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From Labor Action, Vol. 8 No. 47, 20 November 1944, p. 3.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
The assassination of Lord Moyne brought to a climax the series of terroristic acts by Jews in Palestine. In a larger sense it was a climax of twenty-six years of British rule of the much-too-promised land. The assassination has once again put the spotlight on the explosive nature of the “Palestine problem.”
It is impossible to shed a tear for Lord Moyne. He was Under Secretary of Colonial Affairs during the violent suppression of the Indian masses and during the drowning and deportation of Jewish refugees. As a member of that cynical and callous tribe of slave-drivers, who make up the British Colonial Office, he was involved in acts of terrorism that imperialism always carries out on a large scale.
The terroristic activities of the “Stern Group” are the inevitable result of twenty years of British provocation, sabotage and strangulation of the Jewish community in Palestine. The individual terror is also a by-product of the complete frustration of Zionist politics. The more disappointments they suffer, the more conciliatory the Jewish political leaders become.
While the British hound the Jews of Palestine, the Jewish Agency recruits thirty thousand Jews, to shed their blood for the British Empire. The embittered Jewish terrorists are either Yemenites, members of the most depressed and backward sections of the Jewish community, or, in some cases, revengeful relatives of those Jews who were victimized by the British authorities.
All the Jewish organizations and newspapers have denounced the terror. But for the British Colonial Office this wasn’t enough. They wanted the Jews of Palestine to act as stool-pigeons and spies, to be police-hounds for the British Colonial Police. Since such a role was repugnant to the Jewish community, they had to be bullied and threatened.
The whole Jewish community was held “responsible” in the terror. An entire village was punished for “lack of cooperation.” The British police, playing the role of kidnappers, swooped down on 251 Jews and deported; them from Palestine.
There was no trial, no proof and no telling in what foul dungeon the 251 Jews were rotting. A week later, the Jewish Agency capitulated and proclaimed that the Jews are to turn over every suspected terrorist to the police. Taking advantage of the Jewish political weakness the British imperialists have succeeded in tightening their murderous grip on Palestine.
What will come next? Forced evacuations of Jewish villages, more deportations or some abominable imperialist crimes which are as yet difficult to guess? The British Colonial Office is already using the assassination to cloud over the truth of what is going on in Palestine. The Jews are being presented as vicious criminals, the British as innocent bystanders. And behind this thick fog they will be preparing a more staggering blow at Jewish aspirations in Palestine.
Churchill, who in 1938 came out for a Jewish Homeland, kept his mouth tightly shut all during the last four years of anti-Jewish intrigue and violence. Now he comes out bewailing the death of Lord Moyne, “who was a friend of the Jewish people” and “was busy finding a solution to the Zionist problem.” This “solution” is already known.
Palestine is to be partitioned among the Jews, Arabs and British. Imagine the state of New Jersey being cut up into three parts, each one a national state! The Arab peasant masses, ground into the dust by their feudal exploiters, will be forcibly separated from any contamination by the class-conscious, socialistically-minded Jewish working class. The safety of Arab feudalism will be guaranteed by the British Colonial Office. And the Jews slaughtered by the millions in Europe, will be given a walled-in ghetto called a Jewish state – with just about enough room to choke in.
At the last elections in Palestine, one-third of the Jewish voters voted against an exclusively Jewish state, thus expressing indirectly their desire for Jewish-Arab and a bi-national state in Palestine. This is an effective move in the right direction. Neither capitulation to imperialism nor assassination of British officials can break the present political impasse. Only a mass revolutionary struggle led by the workers and peasants of both peoples will finally deport British imperialism out of Palestine.
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Last updated: 18 February 2016