The worsening of the Arab-Jewish conflict in Palestine and the growing anti-British orientation of the Arab world, which had been a pawn of British imperialism during the world war, have led us to consider the Jewish problem and that of the pan-Arab nationalist movement. This time we will try to address the first of these two problems.

We know that after the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans and the dispersion of the Jewish people, the various countries to which they went, when they did not expel them from their territories (not so much for religious reasons invoked by the Catholic authorities, but rather for economic reasons, in particular the confiscation of their goods and the cancellation of their credits), regulated their living conditions according to the papal bull of the mid-sixteenth century, which became the rule in all countries, forcing them to live enclosed in closed quarters (ghettos) and forcing them to wear an infamous badge.

Expelled in 1290 from England and in 1394 from France, they emigrated to Germany, Italy, and Poland; expelled in 1492 from Spain and in 1498 from Portugal, they took refuge in Holland, Italy, and especially the Ottoman Empire, which then occupied North Africa and much of south-eastern Europe. There they formed, and still form, that community that speaks a Judeo-Spanish dialect, while those who emigrated to Poland, Russia, Hungary, etc., speak the Judeo-German dialect (Yiddish). Hebrew, which remained the language of the rabbis during this period, has exited the realm of dead languages to become the language of the Jews of Palestine with the current Jewish nationalist movement.

While the Jews of the West, the least numerous, and to a certain extent those of the United States, acquired an economic and political influence thanks to their influence on the stock market and an intellectual influence through their numbers in the liberal professions, the great masses were concentrated in Eastern Europe, where they accounted for 80% of Europe’s Jews at the end of the 18th century.

With the first partition of Poland and the annexation of Bessarabia, they came under the rule of the tsars who, at the beginning of the 19th century, had two-thirds of the Jews in their territories. From the very beginning, the Russian government adopted a repressive policy which dates back to Catherine II and found its fiercest expression under Alexander III, who envisaged the solution to the Jewish problem as follows: one-third were to be converted, one-third were to emigrate, and one-third were to be exterminated. The Jews were confined to a certain number of districts in the provinces of the north-west (White Russia [Belarus ed.]), the south-east (Ukraine and Bessarabia) and of Poland. These were their areas of residence. They could not live outside the cities and especially could not live in the industrialised regions (mining basins and metallurgical regions). But it was especially among these Jews that the penetration of capitalism in the 19th century began and class differentiation was determined.

It was the pressure of Russian governmental terrorism that gave the first impetus for Palestinian colonisation. However, the first Jews had already returned to Palestine after the expulsion from Spain at the end of the 15th century, and the first agricultural colony was founded in 1870 near Jaffa. But the first serious emigration only began after 1880, when police persecution and the first pogroms led to emigration to America and Palestine.

This first ‘Aliyah’ (Jewish immigration) of 1882, known as the ‘Bilu’, consisted mainly of Russian students who can be considered the pioneers of Jewish settlement in Palestine. The second ‘Aliyah’ took place in 1904-1905, after the repression of the first revolution in Russia. The number of Jews settled in Palestine increased from 12,000 in 1850 to 35,000 in 1882 and to 90,000 in 1914.

They were all Jews coming from Russia and Romania, intellectuals and proletarians, because the Jewish capitalists of the West, such as the Rothschilds and the Hirschs, limited themselves to a financial support that gave them a benevolent reputation for philanthropy, without having to give up their precious person.

Among the ‘Bilu’ of 1882, socialists were still few, because in the controversy of the time over whether Jewish emigration should be to Palestine or America, they were in favour of the latter. In the first Jewish emigration to the United States, the socialists were therefore very numerous, and they soon established organisations, newspapers, and practically attempted communist colonisation as well.

The second time the problem of where to direct Jewish emigration arose was, as we have said, after the defeat of the first Russian revolution and following the worsening of the pogroms, characterised by that of Kishinev.

At the 7th Zionist Congress in Basle, Zionism, which sought to secure a home for the Jewish people in Palestine and had just set up a National Fund for the acquisition of lands, split into a traditionalist current, which remained loyal to the establishment of a Jewish State in Palestine, and into territorialists, in favour of colonisation elsewhere, in this case in Uganda offered by England.

Only a minority of Jewish socialists, like Ber Borochov’s Zionist Poalé, remained loyal to the traditionalists, while all the other Jewish socialist parties of the time, such as the Zionist Socialists (S.S.) and the Seymists – a sort of reproduction in Jewish circles of the Russian Socialist Revolutionaries – declared themselves in favour of territorialism. The oldest and most powerful Jewish organisation of the time, the Bund, was, as we know, completely negative on the national question, at least at that time.

The World War of 1914 opened a decisive moment for the national revival movement and, after the occupation of Palestine by British troops, which had been joined by Jabotinsky’s Jewish Legion, the Balfour Declaration of 1917 was promulgated, promising the establishment of a Jewish National Homeland in Palestine. This promise was enshrined at the San Remo Conference of 1920, which placed Palestine under the British Mandate.

The Balfour Declaration led to a third ‘Aliyah’, but it was primarily the fourth and most numerous, which coincided with the handover of the Palestinian Mandate to England. This ‘Aliyah’ already included a substantial number of petty bourgeois. We know that the last immigration to Palestine, the one that followed Hitler’s rise to power and which is certainly the most numerous, already contained a high percentage of capitalists.

While the first census taken in Palestine in 1922, in view of the devastation of the world war, recorded only 84,000 Jews, equal to 11% of the total population, the 1931 census already recorded 175,000. In 1934, statistics gave 307,000 out of a total population of 1,171,000 inhabitants. The current figure is 400,000 Jews.

In 1928 there were 3,505 companies, of which 782 had more than 4 workers, with a total of 18,000 workers and an invested capital of £3.5 million.

Jews living in the countryside made up only 20% of the population, compared to the Arabs, who constituted 65% of the agricultural population. But the Arabs work their land with primitive means, while the Jews in their colonies and plantations work according to the intensive methods of capitalism with Arab labour at very low wages.

The figures we have provided already explain one side of the current conflict. For 20 centuries, the Jews have abandoned Palestine and other populations have settled on the banks of the Jordan River. Although the Balfour Declaration and the decisions of the League of Nations claimed to guarantee the respect for the rights of the occupants of Palestine, in reality the increase in Jewish immigration meant driving the Arabs from their land, even if purchased at a low cost by the Jewish National Fund.

It is not out of humanity towards ‘the persecuted people without a homeland’ that Great Britain has chosen a pro-Jewish policy. It was the interests of British high finance, in which Jews have a predominant influence, that determined this policy. On the other hand, from the beginning of Jewish colonisation, there has been a contrast between Arab and Jewish proletarians. Initially, the Jewish settlers employed Jewish workers because they exploited their national fervour in order to defend themselves against Arab incursions. Later, as the situation consolidated, Jewish industrialists and landowners preferred the Arab labour force to the more demanding Jewish labour force.

When Jewish workers formed their trade unions, they were more interested in competing with low-wage Arabs than in class warfare. This explains the chauvinist character of the Jewish workers’ movement, exploited by Jewish nationalism and British imperialism.

Naturally, there are also political reasons behind the current conflict. British imperialism, despite the hostility of the two races, would like to see two different States living under one roof and even create a biparliamentary system with separate parliaments for Jews and Arabs.

In the Jewish camp, alongside Weissman’s temporary directive, there were Jabotinsky’s revisionists who fought against official Zionism, accused Britain of absenteeism, if not of failing to fulfil its commitments, and wanted to open Transjordan, Syria, and the Sinai Peninsula to Jewish emigration.

The first clashes, which broke out in August 1929 and took place around the Wailing Wall, resulted, according to official statistics, in the deaths of two hundred Arabs and one hundred and thirty Jews, figures that were certainly lower than reality, because while in the modern installations the Jews managed to repel the attacks, in Hebron, Safit and in some suburbs of Jerusalem the Arabs resorted to outright pogroms.

These events marked a turning point in England’s pro-Jewish policy, as the British colonial empire included too many Muslims, including India, to have sufficient grounds for caution.

As a result of this attitude of the British government towards the Jewish National Home, most of the Jewish parties, the Orthodox Zionists, the General Zionists, and the Revisionists, went into opposition, while the most reliable support for British politics, led at the time by the Labour Party, was the Jewish Labour movement, the political expression of the General Confederation of Labour [Histradut ed.], which organised almost all Jewish workers in Palestine.

In recent times, a common struggle between the Jewish and Arab movements against the mandated power had been expressed, but only superficially. But the fire smouldered under the ashes and the explosion has taken the form of the events of last May.

The Italian fascist press has protested against the accusation in the ‘sanctionist’ press that fascist agents would have fomented unrest in Palestine, an accusation already made in relation to the recent events in Egypt. No one can deny that fascism has every interest in fanning these flames. Italian imperialism has never hidden its designs for the Middle East, that is, its desire to replace the mandated powers in Palestine and Syria. It also had a powerful naval and military base in the Mediterranean, represented by Rhodes and the other islands of the Dodecanese. British imperialism, on the other hand, had an advantage in the conflict between Arabs and Jews, according to the ancient Roman formula divide et impeta [divide and conquer ed.], but had to take into account the financial power of the Jews and the threat of the Arab nationalist movement.

This latter movement, which we will discuss at greater length another time, is a consequence of the world war, which led to industrialisation in India, Palestine, and Syria and has strengthened the native bourgeoisie, which put itself forward to govern, in other words to exploit the native masses.

The Arabs have accused Britain of wanting to turn Palestine into a Jewish national home, which would mean stealing land from the indigenous population. They have again sent emissaries to Egypt, Syria, and Morocco to agitate the Muslim world in favour of the Arabs of Palestine, to try to intensify the movement, in view of a pan-Islamic national union. They are encouraged by the recent events in Syria, where the mandated power, France, was forced to capitulate in the face of the general strike, and also by the events in Egypt, where the agitation and the formation of a single national front have forced London to negotiate on an equal footing with the government of Cairo. We do not know whether the general strike of the Arabs of Palestine will be as successful. We will examine this movement together with the Arab problem in a future article.

As we have seen in the previous part of this article, when, after 2000 years of exile, the ‘Bilu’im’ acquired a strip of sandy territory south of Jaffa, they found another people, the Arabs, had replaced them in Palestine. They were only a few hundred thousand, Arab fellahin (peasants) or Bedouin (nomads); the peasants worked with very primitive means, as the land belonged to the landowners (effendis). British imperialism, as we have seen, when it pushed these landowners and the Arab bourgeoisie to fight on its side during the World War, promised them the establishment of an Arab nation-State. The Arab revolt was indeed of decisive importance in the collapse of the Turkish-German front in the Middle East, because it destroyed the the Ottoman Caliphate’s call for holy war and held many Turkish troops in check in Syria, not to mention the destruction of the Turkish armies in Mesopotamia.

But although British imperialism had caused this Arab revolt against Turkey with the promise of the creation of an Arab State composed of all the provinces of the former Ottoman Empire (Palestine included), it was not slow to solicit, in defence of its own interests, the support of the Jewish Zionists, telling them that Palestine would be handed over to them to be administered and colonised.

At the same time, it agreed with French imperialism to cede a mandate over Syria, thus detaching this region, which forms an indissoluble historical and economic unity with Palestine.

In Lord Balfour’s letter of 2 November 1917 to Rothschild, president of the Zionist Federation of England, informing him that the British government was favourably disposed towards the creation in Palestine of a National Home for the Jewish people and that it would do its best to achieve this goal, Lord Balfour added that: nothing would be done that would prejudice the civil and religious rights of the non-Jewish communities existing in Palestine, nor the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in other countries.

Despite the ambiguous terms of this declaration, which allowed a new people to settle on their territory, the Arab population as a whole initially remained neutral and even supported the creation of a Jewish National Home. The Arab landowners, fearing the introduction of an agrarian law, were willing to sell their land. The Zionist leaders, driven only by political concerns, did not take advantage of these offers and went so far as to endorse the Allenby government’s defence of the prohibition of land sales [General Allenby was appointed commander of the British Expeditionary Force in Egypt in 1917, with the aim of fighting the Ottoman forces in Jerusalem, achieving a victory in Gaza at the end of 1917 then in Jerusalem. He concentrated on Damascus-Beirut and in 1919 was High Commissioner for Egypt and Sudan until 1925. In 1931 he justified the Palestine campaign as a means of blocking Germany’s route to India].

Soon the bourgeoisie began to manifest the tendency to completely occupy Palestine territorially and politically, expropriating the indigenous population and driving them into the desert. This tendency is visible today in the revisionist Zionists, that is, the pro-fascist current of the Jewish nationalist movement.

The area of arable land in Palestine is approximately 12 million ‘metric dunams’ (one dunam = 1 tenth of a hectare), of which 5-6 million are currently cultivated.

Here is a breakdown of the land cultivated by Jews in Palestine since 1899:

                     inhabitants   dunam
1899:  22 settlements   5,000     300,000
1914:  43 settlements  12,000     400,000
1922:  73 settlements   5,000     600,000
1931: 160 colonies     70,000   1,420,000

To judge the real value of this increase and the influence it has had, it is necessary to remember that the Arabs still cultivate the land in a primitive way, while the Jewish settlements use the most modern methods of cultivation.

Jewish capital invested in agricultural enterprises is estimated at several million gold dollars, 65% of which in plantations. Although Jews owned only 14% of the cultivated land, the value of their products accounted for a quarter of the total production. In the orange plantations, Jews accounted for 55% of the total harvest.

* * *

In April 1920, in Jerusalem, and in May 1921, in Jaffa, the first manifestations of Arab reaction appeared in the form of pogroms. Sir Herbert Samuel, High Commissioner in Palestine until 1925, tried to placate the Arabs by blocking Jewish immigration, promising them a representative government and assigning them the best State land.

After the great wave of colonisation in 1925, which peaked with 33,000 immigrants, the situation worsened and eventually led to the movements of August 1929. It was then that the Bedouin tribes of Transjordan, called upon by Muslim agitators, joined the Arab populations of Palestine.

In the aftermath of these events, the Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry sent to Palestine, known as the Shaw Commission, concluded that the events were due to the immigration of Jewish labour and the ‘scarcity’ of land, and proposed to the government the purchase of land to compensate the inhabitants uprooted from their lands.

When, in May 1930, the British government accepted the conclusions of the Shaw Commission in full and again suspended the immigration of Jewish labour into Palestine, the Jewish workers’ movement – which the Shaw Commission had even refused to listen to – responded with a 24-hour protest strike, while Poale Zion in all countries and the main Jewish trade unions in America protested against this measure with numerous demonstrations.

In October 1930 appeared a new statement on British policy in Palestine, known as the White Paper. It too was very unfavourable to the Zionist theses. However, in the face of growing Jewish protests, the Labour government responded in February 1931 with a letter from MacDonald reaffirming the right of Jews to work, immigrate, and settle and authorising Jewish employers to employ Jewish labour – where they preferred to employ Jewish rather than Arab labour – regardless of any increase in Arab unemployment.

The workers’ movement in Palestine was quick to give confidence to the British Labour government, while all other Zionist parties remained in suspicious opposition.

In the previous article, we demonstrated the reasons for the chauvinist nature of the workers’ movement in Palestine.

The Histadrut – central trade union in Palestine – comprises only Jews (80% of Jewish workers are organised). Only the necessity of raising the standard of living of the Arab masses, to protect the high wages of the Jewish labour force, has determined its recent attempts at Arab organisation. But the embryonic unions grouped in the ‘Alliance’ remained organically separate from the Histadrut, with the exception of the railwaymen’s union, which included representatives of both races.

* * *

The Arab general strike in Palestine is entering its fourth month. The guerrilla war continues, despite the recent decree imposing the death penalty on attackers: every day there are ambushes and assaults on trains and wagons, not to mention the destruction and burning of Jewish property.

These events have already cost the Mandated Power almost half a million pounds for the maintenance of the armed forces and, as a result of reduced budget revenues, the passive resistance and economic boycott of the Arab masses. Recently, in the House of Commons, the Minister for the Colonies put the number of victims at 400 Muslims, 200 Jews and 100 policemen; to date, 1,800 Arabs and Jews have been tried and 1,200 convicted, 300 of them Jews. According to the minister, about a hundred Arab nationalists were deported to concentration camps. Four communist leaders (2 Jews and 2 Armenians) were arrested and 60 communists were under police surveillance. These are the official figures.

It is clear that the policy of British imperialism in Palestine was naturally inspired by the colonial policy of all imperialisms. This consists in leveraging certain strata of the colonial population everywhere (pitting races against each other or different religious denominations, or stirring up jealousies between clans or chiefs), which allows imperialism to firmly establish its super-oppression over the colonial masses themselves, without distinction of race or denomination.

But while this manoeuvre may have succeeded in Morocco and Central Africa, in Palestine and Syria the Arab nationalist movement presents a very compact resistance. It was relying on the more or less independent countries surrounding it: Turkey, Persia, Egypt, Iraq, and the Arab States, and was also linked to the Muslim world as a whole, which numbered several million people.

In spite of the contrasts between the various Muslim States and the Anglophile policy of some of them, the great danger for imperialism would be the constitution of an eastern bloc capable of imposing itself – which would be possible if the awakening and strengthening of nationalist sentiment in the indigenous bourgeoisies could prevent the awakening of the class revolt of the colonial exploited who have as much to break with their exploiters as with European imperialism – and who could find a rallying point in Turkey, which has just reasserted its rights over the Dardanelles and could resume its pan-Islamic policy.

Palestine is of vital importance to British imperialism. If the Zionists thought they would get a ‘Jewish’ Palestine, in reality they would only get a ‘British’ Palestine, the Palestinian land transit route which connects Europe to India. It could replace the Suez maritime route, whose security has just been weakened by the establishment of Italian imperialism in Ethiopia. It should not be forgotten that the Mosul pipeline (oil zone) ends in the Palestinian port of Haifa.

Finally, British policy will always have to take into account the fact that in the British Empire live 100 million Muslims. In Palestine, British imperialism has so far managed to contain the threat posed by the Arab national independence movement. It has opposed the latter with Zionism, which, by pushing the Jewish masses to emigrate to Palestine, has displaced the class movement in their country of origin, where they would have found their place, and has ultimately secured solid support for its policy in the Middle East.

The expropriation of land at derisory prices plunged the Arab proletarians into misery and drove them into the arms of Arab nationalists, big landowners, and the emerging bourgeoisie. The latter, naturally, took advantage of this in order to extend its goals of exploiting the masses and directed the discontent of the fellahin and proletarians against the Jewish workers, in the same way that the Zionist capitalists directed the discontent of the Jewish workers against the Arabs. British imperialism and the Arab and Jewish ruling classes can only be strengthened by this contrast between the exploited Jewish and Arab.

Official communism helped the Arabs in their struggle against Zionism, described as a tool of British imperialism.

As early as 1929, the Jewish nationalist press published a police blacklist in which communist agitators appeared alongside the Grand Mufti and Arab nationalist leaders. Many militant communists were arrested.

After having launched the slogan of the ‘Arabisation’ of the party – the latter, like the C.P. in Syria or even Egypt, was founded by a group of Jewish intellectuals who were fought as ‘opportunists’ – the centrists have today launched the watchword ‘Arabia to the Arabs’, which is nothing more than a copy of the watchword ‘federation of all Arab peoples’ proper to the Arab nationalists, i.e. the landowners (the effendi) and the intellectuals who, with the support of the Muslim clergy, run the Arab Congress and channel, in the name of their interests, the reactions of the exploited Arabs.

For the true revolutionary, of course, there is no ‘Palestinian’ question, but only the struggle of all the exploited in the Middle East, including Arabs and Jews, which is part of the more general struggle of all the exploited throughout the world for the communist revolt.

The events in Spain and also those in China have long since passed. New developments are taking place with extraordinary rapidity. Alongside the Mussolini and Hitler’s appeals and the ‘police-like’ decisions in the Mediterranean taken by the Anglo-French fleets in collaboration with the Italian fleet, aimed at tracking down ‘unknown’ pirates, there is the situation in the Middle East, where the project to divide Palestine into a Jewish and an Arab State is gaining ground, causing discontent in both camps.

Using a series of terrorist attacks as a pretext, culminating in the assassination of a senior British official in Galilee, the High Commissioner for Palestine outlawed the Arab Executive Committee and hunted down Palestinian Authority leaders and Arab nationalist leaders to deport them to the remote islands of the Seychelles.

This time we will focus on the Arab national problem. The Arabs are generally confused with the rest of the Muslims. Mainly because until the World War they were subject to the Turks (Ottomans), with whom they had as their only affinity the common Muslim religion. The Arabs, both sedentary and nomadic, number no more than 40 million (5 million in Mesopotamia, Syria and Palestine; 6 million in Arabia proper; 15 million in Egypt and Tripolitania and 12 million in the Maghreb, i.e. Morocco and southern Algeria), but they consider themselves the ‘chosen’ race because Muhammad was born among them. Nevertheless, they are extremely different from each other, both ethnically and religiously. Ethnically, because the conquest was carried out by the Prophet’s successors at the head of tens of thousands of nomadic Bedouins of the Arabian desert, who imposed their rule over the indigenous populations. Religiously, because, although almost all of them are Muslims, they are divided into the various sects of the Islamic heresy. Although the national revival movement, i.e. the Pan-Arab movement, is older, in reality the Arab problem can be considered to have arisen from the 1914 war.

During this imperialist conflict, only a small minority of Arabs followed the Pan-Islamic tendency proclaimed by Turkey and supported by Germany. The majority of the Arabs were won over, at the direct suggestion of British imperialism, to the idea of liberation from the Turkish yoke and the establishment of an independent Arab State (especially the peoples of the Arabian desert where the action of the all too famous Lawrence took place). In Egypt, on the other hand, it was natural that this movement should be less intense, because Egypt was already de facto independent from Turkey and foreign domination was precisely that of England, which took advantage of the war to impose its ‘protectorate’, which was nothing more than the sanction of its actual occupation in 1882.

The Sherif of Mecca, who had pompously proclaimed himself ‘King of Arabia’, was recognised under the more modest name of King of the Hejaz in 1916. The most important result of this skilful policy of divide and conquer, which pitted the two most important fractions of the Muslim world: the Arabs against the Turks, was to prevent the proclamation of the Holy War, which could have set in motion the Islamic populations of the Entente colonies.

As the war ended with the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire – Turkey was reduced to the rank of a secondary Asiatic power until it was conquered by Kemal Pasha – the Arabs were naturally disappointed in their aspirations: the imperialist brigands did not surrender anything they had stolen.

British imperialism has retained Palestine (where moreover it has created a national home for the Jews, to reward the Zionists, its most loyal agents), Iraq (i.e. Mesopotamia and Transjordan) in the form of a mandate. Egypt, where a king more docile to its demands was imposed, obtained a purely fictitious ‘independence’ in 1922, while Sudan remained completely under its occupation. France obtained a mandate over Syria. All in all, the Arabs found themselves having to endure an oppression far greater than the ‘Great Sick Man’.

Only in the deserts of Arabia did national States form: the Sherif of Mecca remained king of the Hejaz and two of his sons became, an emir of Transjordan and the other king of Iraq. The other States were the Emirate of Najd and the Imamate of Yemen.

In short, all the Arab peoples remained dominated by European imperialism in one form or another: through the old dynasties of the kings of Egypt, the sultans of Morocco, the beys of Tunisia or the new vassal kings of Iraq and Transjordan, or in the form of mandates from the League of Nations. And of what the imperialists mean by ‘mandates’, Japan has demonstrated with the Pacific Islands, and Great Britain with its mandate in East Africa. In other Arab countries imperialism has continued to dominate directly, such as Italy in Libya and France in Algeria.

And even the Arab States, despite their name of ‘independent’, remain, due to their state of backwardness, under the economic domination of British imperialism, from which Yemen would like to escape by throwing itself into the arms of Italian imperialism, with which it has just concluded a treaty.

The unified Arab power that Arab nationalists dream of and which the Wahabi sovereign of Saudi Arabia (born from the unification of the Hejaz and the Najd) would like to realise in his own interest, could not be anything other, in the final analysis, than a satellite of British imperialism, because the Saudi Arabian peninsula remains of great strategic importance as a gateway to India, especially since Italian imperialism has established itself in Ethiopia and is threatening the other imperial route through Suez. This Arab State, besides Arabia proper, should include Transjordan, to which Palestine and Syria would be annexed.

This obviously offends French imperialism, which has made Syria its strategic base for the eastern Mediterranean, especially after the Turkish rearmament in the Dardanelles.

But Italian imperialism also has set its eyes on the Middle East. Not only would it like to replace the religious monopoly held by France as the custodian of Christianity, but it would like to replace France for the mandate over Syria and, finally, as we have already mentioned, it is trying to support its manoeuvres in Yemen.

As can be seen, even in the Middle East the various imperialisms are at loggerheads and a new nerve centre could be identified.

As we know, Egypt has obtained – like Iraq in 1932 – entry into the L.O.N. But this sort of certificate of good conduct that the hegemonic imperialists grant to colonial or semi-colonial countries guarantees to them nothing, as Ethiopia has learned at its expense. Egypt’s entry into the Geneva Council, in the wake of this year’s Montreux Conference – the one that has abolished the ‘capitulations’ – thus reinforces the tendency that would like to form, with Turkey, Iran (the official name of Persia), Afghanistan, Iraq and soon, no doubt, Syria and Lebanon, a sort of Little Muslim Entente which could play an important role in the course of events, as a stimulus to the Islamic populations targeted by European imperialism. Indeed, of the two hundred and fifty million Muslims, 80% depend on the latter. 95 million depend on the British Empire (British Isles); 55 million on the Netherlands (Sunda Islands), 22 million on France.

(The Montreux Conference, in 1936, has allowed the remilitarisation of the Straits and had as beneficiary, in the final analysis, Russia, which will be able to build a war fleet in the Black Sea, guaranteed by its ally Turkey, against the intrusion of other naval powers and which will have free passage for its ships... unless they encounter ‘pirates’ at the entrance to the Mediterranean. The capitulations were the legal instrument of European penetration in the Orient and guaranteed foreigners a privileged status in the commercial and judicial fields. They were first instituted against the Turkish Sultanates and accompanied the subsequent expansion of ‘civilisation’ against ‘barbarism’. Abolished in Turkey, in China, in Afghanistan, in the countries under mandate, they still survived in Egypt, which had inherited them from its belonging to the Ottoman Empire).

And what role has the mass of the exploited in all this? There is a common and decisive characteristic of all the Arab countries that, just as all the political levers of control depend on British, French, Italian, and Spanish imperialism (Morocco), they also have their entire economic life in the hands of the British, French, Italian and Spanish imperialists (Morocco). Their entire economic life in the hands of foreign finance capital: banks and factories; livestock and pastures; means of production and communication; public debt... etc. etc. And even the artificial irrigation systems, vital for the Arab populations because they live in the steppes and in the deserts where their existence depends in every way on this artificial irrigation, are in their hands.

The ‘foreign’ imperialism that transforms the Arab countries into agrarian appendages and suppliers of raw materials for the metropolises naturally relies on the feudal landowners, the commercial bourgeoisie, and the clergy. In the Arab countries in particular, it was the landowners who dominated, while the development of the capitalist element was reduced to a few thin strata of the commercial bourgeoisie more or less linked to the feudal landowners. Only Egypt stands out because, as in India, an industry was formed during the war which strengthened the bourgeoisie and gave life to a proletariat. The Egyptian national bourgeoisie also relied on workers’ agitation to achieve its political goals, even at the cost of persecuting the workers’ movement when it was forced to do so, when it came to power with the interested help of British imperialism.

The fellahin (sedentary Arabs) and the Bedouin (nomadic Arabs) were thus subjected to a double exploitation, national and foreign; to the theft of land and livestock; to an unheard-of exploitation in forms different in name but equal in result: the scourge of usury. The influence of the clergy is not to be underestimated: the Grand Sherif of Mecca, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, the Maronite Patriarch of Lebanon, are supporters of imperialism equal to the Abuna (the head of the Coptic Church in Abyssinia) who was among the first to recognise the Italian conquerors.

Centrism obviously holds nationalist movements in high regard, inviting their representatives to its ‘anti-imperialist’ congresses. But it is certain that the Wafd in Egypt, the Arab Executive Committee in Palestine, the ‘National Bloc’ in Syria and Destour (nationalist party) in Tunisia are all ready to come to terms with the imperialists. And if they have put themselves at the head of violent agitations, they have done so to try to curb them and prevent a class solution. As with foreign imperialism, for the Arab privileged classes the enemy is the same: the mass of the exploited seeking a way out. The great uprising in Morocco in 1924-26 (Abd el-Krim), in Syria in 1925, the movements in Palestine in 1929 and 1936, the agitations in Tunisia and Egypt, were much less the work of the nationalists than an expression of the discontent of the masses against their double exploitation, and even less the work of Moscow’s ‘red hand’.

In the more economically developed countries there are trade unions – in all the Muslim countries there are guilds that in many cases have served as nuclei for workers’ organisations – and strikes and workers’ unrest are the order of the day. But most of these unions are in the hands of the nationalist-reformists with whom centrism today forms a united front.

In the more economically backward Arab countries: Morocco, southern Algeria, and Libya, the only form of reaction of the masses against economic exploitation and the prospect of inevitably becoming cannon fodder for imperialist conflicts is represented by the revolt of the tribes against the State. The revolt of the tribes against the oppressor, the typical example of which was the revolt of Abd el-Krim.

Of course there are communist parties in the Middle East, at least in Egypt, Palestine, Syria, and French North Africa. But they are all excessively weak numerically and subject to the most ruthless repression by ‘democratic’ France and Great Britain. Their internal history is represented by the tendency towards the ‘Arabisation’ demanded by Moscow, which in simple terms means integration into the nationalist movement. Naturally, there is no shortage of Trotskyists, and we know what that means.

In assessing all the national problems, one comes up against the incomplete and flawed positions that the Third International, in its revolutionary period, established for the colonial countries. All these incomplete and erroneous positions, which envisage a common struggle between the exploited and the bourgeois nationalist movements, end in massacres and channel the effervescence of the masses behind bourgeois nationalism i.e. behind imperialism, with which a compromise will always be found.

For the other countries, the centrists argue that ‘the communists must oppose the counter-revolutionary and capitulatory national-reformism with the pan-Arab and anti-imperialist revolutionary front of the working masses and the urban petty-bourgeoisie, a front based on the development of workers’ movements’.

This can be read in the theses on the tasks of the communists in the Arab movement. How this tactic of the revolutionary front is applied the Chinese masses learn at their own expense, who, under the banner of the Kuomintang executioners (and pushed by the centrists while Trotsky plays the same tune), must carry out the Third Revolution by participating in the imperialist war.