own state) but also from a personal perspective - it is extremely difficult to live in Israel if you are not Jewish.

I was an outsider, an object of intense  and often worried scrutiny. Everywhere I went, people would ask me if I was Jewish. Taxi drivers would treat me to long and impassioned discourses about how non-Jewish spouses were polluting and corrupting the Jewish race. Co-workers would call me a goy and comment on my distinctly unJewish appearance. When I married my husband we had to go to Cyprus because there are no civil marriages in Israel. I felt the state was denying my right to exist here, and for the first few years I often wondered if I could ever make this my home. My experiences helped me to understand how hard it must be for Arabs trying to live or work alongside this community. They were constantly treated as second-class citizens, as objects of fear and threat. They were denied basic human rights. No wonder they were angry. I was angry too, and I suffered far fewer injustices than they did. 

The intifada has been a progressive campaign. It goes step by step, getting worse with every step taken. Each attack is more appalling than the last. First you react with horror, then the fear comes, then you adapt and gradually learn to live with it. Then something new happens and the cycle begins all over again. The violence that happens now would have been unthinkable 18 months ago, or even a year ago. We are all, Palestinians and Israelis alike, becoming hardened by the violence. We go into survival mode. For months I ignore the bombings. I stay home as much as possible, limit trips to dangerous areas such as city centres, shops, cafés, banks, parks, shows, even the beach. I keep my two children, Daniel and Yonatan, at home. I try not to watch the news, and to think of the dead in terms of numbers, not people. I think small, very small.

What makes forgetting more difficult is that here, near Qalqfiya, we are on the front line. We have frequent security alerts. On occasions I've picked up Daniel, my four-year-old son, from his nursery to be told to go home, lock all my doors and windows and watch the entrances to my house. Neighbours are sometimes woken in the night and told to watch the village perimeter. We have our own security but sometimes soldiers are also stationed here. Last week the village and surrounding area were completely dosed down because a Palestinian dressed as an Israeli soldier was spotted throwing a bag away in Matan, the village next to ours.

We often hear fighting in Qalqiliya. Rounds of machine-gun fire at night, tank shells that rattle the windows, light flares, bombs, helicopters hovering for hours overhead. People on both sides are dying and we can hear it. And if it's frightening for us, what is it like for them, in the midst of it? The truth is that even when you try hard not to think about what is happening, it still penetrates your unconscious. I have frequent nightmares. I often wake sweating with fear. I worry about terrorists breaking into my home and shooting Yonatan, who isn't yet two, in his bed, Daniel as he plays in his room, or an attack in the park, or the swimming pool, or the local shop, anywhere and everywhere in fact I devise escape routes in my head, think of hiding places in my home.

Ask anyone on the Left, and even many on the Right, and they will tell you that the Palestinians should have their own state and the settlers should leave the territories. Until a few months ago I believed it was wrong for the Israelis to reoccupy the territories. I totally disagreed with Operation Defensive Shield; I felt sick at the suffering it was causing the Palestinians.

Now it's not such a clear-cut case. I pity the Palestinians. I know there are good people there who just want to live in peace. I know the closure is harming them deeply, creating further hatred and despair. But I am also scared. I know that the moment the Israelis withdraw from the territories, unless some kind of meaningful negotiations are underway, the whole campaign of terror will start again. And I'm not sure that I can continue to cope with it

We are sick at heart at what is happening in the territories, ashamed of Israeli brutality, saddened by the stories of daily humiliation heaped on the Palestinians, but we have no answers. We have no faith in Yassir Arafat, no confidence in Ariel Sharon and no belief  in the peace process. We no longer trust ordinary Palestinians. We just want to be safe, and if that means a temporary occupation then sadly, very sadly, that's the price that has to be paid.

I've wanted to leave Israel many times. Why should I stay?. This isn't my battle.

Recently at Daniel's nursery they held an end of year party. The children lit candles for peace, laying out tiny night-lights on the Star of David. They sang about peace and hope. My eyes filled with tears. How much longer will they stay innocent? How much longer will it be before they learn that they have an enemy out there who wants desperately to kill them? How much longer before they, too, start to hate the Palestinians? There is no hope here,  just a steady disintegration. The population is depressed, grief-stricken. People marry, hold parties, go to friends, even go to restaurants, but there is a deepening sense of despair. We are in the thick of a long war and there appears to be no way out.

I recently attended a farewell party for a British diplomat here. Many of the guests were left-wing Israelis and the gloom was pervasive. There was not one voice of optimism. Sharon is in a stronger position than ever. He has out- manoeuvred his adversaries, emasculated Peres and Labour. Yet few here believe he is capable of bringing peace. The wave of attacks continues. On Sunday alone 13 Israelis were killed and dozens were wounded. How on earth can the army leave the West Bank when everyone here knows that would unleash an even deadlier onslaught of attacks? How on earth can the Palestinians make progress towards peace when they have been invaded by an occupying army?

It's now your turn - Britain, Europe and America. We don't need boycotts, we need your help. We need you to step in, to come up with creative solutions, to take charge. We cannot do this alone. The situation is disintegrating and spinning out of control. Most people believe that this level of fighting will continue for years. There are many who fear that a major conflagration is coming, a regional war that will destabilise the whole of the Middle East This won't just affect us, it will affect you too. Forget about. your prejudices, forget about who is right or wrong. It's gone too far for that We need international help before it's too late. If we on the Israeli Left have given up, if we on the Left have started to support occupation, then what hope is there?

The shamefaced uneasiness reflected here underlines the historical rottenness of the whole bullying imperialist position, but also shows how the natural fascist-aggressiveness of the West's world domination will not stop DRIVING the Third World towards effective REVOLUTIONARY resistance eventually everywhere.

The wretched delusion of a "fair, reformist compromise" haunts the whole world and not just this sad casualty of the whole arrogant historical wretchedness of the arbitrary "Israel" bastardom, - fittingly the product of 'left'-Labour government's 'reformist' postwar idiocy to feign 'justice' and 'fairness'  while in reality merely oiling the wheels for resurgent imperialist warmongering-nastiness to re-dominate the planet.

Equally fittingly, the fake-'lefts' of Trotskyism and Revisionism, - who may soon be alone among 'intelligent' people still trying to justify the foully poisonous creation of 'Israel' colonialism, are now halfway mentally back in the 'left'-Labour camp of total bogusness and posturing conceit, welcoming joke 'militant' new leaders loyal to the reactionary TUC, and preparing to stand aside in droves for cretinous 'left'-Labour MPs who are now all back on the stump to yet again repeat the age-old historical trick of the 'lefts' of reviving Labour's "party of the working class" image after yet another severe battering from a period of utterly reactionary Labour Government once more.

But as this fake-'left' spinelessness effectively does nothing but disarm people from seriously standing up to imperialist warmongering domination by playing with endless meaningless "reform" pipedreams, - on the real front line of mass suffering from monopoly-capitalism's crisis ridden rule, the unreformable tragic savagery of life at the bottom of the world's exploitation heap carries on relentlessly driving people into spontaneous revolutionary action, however primitive initially:

Musa Rajoub died a traitor's death, dragged from a jail cell in the cold hours before dawn, shot, and strung up by his left foot from an electricity pylon in the centre of Hebron without an ounce of pity.

He must have known he had it coming to him. In the West Bank and Gaza, there is a special hatred reserved for Palestinians believed to have trafficked with Israel's intelligence agencies, and Rajoub had openly boasted for years of his powerful connections.

When an Israeli helicopter gunship fired four missiles into the car of Marwan Zaloom, incinerating the local commander of the al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades and a fellow passenger, Rajoub's fate was sealed.

Under cover of darkness, a mob of masked men descended on the central jail in Hebron and dragged Rajoub and two other prisoners outside. It is unclear where Rajoub's Palestinian Authority jailers were at the time, but there is no sign that they intervened to stop - or even protest at - his punishment. The three men's mouths were sealed with masking tape, their hands and feet bound with wire.

All three were accused of collaborating with Israel. They were beaten for nearly 24 hours and shot on the spot where Zaloom died, around dawn on April 23. The summary execution was claimed almost immediately by the Martyrs' Brigades, a militia linked to Yasser Arafat's Fatah movement.

Several hours later the police cut them down and carted the bodies to city hall in a rubbish truck. Rajoub's widow, Sahar, recognised him by his shirt.

"It was more than mutilation," she said, sitting in the family home in Dura. "If I show you the clothes he was wearing, you will see. So much blood. The collar of his shirt is encrusted with it".

Palestinian informers necessarily operate in secret, for fear of ending up like Rajoub and the 70 other suspected collaborators who have been killed in the West Bank and Gaza in the past two years.

But Rajoub never hid his allegiance, neither has his family. "Of course he was a collaborator. He always used to admit it. Everyone in Dura knew it," his widow said.

"But that's not the real reason why he was killed."

Mrs Rajoub's lack of embarrassment at her husband's profession is extremely rare; the stain of collaborating with Israel is not easily erased.

The families of collaborators almost always disclaim any knowledge of their activities, even after they are killed, or jailed by the Palestinian police.

That Rajoub's family is even prepared to discuss his death is testimony to the power he exerted over his village, Dura, and his powerful clan connections. The Rajoubs are one of the biggest families in Dura, and well connected: Jibril Rajoub, a distant cousin of Musa, is a former West Bank security chief.

Musa behaved as if he was untouchable, drawing on those family contacts, the threat that he could bring down Israel's wrath on those who crossed him, and the protection money he is believed to have paid to the local Palestinian police each month.

"He held his M-16 aloft and walked ostentatiously through the streets of Dura. He would bully people in the street. He would humiliate them," Khalid Amayreh, a Palestinian journalist and commentator from Dura, said.

"He acted in a gangsterly manner. I dare say many many Palestinians in the town have personal stories about their encounters with him." 

Since Israel occupied the West Bank and Gaza in 1967 it has used a variety of methods to build up an extensive network of spies: sexual blackmail; offers of travel, work and building permits; early release from prison.

"Collaborators have been a cancer on the collective conscience of the Palestinian people," Mr Amayreh said. "They are the worst and most diabolical product of the Israeli occupation, and the collective hatred for collaborators cannot be overestimated."

Rajoub began his career as a collaborator after he was arrested by the Israeli army in 1983 for harbouring wanted men in his home. His was a conventional initiation. He started as an asfour - literally a sparrow - the name Palestinians use for the men planted in crowded cells to elicit information from inmates. The asfour also has a more sinister use.

Since the Israeli supreme court restricted the use of torture during interrogations two years ago, Palestinians say, collaborators have been used to administer beatings in the cells. But if they are caught they can be beaten to death themselves.

By the time of his death, people in Dura say, Rajoub presided over five cells of collaborators who collected snippets of information about militant Palestinian groups in the village and nearby areas of the West Bank. On the side he ran a lucrative contracting business sending Palestinian labourers to jobs on building sites in Israel.

He was often away, in other parts of the West Bank, and in Hadera, in northern Israel, where he was able to conduct his business using the Israeli identity papers he was given in 1994.

All those activities came crashing to an end on November 15 2000 when he was arrested by the Palestinian police and imprisoned in a Hebron jail on charges of collaborating with Israel.

A trial was instigated, Mrs Rajoub retained a lawyer. But the proceedings fizzled out, and she turned her attentions towards ensuring her husband's comfort and safety in prison, and securing his eventual release, through bribery rather than the law.

In her version of events, securing Rajoub's safety was simply a business arrangement. Each month she paid a healthy sum to his jailers as an insurance policy, and she began negotiating a price for his eventual release.

There was talk of cash payments and vehicles. Mrs Rajoub looked for a buyer for a plot of family land in the village. The months passed.

Elsewhere in the West Bank and Gaza, life became increasingly perilous for those accused of collaborating with Israel.

Since the uprising against Israel began in September 2000, 71 Palestinians have been killed on suspicion of serving as spies and informers, according to the Palestinian Human Rights Monitoring Group.

Two were publicly executed by the Palestinian Authority after rapid proceedings that made little pretence of being a fair trial. The others were victims of vigilante justice exacted by Palestinian armed groups - mainly those linked to Fatah. They were killed by the mob.

Most of the bodies were dumped in waste ground or in unmarked graves, denied a proper burial in a Muslim graveyard. Rajoub, however, escaped that final insult.

The reason for such hatred is evident. Since the uprising began the Israeli army has used helicopter gunships, tanks, and booby-trapped cars to assassinate 82 Palestinian activists and militants and 31 bystanders.

It hunted them down with information provided by the network of collaborators in the West Bank and Gaza.

The army has also protected its informants. When it reoccupied the West Bank last month troops headed for the jails to free prisoners held on suspicion of collaborating. The 130 collaborators held in Hebron's two Palestinian prisons disappeared, moved to other villages in the West Bank where their personal histories were unknown, or to Israel proper.

But that was too late for Rajoub.

On April 20 his wife visited him in jail. He was weak and had developed asthma. But Mrs Rajoub was hopeful. A few weeks earlier Rajoub's superior in the hierarchy of informers, Ismail Abu Hmeid, had secured his own release by paying a bribe of $100,000 (£65,000) to the Palestinian Authority.

Ms Rajoub was finalising the arrangement to sell the family plot of land and had settled on the terms for buying her husband his freedom: the equivalent of $15,000 in cash plus his 1997 fourwheel drive vehicle.

She told him he would not be in jail much longer. But the cosy business arrangement was coming to a close.

Two days after her last visit to the prison Zaloom was assassinated in the streets of Hebron.

His followers in the al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades wanted retribution. Although Rajoub had been in jail for 18 months and was in no position to have given the Israelis any current information on Zaloom's whereabouts, his earlier notoriety made him a prime target for revenge.

Months later Mrs Rajoub remains shocked at the collapse of the deal. "My husband was in jail for a year and a half. He had nothing to do with Zaloom's assassination," she said. "We were in the middle of negotiations. My sense of things was that if I paid the money he would be released".

Palestinian security officials in Hebron deny that there was such a deal. They also say they were powerless to prevent the men from al-Aqsa Brigades taking Rajoub and the two others from prison. But few people in Dura believe that story.

"I was not surprised, but of course always there is an ambivalent feeling because he was also a victim,"  Mr Amayreh said.

"What happened is the epitome of the entire Palestinian tragedy: Palestinians killing Palestinians. Musa Rajoub and the likes of him are not immaculate people. But they themselves are victims of the Israeli occupation." In a living room plastered with images of Arab militancy - Lebanese and Palestinian fighters, at least four pictures of Saddam Hussein, and one of Osama bin Laden - his neighbour Bassein Zeer describes a man who was ready to use his connections with the Israeli authorities to benefit others - for a fee. Mr Zeer, a dealer in illegal weapons, had frequent need of his services. 

He said Rajoub interceded with Israel on at least two occasions to keep him out of jail. "Not just me, he used to help a lot of people. If you needed a building permit. or wanted to get people out of jail, you went to Musa. He used to walk in the streets of Dura, and say: 'If I do anything bad to my own village, then you are welcome to kill me?

That shameful collusion between patriotism and practical need is crucial to the position of collaborators in Palestinian society.

"They opened fire on their bodies. Minimum each one took not less than 20 bullets," a researcher from the Palestinian Human Rights Monitoring Group said. 

Then the bodies were strung up for the mob -  half-naked carcasses by this point for the boys who' stoned, spat at and stubbed out cigarettes on cold and greying flesh.

According to witnesses interviewed by human rights organisations, no one tried to stop the ghastly spectacle or to persuade the mob that the men deserved to be put on trial.

But to try to stem this revolutionary challenge to the utter fraud of bourgeois 'democracy' and 'justice' fronting for ruthless capitalist warmongering-exploitation all round the world, it is once again the fake-'lefts' who try to come to the western system's rescue (i.e. imperialism's rescue) with their "condemnation" of such raw revolutionary justice as this Palestinian lynch-law, in line with their "condemnation" of Sept 11 and of the Hamas suicide bombers, - all dismissed via the fake-'left' outrageous abuse of 'Marxism' to pretend that the founders of scientific communist understanding "had no sympathy with" so-called "terrorism and Islamic fundamentalism", etc.

Complete lies, - as the EPSR has repeatedly quoted chapter and verse for from the works of Marx, Engels, and Lenin, - to all of which the cowardly fake-'lefts' cannot and won't reply.

But although the fake-'left' of all 57 varieties stay loyal to reformists bourgeois ideology, the relentless passage of imperialist-crisis events themselves continues to undermine Western imperialism's brainwashing grip on international understanding.

Even some Jewish citizens of the 'Israeli' Zionist colonisation of Palestine are prepared to admit publicly that those responsible for the colonial occupation of Palestine since 1948 have no standing to dismiss the Palestinian fightback as "terrorism" no matter what sort of pain and damage it inflicts. These guerrilla-war methods have been virtually described as "justified" even by people who have had their own children killed in 'Israel' by the Palestinian resistance:

Ethics are not black and white - they are all white.  Ethics have to be free of vengefulness and rashness. Every act must be carefully weighed before a decision is made to see whether it meets strict ethical criteria. Our ethics are hanging by a thread, at the mercy of every soldier and politician.

It is unethical to kill innocent Israeli or Palestinian women and children. It is also unethical to control another nation and to lead it to lose its humaneness. It is patently unethical to drop a bomb that kills innocent Palestinians. It is blatantly unethical to wreak vengeance upon innocent bystanders.

It is, on the other hand, supremely ethical to prevent the death of any human being. But if such prevention causes the futile death of others, the ethical foundation for such prevention is lost. A nation that cannot draw the line is doomed eventually to apply unethical measures against its own people. The worst in my mind is not what has already happened but what I am sure one day will. And it will - because the political and military leadership does not even have the most basic integrity to say: "we are sorry": We lost sight of our ethics long before the suicide bombings. The breaking point was when we started to control another nation.

My son Arik was born into a democracy with a chance for a decent, settled life. Arik's killer was born into an appalling occupation, into an ethical chaos. Had my son been born in his stead, he may have ended up doing the same. Had I myself been born into the political and ethical chaos that is the Palestinians' daily reality, I would certainly have tried to kill and hurt the occupier; had I not, I would have betrayed my essence as a free man. Let all the self-righteous who speak of ruthless Palestinian murderers take a hard look in the mirror and ask themselves what they would have done had they been the ones living under occupation. I can say for myself that I, Yitzhak Frankenthal, would have undoubtedly become a freedom fighter and would have killed as many on the other side as I possibly could. It is this depraved hypocrisy that pushes the Palestinians to fight us relentlessly - our double standard that allows us to boast the highest military ethics, while the same military slays innocent children. This lack of ethics is bound to corrupt us.

My son Arik was murdered when he was a soldier by Palestinian fighters who believed in the ethical basis of their struggle against the occupation. My son Arik was not murdered because he was Jewish but because he is part of the nation that occupies the territory of another. I know these are concepts that are unpalatable, but I must voice them loud and clear, because they come from my heart - the heart of a father whose son did not get to live because his people were blinded with power.

As much as I would like to do so, I cannot say that the Palestinians are to blame for my son's death. That would be the easy way out, but it is we, Israelis, who are to blame because of the occupation. Anyone who refuses to heed this awful truth will eventually lead to our destruction.

It is we who insist on maintaining our control over them; it is we who escalate the situation in the region and feed the cycle of bloodshed. I regret to say it, but the blame is entirely ours.

I do not mean to absolve the Palestinians and by no means justify attacks against Israeli civilians. No attack against civilians can be condoned. But as an occupation force it is we who trample over human dignity, it is we who crush the liberty of Palestinians and it is we who push an entire nation to crazy acts of despair.

Yitzhak Frankenthal is the chairman of the Families Forum. This is an edited version of a speech he made at a rally in Jerusalem on Saturday July 27 2002.

And whose is the real "terror", more and more bourgeois journalists are asking as the capitalist world splits on these previously unanimous ideological questions of always instantly condemning as "terrorist violence" all revolutionary resistance everywhere immediately it occurs.

Israeli leaders seem to have modified their strategy in the light of the international criticism of their behaviour in Jenin in April and the bombing of the house in Gaza city. In the newspaper Ha'aretz, the analyst Amir Oren wrote this week that the prime minister, Ariel Sharon, and the top brass are adopting a new policy of "restraint" in place of their previous tactic of immediate, costly and escalated responses to suicide attacks.

They are said to be awaiting for the coming American war to remove Saddam Hussein, a new and more moderate leadership to replace Yasser Arafat and the completion of a security fence between Israel and the central part of the West Bank. In the meantime they will hold back from massive actions, provided the level of Palestinian terror attacks remains "tolerable". This is an undefinable and volatile concept, Oren conceded, and although the Israeli public's tolerance level today is much higher than it was a year ago, it could change suddenly. Another massive suicide bomb could produce demands for heavy reprisals again.

If this is the latest Israeli military spin, the reality for Palestinians is that even "restraint" by the Israeli army is enough to make their lives miserable. The army may no longer be destroying vast chunks of Palestinian cities, but it continues to terrify Palestinian civilians by indiscriminate shooting. One night last week I sat in a Palestinian home in Khan Yunis in the Gaza strip, while Israeli tanks lit up the night sky with flares. Prolonged bursts of machine-gun fire sent bullets flying only a few feet above the roofs of the' city. Terrified women and children hurried into the dark streets to seek shelter with relatives or neighbours further away from the source of the firing.

The army still sends tanks and troops into Palestinian towns for forays of several days, as it did in Jenin last week, or for a single night as it did twice in the northern part of the Gaza strip. Curfews are slapped on or lifted without notice, making life for all Palestinians unpredictable and humiliating. All except "humanitarian" movement between Palestinian towns on the West Bank is banned.

House demolitions as a collective punishment are being stepped up. While UN-funded bulldozers slowly cart away the rubble of Jenin's city centre, cautiously searching for the unexploded munitions which still lurk there, Israeli dynamite teams are at work in other parts of Jenin. We saw a three-storey building which had been blown up a few hours before the UN report was published. The army said troops had found explosives and other evidence that the building was "a bomb factory". 

The troops' dynamiting wrecked several nearby shops and flats. "We are tired and exhausted"; said one desperate trader as he showed us the ruins of his shop. "This is the worst time in 35 years of the occupation." In other parts of the West Bank more than 20 homes have been blown up in the last seven days because they belonged to suicide bombers or their families.

The US defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, took the Bush administration further into Sharon's grip this week by talking about the "so-called occupied territories": He seemed to justify Israel's tenure by arguing that Israel's neighbours jumped into war and "lost a lot of real estate because Israel prevailed'.

After the recent UN report on Jenin and other West Bank cities the Israeli government's defenders have made great play of the word "massacre" : They leapt on the fact that the report did not use the word and cited a total of 22 dead civilians rather than 500, as some Palestinian leaders had claimed. The notion of massacre is relative: In Kosovo and Chechnya the deaths of two dozen innocent people in a single military operation were often described as massacres. But the key criticism of Israel in the UN report on Jenin was not a matter of semantics nor the issue of how many civilians died. It was Israel's comprehensive violation of the laws of war.

The report pointed out that Israel is a contracting party to the Geneva convention, under which the Palestinian residents of the occupied territories are "protected persons". They may not be subjected to "humiliating or degrading treatment or acts of collective punishment or reprisals" : Their property may not be destroyed unless it is "rendered absolutely necessary by military operations".

The UN criticised the protracted curfews and, in Gaza's case, the border closures imposed by Israel on Palestinian cities which have blocked medical supplies, ruined the Palestinian economy and exacerbated poverty. It condemned the vandalisation of schools and government buildings by Israeli troops. It pointed out that, although Jenin was the focus of its inquiry, Nablus suffered more hardship and death during Israel's offensive. In 18 days of fighting, around 50 civilians died in Nablus while Israel lost four soldiers. More homes were wrecked in Nablus, although the area of destruction was not so compact as in Jenin.

The aftermath of the two most heavily debated episodes in Israel's latest war has been captured on scores of video clips but no preparation can prevent a wave of awe and anger from flooding over you at the scene - awe at the destructive power of modern weapons, anger at the indiscriminate slaughter of civilians. The Jenin havoc took place over 15 days in April. Homes were first hit at random from helicopters and tanks with fire that, by the nature of its heaviness, could not be targeted accurately. After 13 Israeli soldiers died in an ambush, army bulldozers systematically levelled the area, crushing around 250 buildings, in some cases with their occupants inside. In Gaza last month the destruction took less than 15 seconds. Learning that Salah Shehada, the military leader of the militant Hamas group, was inside a building, an Israeli air force commander dispatched an F-16 to demolish it, even though it must have been clear that a one tonne bomb on an apartment block at night was likely to kill everyone asleep. Nine children and five adults died, as well as Shehadeh.

As long as the occupation continues, resistance in one form or another is bound to go on.

The US Department of Defence and the CIA know perfectly well that today's Iraq poses no threat to anyone in the region, let alone in the United States.

To argue otherwise is dishonest. They know, for example, that al-Dora, formerly a production centre for vaccine against foot and mouth disease on the outskirts of Baghdad, and alFallujah, a pesticide and herbicide manufacturing unit in the western desert, are today defunct and beyond repair. The UN concluded the former had been involved in biological agent research and development and the latter in the production of materials for chemical warfare. UN disarmament personnel permanently disabled al-Dora in 1996. During a visit with a German TV crew to al-Dora in mid-July - a site chosen by me and not the Iraqi authorities - I found it in the same destroyed condition in which I had last seen it in 1999.

Al-Fallujah was partially destroyed in 1991 during the Gulf war and again in December 1998, during operation desert fox. In between a UN disarmament team disabled all facilities in any way related to weapons of mass destruction there, including the castor oil production unit. My visit this month disclosed beyond any doubt that the castor oil unit was inoperable. Remnants of other production facilities are used to manufacture herbicides and pesticides for plant protection and household use.

One does not need to be a specialist in weapons of mass destruction to conclude that these sites had been rendered harmless and have remained in this condition. The truly worrying fact is that the US Department of Defence has all of this information. Why then, one must ask, does the Bush administration want to include Iraq in its fight against terrorism? Is it really too far-fetched to suggest that the US government does not want UN arms inspectors back in Iraq? Do they fear that this would lead to a political drama of the first order since the inspectors would confirm what individuals such as Scott Ritter have argued for some time, that Iraq no longer possesses any capacity to produce weapons of mass destruction? 

This indeed would be the final blow to the "war against Iraq" policy of the Bush administration, a policy that no-one else wants. The Iraqis would be well advised to seize this opportunity and open their doors without delay to time-limited arms inspectors, thereby confirming that they indeed have nothing to hide. 

This would make a US war against Iraq next to impossible and start the long journey towards the country's return to normality. What was it that Paul Wolfowitz said on the west front of the US Capitol on April 15? "May God bless all the peacemakers in the world." He still has a chance to be among them.

Hans von Sponeck was the UN humanitarian  aid coordinator for Iraq from 1998-2000 and has just returned from a two-week stay in Iraq 

German imperialism's announcement in advance that it will not join in with the US fascist-warmongering aggression against Iraq is the most revealing development of all.
 
It signals to all who want to hear it that Washington's neo-colonial blitzkrieging, - to intimidate all anti-imperialist revolt everywhere and to divert the world's attention from the ultimate calamitous economic failure of the monopoly-bourgeois "free market" system, - is basically a losing hand in history, and not a winning one.

Germany's technological, industrial, and arms-race profiteering might has no 'moral' scruples whatever about joint imperialist marauding against defenceless Third World targets, and played a lucrative role for itself in the Balkan wars and in the Gulf War, for example.

But what Germany's stance now reflects, disregarding its undoubted electoral opportunist motives as well, is that as the West's disastrous economic crisis relentlessly deepens, - and as the already-intolerable conditions of Third World slump deteriorate steadily further, then this previously casual neo-colonialist bullying by the West is likely to run into ever more formidable opposition, - and even DEFEATS.

And it is in circumstances of imperialist defeats that ever-wider-spreading REVOLUTIONS start to topple the less-successful or more blameable imperialist regimes; and all the imperialist powers start to fall out among themselves, invariably with terrifying trade-war and warmongering consequences against each other.

It isn't needed to read too much specifically into German doubts about the wisdom of US warmongering against Iraq (such as anticipating defeat there; or expecting oil-supply upheavals and new alliances to be formed with the upset oil producing region; or predicting even a maverick imperialist pact with some anti-Western feeling in the Middle East region, for example, - such as German imperialism stunned the world with in 1939 by signing a non-aggression pact with the real hate-target of resurgent Western arms-race warmongering, the USSR).

All that has to be noted is that mighty German imperialism has decided virtually for the first time since 1945, and certainly the first time so ostentatiously and on such a big issue, - to deliberately go out of step with US imperialism.

Huge implications are afoot for the whole imperialist crisis-system.

In acting as if it either cannot see all these disasters happening to the imperialist system (economic crash; warmongering cover-up; inter-imperialist splits; spontaneous revolutionary responses all round the world; etc, etc) or else can no longer believe in the dramatic world revolutionary perspectives that a Marxist science analysis of such extraordinary phenomena can formulate, - the fake-'left' is demonstrating for certain how bourgeois ideology always maintains the tendency to keep reasserting itself globally all the time that the international socialist revolution still remains so far incompleted, as Marxism-Leninism explained must be the case.

Thus the fake-'lefts' are part of the BOURGEOIS ideological camp, so their perpetual unreliability as serious anti-imperialists, or any kind of anti-imperialists at all, is hardly surprising.

And hence the huge changes in the world, about to shatter the whole basis of ALL bourgeois ideology for all time, - are being more readily reflected in straightforward middle-class opinion (honest objective Jews who are beginning to understand the IMPOSSIBLE CONTRADICTION that having a state of 'Israel' at all, represents) rather than in the role-play posturing of the petty-bourgeois fake-'left'.

There, a lifetime's PRETENCE of 'progressive' struggle now leaves no mental space for simple objective observation of REAL opportunities for change on the way.

Reformist conceit kids itself that it has "won colonial freedom for all since 1945; prevented imperialist war; abolished segregation and apartheid; outlawed sexism and raised the status of women; shamed racism into a corner; liberated the gays; embraced social-welfare justice for ail"; etc, etc, etc.

In reality however, all that 'reformism' has done is to thoroughly succeed in covering-up and letting-slip the CLASS divisions and exploitation which lay at the root of all other prejudices and fed them, and which still exist more poisonously than ever, and which are now even turning back the clock on such matters as petty nationalism, racism, segregation, etc, etc.

The USA has just admitted that school segregation is now back to being as bad as it ever was, and not just in the South but all over the United States.

And to confirm the class aspect of such capitalist society phenomena (which the fake-'left' eagerly forgot about in their 'reformist' zeal to "abolish race-prejudice for all time", - the re-segregation now reconquering capitalist America is neatly being accomplished by the Whites simply abandoning the state school system completely when "too many" Blacks or Latinos "swamp" it, and going over totally to private education.

In class-ridden Britain, mass racism has never been such a virulent and widespread phenomenon (having never had much chance in history before) as now.

The large-scale race skirmishes all round the North are making up for lost time, and fake-'left' reformism uselessly sits by, completely nonplussed.

And all of the "stamp out racism" activist 'reformism' in the world will not change anything.

A system based on class exploitation rottenness poisons that society right through.

The vast majority of all folk can show all the anti-racist and anti-prejudice goodwill that they like but it will not stop the worst primitive fears and envies from being fanned up in the utterly disturbing confusion when the imperialist-system economic collapse fully hits Britain.

The reconfirmation from Middle East developments that revolutionary class war is the only real 'progress' -- and also exactly what is alone now being placed on the agenda by the irresistible march of historical events themselves, - makes the work of exposing fake-'leftism' more rewarding than ever. Build Leninism. EPSR

Socialist Alliance 'lefts' and SLP/Lalkar remain snake oil salesmen for the worst kind of anti-communist, anti-working class poison

The anti-communist nonsense talked last week at the CPGB SA faction's summer university and Lalkar's launch meeting for Harpal Brar's book on the Middle East and imperialism shows both strands of revisionism are running into the sand. 

Tina Becker launched the CPGB farrago by preaching the value of the slogan "For a United States of Europe", later backed up by John Bridge, dealt with last week by the EPSR, which quoted Lenin at length on the reformist nature of such a call, which fails to recognise the revolutionary nature of the epoch, and plays into the hands of imperialist power bloc formation.

Becker's Trot posturing was followed by a guest speaker from Italy's Rifondazione Comunista, Marco Berlinguer, whose grovelling to bourgeois ideology would have made a Eurocommunist blush.

He spoke about the "crisis of politics", and said his movement's greatest achievement was its search for a "a new subjectivity" "to offer new freshness and a new pluralism and new radicalism" "free of sectarianism" in order to "be creative" so that, most of all, there could be "less doctrine and more experimentation" which could "overcome the classical theory of imperialism".

In other words, total desertion to the side of bourgeois "free world" ideology; total abandonment of any effort to counter anti-communism at any time; total hostility to Leninist theory - total appeasement of imperialism in crisis.

Not that he doesn't know imperialism is in deep difficulties which threaten everyone in Italy with extraordinary dangers: "There is a crisis of globalisation, there-is a real difficulty of managing the system," he whimpers. "But the system is not collapsing."

Which is nicely loyal of him to capitalism, in the middle of destitution and despair spreading right around the world from the poorest parts of Africa to previously prosperous parts of South America - and the US and Europe to boot.

But despite earlier boasts about the 100,000 membership of RC and its 5% share of the Italian vote, and the "new pluralistic forces" (Genoa demonstrators, students and anarchists etc) he is "not optimistic because of the dramatically dangerous phase we are in and the radicalisation of the right" (possibly alluding here to the entire Italian capitalist state being in the hands of the near-fascist elected dictatorship of Berlusconi and the Lombard League and the signs that Italian society has all the makings of an open civil war in the near future).

But never fear -- he says RC is ready to "enlarge awareness of the dramatic conflict we are facing".

After which vacuous spinelessness, the Italian capitalist state can safely get back to sharpening its bayonets. 

Leninist-minded ripostes from two EPSR speakers to Berlinguer's opportunist trash stressed that global imperialist warmongering crisis required scientific understanding, starting with a Marxist analysis of the monopoly-bourgeoisie's economic crisis - as shown by the world's plunging stock markets, growing trade war and Bush's "war on terrorism" onslaught -and a class-war demolition of the lethal dangers of Allendeism and all revisionism - so that the working class is not delivered bound and gagged to a capitalist state massacre.

And it was in the CPGB/ AWL/RC's hatred of the EPSR's forceful communist appeal that the worlds of Trot revisionism and Stalinist revisionism collided - because similar EPSR speeches at the Lalkar book launch met with exactly the same outright hostility.

Both sides of the revisionist coin thought that "going on about revolution" was a terrible thing, quasi-religious, and an affront to a serious discussion.

But as the EPSR has explained over the past few weeks, people who claim to be Marxist but take the revolutionary approach to world history out of their politics are the real affront.

"Socialist leaders" who know that something utterly misleading and revisionist or reformist has been said at a meeting but won't stand up against it are an affront.

Berlinguer's speech was pure reformist windbaggery - deadly dangerous with its poisonous anti-communism to all workers, and villainously spewed out under the "Communist" label. When this was challenged from the floor by an EPSR speaker, who said it was "worse than drugs for Italy's youth because it continued the anti-communism of 'left' leaders that left them betrayed, nihilistic and sometimes suicidal" -- no one from the CPGB/AWL etc would back up the remarks, even though Rifondazione has been tagged as "tailist" in the CPGB's Weekly Worker by Marcus Strom , present at the meeting.

By the same token, what makes it acceptable for Lalkar's Brar to hurl abuse (mainly completely made-up allegations about the EPSR's politics - "EPSR calls SLP fascist etc" and lunatic nonsense ("EPSRers are still Trotskyists who live by Gerry Healy's WRP's old methods") because he is challenged that presenting "oil" as the root of imperialism's Middle East warmongering and domineering is hopelessly inadequate and anti-Marxist because it elevates one important commodity above a global crisis of commodity production - which really is, alongside the intolerability of capitalist exploitation by the Third World masses, driving imperialism to counter-revolutionary warmongering disaster?

What happens when a worker gets up at such "communist" meetings as are led by the Lalkars and CPGB/Socialist Alliance posturers of the world and says that the "stock market crisis convinces him that capitalism has had it, that Blair's support for Bush's warmongering disgusts him, and that the ruling class needs to be overthrown"?

These sectarians will be telling him to shut up, or take him to one side to re-educate him into "left pressure" reformism.

The same wretched abuse of the EPSR's politics shows the Alliance fakers and the Lalkar museum Stalinists know that the game is nearly up.

The titters from the respective audiences for lying slanders against the EPSR's concentration on the surging imperialist crisis and the need for Leninist scientific analysis showed less and less conviction.

As one EPSR comrade said: "Read the capitalist press financial pages!"

Chris Barratt