Lenin, the Right of Oppressed Nations to Self-determination, and the Fight for a Free Palestine

By Karlos Bermann

In 1916, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin wrote:

“The right of nations to self-determination implies exclusively the right to independence
in the political sense, the right to free political separation from the oppressor nation.”^[1]

Throughout history the Palestinian people have been denied the right to self-determination. Lenin’s writings on national self-determination are key to unraveling the Israel-Palestine conflict.

At the time Lenin wrote the lines above, he was  the undisputed leader of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (Bolshevik faction). One year later he would be the co-leader, with Leon Trotsky, of the Russian Revolution. But what does all that have to do with Israel and Palestine, with the Gaza war?

Lenin was talking about a “seceding nation.” Before and during World War I, the rights of oppressed nations, national minorities, and ethnic groups was a hot issue for revolutionaries, socialists, and Marxists in Europe and elsewhere. What rights did those peoples have? How should revolutionary socialists approach them? What position should they take? 

Russia itself was known as a “prison house of nations,” and the same could be said of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Germany, France, Belgium, Turkey, and the Netherlands all had empires with colonial possessions that spanned the Middle East, Africa, Southeast Asia, the Caribbean and Latin America. Poland and other European countries, though not imperialist powers, nevertheless contained oppressed minorities. The United States, which had seized Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines from Spain in the Spanish American War a few years earlier, was just getting into the game.

Lenin’s writings on national self-determination are in fact the key to unraveling the Israel-Palestine conflict. Palestine is a nation imprisoned if there ever was one. Reduced to the two small separated enclaves (or prison cells) of Gaza and the West Bank, its Israeli jailers have virtually cut  the Palestinians off from the outside world. They cannot travel outside those enclaves. The Israelis control virtually everything they need, be it communications, foreign assistance, even their water supply. Getting a package to a Palestinian in one of these enclaves is like getting a package to someone in jail. But the Palestinians as a nation have committed no crime, except the “crime” of wanting their freedom and their country back. Did I imply that the Palestinians are in jail? Concentration camps are more like it. And as if that were not enough, the Israelis can kill them with impunity, whether by bombing, targeted missile strikes, or armed incursions. But you don’t dare call that terrorism!

Nevertheless, in order to truly understand what Lenin’s writings have to do with do with Israel and Palestine, we must look—briefly—at the history.

In the Neolithic era, the land of Palestine was home to a people known as the Canaanites. They were a people whose DNA, according to recent discoveries, can today be found in all the peoples of the Levant (western Asia bordering the Mediterranean Sea), including the Syrians, Lebanese, Palestinians, and yes, the Israelis.^[2]

Over the millennia, long before the emergence of the modern nation state, Palestine passed under the control of one empire after another. In 1516 CE it was conquered by the Ottoman Empire. The  Ottomans controlled Palestine more or less continuously for 500 years, until the First Imperialist World War, during which it was seized by the British Empire. In the words of the Wikipedia entry on the Balfour Declaration,

“Immediately following their declaration of war on the Ottoman Empire in November 1914, the British War Cabinet began to consider the future of Palestine.”^[3]

In 1917, while Palestine was still a part of the Ottoman Empire, the British imperialists issued the Balfour Declaration, which announced British support for “a national home for the Jewish people in Palestine.” This they did despite the fact that at the time there was only a small minority Jewish population—under 11 percent. The Balfour Declaration was drafted in collaboration with prominent British Zionists who, in return for Britain’s support for their project to create a Jewish state in Palestine, promised Jewish support for Britain’s imperialist war aims. Non-Jewish Palestinians—the vast majority of the population—were not consulted.

In 1922, after the war, the League of Nations put its stamp of approval on Britain’s conquest. It gave the British a “mandate” to govern Palestine. The Palestinians had no say in this, either. In fact, non-Jewish Palestinians revolted against British rule in 1920, 1929, and again in 1936.

After the Second World War the British imperialists decided to divest themselves of the Palestine mandate. But the Palestinian people were not permitted to choose their future for themselves. Instead, the future of Palestine was turned over to the United Nations, successor to the League of Nations. The UN adopted a partition plan for creation of independent “Arab” and Jewish states and an “internationalized” Jerusalem. The Zionists accepted the plan; non-Jewish Palestinians did not even have a say. The neighboring Arab monarchies rejected the plan, however, resulting in the 1948 war. During that war the unilaterally declared State of Israel drove 700,000 Palestinians from their homes, an event known to the Palestinians as the “Nakba”—their version of The Holocaust.

Today the survivors and descendants of the Nakba live in refugee camps in Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan, as well as in unofficial refugee status in Egypt and Iraq, their numbers swelled by Israel’s continual expansion. Of the approximately 14.3 million Palestinians in the world today, only 5.3 million live in the Israeli-occupied territories of the West Bank and Gaza. Most of the remaining 9 million are living as refugees.

The point of this history lesson is to show how the Palestinian people have been denied self-determination. Their land has been passed from one empire to another and finally given to the Zionists, who have been both the tools and the beneficiaries of West European and US imperialism.

As justification for their seizure of Palestine, the Zionists maintained, and still maintain today, that the Palestinian Muslims are not a nation, that they are merely Arabs who can go live with the other Arabs.  The Zionists conjure an image of Arabs as backward, nomadic people, not far removed from the time when they wandered the desert on camels, barbarians who don’t deserve their own state and wouldn’t know what to do with it if they had one. Israeli leaders recently called the Palestinians “animals.”   In essence it is the same justification used by the United States to uproot or exterminate the American Indians and “ethnically cleanse” new territory for its westward expansion in the 18th and 19th centuries. It is similar to the justifications advanced for enslaving African people during the same era.

The majority of the Palestinian people are not “Arabs.” In 1920, the British Government’s own Interim Report on the Civil Administration of Palestine reported, “Four-fifths of the whole population are Moslems. A small proportion of these are Bedouin Arabs; the remainder, although they speak Arabic and are termed Arabs, are largely of mixed race.” Palestine has been a land of mixed race since the time of the Canaanites. According to the same report, out of a total population of 700,000 at the time, only 76,000 were Jews. During and after World War II hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees and victims of Nazism were channeled to Palestine by the Zionist movement, aided in its goals by the anti-Semitism of the victorious imperialist powers, who denied most Jewish refugees entry to their own countries. Yet in 1948, even after the postwar refugee wave, the population of Palestine was still two-thirds Muslim. But whatever the national characteristics of the Palestinians may be, it is not for the oppressor state to define them.

In short, imperialism has never permitted the Palestinians to exercise self-determination in their own country. Palestine was a colony first of the Ottoman Empire, then of the British Empire. Then the League of Nations got involved, followed by the United Nations, both organizations controlled by the imperialist powers. The latter turned Palestine over to the Zionists, who had their own imperialist ambitions, which have involved the constant expansion of the state of Israel and the expulsion of the Palestinians from Palestine.

Lenin’s writings on national self-determination are key to unraveling the Israel-Palestine conflict

Lenin also wrote:

“The bourgeois nationalism of any oppressed nation has a general democratic content that is directed against oppression, and it is this content that we [i.e., revolutionary socialists] unconditionally support. At the same time we strictly distinguish it from the tendency towards national exclusiveness; we fight against the tendency of the Polish bourgeois to oppress the Jews, etc., etc.”^[4]

No country on earth better illustrates the “tendency towards national exclusiveness” than Israel, which was created as an exclusively Jewish state, which systematically oppresses its Muslim citizens, who are second class citizens at best, and which systematically expels the Palestinians whose land it has illegally occupied.

As a consequence of the above, the Israeli workers have absolutely no rights—no rights that come at the expense of the Palestinians, that is. They have the right to fight for the equality and the self-determination of the Palestinian people. They have the right and the duty to fight against Israel’s imperialist aggression not only against the Palestinians, but against its Middle Eastern neighbors as well. They have the democratic right to speak out in the face of the Israeli ruling class’s attempts to silence them. And they have the right to fight the Zionist rulers for power.

Socialists who argue that the struggle for national liberation and self-determination are backward or even reactionary in an age when world revolution against capitalism is on the agenda are only repeating arguments that Lenin sought to demolish during World War I. Below is some of what he wrote in 1916, one year before the Russian Revolution.

“Victorious socialism must necessarily establish a full democracy and, consequently, not only introduce full equality of nations but also realise the right of the oppressed nations to self-determination, i.e., the right to free political separation. Socialist parties which did not show by all their activity, both now during the revolution, and after its victory, that they would liberate the enslaved nations and build up relations with them on the basis of a free union—and free union is a false phrase without the right to secede—these parties would be betraying socialism.”^[5]

Lenin used the characterization “bourgeois nationalism” above to refer to the historical epoch when the capitalist class, then a progressive class, sought national independence and created the modern nation state to better foster its interests. From the standpoint of historical materialism, the demand for national independence—for a nation state—belongs to the era of the bourgeois “democratic” revolution against monarchism and the feudal aristocracy. But the ascendant working class must clean up what the capitalist class has left unfinished simultaneously with its own historic tasks in the construction of socialism. This is not “revolution in stages.” It is what Lenin and Trotsky called the “Permanent Revolution.”

For revolutionary socialists there can be no such thing as “proletarian nationalism.” Proletarian revolutionaries are internationalists whose ultimate goal is the dissolution of national states and boundaries. But, as Lenin explained at length, unfettered self-determination for oppressed nations is a necessary precondition for the international socialist commonwealth, and so is one of the unfinished tasks of the bourgeois revolution that the working class must complete. In this Age of Imperialism it is one of the tasks left over from the bourgeois revolutions of the 18th and 19th centuries that only the socialist revolution can fully accomplish. And it must be accomplished before the workers of the oppressed and the oppressor nations can unite.

 

Footnotes

[1] “The Socialist Revolution and the Right of Nations to Self-Determination,” in V.I. Lenin, Questions of National Policy and Proletarian Internationalism (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1970), p. 113.

[2] “DNA From the Bible’s Canaanites Lives On in Modern Arabs and Jews” 

[3] Other Wikipedia entries referenced in this piece are ““Demographic history of Palestine (region),” “Palestine (region),” and  “State of Palestine.”

[4] “The Right of Nations to Self-Determination,” in V.I. Lenin, Questions of National Policy and Proletarian Internationalism (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1970), p. 62.

[5] “The Socialist Revolution and the Right of Nations to Self-Determination,” in Lenin, Questions of National Policy and Proletarian Internationalism (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1970), pp. 110-111.