Stop the Bombing of Gaza!

The horror and inhumanity of Israel’s latest military offensive on Gaza, beginning on 8 July, has shocked and outraged people all over the world. 

More than 5000 air strikes on the besieged Gaza strip have left more than 2,090 dead; tens of thousands injured and disabled; and more than 100,000 displaced, as of late August.

500 children have been among the unarmed civilians killed as Israeli rockets targeted homes, refugee centres, schools and hospitals. 

The western powers have unsurprisingly lined up behind the Zionist state, blaming Hamas for firing rockets and mortars into Israel, which have killed 64 soldiers and 4 civilians including a child and a Thai migrant worker.

“Israel has the right to defend itself”, said the US Senate, as it voted unanimously to increase military aid to Israel in 2015 to US$621 million.

To borrow from Raji Sourani of the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights, this argument equates “an occupier and the occupied, the oppressed and the oppressor and ... plays down the Palestinian people’s right to defend themselves”.

The Arab states, in an unspoken pact with Israel, back attempts at smashing Hamas through assassinations, aerial bombardment, and mass arrests. In the grip of despots, solidarity with Palestinians is secondary to safeguarding their own regimes from radical Islamists.

Blockade

The Gaza strip has been under economic blockade by Israel since Hamas fairly won elections there in 2007. Since then, the people of Gaza are under ‘collective punishment’ for making the ‘wrong’ choice. Liberal and neo-liberal democracy is only supported when it produces the result desired by imperialism and its local allies.

Israel controls all movement of persons and goods into and out of the territory; as the Government of Sri Lanka did in its blockade of the LTTE-controlled northern peninsula. Short of food and medicines, basic consumer goods and building materials, and denied the opportunity to earn their livelihoods outside of Gaza including to fish more than 3km off its coast; Israel seeks the surrender of the people of Gaza by turning them against Hamas.

This strategy has failed; forcing the corrupt and submissive West Bank leadership of Mahmoud Abbas to sign a unity agreement with Hamas earlier this year. The Israeli assault on Gaza is a naked attempt to weaken if not destroy Hamas, which would also benefit the Abbas-led Palestinian Authority.

While Hamas is no friend of the working class and poor peasantry and deeply hostile to the Left, its violence against Israel has to be recognised as a reaction to the strangulation of economic and social life in Gaza; targeted assassinations of its leadership; the detention of hundreds of Hamas members and supporters in Israeli prisons; and the failure of international diplomacy and constitutional politics.

Meanwhile, Israel continues to build its ‘wall’ in the occupied West Bank, stealing Palestinian farmland and water resources, destroying homes and communities and creating Palestinian reservations as the US did with Native Americans and Apartheid South Africa did with Africans. The colonisation of Palestinian lands by Jewish settlers becomes the justification for militarisation and occupation by Israeli armed forces.

Government of Sri Lanka

What has the response of the government of the recipient of the ‘Star of Palestine’ award, and patron of the Sri Lanka Committee for Solidarity with Palestine, been?

An official statement piously said: “We are convinced that dialogue remains the only viable option that can effectively address the issues confronting the region and reaffirm our commitment to a peaceful solution.” Good advice for the Middle East but not apparently for Sri Lanka!

President Rajapakse recently announced the gift of US$1 million to the Palestinian Authority as humanitarian assistance. Likewise the European Union, who do nothing now to stop Israel from levelling Gaza into the ground, promise to give loans and grants once this round of conflict ends; rebuilding tomorrow what Israel has destroyed and will destroy again.

As a mark of protest, the principled approach would have been at the very least, to recall the Sri Lankan ambassador in Tel Aviv. But of course the Rajapakse government can do nothing more.

The close military ties that JR Jayewardene’s government established with Israel have deepened under this regime. Israel has been an important source of arms and equipment to the Sri Lankan armed forces during its military campaigns including in its final phase.

Israel has become a favoured non-traditional destination for Sri Lankan migrant workers. At least 7,000 of whom, mainly women, are contracted as care-givers to the elderly and the disabled and unofficially as domestic servants within the household. Men are employed largely as farm labour in harsh and exploitative working conditions without legal rights and protection of Israeli nationals.

In fact, there is a powerful pro-Israel lobby within the defence establishment led by Gotabaya Rajapakse; and within the political establishment led by Champika Ranawake. The admiration and support for a rogue state that officially practises ethnic cleansing, military occupation, and racist treatment of Arabs, is echoed in Bodu Bala Sena leader Galagodaatte Gnanassara’s threat to act like Israel, if Muslims in Sri Lanka challenge his movement.

Both Sinhala and Tamil nationalists have sympathised with Israel and not Palestine. Each identifies itself with Zionist ideology: believing themselves to be ‘chosen people’, inhabiting their traditional homeland, and encircled by hostile and alien forces. Both nationalisms have also been influenced by the global wave of Islamo-phobia, which each has connected with historical inter-ethnic conflicts and tensions with local Muslims.

Protests

Public action and protest against the Israeli bombardment has been disappointing. The official Committee for Solidarity with Palestine met with its patron, and organised a media conference of political party representatives on 22 July.

The Islamist Thowheed Jamath organisation organised a demonstration on 13 August, which the police tried to ban to prevent clashes with the Bodu Bala Sena’s rival protest. The limits of the Thowheed Jamath is reflected in its disinterest in mobilising outside of the Muslim community and in fact, its own supporters, for the protest. However, its courage in challenging the court order and holding its protest in Maligawatte should be recognised.

However, the first public protest in solidarity with the people of Gaza was organised on the initiative of several Left organisations, including the Nava Sama Samaja Party and Frontline Socialist Party on 31 July in front of Fort Railway Station. Its numbers were small and confined to its own circle of activists.

BDS campaign

Solidarity with the Palestinian struggle in Sri Lanka has to break free from all three methods above: that is, elite politics; communal mobilisation of Muslims; and self-activity of Left radicals.

The global Boycott-Divestment-Sanctions (‘BDS’) campaign should be taken up as the strategy for supporting the Palestinian resistance.

As its name indicates, the objective of the campaign is to treat Israel as the pariah state that it is, by boycotting Israeli goods and services; by removing investments in Israeli companies; and by using economic and other sanctions to isolate Israel.

Only a movement that mobilises large sections of society, cutting across ethnic and religious identities, will have the social and political weight to resist Israel and its imperialist allies, starting within Sri Lanka itself.

Stop the Bombing! Reopen the borders! Rebuild Gaza under democratic control of its people! Indict and Convict the Israeli war criminals!

Colombo -- 23 August 2014. Published in Sinhala in Vame Handa ('Left Voice'), Vol. 1, No. 3 (September 2014)

Sexism and the Left: Crisis in the British Socialist Workers Party

Colombo – 28 January 2013

The British Socialist Workers Party (SWP) is undergoing the latest and possibly most serious internal crisis since its foundation in the late 1970s, as loyal members warn of its “inevitable demise” or “terminal decline” unless there are urgent reforms.

One of the largest far-left organisations in Europe, and the leader of an international trotskyist current – the International Socialist Tendency – that has or once had important members in countries such as Canada, Greece, the USA and Zimbabwe – the implosion of the SWP is not, on the surface, to do with ideological disputes or differences of political perspective.

Instead, it revolves around a more awkward question for radical organisations: issues of patriarchy and women’s oppression -- including its reproduction within the working class movement -- as well as the “interior reality of socialist organisation” (Sheila Rowbotham).

The present unhappiness among members and supporters of the SWP began with the manner in which its leadership handled allegations of rape made by one of its women cadre against a central member of its leadership. These acts and omissions have, in the view of many, caused “significant and irreversible damage” to the reputation of the SWP.

As always, one issue soon leads to another: the stubbornness of the SWP leadership in recognising its fault; the undemocratic internal regime of the SWP; and the dawning realisation that for the leadership and older members of the party, “feminism” is a term of abuse.

Internal Processes

It all began when an internal inquiry into the rape allegation exonerated the male leader concerned. The only sanction he faced was to be dropped from the slate for the incoming central committee after the January 2013 party conference; but he continues to be a member ‘in good standing’ and indeed, full-timer of the SWP.

The matter is now “closed”, according to the leadership; but many members, especially younger women and men in its university student societies disagree.

When the transcript of the inquiry was leaked, it revealed that the process had been biased and unfair to the woman involved, inflaming disgruntled cadre. Their outrage, also shared by many other Leftists, feminists, and trade unionists, is that a socialist organisation that supports women’s liberation should be so insensitive to the crime of rape, and appear to protect one of its leadership against whom there are earlier allegations of sexual misconduct.

As critics observe, revolutionary organisations need to continuously combat within its own structures and among its own members, ideologies and practices that are oppressive, such as violence against women. For this reason, two decades ago, the Mexican Fourth Internationalists adopted a remarkable text on the need to defend women comrades from physical violence; sexual violence; and verbal violence, by other members.

Internal Regime

The SWP does not tolerate organised currents of its members on internal questions, outside of the right to form a faction for its three-month pre-conference period. Any such faction must be dissolved at the end of the conference. The leadership is composed only of the majority current and is a semi-permanent homogenous bloc; renewing itself only with those acceptable to it. Political minorities are not included on the leadership.

The SWP appears to offer its members less, rather than more, democracy when compared to many social and political institutions in contemporary western capitalist societies, (or even the Bolshevik Party during conditions of Tsarist repression in Russia)!

The SWP has favourably contrasted its version of ‘democratic centralism’ with that of organisations of the Fourth International, where there are full rights to have short or long-term tendencies and factions, and where representatives of minority tendencies and factions are included (in proportion to the support received at delegate conferences) in all leadership bodies.

There is no doubt that long-lasting factions within organisations reflect serious divergences, and is no cause for celebration! However, any ban on factions is a bureaucratic means of suppressing genuine political differences. These differences cannot be resolved by preventing their open discussion; rather, only the freedom to publicly discuss, and even apply different tactics, allows for the possibility of their narrowing within a common organisational framework.

Where internal dissent is not permitted by rules, it does not stop. Instead, it continues outside of the formal structures through informal individual interactions – after formal meetings, or by telephone and email, and through social media. In fact, the SWP expelled four of its party workers just before its recent conference, for the ‘offence’ of airing organisational and political issues on their Facebook pages! Where there is no space for open and respectful discussion of differences, dissenting individuals drift away; while those who remain become paralysed politically and cynical about their own organisation.

What’s worse, according to its external critics, is that the SWP transplants the same bureaucratic centralist regime within non-party organisations, structures and campaigns that it leads or participates. The lack of democracy, pluralism, and respect for the opinions of numerical and political minorities repels Leftists not organised by the SWP and is an obstacle to building unitary initiatives, whether in trade union or community struggles or in creating a political force (at once extra-parliamentary and electoral) to represent those unrepresented by the pro-capitalist parties.

Feminism and Socialism

Another aspect of the SWP’s troubles common to the Sri Lankan Left is the reduction of women’s oppression to capitalism and class society. Although women were founders and leaders of the first Left party in Sri Lanka; and were influenced by the first wave of feminism in the early 20^th century; the Left in Sri Lanka has generally been antagonistic towards feminism, denouncing it as an ideology of middle-class women.

Women on the Left shaped by the second wave of feminism in the late 1960s and 1970s were not able or willing to stay within their anti-feminist organisations. Some became leaders of non-governmental organisations in the 1980s, but in the absence of an autonomous women’s liberation movement in Sri Lanka, and the retreat of the Left everywhere, were unable or disinterested to sustain and develop socialist feminist ideas and practices.

This failure meant that Left parties and trade unions were never challenged to admit and discard their backwardness on women’s oppression; whereas the Tamil national liberation struggle in the 1970s forced some Left and labour organisations to recognise that national oppression could not be dismissed as secondary to the struggle for socialism.

Back in Britain, militants of the Socialist Workers Party are leaving in disgust believing it to be irredeemably “tainted by a toxic combination of sexism, unaccountability, [and] anti-democratic manoeuvring”, (to borrow from China Miéville).

The Serbian affiliate of the International Socialist Tendency (IST) has withdrawn in protest; and leading Left intellectuals in other countries have signed an open letter breaking all links with the British SWP.

More resignations and possibly expulsions will follow, as the leadership dismisses appeals for a special party conference to review the case that sparked this chain of events; especially as its critics also demand a change in leadership and greater internal democracy.

The crisis in the SWP holds a mirror to the Left everywhere to draw appropriate lessons about the internalisation of patriarchy and authoritarian and male-dominated organisational cultures; or to be cast aside by those who realise that to change the world also includes to change ourselves. The personal is political.

 

A Sinhala-language version was (finally!) published on p. 6 of the May 2013 edition of Haraya