On Saturday 25 October, members of the Revolutionary Communist Group participated in the Your Party (YP) North London Regional Assembly and confronted Jeremy Corbyn over his reactionary positions on Palestine.
The assembly was to discuss YP’s foundation documents in preparation for its founding conference in November. Corbyn joined the assembly and addressed the room twice. In a meeting break, an RCG comrade approached Corbyn in conversation, pointing out that Zarah Sultana was declaring that Your Party would be anti-Zionist and anti-imperialist, but Corbyn had yet to do so.
Corbyn immediately became evasive and defensive, stating that what the RCG had been publishing about him was ‘quite disgusting’. However, pushed by our comrades, and aware of the strength of feeling on this question among YP supporters, he had little option but to finally agree that he is ‘of course’ an anti-Zionist. Still reluctant to break with the reactionary pro-imperialist political line of the Labour Party which supports an imperialism-brokered two-state solution, Corbyn refused to go on to voice support for a single Palestinian state.
Corbyn’s justification for failing to support Sultana’s position of a single, unitary and secular Palestinian state with equal rights for all, was that ‘it is for the Palestinian people to decide what kind of state they want to have’ and that ‘in solidarity you do not tell people how to lead their lives, you let them decide how they want to lead their lives and support them in doing that…if the Palestinian people are calling for that…yes.’ This evades the responsibility of socialists within the imperialist heartland: we do not take our lead from an abstract ‘Palestinian people’ but from the need to bring down British imperialism. There will be many different political trends among the Palestinian people, ranging from those who support the Palestinian Authority traitors to those who actively resist the barbaric Zionist state. Is Corbyn seeking to give legitimacy to the Palestinian Authority? Certainly the Palestine Solidarity Campaign does because it gives a regular platform to its ambassador in Britain, Husam Zomlot, while distancing itself as far as possible from the armed resistance.
As FRFI has said, Palestine is still the issue, and the position that Your Party adopts on Palestine will stamps its political character. The solidarity movement in Britain is almost certainly the only one in the world which has not taken up and prioritised a campaign for the imposition of total sanctions on the Israeli state, demanding its complete isolation as a pariah state. This has to change. Imposing the isolation of the Israeli state is to create the conditions for its collapse, and, therefore, for its revolutionary replacement by a unitary secular Palestinian state ‘from the river to the sea’.
Any support for a two-state solution is to concede to imperialist plans for Palestine, plans which exclude the Palestinian people from self-determination, and plans which the Zionist state will anyway sabotage. The question therefore is whether Your Party will take its stand on Palestine on the need to destroy British imperialism or whether it will, like the Labour Party, support the two-state solution that is essential for imperialist interests. Corbyn won’t say and while Zarah Sultana is putting forward the correct position, we do not know whether this is a make-or-break issue for her.
FRFI will continue to be among those who force these questions into the YP debate and we encourage everyone who is serious about Palestine solidarity to keep confronting the party’s self-appointed leaders with the need to take a clear and principled anti-Zionist position, and reject all British collaboration with the Zionist regime. We will also continue to condemn those on the left who deliberately avoid doing so in the quest for some kind of fake unity, which in practice serves to cover up for the pro-imperialist trend within YP.
