The Communist Party of Greece (KKE), and its affiliated orgs, are working to normalize Zionism within the workers movement. The KKE made this clear two years ago, when it put forth the statement that the “Israeli people are also a victim.” The KKE’s reasoning for this was that Jewish Israelis include people who work, meaning their interests have been hurt by the Netanyahu government’s neoliberal policies. To assert that this alone means these Israelis are of the proletariat is absurd; they directly benefit from Palestinian slave labor, making them not just labor aristocrats but members of a slaveocracy. There can be no Jewish proletariat in Palestine for as long as Palestine remains occupied by a settler state, and its Jewish population continues having an extractive role within the slave economy. This is the reality that blows apart every single argument for labor Zionism, the ideology which seeks to fuse a twisted version of workers politics with Zionism’s mission for permanent ethnic cleansing.
It’s pertinent to bring up the KKE’s post-October 7 statement today because right now, when the Palestinian struggle is trying to avert more genocidal aggressions following the Gaza ceasefire, the KKE’s labor Zionist camp has started upon a redoubled effort to normalize its ideas within the workers movement.
A warning sign for this new, insidious threat towards the Palestinian cause appeared last week, when the Communist Party of Israel’s leading member Ofer Cassif gave a speech at the Communist Party of Britain’s 58th Congress. One of Cassif’s core arguments was that “The Palestinians have no time to wait for one state,” and therefore “Those who support a one-state solution actually deny the Palestinian people their national self-determination.” We know that this narrative is propagated by the KKE both because the KKE has explicitly advocated for a return to the pre-1967 borders; and because one of the KKE’s allied publications In Defense of Communism has uncritically platformed Cassif’s statement.
To explain to the workers why they shouldn’t side with the forces which take these positions, we first need to clarify the difference between the labor Zionist vision for Palestinian statehood; and the plan for statehood that’s put forth by the Palestinian resistance. Hamas also supports the creation of a Palestinian state alongside so-called “Israel”; however, this of course doesn’t mean Hamas is not still anti-Zionist. Therefore when Hamas and the other members of Gaza’s resistance coalition push for a two-state solution, what they’re functionally doing is working to create the conditions for a full end to the Jewish state.
If we actually get a Palestinian state, in the long term this will mean the total collapse of Zionism, even if the Zionist entity can’t realistically be abolished in one step. A Palestinian state will allow Palestinians to recover from their demographic losses, taking away the Jewish majority that the Zionists have built up; and when the colonizers have lost their demographic advantage, their ethnic supremacist project will become untenable.
It’s due to this mortal threat which Palestinian statehood poses towards Zionism that when liberal or labor Zionists ostensibly advocate for a two-state solution, they never intend to actually assist in bringing about a Palestinian state. The only way that Palestine can ever practically get a state is if the resistance wins, and forces the occupier to give up enough stolen land for Palestinian statehood to again be viable. When “Israel” carved up the West Bank into an archipelago of isolated Palestinian enclaves, this rendered a Palestinian state unreachable, making it so that victory for the resistance is the only way another state could come into being. The “moderate” Zionists claim to want a second state, but because they oppose any realistic path towards undoing the West Bank’s carve-up, they will always act as impediments to that goal; which perfectly fits with the role they fill, because a two-state solution would in practice doom Zionism and these actors want to maintain Zionism.
The way in which the KKE obstructs the practical route towards Palestinian statehood is by asserting that Palestine somehow can get a state amid the present border map, and therefore supposedly the resistance won’t need to prevail in order for such a state to be viable. The KKE says:
…approaches such as that of MeRA25 (Y. Varoufakis) and its international alliance Diem 25, which opposes the two-state solution since 2021, arguing that it is now impossible for a Palestinian state to exist given that the Israeli settlements have created a fait accompli that must be accepted, kowtow to Israel’s aggression and accept the reality imposed by its military power and that of its allies. This approach, which calls on us to renounce the right of the Palestinian people to establish their own state on the borders that existed prior to 1967 with East Jerusalem as its capital, which is the most widely accepted international demand (145 states have recognized it), and to turn the Palestinian question from a “national question into a human rights question” is in fact an acceptance of the Israeli occupation; an acceptance that the Palestinian people will not have a homeland, as long as some “human rights” are granted to the Palestinians under occupation.
The labor Zionists are putting forth a false promise, asserting that Palestine will be capable of creating a state without first attaining the military victory which would reconnect the West Bank archipelago. It’s how we know the KKE does not support the Palestinian resistance in a principled way, despite whatever it says. It’s also what exposes Cassif’s position as being the stance which truly opposes Palestinian self-determination. Unless somebody’s stated support for Palestinian statehood is accompanied by real solidarity with Palestine’s liberation struggle, the role they’re playing is to further normalization, and to assist in the efforts by “soft” Zionists at capturing the pro-Palestine movement.
Cassif showed this when he framed his argument around the idea that there’s been a “takeover of fascism in Israel,” which is another labor Zionist narrative that we need to steer the workers away from. However passionately Cassif denounced the crimes that have been committed by Netanyahu’s government and by the West Bank settlers, he started from the premise that these crimes are aberrations within Zionism, brought about by extremist forces that are distinct from what was already there.
Any knowledge about the history of the labor Zionist movement lets us see how dishonest this narrative is. The labor Zionists were the ones who carried out the first stage of Palestine’s ethnic cleansing; the fact that the Nakba was the design of the “Marxist” Zionists tells us where labor Zionism truly stands. When Cassif accurately describes the settler murderers as “Nazis,” coming from him this rings hollow, because the politics Cassif represents is essentially just as Nazistic as that of the “extreme” Zionists. Labor Zionism’s narrative about being the righteous kind of Zionism falls apart upon any scrutiny; but this doesn’t mean the labor Zionists aren’t an urgent threat, because their absurd and contradictory political brand serves a particular role in the genocidal project.
Their role is to make the pro-Palestine movement defanged, and connected with pro-normalization forces like the KKE, the CPG, or the Communist Party in occupied Palestine. “Marxist” politics will never again become dominant within the Zionist state, which is why today’s labor Zionists can make themselves appear separable from the crimes of their movement’s forebears. Modern labor Zionism is a marginal current that’s designed to make Palestine a marginal issue by proxy, drawing Palestine supporters and the class-conscious workers into its project of controlled opposition.
If we can keep this current’s influence out of our movement, while continuing to build a workers movement which acts in solidarity with the resistance, we will be able to add upon the large strategic gains which Palestine has already won in these last several years.
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