1-26-06, 9:50 am

Politics makes strange bedfellows. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the rightwing adventurer who got himself elected President of Iran, has proclaimed his desire to see Israel destroyed and Ariel Sharon die. Pat Robertson, who will support Israel to the last unconverted Jew, has issued a statement to the effect that Sharon’s stroke was the Lord’s revenge on him for turning over God-given land to Palestinians. Mahmoud and Pat aren’t as far apart as one might think, even though they are selling different brands of clerical reaction. Pat believes in supporting Israel to the hilt since that will facilitate the final judgment, the conversion of those Jews who will convert, and the end of all others who will not ascend to heaven with the Christians. Ahmadinejad is on record as saying that Israel was created for the purpose of antagonizing 'the Muslims' and has made other cynical and vulgar anti-Jewish racist statements to appeal to the sort of constituents that GW Bush appeals to when he states that Al Qaeda and Iraq were working together to foment global terrorism.

Ahmadinejad’s statements have pleased global media by enabling them to simply forget all the real injustices that the Iranian people have suffered at the hands of British and U.S. imperialism and see the present government as in league with Hitlerian Holocaust deniers. They have also provoked a rash of stories that Israel will attack Iran’s alleged nuclear facilities or Iran itself. Any attack would of course be completely indefensible and would have disastrous consequences for the region and the world.

The statements themselves, particularly those expressing 'doubt' about the genocide directed against the Jewish people of Europe during World War II echo the contentions of Nazis and neo-Nazis who have campaigned for decades to deny the reality of the Holocaust in order to make open anti-Jewish racism or anti-Semitism acceptable again.

Progressive people generally have not responded to Ahmadinejad’s demagoguery because they fear that such responses may aid the Bush administration in fomenting an attack on Iran or the Israelis in once more acting as a military middleman for U.S. imperialism by attacking Iran.

That silence though is not positive, since it assumes that most people, particularly those that progressives are speaking to, can’t separate the Iranian people or the American people or the Israeli people from their rulers.

The following are left responses to the president of Iran and the reactionary clerical forces that have led the Iranian revolution away from serving the masses that ousted the Shah in 1978. They are responses that reject reactionary Jewish nationalism, but refuse to see such nationalism as special, different, greater or worse than any other reactionary nationalism.

These responses draw a clear line, as Marxists always must, between those who condemn the policies of successive Israeli governments against both the Palestinian people and in service to the U.S./NATO imperialist bloc, and those who both denounce 'Zionism' and Israel in what are Reaganesque 'evil empire' terms, either supporting or silently assenting to vicious libels and slanders against Jewish people in the name of fighting 'Zionism.' Although most Communists and socialists have always rejected and condemned the latter views, they are certainly on the rise today.

The first view condemns Israel’s repressive policies toward the Palestinians as representing legitimate and realistic politics. The second view blurs all distinctions between Israel’s government and people and the Jewish people of the world through either ill-defined or crudely simplistic assertions about Zionism is an updated version of what 19th century Marxists called 'the socialism of fools,' i.e., so-called 'Christian' and other anti-Marxist 'socialists' who sought to deflect mass hostility to the evils of capitalism by blaming those and other evils, including revolutions, on Jewish capitalists and 'Jewish' Marxist socialists and the Jewish people generally.

In this case, one might call the hysterical attacks on 'Zionism' as an all-powerful force controlling world politics and the Israeli people and nation as 'the Zionist entity' as an 'anti-imperialism of fools' which objectively strengthens imperialism.

First a little history about Iran, a nation that was not a party to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and a nation that has suffered and continues to suffer from imperialism. The 'old Shah' (father of the one ousted in 1978) had a court filled with pro-Nazi elements in the 1930s. The British and the Soviets acted jointly in 1941 to remove him, in order to prevent his regime from aiding the Nazis directly in their war against the UK and the USSR. The new regime established was a constitutional monarchy with the Shah’s son on the throne and workers (thanks to Soviet influence) able to organize the Tudeh (Communist) party, to defend their interests, along with the democratic rights of the people.

Iran was a nation whose overwhelming majority of people was poor and illiterate. Iran’s most valuable resource, oil, was controlled by the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, which paid the government in royalties pennies on the dollar (or pence on the pound) of the oil’s worth. To add insult to injury, Iranians were barred from all of the good (managerial and professional) jobs in the company and restricted to poorly paying manual labor.

The struggles led by the Tudeh party helped to create the context in which the anti-Communist liberal (in the American sense of that word) Muhammad Mossadegh sought to fight mass poverty by nationalizing the oil. After Britain responded with an embargo and the U.S. under both the outgoing Truman administration and the incoming Eisenhower administration told Mossadegh to capitulate to the British, he turned to the Soviet Union to do business. Although Mossadegh mirrored the anti-Communism of many U.S. politicians of the time, having taken repressive actions against the Tudeh, he did not, as a liberal leader in a desperately poor country, have the luxury of saying that 'what is good for the Anglo-Iranian oil company is good for Iran,' as Eisenhower’s Secretary of Defense, Charles E. Wilson, had said, 'what’s good for General Motors is good for the U.S.'

The Eisenhower administration, of course, proceeded in 1953 to designate him as a Soviet stooge, Communist sympathizer, and 'menace' to the free world. Mossadegh was ousted in a CIA organized and funded coup. The young Shah was 'restored' (this time as a brutal tyrant) and the oil was privatized and split up, with U.S. oil companies receiving 40 percent. The CIA coup organizer, Kermit Roosevelt, even 'retired' to become Vice President of a U.S. oil company.

Following this gangland style coup, the Shah remained in power for 25 years, terrorizing not only Tudeh activists but also all progressive and secular liberal forces in the country. He did this with the wholehearted support of U.S. administrations, falling over his feet to serve all U.S. cold war strategic interests and buying large quantities of weapons from U.S. firms. The Shah’s Iran was acting as a military middleman for the U.S. more than a decade before Israel assumed that role and the Palestinian-Israeli conflict had nothing to do with the suffering and oppression of the Iranian people.

While the Shah’s regime acted as a comprador for U.S. and to a lesser extent European capital, a section of the Islamic clergy, whom the regime had supported generally as a conservative force, emerged in opposition to the Shah. At this point, the exiled cleric Ayatollah Khomeini, who combined theocratic conservatism with what might be called populist appeals, becoming a major symbolic figure.

When the Shah was ousted in a popular revolution, the clerical forces rode the revolutionary wave and interpreted the masses anti-imperialist sentiments in clerical terms (America as the 'great Satan'). The U.S. embassy hostage crisis of 1979-1980 helped both these clerical forces and the Republican right in the U.S., as Ronald Reagan rode the crisis to help him gain the presidency.

Although there were some significant reforms in the early years, the clerically established 'Islamic Republic' found itself attacked by Saddam Hussein (with the active and not so covert support of the Reagan administration) and forced into a bloody war that lasted until 1988.

The Islamic Republic was of course anti-Communist, and the Tudeh party and other left activists faced persecution as the regime moved to the right and used traditional religious and social conservatism to maintain its power. Iranian politics became a sad game of clerical 'conservatives' supporting a protectionist capitalist policy and clerically based 'liberals' supporting some minor social liberalization along with 'free market economics.'

The social and economic conditions of the Iranian masses continued to deteriorate, creating the conditions where Ahmadinejad, a political adventurer with strong ties to the reactionary military and police sectors of the clerical regime, catapulted himself into the presidency from his post as mayor of Teheran.

While his regime today does nothing to alleviate the suffering of the masses, which was a central factor in his election, Ahmadinejad panders to religious fanatics in his country and the region. Such people exist in all countries and today are core constituencies for the Republican Party and the Bush administration. Ahmadinejad does so by portraying Israel and the Jewish people of the world the way right wing U.S. politicians long portrayed the Soviet Union and Communists throughout the world, a global 'force of evil.'

Although logic, reason, and evidence have as little to do with Ahmadinejad’s statements as those of Rumsfeld or Cheney, I will use what I consider historical analysis and evidence to answer them.

First, the statement that the regime does not accept the Holocaust. This means that the regime does not 'accept' the following facts as historical: the rounding up of millions of Jewish civilians in all occupied territories by Nazi military and police forces for extermination once the Nazi elite made the decision to carry out that policy; the initial use of murder detachments (einsatzgruppen) to roam occupied territories to hunt down, round up, and murder Jewish people; the transformation of specific concentration camps from nightmarish prison camps into literal slaughterhouses where millions of people were 'processed ' through gas chambers, and the bodies then scavenged for gold teeth before the remains were incinerated.

The indisputable evidence for this comes from the Nazi records themselves and the testimony of both Nazi officials, low level murders, and survivors, both Jewish and non-Jewish. The Nazis murdered many millions of others: Communists and other anti-fascist political activists, Roma people, Serbian Christians and other Slavic peoples deemed inferior.

To Nazis and neo-Nazis, this history was invented as part of a Jewish plot to gain sympathy from non-Jews for nefarious purposes. To Nazis and neo Nazis, the unstated argument is that 'if the Holocaust didn’t happen,' then anti-Jewish racism or anti-Semitism, including the many centuries of separation, ghettoization, and outright persecution that preceded the fascist genocide of World War II was justified.

Of course the Holocaust did happen, and it is massively and irrefutably documented, as is the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company’s exploitation, the CIA coup of 1953, and the crimes of the Shah’s regime for those who want to consult evidence.

Bush certainly and Blair might deny the reality of Iran’s history and call for the restoration of transnational oil companies privileges in Iran with the same logic that Ahmadinejad uses to deny the existence of the Holocaust in order to condemn Israel specifically and Jewish people generally. CIA men might claim that Mossadegh brought it all on himself, and the Tudeh party activists and all others who opposed the Shah got what they deserved in the defense of the 'free world.'

Ahmadinejad’s demagoguery provides justification for Bush and Blair to cloak imperialist wars in slogans about democracy and rightists in Israel to reject any peace process on the ground that Israel is threatened by Ahmadinejad and other regional leaders seeking a new war of extermination against Jewish people.

Second, there is Ahmadinejad’s statement that the 'West' created Israel to attack the Muslims of the world. Most of the Muslims of the world are not members of Arabic nations. Although Arabic nations have fought a number of wars with Israel, they have done little in a positive sense to assist the Palestinian people, who have been the biggest losers in these conflicts. While left and socialist forces have both existed and at various times had some influence in a number of these nations, particularly when they received aid from the Soviet Union, it is wrong to see any of them, the secular states, as advancing workers rights or committed to anything beyond a self-aggrandizing bureaucratic state capitalism. They have consistently used hostility to Israel as political theater for their own oppressed peoples, whether they are secular or clerical regimes.

The Palestinian resistance to Israeli policies and occupation of territories also has been primarily, until recently, a secular resistance including both Christians and Muslims. The major Arabic regimes that fought wars against Israel, Egypt, Syria, and Iraq, were also secular regimes.

Jewish minorities in Muslim countries and Jews and Muslims, one should understand, generally got along better with each other than either did with Christian regimes, or Jewish minorities did in Christian countries, since Muslim and Christian states engaged in many wars with each other. There was and is nothing in Islam as a religion, however right-wing clerical elements may interpret some Muslim teachings, for anti-Jewish purposes that is in any way comparable to the use of Jesus crucifixion to encourage anti-Jewish incitement among Christians over the centuries.

An American doctor who visited Egypt once told me this story which highlights the social reality of the region hidden by anti-Zionist rhetoric. He saw a ragged man with filth on his body and clothes literally cleaning his penis in the sand before he went into a Mosque to pray. Whether or not Israel won its wars and expanded its territory or ceased to exist after 1948 had nothing to do with that man’s misery and poverty or the misery and poverty of most of the Arabic nations and Muslim people of the world, except of course the Palestinians.

The Palestinians were made stateless people and driven into refugee camps and occupied territories by successive Israeli governments who either saw them as a perpetual threat to Israel’s security, or in the outlook of a religious right that would understand Ahmadinejad, interlopers on sacred land given them by God.

Ahmadinejad has also given global media a provocative sound bite with the comments that 'the Jews' of Europe might have been resettled in Germany after the war – not a particularly good idea if he wishes to curry favor with contemporary Nazis, as his ideological forebears in the old Shah’s Court in the 1930s sought to curry favor with the Hitler regime. He has also said that 'the Jews' might be resettled in Alaska.

The first point, 'resettling' European Jews on German territory, might sound reasonable if one blames the Germans as people for the Holocaust rather than fascism and the German and European ruling classes who supported fascism. But that is like blaming Iraqis for Saddam’s war against Iran or Turks and Iranians and Iraqis for the oppression of the Kurds.

Also, it makes no real sense, since the territorial changes after the war involving Czechoslovakia, Poland, and the Soviet Union, for example, involved existing nations. The Jewish settlements in Ottoman Turkish and British colonial Palestine had been for the purpose of establishing a Jewish nation. The institutions for such a nation – the Hebrew language, a press, political groups committed to such a nation, agricultural settlements and labor organizations – existed as the war ended.

The British Empire cynically manipulated the Jewish settlements and played Jewish settlers against the Arabic population as part of a strategy to both develop and control the region for the British Empire. When World War II began, Britain issued a White Paper barring further Jewish immigration to their Palestine colony while German fascists prepared to use their advancing armies to persecute and eventually exterminate all Jewish people who fell under their control.

Israel’s creation, for good and for ill, was a product of the defeat of fascism during the war, the Holocaust carried out against the Jewish people which greatly strengthened the support for resettlement of survivors in Palestine among both Jews and non-Jews throughout the world, and the fact that the British empire could no longer maintain its colonies in Palestine or most of the rest of the world.

Although I do not mention this to justify the policies of Israeli governments in expelling and occupying Palestinian people, a significant portion of the 1948 Palestinian population had come from the region in response to the economic development that the Jewish settlements had carried forward under the British colonial regime. To say that an Israeli nation does not exist and a Palestinian nation does would be like saying that an American nation does not exist in the Southwest and a Mexican nation does, regardless of how the land was taken by American settlers.

At roughly the same time that Israel came into existence in 1947-1948, the rightist 'All Indian Muslim League' of India established in connivance with British imperialists and the support of the United Nations, a 'homeland' for Indian Muslims called Pakistan ('Pure Land'). Pakistan was a theocratic-based state whose boundaries have shifted through wars and which has been supported as the Shah’s Iran was by the U.S. because it has been totally committed to U.S. cold war and post cold war strategies. Whereas the surviving Jewish population of Europe sought to recover from the horrors of Hitler fascism, the Muslim minority of India after the war had the choice of living in a secular independent India represented by the humanism and pacifism of Mohandas K. Gandhi and the secularism and socialism of Nehru, and the inclusionary policies of the Communist Party of India (then unified) or making their future in Pakistan, controlled by the Muslim League and various military dictators since its inception.

One could argue that the 'West,' British and later U.S. imperialism, created a Muslim separatist state in Pakistan, where no movement of any kind had really existed for such a state until the 1930s and even the Muslim League had not endorsed the idea until 1940, in a much more direct way than the 'West' created Israel. Pakistan became an ally of the U.S. years before Israel did.

One could then follow the logic of Ahmadinejad and argue that the 'West' created Pakistan to attack the Hindu majority of India (whose numbers make them the third largest religious group on earth, after Christians and Muslims). Perhaps those Muslims who wished to leave India (India today has a Muslim minority larger than the whole population of Pakistan) should have been resettled in Iran and other Muslim countries? Perhaps the British Empire, instead of acting to create Pakistan, should have resettled those Indian Muslims in the Canadian Yukon, the equivalent of resettling European Jews in Alaska?

Perhaps Ahmadinejad knows some ancient history. The ancient Persian Empires were the best friends that the ancient Hebrews, caught between powerful Egyptian and Babylonian empires, had for many centuries. The Persians freed the Hebrews from the 'Babylonian captivity' and many believe that 'modern' meaning post 400 BC Jewish Monotheism was significantly influenced by Persian sources. Besides the 'West,' Ahmadinejad may fear a Zoroastrian threat lurking behind Israel.

Finally, Ahdamdinejad has said that he wishes Sharon dies. Sharon, if he recovers, I am sure would say the same thing about Ahmadinejad. As a right-wing general of the kind that U.S. and other imperialists supported in the 'third world,' Sharon has long seen Palestinians pretty much the way General Andrew Jackson saw Native Americans, that is, people to be forced out of land cleared for the settlers. In both cases a doctrine of Manifest Destiny was involved.

Concepts of 'Manifest Destiny' are also present in both religious and secular imperialist ideologies, from Hitler’s proclamation of a Third Reich' (Empire) to succeed two mythologized German Empires of the past, to Mussolini’s use of Roman Empire symbolism (the fasces, the salute, etc,) to the Israeli right-wing’s proclamation of a divine right to occupy all of the territories of the Kingdom of David and Solomon. They are present in contemporary rightwing Muslim dreams of restoring the clerically based empires of the past (Caliphates) and for matter in the transformation of the material world to conform to the principles of free trade and free markets advanced by the IMF, the World Bank, and the multi-national corporations.

In Israel and in Palestine today there are possibilities for progress and eventual peace in a very difficult time. Israel, the major military power of the region, has seen moderate center left social democrats (not to be confused with Marxists or Communists) gain leadership of the Labor bloc.

Before his stroke, Sharon, to save his leadership broke with the right-wing Likkud bloc, in which he had been a far rightist before he became Prime Minister, to join with Shimon Peres, former right social democratic leader of the labor bloc, to form a new centrist group. In Palestine, the governing Fatah group, made up of the old PLO, finds itself being challenged by the rightist clerically based Hamas, which has combined terrorist policies (indiscriminate attacks against Israeli civilians) with social conservatism and grass roots social welfare campaigns among the Palestinian poor. In this context, new alignments are possible, including de facto informal alliances between Palestinian and Israeli progressives against the far right in both groups.

All of this is contingent around preventing a new war involving Iran and turning over the reconstruction and healing of Iraq to international authorities, including international peace keepers under UN leadership. Iran’s government is a threat first and foremost to its own people, whose dire needs it ignores, not to the Israelis, who the world knows already possess nuclear weapons and the most powerful military force in the region.

Ahmadinejad’s ugly anti-Jewish racist comments are not representative of the Iranian people, their history, their culture, or their religion. They dovetail in their own way with the 'western movie' foreign policy of the Bush administration, in which the military invades countries to search and destroy terrorists and their supporters the way posses hunted down outlaws and those who gave them refuge.

They may play well with certain core constituencies in both Iran and the U.S. but they do nothing except energize a political theater of hatred and fear, avoiding the only real anti-imperialist policy that is possible for Iranians, Iraqis, and for that matter Israelis and Americans – a policy that would foster regional development of the oil resources of Iran and Iraq for the benefit of both peoples along with an upgrading of labor forces and larger regional economic integration, involving Israelis, Palestinians, Syrians, and others, a peace process connected to an economic union in which Israel, with its skilled labor force and educational infrastructure, would have to play a significant role.

For that to occur, though, the establishment of 'Muslim Israels' or 'Jewish Pakistans,' 'pure lands' based on exclusionary principles of ethnicity or religion, must be actively fought by progressive people in the region and in the U.S. who wish to advance a policy of positive peace, as Martin Luther King called it in the U.S., peace with social justice, in the Middle East.

If this sort of internationalism, based on economic and social planning and regional development sounds utopian, one should ask what its alternatives are. Feudal regimes led by corrupt aristocratic cliques; Jewish settlers motivated by religious fanaticism and manipulated by political reactionaries turning the West Bank into Fort Apache; a 'jobs corps' of suicide bombers recruited by various factions as they fight against occupiers and each other; oil companies and other foreign forms with private armies to protect their property and profits while the masses of people live in misery.

Stuart Chase, the economist whose 1932 book helped coin the phrase New Deal, wrote at the end of World War II that 'you can’t bomb democracy into your enemies.' You cannot also bomb socialism into peoples either or bring it in an effective way through armed occupation, as the Soviet Union largely did after World War II, even though they liberated countries from Nazi occupation and occupied states that were allies of Hitler.

What one can do is fight consistently for an internationalism that goes beyond the 'enemy of my enemy is my friend' and fights both the Saddam Husseins and Mahmoud Ahmadinejans and Ariel Sharons of the world while fighting the Rumsfelds, Cheneys, et al, and the global monopoly capitalist/imperialist system that ensures a steady flow of Ahmadinejans and Sharons and in reality needs them as both allies and enemies to sustain its power.



--Norman Markowitz is a contributing editor of Political Affairs and can be reached at pa-letters@politicalaffairs.net.