The Morning Star is usually a decent publication but this is a massive miss. I don’t know who anything about the author of this particular article but i hope they don’t reflect the views of the newspaper as a whole.
Setting aside the weirdness of putting indigenous in quotation marks, we need to address the fundamental problem with the 1947 partition plan which is that it was purely an imposition of the imperialist powers in which the actual population living there had no say. Any borders drawn by an outside power for post-colonial states are fundamentally illegitimate. It denies the Palestinians self-determination in order to erect a Anglo-European colonial bridgehead in West Asia. That’s the first and most glaring problem.
The second is that you can see just by looking at a map how little sense this partition makes. Let’s pretend for a second that a Zionist “state of Israel” wasn’t a fundamentally genocidal settler-colonial project that could never be satisfied with the 1947 borders. A Palestinian state with these borders will never and would never have been viable, chopped up into separate pieces which do not connect to each other. And they knew this when they drew up this map because they did not chop up the “Israeli state” in the same way - they made it territorially contiguous! Also, what possible justification could there be for giving the Negev desert to the “Israeli state”? In no universe do they have any claim on that region either demographic or historical. It is and was Bedouin territory. The only reason they were given it in the partition is to allow the imperialist powers (of which the “state of Israel” was always conceived as a proxy) access to a Red Sea port while denying one to the Palestinian state.
You don’t even need to be a Marxist to see all of this, you just need to use a little common sense. Morning Star really dropped the ball on this one. If you want to advocate for a partition then at least do so in sensible borders that take into account sea access, resource distribution (in particular access to fresh water sources) and military defensibility. Those of us who advocate for full decolonization will still vehemently disagree but at least you won’t look like an idiot who has no understanding of what it takes to make a state viable in the real world.
Don’t get me wrong, I buy Morning Star often as it is an important paper as the only daily voice for Socialism in Britain, however this article is undoubtedly a reflection of the overall revisionist turn that has been repeatedly taken by the CPB(which has voiced support for 2-states) and the British left in a wider sense.
As i said, if they want to advocate for a “two state solution” they should at least do so with borders that make sense. Ultimately it won’t make a difference because a “two state solution” is an impossibility as long as one of the two is driven by Zionist ideology. All that advocating for a “two state solution” and seeing it get trashed again and again by the Zionists does is convince the world that it is impossible to reason with these genocidal fanatics. At some point even the densest British revisionists should get this.
In the meantime they should be focusing on what actually urgently needs to be done which is stopping the genocide and siege of Gaza, and ending the occupation of the West Bank (and of the Golan Heights!). How they managed to write a whole article about Palestine and not mention either of these things is beyond my comprehension. Speaking in the abstract about “peace and equality” is just not enough. Clearly they don’t like the term indigenous but are British “socialists” now even too afraid to say the words apartheid and occupation?
British people seem incapable of reason at this point lol, I don’t wanna live here anymore but I can’t abandon my shared responsibility to fix this shitfuck of a nation.
I think part of fixing the left in the UK is removing trots infulence from it by creating parrell sources of information and news.
Trot outlets and the daily star often serve as curious leftists first entry into communist-adjacent politics, and they do a utter shit job of it everytime; from throwing trans people under the bus to spending there political energy and capital appealing to angry socialist boomers over the age of 60
Definitely agree - but I also think the British left should focus more on building class power in oppressed communities(in a geographical sense, but also focussing mainly on imperialised communities like racially oppressed people who are more likely to support Socialism than labour aristocrats) rather than trying to recruit university students and flogging any kind of newspaper or magazine or book in the city centre where mostly just well-off shoppers are found. The masses must be convinced to trust us - we cannot simply just expect them to listen just because it’s in broadsheet print.
Re-building communist power in unions is also important, as is trying to stop them from becoming increasingly establishmentarian.
Agreed on both points, it reminds me of a conversation I had with a trot org when I was trying to find a ML party to throw my political weight behind in the UK; I live in one of the most deprived areas, there idea of organizing was handing out there own newspaper in the deprived area, right outside a methadone clinic; the paper they wanted me to hand out was anti-china, anti-russia and anti-cuba confusingly.
I suggested they focus on rent instead and didnt contact them again lol.
The Morning Star is usually a decent publication but this is a massive miss. I don’t know who anything about the author of this particular article but i hope they don’t reflect the views of the newspaper as a whole.
Setting aside the weirdness of putting indigenous in quotation marks, we need to address the fundamental problem with the 1947 partition plan which is that it was purely an imposition of the imperialist powers in which the actual population living there had no say. Any borders drawn by an outside power for post-colonial states are fundamentally illegitimate. It denies the Palestinians self-determination in order to erect a Anglo-European colonial bridgehead in West Asia. That’s the first and most glaring problem.
The second is that you can see just by looking at a map how little sense this partition makes. Let’s pretend for a second that a Zionist “state of Israel” wasn’t a fundamentally genocidal settler-colonial project that could never be satisfied with the 1947 borders. A Palestinian state with these borders will never and would never have been viable, chopped up into separate pieces which do not connect to each other. And they knew this when they drew up this map because they did not chop up the “Israeli state” in the same way - they made it territorially contiguous! Also, what possible justification could there be for giving the Negev desert to the “Israeli state”? In no universe do they have any claim on that region either demographic or historical. It is and was Bedouin territory. The only reason they were given it in the partition is to allow the imperialist powers (of which the “state of Israel” was always conceived as a proxy) access to a Red Sea port while denying one to the Palestinian state.
You don’t even need to be a Marxist to see all of this, you just need to use a little common sense. Morning Star really dropped the ball on this one. If you want to advocate for a partition then at least do so in sensible borders that take into account sea access, resource distribution (in particular access to fresh water sources) and military defensibility. Those of us who advocate for full decolonization will still vehemently disagree but at least you won’t look like an idiot who has no understanding of what it takes to make a state viable in the real world.
Don’t get me wrong, I buy Morning Star often as it is an important paper as the only daily voice for Socialism in Britain, however this article is undoubtedly a reflection of the overall revisionist turn that has been repeatedly taken by the CPB(which has voiced support for 2-states) and the British left in a wider sense.
As i said, if they want to advocate for a “two state solution” they should at least do so with borders that make sense. Ultimately it won’t make a difference because a “two state solution” is an impossibility as long as one of the two is driven by Zionist ideology. All that advocating for a “two state solution” and seeing it get trashed again and again by the Zionists does is convince the world that it is impossible to reason with these genocidal fanatics. At some point even the densest British revisionists should get this.
In the meantime they should be focusing on what actually urgently needs to be done which is stopping the genocide and siege of Gaza, and ending the occupation of the West Bank (and of the Golan Heights!). How they managed to write a whole article about Palestine and not mention either of these things is beyond my comprehension. Speaking in the abstract about “peace and equality” is just not enough. Clearly they don’t like the term indigenous but are British “socialists” now even too afraid to say the words apartheid and occupation?
British people seem incapable of reason at this point lol, I don’t wanna live here anymore but I can’t abandon my shared responsibility to fix this shitfuck of a nation.
Exactly my thoughts.
I think part of fixing the left in the UK is removing trots infulence from it by creating parrell sources of information and news.
Trot outlets and the daily star often serve as curious leftists first entry into communist-adjacent politics, and they do a utter shit job of it everytime; from throwing trans people under the bus to spending there political energy and capital appealing to angry socialist boomers over the age of 60
Definitely agree - but I also think the British left should focus more on building class power in oppressed communities(in a geographical sense, but also focussing mainly on imperialised communities like racially oppressed people who are more likely to support Socialism than labour aristocrats) rather than trying to recruit university students and flogging any kind of newspaper or magazine or book in the city centre where mostly just well-off shoppers are found. The masses must be convinced to trust us - we cannot simply just expect them to listen just because it’s in broadsheet print.
Re-building communist power in unions is also important, as is trying to stop them from becoming increasingly establishmentarian.
Agreed on both points, it reminds me of a conversation I had with a trot org when I was trying to find a ML party to throw my political weight behind in the UK; I live in one of the most deprived areas, there idea of organizing was handing out there own newspaper in the deprived area, right outside a methadone clinic; the paper they wanted me to hand out was anti-china, anti-russia and anti-cuba confusingly.
I suggested they focus on rent instead and didnt contact them again lol.