NM's blog

The 'revolution' is still hardly assessed in official historiography.

On this day, 15 May 1948, the British mandate in Palestine ended on the date which is now commemorated as Nakba Day - meaning “catastrophe”. Israel declared independence a few hours beforehand, and British forces withdrew that day. The Nakba refers to the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians to make way for the establishment of the state of Israel as a Jewish ethnostate. The United Nations had approved a plan to partition Palestine into separate Jewish and Arab states. According to that plan, the 30% of the population which was Jewish would be given 70% of the land. But around 42% of the population of this land would still be Palestinian Arabs. To ensure a bigger demographic majority, in December 1947 Zionist militias began a programme of ethnic cleansing, to expel the Palestinian Arab population. One early operation was an attack by the Irgun against the village of al-Tira, which killed 12 Palestinians and injured six others. Albert Einstein and other Jewish intellectuals described the Ir...

“In an anthropological spirit…I propose the following definition of the nation: it is an imagined political community – and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign.It is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion. “The nation is imagined as limited because even the largest of them, encompassing perhaps a billion living human beings, has finite, if elastic, boundaries, beyond which lie other nations. No nation imagines itself coterminous with mankind. The most messianic nationalists do not dream of a day when all the members of the human race will join their nation in the way that it was possible, in certain epochs, for, say, Christians to dream of a wholly Christian planet. “It is imagined as sovereign because the concept was born in an age in which Enlightenment and Revolution were destroying the legitimacy of the divinely...

“Donning yourself with an Israeli flag while demonstrating for freedom in Iran is a travesty: this a flag that today represents a genocidal state led by war criminals. Equally, waving the American flag shows identification with an administration that executes violent policies informed by economic greed, Islamophobia, racism and overt imperialism. “I can understand pragmatic alliances. It is not always possible to be purist when one builds an alliance against injustice, but there must be red lines that cannot be crossed even in the face of calamity . Once the bombing subsides “ Palestine and the Palestinians will still be the most important issue facing Israel and its allies in the region and in the world. Americans will be left with a president that destroys their economy, their international standing and social cohesion and it is very likely that Iran will still be ruled by the same regime, be it weakened or more challenged. The political map of the region will not change much, neithe...

“Before delving into the subject, one thing must be clear: when it comes to the Global South, any country facing imperialist aggression must be defended. Moreover, in the event of war or occupation, this defence must not be watered down. However, this does not mean turning a blind eye to the nature of the regimes under threat. “Rather than viewing those horrific massacres from the perspective of Iran’s poor, workers, women, minorities and leftists, the Western left approached the situation simply from the point of view of “will this benefit the US?”. This ultimately led into inaction. Taking advantage of this, liberals and conservatives were able to lend credibility to their empty rhetoric, saying things such as: “See, leftists are not bothered by the massacre of people.”

The irrational and planless character of society must be replaced by a planned economy that represents the planned and concerted effort of society as such. Society must master the social problem as rationally as it has mastered nature. One condition for this is the elimination of the secret rule of those who, though few in number, wield great economic power without any responsibility to those whose fate depends on their decisions. We may call this new order by the name of democratic socialism but the name does not matter; all that matters is that we establish a rational economic system serving the purposes of the people. Today the vast majority of the people not only have no control over the whole of the economic machine, but they have little chance to develop genuine initiative and spontaneity at the particular job they are doing. We must replace manipulation of men by active and intelligent co-operation, and expand the principle of government of the people, by the people, for the peo...