Accrington right routed

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110• datour lai 1o suspend subsequent witch-hunt ing a full de A SHOW of solidarity by the left wing of Accrington Constituones Labour Parly prevented an attempt by the right to shelve three resolulions opposing witch-huntire shurabai. any debate! hit around it ville my deman crate meeting. would defeated.

Social Ostensibly, this demand was made do that a democratic discussion could take place to determine the party's atfitude to the witchWhor the beft including lind 1,11 urt. ers. poin tions of mecting.

e'sposed led out the funche official delegato the right's antimanocuvring was and the mecting • . 1.• :: ..:70 entuaily tions demanding witch- hunts in the Labour Party.

A composite of the resolutions is as follows:

"Acerington (L' considers that there should be no witch-hunt against the Militant and other groups proposed the Milani tendency, but they v insist that criticism Militant should be by ment and democratic cussion.

Reject

Fi ticism of the comes ..red by er ¿pulsion :.cuires toti alitarian • ich any demo -I3l!! should Actringt supporte suld of rgu-disMARTIN THOMAS addresses an letter to TONY BENN about the

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MIDDLE FAST Ten to fifteen thousand dead, 25,000 injured.....

Jre in occupied Lebanon Report from Socialist Organiser's correspondent in Haifa Wh NO DOUBT you share our anger at the horrors of the Israeli invasion of the Lebanon. Last week you gave your signature to a statement in the press - 'Let the Lebanese and Palestinians live' You called for 'the immediate and unconditional withdrawal of Israeli military forces" and "the right of self-determination and an independent state in Palestine" for the Palestinian people.

Yet at the same time so far as we are aware -you remain a supporter of the Labour Friends of Israel. The attitude of the Labour Friends of Israel to the invasion is well expressed in a letter by the group's Director and Assistant Director Labour Weekly (July 9):

"We totally reject the charge of 'brutal insensitivity' to the plight of present-day Lebanon. For is it not solely as a result of Israel's actions that the Lebanese have for the first time in seven years the chance to throw off PLO and Syrian domination and restore sovereignty to their dismembered territory...

Stress

They stress "the uniquely democratic nature of Israeli society which exists within a feudal and totalitarian Middle East region". Israel's wars are thus in their view at worst self-defence for the oppressed Jews, at best positively beneficial to surrounding peoples like the Lebanese.

To this view have been sacrificed ten to fifteen thousand dead in the Lebanon invasion, more than 25,000 injured, and some 250,000 to 300,000 homeless.

It is, you might reply, ortur THE worst fears about ine fate of the Palestinians in Israeli-occupied Lebanon have now been authoritatively confirmed, even by Israeli sources.

Lieutenant-Colonel Dov Yirmiya, who served in the military administration of southern Lebanon, has disclosed that in a meeting between the military govenment's officers and the Israeli minister responsible for the "reconstruction" of the area, they were explicitly ordered to "push the Palestinians eastward, and not let them come back.' The Palestinian population of the region was some 200000 women, children old people, all the younger men had either fled or were killed or arrested.

After the occupation the camps are being systematically razed to the ground, and the people are prevented from putting up tents (even though there are plenty of tents, some contributed by an Arab millionaire).

do possible to be a friend of Israel without supporting its every action. Can we not support both Israel and the Palestinians; oppose aggression on both sides, and seek reconciliation?

In truth no such evenhandedness is possible, because the situation is not even-handed.

The idea used to be common on the left that Israel was a socialist state.

Few claim that any longer.

The kibbutzim are marginal to the economy. The state is the closest ally of US imperialism in the region, and an ally of reactionary forces around the world: Central American dictatorships;

Argentina, South Africa.

Promote

The Histadrut, the Israeli 'trade union' organisation, was set up as an organisation to promote Jewish labour as against Arab labour. It is more an arm of the state - and the second largest employer in the country - than a trade union: Employers join it alongside workers.

The Israeli Labour Party also is not an independent base is the Europeanorigin section of the population, the Histadrut, and the kibbutzim.

Israel is a capitalist state. The Palestine Liberation Organisation also is not a socialist and 100% progressive force. But the difference is that one is the oppressor and the other represents the oppressed.

Israel was established as a Jewish state by driving out the Palestinians. When the state was established, under the sponsorship of the big powers, in 1948, many Palestinian Arabs were massacred, and some 600,000 were made refugees.

Some 10,000 Palestinians who found refuge in halfbuilt houses and shops in Sidon, getting water and some. help from the local population, were expelled in a special "operation"

From the concentration camps, further news of torture arrives. One Israeli officer reported "three stage" torture for prisoners: electricity, nails and cold water with little cells for each treatment, organised on the "line" system.

Nominated heads of groups of prisoners are forced to beat their mates with a heavy stick. One who the guards said "didn't beat hard enough" was taken by Since then Israel has been pitted in permanent hostility to the surrounding Arab states. In successive wars it has expanded its borders, creating more refugees.

The establishment and expansion of Israel has been carried through as if the Palestinians had no rights - almost as if they did not exist. And not by accident. The project of establishing an exclusive Jewish state on land already occupied by another people could be carried through no other way. The atrocities in the Lebanon are one more episode in this history.

Today some 600,000 Palestinian Arabs live in Israel proper - as secondclass citizens. About 1.2 million live under Israeli military occupation in the West Bank and Gaza, areas overrun by Israel in the 1967 war.

About 500,000 live in Lebanon (or used to), about one million in Jordan, and another 700,000 or so scattered through _other Arab countries. Nearly two million of them are registered with the UN as refugees, and about 700, 000 live in refugee camps.

Bloody

As well as the attacks on them from Israel, the Palestinians have also faced attacks from the Arab states. In 1970 King Hussein launched a bloody attack on the Palestinians in Jordan. The Palestinians in Jordan have faced attack both from the Lebanese Right and from Syria.

Why are the Palestinians in Lebaron? According to the Labour Friends of Israel, 'the PLO have deliberately subjugated Lebanon for the purpose of destroying Israel"

them and beaten till his bones were broken.

No. wonder many Palestinians prefer fighting to the death in Beirut to the fate threatening hundreds of thousands of them if the Israelis get in.

Mass arrests, torture and concentration camps also face the Lebanese suspected by the Israeli military government of belonging to left parties. The occupation brand them all as "terrorists" and disclose no numbers, but it has already been said that "the second largest component" in the concentration camps are Shia -mostly the poor villagers of the south.

of the Lebanon The Palestinians are in Lebanon because they were driven out of their own homeland by Israel. Lebanon is important to the Palestinians because it has been the one country where the PLO armed forces could find a base.

Of course the PLO is armed for war against Israel - not nearly so heavily armed as the Israeli stated is for war against them. Yes, the PLO sometimes carries out desperate and indefensible actions -they are in a desperate situation.

..The truth is that Israel is deliberately subjugating Lebanon for the purpose of destroying the PIO.

Maxime Rodinson has summed it up like this:

A video movie telling the story of a Druze family is now circulating the Druze villages inside Israel. One day the Falangists were looking for the husband and didn't find him. At night they came back and killed his wife and little daughter, wounding another child.

The Druze were generally better protected, as there are Palestinian Druze .in the slael army, : ano ine militar government wants to keep its divide and rule policy. Now there are protest meetings in the Druze communities in Palestine, and a senior Druze officer who had served as Governor in Lebanon was removed. •The conflict therefore appears essentially as the struggle of an indigenous population against the occupation of part of its national territory by foreigners...

'When a people is subjected to foreign conquest, the moral wound it receives is in no way alleviated by the spiritual tendencies observable within the conquering group, nor by the motives for the conquest or the aspirations they may express...

Sufferings

Again, the same applies to the sufferings of the Jews. Those sufferings might, perhaps, justify the aspirations felt by some Jews to form an independent state. The Arabs cannot be made to see this as sufficient reason why such a state should be formed at their expense...

'In just the same way, the qualities and faults which may be attributed to the Arabs, and the various judgments which might be expressed on their political or social structures, have no bearing on the analysis of the nature of the conflict. It is self-evident that no-one has the right to make the lordly judgment that a people or group of peoples has such faults that it deserves to have slices of its territory forcibly taken away...

Concerned

Rodinson is not antiJews, but also concerned for the fact that no nation that oppresses another can itself be free.

Isn't the best course some compromise achieved through the influence of the big powers? That is what the statement 'Let the Lebanese and Palestinians Live' suggests. It is co-signed by Tory and Liberal MPs, it refers to the United Nations, and the Palestinian 'self-determination' and 'independent state' evidently refer to a 'mini-state' The record of the big powers in the region is a conclusive warning against this perspective.

The region was formerly ruled by the Ottoman (Turkish) empire. After World War 1 the imperialist powers of Britain and France grabbed it and carved it up. It was British imperial power in Palestine which sponsored the beginnings of Zionist colonisation.

When Britain and France released their colonial grip in the 1940s, they left a patchwork frontiers dividing the Arab peoples. In Lebanon the French left sectarian arrangements which helped generate the communal conflict.

The big capitalist powers helped set up Israel, then used it as an ally and weapon against all radical movements in the region -as with the British-FrenchIsraeli assault on Egypt in 1956.

Today the US remonstrates with Begin about his methods, but fully shares his aim of driving the PLO out of Lebanon.

Oppression cannot be smoothed out of existence by compromises among the oppressors. It can only be fought by the oppressed. In the Middle East, that includes the oppressed Israeli Jewish workers. Organiser, 19 August Page 3 1982 Their interests are certainly not identical with those of the Israeli oppressor state - which, contrary to Zionist promises, is not a haven but a death-trap for the Jews.

The aim of a democratic secular state proclaimed by the Palestinians offers a place for the Israeli Jews as equals. It is compatible with land we would fight for) maximum cultural and communal rights for them.

It excludes a racist Jewish state based on the dispossession (with the aid of the big powers) of the previous population - but it is, we believe, the only way forward for the Israeli Jews, too.

True, the vast majority of the Israeli Jews do not believe that. But the Palestinians are not willing (and why should they be?) to delay a fight for their rights until the Israeli Jews change their minds, or until socialists develop a united Arab/Jewish working class struggle.

Some of them would settle for a 'mini-state' as a lesser evil; but the more militant insist that such a solution is unjust and unworkable.

A just solation will only be achieved by a struggle. And the Palestinians together with the anti-Zionist opposition inside Israel - are the force struggling against oppression today.

Appeal

The statement 'Let the Lebanese and Palestinians Live' was addressed to the governments of Europe and the UN Security Council. Wouldn't the struggle against oppression be better served by an appeal to the British and international labour movement to black the Israeli war machine?

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Last week Henry Phillips described the disarray of Spain's bourgeois parties and the rise of the PSOE (Socialist Party).

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