Corbyn on Palestine

Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn has said that the next Labour government will recognise Palestine as a state. Corbyn, on a tour of Palestinian refugee camps in Jordan, said that a future Labour government will recognise Palestine as a state as one step towards a genuine two-state solution to the Israel–Palestine conflict. He also criticised the Trump administration for recognising Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and called the moving of the US Embassy there a “catastrophic mistake”.

At Labour’s annual conference last year Corbyn received his longest and loudest standing ovation when he called for an end “to the oppression of the Palestinian people” and Israel’s “50-year occupation and illegal settlement expansion”.

No-one, apart from the most rabid Zionists, would disagree with Corbyn’s sentiments.

Unfortunately there are plenty of them about within the Labour party apparatus.

Zionism, which Lenin said was “absolutely false and essentially reactionary”, has never supported the working class movement.

 Zionism poses as the “national liberation movement of the Jewish people” but it has never served the interests of Jewish workers. Zionists would have us believe that all members of the Jewish faith are in some way the literal descendants of the Jews of Biblical days. In fact it is nothing more than a reactionary bourgeois-nationalist ideology of the big Jewish capitalists in the imperialist world. It tells Jewish workers that their interests are served by Jewish exploiters and it seeks to colonise Palestine in the same way as the imperialist powers it allies itself with have done in the past.

Those who stand in their way are often branded as anti-Semites for daring to uphold the legitimate rights of the Palestinian Arabs. But the Zionist lobby and its Blairite allies in parliament can bleat on about “anti-Semitism” for as long as they like. They represent no-one but themselves.

What the mass movement has to ensure is that Corbyn’s very modest steps to meeting the aspirations of the Palestinian people are immediately taken on board when Labour returns to power in the not-so-distant future.