ON THE SEVENTH DAY

ISRAEL/PALESTINE An occasional series The Six-Day War of 1967 once more brought terror and destruction to the Palestinian Arabs, as Israeli forces, seizing fresh Arab territory, were once again used to pursue a policy based on denying the Palestinians all rights to the land of Palestine.

Villages were destroyed, land seized, people again driven out as refugees from their homes.

Amos Keinan, an Israeli writer serving in the forces, protested to Israeli politicians over some of the things he had seen, and his letter was later published abroad.

The unit commander told us that it had been decided to blow up three villages in our sector; they were Beit Nuba, Amaos and Yalu.

We were told to search the houses of the village, to take prisoners any armed men. Unarmed people were to be allowed to pack up their belongings and to be told to go to the nearby village of Beit Sura. We were ordered to block the entrances of the village and prevent inhabitants from returning ... the order was to shoot over their heads.

Beit Nuba is built of fine quarry stones; some houses are magnificent. Every house is surrounded by an orchard, olive trees • • • they are well kept.

At noon the first bulldozer arrived and pulled down the first house at the edge of the village. Within ten minutes the house was turned to rubble, the destruition of hree houses the first refugee column arrived from the direction of Kamallah. There were old people who could hardly walk, murmuring old women, mothers carrying babies, small children. These children wept and asked for water. They carried white flags.

We told them to go to Beit Sura. They told us that they were driven out everywhere, forbidden to enter any village, that they were wandering about like this for four days, without food, without water, some dying on the road. They asked to return to the village and said had them.

.. We drove them out. They go on wandering in the south, like lost cattle. The weak die. In the evening we found that we have been taken in, for in Beit Sura, bulldozers had begun to destroy the place, and they were not allowed to enter.

'We found that we had been taken in.' That is the way a number of Israelis—perhaps as yet small, but nevertheless increasing-have begun to feel, in the last tew years, not only about particular incidents, such as described above by Amos Keinan, but about the whole Six-Day War, and the policies of which it formed part.

The Israeli leaders told their people that they must go to war to defend themselves against invasion and, probably, extinction, by the neighbouring Arab states. Moshe Dayan said: 'We have no invasion aims. Our only target is to foil the Arab armies' aim of invading our country.' On the eve of war, he declared: 'Soldiers of Israel, we have no aims of territorial conquest.' Of course, it must be said, that the Israeli plaI 1S were aided by the sabri -rattling bombast of the Bonapartist Nasser, and the bloodthirsty demagogy of reactionary Arab leaders like Ahmed Shukairi, who spoke of a war of extinction. But Israeli commanders have admitted since the war that all the evidence showed that the Egyptian forces in Sinai had not been prepared for an offensive.

The Israeli leaders claimed that the war, and the occupation of Arab territories which has followed it, would bring new security and the prospect of peace for the Israeli people. But far more Israelis have been killed in action maintaining the occupation than were killed in the actual war itself. Every week brings fresh incidents, clashes, ambushes, roads mined, acts of sabotage, bomb explosions, as the Palestinian youth, both young men and girls, take up the fight against the oppressor.

For young Israelis, the loss of lives, and the need to be in a permanent state of tension and militarization, goes with the demoralizing effect of having to serve in an army of occupation, repressing a subject population.

As regards territorial conquest, both statements and forces have belied any claims to have no expansionist aims. On the day that Israeli forces went into action in 1967, Levi Eshkol declared: 'We do not demand anything except to live in tranquillity in our present territory' After the war, however, Eshkol stated: 'A new political reality in the Mid-East has been created. Israel intends to keep the former Jordan part of Jerusalem and the Gaza strip. Israel without Jerusalem is Israel without a head ...

Explaining that he was 'not an annexationist, Moshe Dayan told a Kol Yisrael radio programme on March 9, 1969:

'I am not in favour of annexation now, and certainly not in favour of total annexa'But there is a difference between annexation-meaning a Knesset resolution that Israeli sovereignty shall be extended to all areas which we today call "the occupied areas" -and linking the inhabitants of these areas to Israel through economic ties, and the creation of physical facts in the areas, such as new settlements and the like.

'These latter things can be done without extending Israeli sovereignty legally to those le areas.' As to what 'facts' should be created, Dayan explained: "The decision must be based on a certain view of what the future

Id es ot ve nt as situation, the final settlement we desire, shall be ... Indeed, the facts constitute a basis for the settlement which we desire and which we could more easily attain by creating the facts...

I do not want to draw a map, I merely want to say that anyone who thinks that the map of the new borders should include a certain area must also support the creation of Israeli settlements in that area. Anyone who thinks that no settlements should be established anywhere makes a withdrawal from all the areas easier.' Recently, there was a wellpublicised row between Dayan and other Israeli political leaders over the issue of acquisition of land for Zionist settlement in the occupied territnriac Same rennete-ner- LAVAILO. prehaps deliberately-tried to conissue was one of principlet Dayan alone for taking over the land. This was not so.

The difference was that Dayan had come out for right of private interests and individuals to buy up land wherever they wished.

(this laissez-taire policy, as well as their chauvinism, may help to explain why Zionist leaders in Britain tended to side with Dayan in this row.)

The Israeli government, however, was mainly in favour of a planned policy of acquisition, so that colonization would be Ai.

Israeli troops during the Six-Day war of 1967, fighting to capture the city of Jerusalem. The Israeli leaders surround the war wịth a myth of lands c crying out and cloak of musticism. with the places calling out for liberation.' carried out selectively, strategic points.

This 'creation of facts' has been proceeding for a few years now. In June last year, it was reported that 600 dunams of land in the Jericho area had been confiscated by the occupation authorities and fenced off with barbed wire.

In the same month, the Israeli forces radio announced that the Nahal Sinai outpost was to be made into a settlement. On July 3, a new settlement, Baq'on was reported established in the occupied Jordan valley.

On August 1, Israeli Minister without Portfolio Israel Galili announced that 15 Jewish settlements had been set up in the Golan Heights since the 1967 war, and declared: 'Settlement of the Golan Heights will continue.' Later in the month, Israeli radio reported that the groundwork was being new village in the Golan, about two kilometres south of Ramat Magshimim, and also that the 54th Nahal outpost in the Jordan valley, named Gitit, had been established.

On October 11, the 'Financial Times' reported from Jerusalem that Jewish companies had set up 145 new industrial plants in the territories occupied since the une The 'Daily Telegraph' reported that the Israeli government as offering low interest loan:

rants, financial aid for build ing and working capital up to 50 cent, to encourage businessmen to set up in the occupied territories.

On February 3 this year, Israeli radio announced that 42 new settlements had been established in the occupied territories since the June 1967 war and also that plans had war drawn up for the porta Sharm El Sheikh the southern tip of Sinai. These would include a number of military camps, a naval harbour, a domestic airport, an industrial zone and a power station.

There is another side to this creation of facts', of course. In 1968, Israeli forces tool over half the land of the Arab village of Akrabeh, south-west of Nablus. In 1971, the confiscated area was extended to take in a further 1,250 acres of best arable land.

The people complained to the Israeli government that this was the main acreage from which they derived a living, and they organized a delegation to the military governor of the area. They were given permission to pasture animals on the land, but only to enter it by day, and then they must carry an army permit.

In December 1971, seeing their land lying fallow, the villagers decided to sow it. By the beginning of March, the wheat could be seen coming up. So that month, Israeli army vehicles were sent out to flatten it. Then, in the middle of April, an army plane went over and sprayed the crop with chemicals to destroy it. On July 8, 1972, after questions had been asked in the Knesset, it was officially admitted that this had been carried out on orders from the military overnment. of the occupied West Bank On November 25, 80 Israeli demonstrators who protested at the treatment of the Akrabeh villagers and the establishment of a Nahal settlement on the confiscated land, were arrested. On March ll. five them, members of the left-wing Siach group, received sentences of six-months for 'incitement' from a military court.

Also last year, the Israel commander the Southern Front, General Arik Sharon, decided to implement army contingency plans for deportathe Bedouin from the area of the southern Gaza strip Sid the adjoining parts of The plans called for the re moval of the tribes, the blocking of water-holes and wells, and the fencing off of pasture Eight different areas were fenced off and from one of these alone, Pithat Rafeah, 4.800 Bedouin were evicted.

Sharon also ordered the bulldozing houses in Gaza to clear a path for so-called 'strategic roads be patrolled by Israeli soldiers; the hunting down of Palestinian resistance men in the camps, who are either sentenced to life imprisonment o shot, and the leportation o wanted men's families to special camps, so that they cannot give food or refuge to the resisters.

Military censorship was used to try and keep the Israeli public 'in the dark' about wha was going on in the Gaza area. through when even israel Laot The news eventually our Party's weekly review 'Ot. carried an article-using paraphrase to dodge censorship—-revealing details of the Pithat Rafeah action, and Dan lie me 0 ang the criticizing it.

Dayan threatened to have the editor: David Shaham, sacked from his iob and even to have the Labour Party close down the paper!

seen pressive methods and apparatus used in the occupied territories threaten to reach back also into Israeli political life itself.

In fact, the increasing number of arrests, both of Arab and Jewish opponents of the government; inside Israel itself; the use of Shin Bet infiltration and of police torture against them; and the use by Israeli leaders of terms like 'saboteurs' and 'Fatah' against Israeli workers striking to defend their living standards, show that this is happening Already the British Mandate Emergency Laws, which the Israeli government has maintained on its own statute books, have been used first to jail Arab socialists (in 1968) and then to end a strike by Israeli postal workers (in 1969).

The continuation of the repressive policies in the occupied territories means danger for the democratic rights of the Israeli working class.

ideological field as well, the aftermath of the 1967 war has been an upsurge of reaction. This is no small matter in a state where clericalism and chauvinist ideology have always enjoyed a privileged position.

Although the Ultra-Orthodox religious fringe has never recognized secular Zionism or gone along with the state, and many Israelis, for that matter, are non-religious, the Zionist movement, with its use of traditions such as the 'Chosen People', the •Promised Land' and the very idea of 'Return to Zion', has interwoven some of the most backward aspects of Judaism with modern chau. vinist attitudes to produce a highly reactionary mixture.

Furthermore, not only have the religious parties been able to exercise an influence in Israeli politics and legislation out of all proportion to their electoral support—in 1966, for instance the National Religious Party was able to secure ban on Sabbath working in agricultural settlements - but also, the clergy has been given legal power in such matters as marital law.

In 1964, Mrs Rina Eitani, a well-know figure in the Israeli Labour Party, who had escaped from the Warsaw Ghetto, and served in the Israeli forces in 1948, was told that she would have to give up her Israeli citizenship, because it had been discovered that her mother was a Protestant.

The Israeli Law of Return of 1950 and the Nationality Law of 1952 both give legal recognition to the concept of a Jewish nationality, with special rights to Israel as a Jewish homeland'. definition samho is a Jehe has been based on religious tradition—-is the mother Jewish -and on recognition by the rabbinical establishment In 1968, a Lieutenant-Commander Benjamin Shavit caused a row by demanding that his children be entered as 'of Jewish nationality' on their identity cards, being told that they could not, because their mother was a Christian.

A special anomaly concern nyone born of a Jewish fath and Arab mother. Under Jewish law they are not acceptable as lews, while under Moslen law they cannot be accepted as Moslem either! Of course, israel is secular s state -which would probably not bother them much, but in the context of Israel's archaic legal system it could prove a real problem.)

In September 1971, it was reported reported that a number of Jews from Ethiopia-who had emigrated o Israel were applying for cor version to Judaism. In actua fact. the Falashas, who numbe some 30,000 in Éthiopia, have for macy centuries. The Zonest practised the Jewish religion the rabbinate nor the Zionist authorities would recognize them as Jews and it is an attempt on their part to get Friday PAGE through the discrimination that this entails, and gain acceptance, that has led some of them to seek to be 'converted' to of the 62, there was the issue their own religion!

Bene Israel, a Jewish community from India. (The fact that it is Afro-Asian Jews who are affected in these cases probably not accidental. There is more than one type of racism in the Israeli blend.)

The Bene Israel demanded an end • to discrimination in marriage questions and full acceptance as Jews. It was only after they had staged demonstrations and sit-down strikes and the Israeli authorities had been embarrassed by the prospect of the Indian government raising their case, as well as the threat by the Bene Israel (who said that their first experience of discrimination had been in Israel), return ndia, that on August e8, 1964 the Knesset voted i that they should and siven full Jewish Slalus affirmed their equality.

While many Israelis resent he power of the rabbinate i he life of their country, an even the government finds it an embarrassment and a nuisance at times, the fact remains that Zionism, the official ideology of the state, has drawn much of its mystique from backward religious ideas; that the state's patriotic literature and culture glories in the nationalist 'traditions' of the remote tribal past, in all its brutality, culled selectively from the pages of the Bible; and that the conquests of 1967 have been consecrated by deliberately whipping-up nationalisteligious hysteria and artifici illy-created emotion about Jerusalem, the Wailing Wall' and so forth.

After saying •The Land of Israel, the Land of our Fathers becomes a reality', one writer, Avi Porat, describes his feelings as his unit camps down for the night under Mount Gilboa:

I sense it in my very being. They're all with me tonight, the Macabees, Bar Kochba, Joshua, and all the Judges. My thoughts fly to Gideon and his men, who fought at Harod's Well. Well, in 'The Seventh Dasix (Extract from 'At Harod's Soldiers Talk about the Day War' Penguin edition 1971)

It is perhaps not surprising after this sort of stuff, and its use Dv the Israeli leaders CLO surro a cloak o praysical, toat mysticism, that after the Six-Day War the National Religious Party has gained a new strength and arrogance. It has been noticeably associating with the exTreme right-wing chauvinists of Herut in its pronouncemenic Not that all Israelis go along with the religious-nationalist cult. In another part of the book quoted above, another young soldier, Amos Oz, describes a visit to the parents of a paratrooper who had been killed:

'A few of the kibbutz members were there and the mother was crying The father was biting his lips to hold back his tears. One of the older members • tried to comfor them: Look, after all, we've libera ted Jerusalem" he said, "he didn't die for nothing". The mother burst into sobs and said: "The whole of the Western Wall isn't worth Micha's little finger, as far as I'm concerned.

And Oz himself goes say: dynamiting the w Western Wall today would bring Micha back to life, then I'd say "Blow it up!" That's how I feel about it.' Later he adds: Today, I'm completely opposed to all this myth lands crying out Liberation 18 calling out for ut to noerate places worth anyone's little finger.

Since May-June 1968, the Soviet Stalinists have been haunted by the spectre of revolution in western Europe and the growth of Trotskyism in the advanced countries in the west. Fearful of losing their parasitic privileges at home and their control of the labour movement abroad, the Soviet bureaucracy has begun a campaign to once again discredit and distort the principles and history of Trotsky's struggle for the regeneration of the USSR and the world-wide revolution of the working class. The Institute of Marxism-Leninism of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1972 published 'Against Trotskyism', , a compendium of documents, articles, extracts, speeches and resolutions aimed at discrediting Trotskyism and distorting completely the truth about the relations between Lenin and Trotsky. In this series of articles MICHAEL BANDA replies to this book.

Lenin at Second Congress of the Third International in 1920. Shortly after the 'trade union of this period, Trotsky was standing In alliance with Lenin against the Insipient bureaucracy.

PAGE Friday PART ELEVEN Passing in silence over Trotsky's outstanding record as Commissar for War and builder of the Red Army, the book 'Against Trotskyism' moves to the other major conflict in which Lenin and Trotsky stood on opposite sides.

There is no attempt at any objective portrayal of the period, not even a chronology to guide the reader, who might well be excused for thinking that the only communication between the head of state and his minister for war in the course of two years' bloody conflict consisted of two brief, cryptic and slightly critical telegrams.

These occupy 14 lines of type in all and are the only documents oftered to cover the period from March 18, 1918, to December 20, 1920. The Moscow lie specialists certainly cannot be accused of being overscrupulous in presenting their case against Trotsky. They make no pretence of historical accuracy or completeness!

They fasten on the trade union controversy, which broke out at the end of 1920, with great eagerness after the 'barren years' in between. The trade union controversy occuples almost a quarter of the book and comprises over Tito of the material taken from Lenin's works.

The trade union controversy came, as Trotsky points out in his Letter to the Institute of Party History, at a time when war communism had exhausted itself.

'Agriculture and with everything else had arrived in a blind alley. Industry was disintegrating. The trade unions had become agitational and recruiting organizations which increasingly lost their independence.

"The crisis of the trade union was by no means "crisis of growth"; it was a crisis of the whole system of war communism. There was no passage out of this blind alley without the introduction of the New Economic Policy?

Trotsky admits that his proposals, which essentially aimed at harnessing the trade union machinery to the administrative system of economic management, did not point the way out of the impasse.

Nor, for that matter, did the proposals advanced by Lenin's faction, which presented the unions as defenders of the material and cultural interests of the working class and a school of communism.

Lenin's view carried the day in the party, but it still did not resolve the questions posed by the discussion, which could be resolved only by a new economic orientation, embodied in the retreat of the NEP.

Not only did Trotsky come to see that he had been wrong on this question, he was within a short time in alliance with Lenin against the incipient bureaucracy emerging in the Bolshevik party and the state machine.

Lenin was at pains to point out that the USSR could not simply be labelled a workers' state. According to Lenin it was 'workers' and peasants' state' '- even more, in a phrase Trotsky was to quote frequently later, it was la workers' state with bureaucratic deformations' (transGregory Zinoviev. Alongside Stalin and Kamenev, he supported modifying the foreign trade monopoly. lated in "Against Trotskyism' as 'with a twist in it').

Naturally this book, which is concerned entirely with episodic differences, makes no mention of the most vital policy questions facing the Soviet state. These fall under three main headings: the future of the NEP and how the workers' state could be protected from the danger of capitalist restoration; the nationalities question; the growing bureaucratization of the party ana the state.

The introduction of the New Economic Policy involved the regeneration of petty-bourgeois and trade layers in Soviet society who wcre once again able to engage in trade to a limited extent.

The peasants sold grain on a 'free' market while small capitalists and other exploiters were given greater liberties in order to stimulate post-war reconstruction and provide a breathing space for the USSR.

This policy was universally recognized as a retreat, and Trotsky and controversy' it strengthened those tendencies within and outside the Bolshevik Party which represented the interests of the bourgeoning middle class.

In addition the opening up of trade with the capitalist countries gave the capitalists the hope that they would be able eventually to break the state monopoly of foreign trade and deal directly with peasants and private businessHad the monopoly been breached, one of the pillars of Soviet power would have been elements at home. undermined. Lenin was forced to defend the monopoly with all his might alongside Trotsky and against Stalin.

None of this is mentioned in the present book, though its authors are well aware both urged repeal of the monopoly, of Stalin's role and of the alliance between Lenin and Trotsky against hirh in defence of the foreign trade monopoly.

The following quotations are taken from the already quoted book 'V. I. Lenin, A Biography'. Here is what the Institute of Marxism-Leninism had to say eight years ago a 'formal ban' on measures to about the foreign trade mono- poly at the present stage. poly and Stalin's attitude towards it:

'I Lenin | attached great im- sable." portance to the foreign trade monopoly as a lever of socialist development. He regarded it as a crucial economic factor and attend, passed an incorrect depointed out that nothing but, cision providing for temporary the foreign trade monopoly, permission "to import and excoupled with planned govern- port certain groups of commoment regulation of exports and dities with respect to certain imports, could safeguard the as borders". yet weak Soviet economy from In a letter to Stalin, who an invasion of foreign capital, was secretary of the Central secure the rehabilitation and Committee, Lenin objected to development of domestic indus- the decision and pointed • out try and obtain the profits and that "it is tantamount to lifting gold necessary for the country's the monopoly on foreign trade". industrialization that the mono 'He noted that "undue haste was shown in putting the matter meeting», agenda of the plenary poly on foreign trade was particularly important in view of the and that "no serious New Economic Policy and the discussion ensued" and suggesfierce attacks made on it by ted postponing the final decision foreign imperialist and capitalist until the next plenary meeting two months hence in order to "The issue became doubly collect the necessary facts and acute because some leading make a deep-going study of the Party and government officials question. came out with proposals to 'All members of the Central modify, even to repeal, the for- Committee present in Moscow eign trade monopoly. Sokolni- were consulted, and backed kov, Buhkarin and Pyatakov Lenin's proposal. Only a few persisted in their erroneous attiwhile Stalin, Zinoviev and tude. In a letter to the political Kamenev suggested modifying it. bureau, Bukharin, for one, tried Replying to a letter which to justify his plan of abolishing Lenin wrote to him and the foreign trade monopoly. M. Frumkin on May 26, 1922, Stalin too wrote: in formal ban on all discussion, • "Comrade Lenin's letter has not made me change my mind negotiation and committee work, about the decision of the CC etc., about modifying the mono- plenary meeting of October 6 poly of foreign trade" Stalin on foreign trade [i.e. Stalin still write: "I have no objections to opposed Lenin].. • •"All the same, in view of mitigate the foreign trade mono- Comrade Lenin's insistent proposal to delay implementation of "All the same, I think that the CC decision I vote for a mitigation is becoming indispen- postponement with a view to the question being discussed Centr plenary meeting of the meeting again at the next plenary meetWing in Lenin's presence.' (Lenin 1922, which Lenin did not biography, p.517.)

CONTINUED TOMORROW

means and the same ends can their paths be different? They want to recruit more members into their parties. They want

June

PROBLEMS OF THE DISABLED