How can the devastating cycle of imperialist invasions, genocide, exploitation and authoritarian rule that has been inflicted on the people of the Middle East be ended? There is profound sympathy among the workers and the poor of the Arab world for the Palestinian cause, but the brutal dictators who rule Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Syria have held popular mobilisations in check. There is a burning need for a socialist left that can galvanise the masses into action.
The Arab Spring revolution that swept the region just over a decade ago showed the potential for rebellion against these detested regimes. But today the region’s once powerful left is very weak because of the disastrous failure of the Stalinism that long dominated its politics.
If a socialist left is to be built with some hope of liberating the workers of the Middle East and winning freedom for the Palestinian people, then it is vital to come to terms with the legacy of Stalinist class-collaborationist politics and rebuild on a genuinely revolutionary basis.
Prior to the 1930s, the Arab Communist parties were tiny. In the early 1930s, the original Communist leaders, who were genuine working-class revolutionaries, were purged and the parties thoroughly Stalinised. New leaders trained in Moscow loyally carried out the dictates of Russian foreign policy—the policy of the counter-revolutionary regime that had destroyed workers’ power in Russia.
The last thing Russia’s rulers wanted were workers’ revolutions that would threaten their imperialist interests. For Stalin and his supporters, the role of Arab Communists was to find allies for Russia, not to advance working-class interests.
From the mid-1930s, Moscow directed Communists to adopt a class-collaborationist popular front policy that subordinated the interests of workers and peasants to the supposedly progressive national bourgeoisie. As the Syrian Communist leader Khalid Bakdash put it in 1943: 
“We assure the national capitalist, the national factory owner, that we do not look with envy or with malice on his national enterprise. On the contrary, we desire his progress and vigorous growth ... We assure the owner of land that we do not and shall not demand the confiscation of his property ... All we ask is kindness towards the peasant.”
This approach totally contradicted the genuine Marxist tradition. Compare Bakdash’s statement with what Lenin argued about how revolutionaries should relate to their local capitalists in 1920: “The Communist International must enter into a temporary alliance with bourgeois democracy in colonial countries, but must not merge with it and must under all circumstances preserve the independence of the proletarian movement, even if in its most rudimentary form”.
The precise form of the popular front varied over time, and the section of the bourgeoisie that was considered progressive could also change dramatically. During World War Two, Moscow told Arab Communists to back the war effort of Stalin’s British allies. Consequently, Communists opposed strikes by workers. And in the eyes of the Stalinists, the bourgeois Arab forces that continued to support the struggle against British and French colonial rule went from being progressive allies to outright fascists.
Later, the main task was to curry favour with the new nationalist Arab regimes. Moscow spelt it out in 1960:
“At the head of the majority of new national states ... stand bourgeois political leaders ... However, this cannot belittle the progressive historical importance of the breakthrough that has taken place ... [T]he central task ... remains for a comparatively long period of time that of struggle not against capital but against survivals of the Middle Ages. From this stems the possibility of the cooperation over a long period of the workers, peasants and intelligentsia ... with that part of the national bourgeoisie which is interested in the independent political and economic development of its country and is ready to defend its independence against any encroachments by the imperialist powers.”
But no section of the Arab bourgeoisie, even supposedly radical leaders like Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi, was prepared to mobilise the masses for a determined fight against imperialism. In June 1969, Gaddafi opposed a popular war of liberation to free Palestine. He argued that the Palestinian guerrilla movement must rid itself of “ideologies” and operate only according to the strategy laid down by Arab governments.
The popular front approach had an incredibly damaging impact. It led to repeated defeats for the working-class movement. In Iraq following the popular revolution of July 1958 that overthrew the monarchy, the Communists built mass working-class support and dominated the student movement. But despite intensified repression, the Iraqi Communist Party tailed behind the government of General Kassem, which supposedly represented the “national bourgeoisie”. The failure to mobilise workers to fight for power led to a crushing defeat, with at least 5,000 Communists murdered and thousands more sacked from their jobs and sent to prison by the lorry load.
The Communists learned nothing from this disaster. In the 1970s, Iraqi Communist Party members took cabinet posts in the authoritarian Ba’athist government until Saddam Hussein had them hanged.
In Egypt, the Communists initially denounced Abdul Nasser’s nationalist regime as “fascist” after it executed striking workers. But once Nasser developed friendly relations with Moscow, the Communists became cheerleaders for his regime despite the fact Nasser was imprisoning Communist Party leaders. The Egyptian Communists eventually dissolved their party into the highly authoritarian ruling party.
In Lebanon during the civil war of the 1970s and 1980s, the Communists refused to establish democratic control by workers over the sectors of Beirut the party’s armed wing dominated, instead tailing behind the bourgeois nationalist forces. They even went so far as to adopt communalist slogans that served to divide the working class. In Syria, the Communists were absorbed into the Assad regime’s totalitarian state apparatus, occupying minor cabinet posts. This disoriented the working-class movement, tying it to the exploiters and impeding the possibility of independent working-class actions to defend living standards and democratic rights.
Despite these repeated failures, popular-front-style class-collaborationist politics rather than clear-cut class politics in one form or another remained hegemonic on the Arab left for decades. In Palestine, the popular front approach meant that in the Arab revolt of 1936 to 1939, the Palestine Communist Party (PCP) was unable to offer a class-struggle alternative to the reactionary Arab leadership of landlords and clerics. And because the PCP abandoned class politics for nationalism, it was in a weaker position to hold the line against Zionism among its Jewish worker members (who were a majority of members in the 1930s).
The end result was the formation of two Communist parties in British mandate Palestine. One party, predominantly Jewish in composition, tailed Zionism. The other party, predominantly Palestinian in composition, tailed Arab nationalism.
In 1947, Moscow backed the setting up of the Zionist state as it saw Israel as a potential ally. This had a disastrous impact on Communist parties throughout the Arab world.
The membership of the joint Communist Party of Syria and Lebanon, which had built substantial support during a postwar strike wave, collapsed from 18,000 in 1947 to just a few hundred. Dissidents who opposed Moscow’s pro-Zionist line were expelled. Consequently, Communists were in no position to take advantage of the wave of strikes and protests that rocked Syria after the failure of the Arab regimes to defend Palestine. 
The Communists were discredited for many years among Palestinians driven from their land. This explains why the Palestinian left that developed in the 1960s, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestinian (PFLP) and the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP), were not direct descendants of the old PCP, but had quite different origins.
The tragedy was that when these groups groped towards Marxism, the predominant ideas on offer were still those of Stalinism. They ended up embracing a popular front approach, as reflected in the names of their organisations, and with all the same problems.
The official Communist Party did retain some influence among Arabs within the state of Israel. It was, however, a reformist party committed to the Zionist state. And the PCP on the West Bank was a conservative force promoting a two-state solution.
The new Palestinian left of the 1960s originated in the Arab National Movement (ANM), which originated among a group of intellectuals at the American University of Beirut, the most prominent of whom were George Habash and Wadi Haddad. The ANM was a highly secretive organisation that had an elitist approach of armed struggle by small bands of guerrillas. It viewed armed actions as a means to pressure the Arab states to launch a war against Israel.
In its early years, the ANM was conservative politically and, reflecting the upper-middle-class social backgrounds of its members, hostile to working-class politics, which it viewed as disrupting Arab national unity. After 1957, the ANM looked to Nasser’s regime in Egypt to unite the Arab world and drive out the imperialists and Zionists.
The crushing defeat of the Arab armies in the 1967 war with Israel discredited Nasserism. The ANM condemned Nasser’s regime as petty bourgeois rather than socialist and began to look to the Vietnamese model. In December 1967, George Habash established the PFLP based on a version of Stalinised Marxism looking to Cuba and China. Then in February 1969, the Democratic Front split from the PFLP. 
Initially, the Democratic Front, influenced by New Left ideas and with a following among Palestinian students in Europe and the US, was the more leftish and open group. Some Palestinian Trotskyists exiled in Europe joined. The Democratic Front strongly rejected Arab chauvinism (and slogans such as drive the Jews into the sea, which was still influential in the 1960s) and placed less emphasis on militarism than the PFLP, which in 1969 and 1970 engaged in a series of plane hijackings and hostage takings.
The DFLP called for the “establishment of a democratic state in which Arabs and Jews shall enjoy equal national rights and responsibilities”
as part of a federal socialist state of the whole region. It sought links with the Israeli Trotskyist group Matzpen. 
In 1970, during the mass upheavals in Jordan, both the DFLP and the PFLP raised the slogan “All power to the resistance” and called for a socialist state. But after the Black September crushing of the resistance, the DFLP moved to the right, purging its more left-wing members and moving towards a more pro-Moscow orientation.
This explains why the DFLP, which had participated in the Left Front in the Lebanese civil war and had been critical of the PLO’s failure to launch an all-out struggle against the far-right Lebanese forces, largely dropped out of the fighting once Russia’s ally Syria invaded Lebanon. The main game for Moscow was its relationship with Arab regimes like Syria. That meant that the interests of Arab and Palestinian Communists were always going to be sacrificed.
The Russians were also keen to develop a relationship with Fatah, the mainstream leadership of the PLO. From the late 1970s, the Russians gave the group substantial funding and arms. Consequently, a strong pro-Moscow Stalinist current developed within Fatah.
The DFLP began to popularise the idea of a Palestinian mini-state in the Occupied Territories. By the early 1970s, sections of the Fatah leadership supported the idea but faced opposition within their ranks, so they were happy for the DFLP to be the stalking horse for the idea.
The DFLP was smaller than the PFLP and had less of a base in the refugee camps. But it had an ideological impact on left-wing intellectual circles in the Arab world. In the early 1970s, it published an influential weekly paper in Beirut with the Lebanese Communist Action Organisation. This enabled it to play an important role in rallying sections of the secular Arab intelligentsia to support a two-state position. It was a slippery slope. The end result was that the DFLP became little more than a left cover for Fatah’s betrayals. 
The PFLP was hostile to “Arab reaction”, represented in its view by feudalism and capitalism, particularly the rulers of Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, the Gulf States and Jordan. But it was much less critical of the supposed radical Arab regimes such as Algeria, South Yemen, Syria and, at times, Iraq.
In March 1969, George Habash attacked the DFLP as suffering from “infantile leftism”. “We are not as against Arab regimes as they are”, he argued. “We criticise but collaborate with Arab regimes, as Mao did with the Kuomintang against the Japanese threat in China.”
But so-called radical regimes like Algeria, Syria and Iraq were far from reliable allies of the Palestinian masses. Their approach was not qualitatively different from that of Jordan, Egypt or Saudi Arabia. By tying themselves to these regimes, the PFLP downplayed the need to build a mass revolutionary movement from below throughout the Arab world. The PFLP ended up providing left cover for regimes like the Ba’ath in Iraq and Syria.
So, while the PFLP called itself Marxist-Leninist and talked a lot about the role of the masses and the working class, this became little more than a rhetorical incantation as it sought alliances with various non-proletarian forces.
In 1970, Habash went to China and North Korea to win support, and the Chinese began to send the PFLP considerable amounts of arms. But this was at a cost, as the Chinese opposed the PFLP’s attacks on conservative Arab regimes in Jordan and Saudi Arabia, with which China was trying to curry favour.
After the defeat of the Arab states in the 1973 war with Israel, Yasser Arafat openly backed the proposal for a Palestinian mini-state in the Occupied Territories. In response, the PFLP and other groups formed the Rejection Front, which was also backed by the Iraqi regime.
Opposition to a mini-state had a resonance among intellectuals and students and in some refugee camps in Lebanon (after all, the refugees would get nothing out of setting up a state in the Occupied Territories). However, by 1978 Iraq was moving to cosy up to the conservative Arab regimes and it consequently went cold on the Rejection Front, which went into a marked decline.
Despite tensions and battles with Fatah, the PFLP refused to break decisively with the Fatah-dominated PLO and called for the national unity of all Palestinian groups. In other words, despite declaring itself a Marxist-Leninist organisation, the PFLP consistently put nation before class. It sought to unite with the bourgeois-dominated Fatah rather than build a class-struggle alternative to Fatah’s betrayals of Palestinian workers and peasants.
The PFLP came to operate as a ginger group within the PLO rather than trying to build a clear socialist leadership alternative to Fatah. This led the PFLP, on several occasions, to fudge its opposition to official PLO policy in the interests of preserving national unity. 
Eventually, the PFLP toned down its opposition to a two-state solution. It came to accept it as inevitable, and when the Palestinian Authority was established, it chose to operate within its framework.
The failure of the PFLP, the DFLP and the official Communist parties to build a class-struggle alternative to the rightward-moving Fatah demoralised their supporters. The demoralisation was further compounded by the collapse of the Russian bloc, which all of the Arab left had mistakenly looked to as socialist. 
This opened the space for the rise of the Islamists, who cohered around them a new generation of Palestinians who wanted to fight. But the Islamists were incapable of offering a road forward and, just like Fatah, led the Palestinian people down the road to further defeats.
A new revolutionary left needs to be built in Palestine and the broader Arab world that bases itself on a clear rejection of all forms of alliances with capitalist forces. A left that puts working-class unity ahead of national unity. A left that has no truck with any of the Arab regimes, whether so-called progressive or reactionary. A left that fights for working-class leadership of the struggle against Zionism and imperialism. One that seeks to rally the urban poor, the peasantry and the refugees behind the working class and recognises that freedom for the Palestinian people can be won only by a socialist revolution that sweeps away both the Zionist state and the bourgeois Arab states.

Mick Armstrong

The terrible legacy of Stalinism in the Middle East

Israel’s latest murderous assault on Lebanon is part of a recurring pattern of imperialist aggression. Israel has invaded Lebanon three times previously—in 1978, 1982 and 2006. On each occasion, Israel inflicted horrific death and misery as well as destroying vital infrastructure and forcing thousands of people from their homes. 
The three previous invasions are, however, only part of the story of Israel’s concerted aggression against the Lebanese people. For well over 50 years, there have been repeated Israeli air raids, sabotage operations, naval attacks, border raids and the funding of the military operations of Lebanese fascist forces. And for many years, Israel maintained an occupation of south Lebanon.
After the defeat of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in Jordan in 1971, Lebanon became the main centre of the Palestinian resistance to the Zionist occupation. To counter the Palestinian forces, Israel attacked Lebanon more than 6,200 times between 1968 and 1975.
As a consequence of the Israeli aerial attacks, some of the Palestinian refugee camps in southern Lebanon were totally levelled. By October 1977, about 300,000 refugees—mainly Lebanese Shia Muslims—had fled southern Lebanon.
These attacks provoked mass popular opposition amongst workers and the poor in Lebanon. After the Israelis assassinated three Palestinian leaders in Beirut in 1973, 250,000 demonstrators, roughly a tenth of the population of Lebanon, marched in protest. The Lebanese army, however, refused to lift a finger to fight Israel and instead tried to crush the resistance.
The ongoing raids into south Lebanon radicalised the predominantly Shiite population of the south and led to the rapid growth of the Lebanese Communist Party, the Organization of Communist Action and other socialist groups. These groups organised armed militias to repel Israeli attacks.
Israel in turn armed and trained fascist militias in Lebanon. The largest militia, the Kataeb or Phalange, had been directly inspired by General Franco’s Spanish fascists of the 1930s.
In March 1978, Israel invaded southern Lebanon up to the Litani River in an attempt to crush the PLO’s guerrilla forces. The Israel Defence Force unleashed cluster bombs provided by the United States against the civilian population, killing between 1,100 and 2,000 Lebanese and Palestinians and forcing 100,000 to 250,000 to flee as refugees.
Israel installed their far-right ally, the South Lebanon Army militia, to preside over Lebanese territory south of the Litani River. During its long years of military rule, the South Lebanon Army, which was cohered, armed and trained by Israel, became notorious for its sheer brutality. In 1985, it set up the Khiam detention centre, where torture was carried out on a large scale against its popular opponents.
In 1982, Israel invaded again. This time, Israeli troops advanced all the way to the Lebanese capital Beirut. They laid siege to the city for nearly two months to starve the population into submission. They then unleashed their fascist Lebanese allies to carry out a horrific massacre of the population of the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila.
In some areas of southern Lebanon, the Islamist organisation Amal was able to mobilise sections of the Shiite population against the Palestinians and the left, who they blamed for the devastation wreaked by Israel. Amal aped the fascist Phalange with its own massacres of Palestinians. Nonetheless, over the next few years a concerted struggle by left-wing and Arab nationalist forces managed to drive the Israelis out of all but a small strip of southern Lebanon.
By 2006, Hezbollah had established itself as a powerful force in Lebanon, both politically and militarily. So Israel again invaded, determined to take out Hezbollah and thus severely weaken the strategic position of Hezbollah’s ally Iran.
As is invariably the case, Israel was backed by the US, which vetoed a UN ceasefire resolution. Initially, most of the surrounding Sunni Arab states were happy to see Israel take on their regional rival.
But this time the Israeli steamroller was stopped in its tracks as Hezbollah was able to galvanise widespread popular support from outside its core Shia communal base. After 33 days of intense fighting, the Israel Defence Force was forced to retreat with its tail between its legs.
Israel has long held plans for another assault on Hezbollah to make amends for its defeat in 2006. Israel’s public justification this time is that it is simply responding to rocket attacks by Hezbollah, a listed terrorist organisation.
But the Israeli state and, notoriously, its security apparatus Mossad have long been among the most proficient and blatant exponents of terrorism—car bombings, individual assassinations, poisonings and sabotage operations—all around the world. The recent coordinated Israeli attack on pagers and walkie-talkies is just their latest terrorist atrocity.
Yet again Israel’s war drive is backed by the US and other Western powers such as Australia. The US administration doesn’t relish the prospect of a war with Iran, which Israel’s assault on Hezbollah opens up. Nonetheless, the US continues to pour in the weaponry that Israel vitally depends on to carry out its assault on Lebanon and is sending more warships and troops to the Middle East to back Israel. Why?
Because whatever its “excesses”, Israel is a key strategic force defending the interests of US imperialism in the Middle East. With its enormous oil wealth and its strategic location, including the vital international trade route the Suez Canal, the region is of vital importance to world capitalism.
Consequently, the US establishment, including both major political parties, continues to provide the political support and the enormous military hardware necessary for Israel to wage its repeated wars and to carry out its genocide in Gaza.
The liberal Israeli newspaper Haaretz summed up the relation of Israel to Western imperialism as early as September 1951: “Israel has been given a role not unlike that of a watchdog ... Should the West prefer for one reason or another to close its eyes it can rely on Israel punishing severely those of the neighbouring states whose lack of manners towards the West has exceeded the proper limits”.
Indeed, most of Israel’s innumerable wars have been waged, not against the Palestinians, but against the neighbouring Arab states. As far back as 1956, Israel made clear its role as a protector of Western imperialist interests by joining the old imperial powers of France and Britain in a war on Egypt. The war was in response to the nationalisation of the Suez Canal by Egypt’s new nationalist government led by Gamal Abdel Nasser. 
Since then, Israel has waged war after war against the surrounding Arab states. It was Israel’s lightning military victory in 1967 over Egypt, Syria and Jordan that really demonstrated Israel’s worth to the US as a power in the region.
In the wake of the 1967 war, the US began to throw its full weight behind Israel with much greater political, financial and military support. It became the key defender of Western imperialist interests in a volatile region. Israel’s latest war is no exception to this pattern. 
There has been much hypocritical hand-wringing in the West, including by the Albanese government, over the devastation being inflicted on Lebanon. But the Western leaders’ calls for a ceasefire and “restraint” by Israel are nothing more than a show.
The rich and powerful in the US, Britain and Australia know on which side their bread is buttered. A victory for Israel very much serves their rapacious capitalist interests. We must stridently oppose this war.

Israel’s history of aggression against Lebanon

The hidden history of Lebanon’s revolt

There is no shortage of sympathy for the besieged people of Gaza among the mass of people of Jordan, 50 to 60 percent of whom have Palestinian heritage. This is reflected in the substantially revived street protest movement.
Since 24 March, there have been nightly marches on the Israeli embassy in the capital, Amman, and ongoing protests elsewhere demanding the breaking of ties with the Zionist state and an end to the peace treaty that Jordan signed with Israel in 1994. However, this support for Palestinians facing genocide does not come from the rich and powerful who rule the Jordanian state.
The authorities denounced the protests as the work of “foreign agents” and instructed the security forces to attack them and to make widespread arrests of protest leaders. A previous round of protests in October and November was broken by mass arrests and police violence. 
The Jordanian government has maintained a multi-billion-dollar gas deal with Israel and even opened a land bridge to allow trade to bypass the Houthi attacks on shipping in the Red Sea. No wonder that Joe Biden praised the Jordanian King for his “critical leadership” and pledged “unwavering” US support for Jordan.
In its most explicit military backing for Israel, Jordan this month allied with the US to help repel Iran’s drone and missile barrage. Other Arab states, such as Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, participated in this military defence of Israel. But Jordan was the most brazen about it, mobilising its air force to shoot down Iranian drones.
To cover their tracks, Jordan’s rulers have called for a ceasefire and for more food aid for Gaza. King Abdullah engaged in a grandstanding photo opportunity, airdropping food into Gaza in an operation co-ordinated with the Israeli military, while Queen Rania has sought to use her Palestinian origins to deflect criticism.
None of this grandstanding has in the least upset US officials, who know that they can count on the government in Amman as a “reliable partner during regional crises”. It is precisely for this reason that Jordan was one of the first countries to obtain a free trade agreement with the US back in 2000.
Jordan is a leading recipient of US financial aid, currently worth US$1.45 billion a year. Its military expenditure is well above the world average, as a percentage of GDP, and is based on US supplied weaponry.
Indeed, the Jordanian monarchy has a long history of collaboration with Israel and the major imperialist powers, first Britain and then the US, and of repressing its own Palestinian population—most notoriously in the 1970 Black September massacre.
The Jordanian state had its origins in the carve up of the Ottoman Empire by the imperialist powers at the end of World War One. However, the British did not even send troops to occupy their new possession of Transjordan, as it was overwhelmingly desert and had a population of only 200,000. Its only strategic value was as a link between Britain’s more important colonies of Palestine and Iraq. 
After initial hesitation, Britain handed Transjordan to Abdullah Hussein, a Hashemite prince from the area around Mecca in current day Saudi Arabia. His brother Faisal, who the British regarded as a more accomplished figure, was installed as king of Iraq after he had been dethroned by the French as king of Syria.
Abdullah badly needed British backing. He had arrived in Maan, southern Jordan, in November 1920 with a mere 300 followers and six machine guns. As an outsider, Abdullah had no developed base of support in an area beset by rival Bedouin tribes. And he faced the threat of invasion by the Saudis who, in October 1924, had defeated Abdullah’s Hashemite relatives and captured Mecca.
Britain’s air force secured Abdullah’s position. The British also built a local army initially drawn from Palestinians, Syrians and Circassians. Though, by the 1930s, it was dominated by local Bedouin recruits with British officers in command.
While Abdullah relied on British financial support and military backing, he was not content to be a mere lackey in control of a Jordanian backwater. He had his own expansionist ambitions with his eyes set on becoming king of Syria and Lebanon.
When that ambition was blocked by the French imperialists, he turned his attention to acquiring Palestine. By the early 1930s, Abdullah and the Zionist leaders in Palestine were allies and the Jewish Agency, a branch of the World Zionist Organization, was providing him with money. Abdullah also supported proposed Zionist settlements in Jordan and land sales to Zionists. This was blocked by a British veto.
Abdullah opposed the Palestinian popular revolt of 1936-39 against the British, the Zionist settlers and the wealthy Palestinian landlords, and took concerted measures to prevent it spreading to Jordan.
In May 1946, Jordan was proclaimed an independent kingdom. But without the oil wealth of other Arab states, Abdullah still relied on a British subsidy and British officers remained in command of his army. He continued to hold regular secret meetings with the Zionist leaders and backed the proposal for the partition of Palestine. He saw it as an opportunity to grab territory.
In the 1948 war with Israel, the small British officered Jordanian army was the most effective fighting force of the Arab armies. This had nothing to do with liberating the Palestinian people. It was all about seizing as much territory as possible on the West Bank for the Jordanian ruling class.
It was a very profitable operation as the West Bank was more economically advanced and agriculturally fertile than Jordan. The 458,000 refugees fleeing Zionist atrocities also provided a readily exploitable workforce. New refugee camps were tightly policed by Jordanians drawn from elite families. Wages fell by 50 percent on the West Bank.
To provide a charade of democracy, Abdullah allowed lower house elections in April 1950. But while the West Bank contained two-thirds of the population, it was allocated just half the seats. And the unelected upper house was stacked with wealthy Bedouin notables loyal to the king.
Sections of the regime fomented chauvinist hostility against Palestinian “outsiders” with calls for “Jordan for the Jordanians”. In July 1951, when Abdullah was assassinated by a Palestinian gunman, Amman was rocked by anti-Palestinian riots.
By the 1960s, the Palestinian population was recovering from the defeat of 1948 and a new national liberation movement was on the rise. Fatah, headed by Yasser Arafat, was the dominant force in the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO). But more radical groups like the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine also gained support.
Jordan, which was swelled by a further wave of Palestinian refugees after Israel seized the West Bank in 1967, became the main base for the Palestinian guerrilla forces. But the Arafat leadership of the PLO pledged to not intervene in the internal affairs of Arab states such as Jordan. Nonetheless, discontent among the refugees was surging and there were repeated clashes with the Jordanian Army. The refugee camps around Amman became no-go areas for the Jordanian police.
King Hussein, who ascended the throne in 1952, was vulnerable. But despite calls by radical Palestinian groups and Jordanian leftists for a revolt against the regime, Arafat refused to take decisive action. This gave Hussein time to regroup and to obtain US arms.
In September 1970, the Bedouin dominated army, whose salaries had been substantially raised, attacked the refugee camps near Amman where the guerrillas had their main bases. Intense fighting went on for days.
The Israeli air force intervened to back Jordan and counter any Arab support for the PLO. It took ten months for the Jordanian army to defeat the Palestinian forces. A final action occurred in July 1971 in the country’s north, where 5,000 remaining guerrillas made a concerted stand.
The Palestinians had suffered a serious defeat not at the hands of the Israelis but at the hands of an Arab state. This was to be a recurring pattern.
In 1976, the Syrian regime, with Jordan’s backing, invaded Lebanon to prevent the allied Lebanese leftists and Palestinian forces from winning the civil against right-wing Lebanese forces. The Arab rulers feared that the overthrow of the Lebanese regime would spark revolts throughout the region, threatening their own wealth and power.
By the late 1980s, King Hussein, who was a great admirer of British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, was facing growing discontent at home over his right-wing economic policies. In 1989, rioting against social spending cuts broke out among his traditional base of support in the non-Palestinian population in the south of the country.
Between 1988 and 1991, the standard of living fell by about one-third and unemployment climbed above 30 percent. In this context, the regime was terrified that the Intifada sweeping occupied Palestine might spread to Jordan.
In the hope of stabilising the situation, Jordan backed the 1993 Oslo Accord between Israel and the PLO and the 1994 Cairo Agreement that established the Palestinian Authority to police the occupied territories on behalf of the US and Israel. Jordan concluded its own peace agreement with Israel later that year.
To reward Jordan, the US provided US$950 million in debt relief and new military equipment to modernise the Jordanian armed forces. By 2003, Jordan was the fourth largest recipient of US aid after Israel, Egypt and Colombia.
The Jordanian business class hoped that the normalisation of relations with Israel would lead to increased Israeli investment and a surge of Israeli tourists. Meanwhile, the king was avidly courting right-wing Israeli politician Binyamin Netanyahu even before he won the country’s national election in May 1996.
But a growing gap opened between the pro-US and pro-Israel opinions of the Jordanian ruling class and the opinions of the mass of workers and the poor. To curb growing opposition to the government, there was a crackdown on democratic rights and press freedom.
The repression was stepped up further under the new King Abdullah II, who ascended the throne in 1999. More than 100 emergency laws were introduced. To divide the population between “Jordanians” and “Palestinian outsiders”, Abdullah promulgated a “Jordanian first” ideology with loyalty to Jordan coming before everything else.
The king maintained tight security cooperation with Israel, including joint military training exercises. Mass protests in Amman in support of the Second Intifada in September 2000 were “contained” by an authoritarian crackdown by the intelligence service, the army and the police. 
Yet strikes and riots occurred regularly during the 2000s against austerity measures. Importantly, these actions did not just involve Palestinians, but also rocked the public service, which primarily employed non-Palestinians, and cities in the south such as Maan.
Substantial protests swept the country in 2011 as part of the Arab Spring and discontent has remained high in subsequent years. There were revived protests in 2018 after cuts to food subsidies and increases in sales taxes. In 2020, the regime broke up protests in support of higher teachers’ pay, arresting more than 1,000 teachers.
Jordan remained a close US ally backing the so-called war on terror, even sending Jordanian troops to support the US in Afghanistan.
The cynical pro-imperialist policies of the Jordanian regime are typical of the rulers of country after country in the Arab world. These regimes are all about advancing their own wealth and power and maximising the profits of their capitalist classes. King Abdullah alone has a net worth of more than a billion dollars and the royal family owns a global network of real estate.
The Arab ruling classes are going to have to be overthrown if there is to be any hope for both the Palestinian people and the broader masses of the Arab world. There is no shortage of combustible material. While the rulers of Jordan continue to flaunt their wealth alongside the super rich of Saudi Arabia and the UAE, unemployment stood at 22 per cent at the start of this year and 40 percent among young people.

Jordan has long betrayed the Palestinians

In the latest outburst of national security hysteria, ASIO spy chief Mike Burgess declared, <a href="https://www.oni.gov.au/asio-annual-threat-assessment-2024">in a speech on 28 February</a>, that an unnamed former Australian politician had betrayed our beloved country by clandestinely working for an evil foreign spy network—which he called “the A-team”—to provide secret information to a rival power.
“This politician sold out their country, party and former colleagues”, he declared, “to advance the interests of the foreign regime. At one point, the former politician even proposed bringing a prime minister’s family member into the spies’ orbit”. Unbelievable! Simply not cricket! 
The media lapped up this manna from heaven and naturally went on a furious round of China bashing. After all, the foreign power in question couldn’t be the Indians or New Zealanders. They play cricket!
Peter Dutton and a coterie of Liberal politicians waded in with calls to out the evil “traitor” and clear the supposed “good name” of other politicians. But if ASIO was to release a full list of Australian politicians, journalists and trade union officials who have provided information to foreign powers, it would be an extremely long one indeed and would include Dutton himself.
Back in 2010 Wikileaks published <a href="https://www.wikileaks.org/Cablegate-250-000-US-Embassy.html">a swathe of secret US embassy cables</a> that <a href="https://www.smh.com.au/national/arbib-revealed-as-secret-us-source-20101208-18prg.html">revealed that Mark Arbib</a>—then a federal Labor cabinet minister and a former NSW ALP state secretary—had long been a “protected” US source. 
Arbib wasn’t alone. Other Labor contacts of the US embassy include current cabinet ministers Bill Shorten and Richard Marles, former minister Bob McMullan, former union leader Paul Howes and a string of right-wing Labor MPs including David Feeney, Peter Khalil and the one-time member for Melbourne Ports, Michael Danby. 
Danby is a special case as he operated as a kind of double agent, also providing help and advice to the Israeli government. In fact, Danby didn’t just provide information to the Israeli state—he worked, in effect, as an operative for it. In one case, while spuriously claiming he couldn’t attend parliament because of illness, <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-10-16/michael-danby-missed-sitting-week-to-attend-israel-conference/9053194">he flew to Israel</a>, among other things to <a href="https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/world-vision-eyeless-in-gaza/">attack the worthy charity World Vision</a> for its mild-mannered criticisms of Israel’s oppression of the Palestinians.
Burgess’ latest expose was flagrant grandstanding, aimed at demonstrating what a fantastic job ASIO is doing protecting us all from nefarious foreign operatives like “the A-team”. No doubt he thought this would encourage further increases to the agency’s bloated budget.
In reality, though, the bulk of ASIO’s budget—which totalled $514.1 million for the current financial year (an increase of $33.9 million from 2021-22)—has always gone into covert operations to protect the interests of the business establishment against protesters, union activists and political dissidents here in Australia rather than into combating foreign spies.
Indeed, ASIO and the other Australian spy agencies such as the Australian Signals Directorate actively facilitate the operations of the great bulk of foreign spies based on Australian soil. They work closely, for example, with the hundreds of US spies who operate out of the Pine Gap base located just outside Alice Springs in the Northern Territory.
The CIA-controlled Pine Gap is a vital base for monitoring information from US spy satellites and directing US military operations around the world. Pine Gap played a central role during the US invasion of Iraq and numerous other wars, and continues to play that role in US-backed wars like <a href="https://declassifiedaus.org/2023/11/03/targeting-palestine/">Israel’s assault on Gaza today</a>.
Pine Gap is also used for the geolocation of cellphones operated by people throughout the world, from the Pacific to the edge of Africa. This enables the US military to pinpoint airstrikes and drone strikes and to carry out covert operations such as the assassination of dissidents.
In 2013 former US National Security Agency (NSA) analyst Edward Snowden revealed that Pine Gap, as well as three other locations in Australia and one in New Zealand, contributed to the NSA’s global interception and collection of internet and telephone communications, which involves systems like <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jul/31/nsa-top-secret-program-online-data">XKeyscore</a>. The base is used by US and Australian spies to monitor civilian communications, including telephone calls, emails and internet traffic, in Australia and around the world.
Pine Gap is just one of a growing number of US military and spy bases here in Australia, including the longstanding North West Cape base in Western Australia.
One genuine issue raised by ASIO is the increased surveillance and attacks by foreign governments on political dissidents who now live in Australia. These actions should definitely be called out and exposed.
However, the security forces are very selective when it comes to highlighting foreign interference in Australian politics. They single out China, Iran and so on. They very much shut up about actions by so-called friendly powers such as India, which has been targeting Sikh activists abroad. They cooperate closely with the activities of the Israeli state, despite the fact that its spy agency Mossad <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2010-02-26/mossad-factory-churned-out-fake-australian/343612">notoriously manufactured</a> counterfeit Australian passports for its agents’ use.
But the thing that really highlights the hypocrisy of Australian media and politicians’ morally righteous claims about the dirty deeds of foreign powers is the Australian state’s own long history of spying and covert operations both abroad and against its own citizens.
One of the most notorious cases was the bugging of the offices of East Timor’s government by the Australian Secret Intelligence Service (ASIS)—Australia’s overseas spy outfit—in the lead-up to negotiations about the rights to fossil fuel resources in the Timor Sea worth an estimated $71 billion. This helped ensure Australian officials were well placed to do over the poverty-stricken Timorese.
Then, to compound this typical Australian act of bastardry, the heroic whistleblowers who exposed the ASIS scheme—a conscience-stricken senior intelligence officer and his lawyer Bernard Collaery—were <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jul/12/witness-k-and-the-australian-spying-operation-that-continues-to-betray-timor-leste">subjected to years of persecution</a>.
Australian spying operations are, however, much more extensive and longstanding than simply the Timorese case. Since at least the 1980s— as part <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-10-30/australia-acting-as-listening-post-for-us-spy-agencies/5056534">of an operation codenamed “Reprieve”</a>—Australian embassies in Port Moresby, Jakarta and Bangkok, among others, have used highly sophisticated electronic intercept equipment to monitor all telecommunications. 
When it comes to operating nefarious international spy networks, Australia can match it with the best.

The most nefarious spy networks in Australia are its own and its allies’

The US and Britain proclaim that the concerted attacks they have launched on Houthi military positions in Yemen are all in the noble defence of “international law”. In this, of course, they have the wholehearted support of the Albanese Labor government and Peter Dutton’s Liberal opposition.
Yet the imperialist powers, again with Australia’s backing, are more than happy to ignore that very same international law when it comes to Palestine. They allow Israel to defy it with impunity with its relentless expansion of illegal settlements on the West Bank, its repeated murders of Palestinian civilians by armed gangs of settlers and its murderous attacks on hospitals, schools, refugee camps, mosques and churches in the course of its genocidal war on Gaza.
This double standard is not some regrettable oversight by Joe Biden and Co. It reflects the reality that there is something far more sacred to the Western capitalist powers than international law: profit and strategic domination over the Middle East.
The Houthis’ actions in solidarity with the Palestinians have not resulted in the deaths of tens of thousands of unarmed civilians or left 2 million people homeless. The Houthis have, however, disrupted the orderly passage of oil tankers through the Suez Canal and the Red Sea and consequently hit profits. For the imperialist powers, that is a much more terrible crime than the ethnic cleansing of Gaza.
It is for the same reasons of strategic power and the protection of profits that the US has long armed Israel to the teeth and backed its dispossession of the Palestinian people. Palestinian lives don’t count when it comes to securing imperialist control over the oil-rich Middle East.
Yemen itself has long suffered from imperialist intervention. Little wonder that it is today the poorest country in the Arab world.
The British military seized Aden in south Yemen in 1839. The port of Aden was vital for the British Navy’s control of the sea route to India—the jewel in the crown of the empire.
The British faced repeated tribal revolts, which they ruthlessly crushed—initially with ground troops and then in the twentieth century with devastating bombing raids on defenceless villagers. However, by the 1950s a powerful working-class movement had emerged.
The unions launched repeated mass strikes for improved living standards and eventually an insurrection against British rule. By the 1960s, a guerrilla war had broken out. Despite savage repression, the British were unable to crush the rebellion. At the end of 1967, they were forced to evacuate South Yemen.
In the north, which was then a separate country, a nationalist revolt had overthrown the reactionary monarchy and set up the Yemen Arab Republic. The British, the Israelis and the Saudi Arabian and Jordanian monarchies armed and funded a reactionary Islamist revolt against the republican government, which led to a devastating war.
War after war followed over the following decades, extended by the shifting alliances of rival local forces and their opportunistic imperialist backers—the US and Russia, and various regional powers, including the Saudis and Egypt.
In 1978, Ali Abdullah Saleh became president of North Yemen; in 1990, the country was unified under Saleh’s dictatorial rule. With the on-and-off backing of the West, Saleh maintained his corrupt regime for 33 years through opportunistic alliances, by playing off one tribal group or religious sect against another and by using brutal repression.
Then, in 2011, inspired by the revolts that swept the region in the course of the Arab Spring, a mass rebellion erupted against Saleh’s rule. Day after day, hundreds of thousands took to the streets demanding the downfall of the regime.
The democratic revolt sweeping the country offered hope of a better world for Yemen’s workers, young people and rural poor. That made it a threat not just to Saleh, but to Washington and the Saudi regime, which intervened to ensure “regional stability”.
They divided the opposition forces, bought off various opportunists and brought to power Saleh’s Vice-President Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi. Hadi’s regime survived a few years before it was brought down by ongoing fighting.
The Houthis, who had long been waging a war in the rural north against the Saleh regime, emerged as a serious force. The Houthis are a tribal or clan-based group adhering to the minority Zaydi current of Shia Islam.
The Houthis’ war with Saleh was not some simply religious affair; after all, Saleh himself came from the Zaydi community. It was a product of a falling out within the elite of the north over local grievances.
Neither are the Houthis, as they are commonly portrayed in the Western press, simply some puppet of the Iranian regime. While more than happy to receive Iranian arms, they operate primarily on the basis of their own local interests.
But nor are the Houthis some democratic liberation force. They impose harsh dictatorial rule in the areas they conquer and, for a period between 2015 and 2017, they formed an alliance with their former rival, the old dictator Saleh.
The Houthis’ actions in support of the Palestinians are popular among the Yemeni population and expose the failures of Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the other much more powerful Arab regimes to lift a finger to stop the genocide in Gaza. But the Houthis’ attacks on Western shipping are also useful for deflecting popular discontent with their rule.
In 2014, the Houthis’ military drove the Hadi government out of the capital, Sanaa, riding a wave of popular revolt. In the south, they faced a heterogeneous coalition of local forces backed by the Saudis and the United Arab Emirates.
The Saudis believed that the massive supplies of high-tech arms they received from the Western powers would enable them easily to crush the Houthis. But despite spending tens of billions on the war, the Saudis and their allies were no match for the battle-hardened Houthi guerrilla fighters.
The Saudis are currently trying to reach a settlement with the Houthis; a fragile truce is now in place. This makes the Saudis far from enthusiastic about the US and British attacks on the Houthis, as they fear that they could reignite a war they are desperate to end.
Nearly a decade of war and famine has devastated Yemen, costing something like 400,000 lives. More than 4 million people have fled their homes.
The latest US and British attacks will simply add to that misery. The Western powers are not in the least interested in democracy, peace, security or decent lives for the people of the Middle East.
Their only concern is protecting their wealth and imperial power. If that means famine in Yemen and genocide in Gaza, then the price is “worth it”, as then US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright notoriously said in defence of the US sanctions that killed 500,000 Iraqi children in the 1990s.

Hypocrisy about the Houthis

US President Joe Biden continues to combine arming Israel to the teeth for its genocidal war on Gaza with hypocritical phrases about supporting a “just” long-term solution for the Palestinian people—a supposed Palestinian state alongside Israel. The other Western powers invoke similar platitudes about a “two-state solution”, including Labor’s foreign minister, Penny Wong, who could not bring herself to criticise even the Israeli blockade that cut off food, water and medical supplies to the civilian population of Gaza.
Let’s cut to the chase: the US and its allies have no intention of forcing Israel to allow the Palestinians to have a genuine state of their own.
Talk of a two-state solution by the great powers and their mainstream media acolytes is nothing but a fig leaf to cover up their concerted backing for Israel’s decades-long war against the Palestinian people. And it is not just the Western powers. The Arab capitalist regimes, like Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states, also cynically employ rhetoric about a two-state solution in an attempt to deflect attention from their unwillingness to defy Western imperialism and give any meaningful support to the oppressed Palestinian masses.
Talk about a supposed two-state solution has been bandied around for well over 50 years, but not one serious step has been taken towards achieving that goal. Why? Because Israel is an aggressively expansionist colonial state that is intrinsically hostile to the Palestinians having any right to national self-determination and a state of their own.
Indeed, the Zionists long denied the very existence of the Palestinian people. The Zionists adhered to their own version of terra nullius: Palestine was “a land without people for a people without land”.
According to the advocates of a two-state solution, the West Bank (the area to the west of the Jordan River) combined with the tiny Gaza Strip would form the basis of a Palestinian state. But ever since Israel’s invasion of the West Bank in 1967, Zionist settlers backed by the Israeli military have been relentlessly seizing more and more land and expelling increasing numbers of Palestinians from their homes.
The West Bank is now honeycombed with Israeli military outposts and Zionist settlements, and the pace of land seizures and murders of Palestinians by the far-right Zionist settlers has dramatically accelerated over the last decade. There are now around 430,000 heavily armed Israeli Jewish settlers on the West Bank as well as 220,000 in East Jerusalem.
The Palestinians are being reduced to living in little pockets of walled-off land similar to the bantustans of apartheid South Africa or the reservations that the US state used to confine Native Americans as it stole their land. However, the process of dispossession that took hundreds of years in North America has taken place in Palestine in a matter of decades.
Left to its own resources, the Israeli state would never have been powerful enough to carry out this ongoing project of ethnic cleansing. It needed the military and financial backing of US imperial power.
The US has long seen Israel as a vital protector of Western imperialist interests, above all oil and trade through the Suez Canal, in this politically unstable region. Precisely because Israel plays such a vital strategic role for world capitalism, the US is simply not prepared to take the sort of decisive measures that would be needed, including cutting off arms supplies, to force Israel to accept the establishment of a truly sovereign Palestinian state with an independent foreign policy and its own armed forces and security apparatus.
The most that Israel has ever been prepared to accept grudgingly is a Palestinian mini-state on the West Bank and Gaza ruled over by the corrupt Palestinian Authority (PA) to police the Palestinian population on behalf of the US and Israel. The West Bank authorities have never had genuine autonomy or control over their supposed territory, and Israel has never allowed the return of the Palestinian refugees and their descendants driven out in the Nakba (catastrophe) of 1948.
Israel and the US effectively control the funding of the PA, and the Israeli army continually carries out military operations on the West Bank, attacking Palestinian refugee camps and backing the far-right Jewish settlers who murder Palestinians and seize their land.
The Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) at its radical height in the 1960s opposed any idea of a two-state solution. The PLO was for one democratic state for all the people of Palestine—Arab and Jew alike.
However, following the severe defeat inflicted upon the Palestinian resistance by the Jordanian army in the 1970 Black September massacre, and subsequent defeats in Lebanon, the PLO’s vision substantially narrowed. It pulled back from mobilising to confront the Zionist state and instead increasingly relied on diplomatic lobbying, motions in the UN and pleas to the US administration to act as an honest broker to negotiate the setting up of a Palestinian mini-state on the West Bank.
By the time of the 1993 Oslo Accord, the PLO, under the leadership of Yasser Arafat’s Fatah and with the support of the Palestinian capitalist class, was prepared to accept the few crumbs still left on the table. In return for being allowed to establish the Palestinian Authority, the PLO agreed to be a police force over its own people on the West Bank and Gaza on behalf of the US and Israel.
Despite the PLO’s capitulation, Israel was never prepared to carry out its side of the Oslo agreement. It continued to seize more land on the West Bank, violate the authority of the PA with repeated military attacks and sabotage the West Bank economy.
The two-state solution of a Palestinian capitalist state alongside Israel is now totally unviable. Yet all around the world liberal and social democratic politicians and some on the left continue to cling to this dead end because they refuse to countenance a revolutionary challenge to the state of Israel. The reality is too hard for them to face: that for any hope of Palestinian liberation, the power of the Israeli state will have to be broken. There is simply no other way forward.
The ongoing struggle of the Palestinians is vital for challenging the oppressive Israeli state. But on their own, no matter how heroic their resistance, the Palestinian masses are not going to be able to break the power of the heavily militarised Israeli state backed by all the might of the US, still the world’s leading imperialist power. To succeed, they need wider support and solidarity.
The working classes of Egypt and the other Arab states have shown time and time again that they are prepared to rise up against their own venal capitalist ruling classes and support the Palestinian people. It is this mass working class force that needs to be galvanised if we are to have any hope of ending the genocide of the Palestinian people and winning freedom and democracy for all the oppressed of the region. 
The uprisings that swept the region in 2011 show that this is possible, but also that the aims of any mass movements that emerge are vitally important. Simply bringing down dictators, or winning limited democratic rights, is not enough to transform the situation fundamentally or win liberation. The radical reordering of society based on mass working class democracy, that is socialism, is needed to achieve that aim, and the need to build up the forces of people committed to that goal is as urgent as ever.

Two states not a solution

It is an indictment of Australian capitalism that, more than 230 years since the British Empire’s invasion of this continent and the consequent dispossession and widespread massacres of the original inhabitants, most Indigenous people remain confined to the very bottom of the social pile.
Despite all the talk about closing the gap, the lives of Indigenous people are not getting better. There has been little improvement in the almost 50 years that have passed since the 1975 Henderson report into poverty. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people remain the most socially and economically deprived and marginalised section of the Australian working class, and continue to face appalling oppression and deep-rooted discrimination.
On virtually every measure—employment, income, health, life expectancy, education, homelessness, savings, imprisonment rates, home ownership and quality of housing—Indigenous people are much worse off than the mass of the population.
Let’s start with incomes. The 2021 census starkly reveals that the median weekly household income for Indigenous adults was $825, compared with $1,141 for non-Indigenous adults. In the Northern Territory, Indigenous adults received less than a third of the amount of non-Indigenous adults (an appallingly low $465, compared to $1,485).
The proportion of Indigenous adults living in households with an income in the lower half of the income distribution declined by only a meagre 2 percent, from 69 percent in 2011 to 67 percent in 2021. Indigenous Australians are vastly over-represented in the lower household income categories, 35 percent of Indigenous adults living in households in the bottom 20 percent of incomes. 
About 30 percent of Indigenous households live in poverty; more than 120,000 Indigenous people live below the poverty line. One consequence of this is that, in New South Wales, Indigenous people account for 6 percent of the entire homeless population.
Indigenous children have the highest rates of poverty of any group in Australia. Half live in families with incomes below the poverty line, compared with 18 percent of non-Indigenous children. 
In 2008, federal, state and territory governments set the goal of halving the employment gap between Indigenous people and other Australians within a decade. That required, by 2018, lifting the employment rate for Indigenous people from 48 percent to 60 percent (the rate for other Australians being 72 percent). But at the time of the 2021 census, there had been barely any improvement—the Indigenous employment rate was still only 51 percent, while that for other Australians was 74 percent. 
The 2021 census also revealed the unemployment rate for Indigenous people was 12 percent, more than double the overall rate. For those living in remote and very remote areas, it is markedly worse, with unemployment rates between 15 and 25 percent. This dire situation in part is due to the federal government’s cancellation in 2021 of the Community Development Program, which threw thousands of Indigenous people in remote areas on to the unemployed scrap heap. 
Even for Indigenous people living in the major cities, the unemployment rate is still double that of other workers, and it is even worse in areas like western Sydney, where many Indigenous people live. 
While over the last quarter of a century a small Indigenous middle class of managers, small business owners, government bureaucrats and well-paid lawyers and other professionals has emerged, Indigenous people who work are still much more likely to be in poorly paid labouring jobs (18.1 percent compared to 11.8 percent of the total population) and in other lower paid blue-collar, sales assistant and clerical jobs than as professionals (14.2 percent compared to 24.7 percent) or managers (8.3 percent compared to 13.7 percent)
Most poverty in Australia is so-called relative poverty, but some Indigenous communities face absolute poverty, which results in high infant mortality rates and severe malnutrition. This is particularly the case in a number of remote communities, which have totally inadequate infrastructure and health provisions and are blighted by diseases that are largely eradicated in the rest of the country. 
Approximately 50 percent of Indigenous adults are reliant on some form of welfare payment. Sole parents are particularly vulnerable to poverty, and a relatively high proportion depend on the Parenting Payment—more than 15 percent of young Indigenous women compared with around 4 percent of non-Indigenous women.
Indigenous people suffer ill health and disability at greater rates than non-Indigenous people. This leads to life expectancy being around eight years less than that for non-Indigenous people. Ill health limits work opportunities and places a significant burden on the individuals and communities that care for the sick and disabled, especially where support services are inadequate or non-existent.
Families relying on public or private rentals are much more vulnerable to poverty. Nearly 60 percent of Indigenous people are housed in some form of rental property, compared to about 30 percent of the total population, and the housing is commonly of poor quality. Conditions are worse for those living in camps on the outskirts of places like Alice Springs.
Indigenous people are much more likely to experience overcrowding or homelessness. Crisis support accommodation for Indigenous women and children escaping family violence is totally inadequate.
Indigenous people are also greatly disadvantaged in the education system. Poverty is a major factor impeding access to quality learning experiences. Indigenous people typically experience rates of school attendance, achievement, retention and completion well below those of the general population. In turn, this contributes to higher unemployment, lower family incomes and a higher incidence of poverty. 
Almost half of Indigenous people (49 percent) do not have a qualification beyond secondary education, compared with 31 percent of other Australians. About 12 percent of Indigenous people attain university qualifications of a bachelor’s degree or above, compared with about 37 percent of other Australians.
For the 6.7 percent of Indigenous people who leave school before year 10, the unemployment rate is more than 25 percent. For those with no qualification beyond secondary school, the rate is 16.7 per cent.
Indigenous people are more likely to suffer reduced quality of life due to ill health, to experience disability and to die at younger ages than the non-Indigenous population. Poorer employment opportunities, education and housing have a decisive impact on health outcomes. Health risk factors (for example, smoking, alcohol misuse) and other risk factors (for example, poor housing, exposure to violence) are much worse for Indigenous people.
The effects of poverty begin at birth. Babies born to Indigenous mothers are much more likely to be of low birth weight compared with non-Indigenous mothers; and Indigenous infant mortality is double that of non-Indigenous infants. Indigenous children have high rates of illness, greater risk of injuries resulting from accidents, higher risk of asthma and lower developmental achievement.
To make things even worse, Indigenous people experience much lower levels of access to health services than the general population, even though they are twice as likely to be hospitalised. 
The Indigenous imprisonment rate is more than 12 times that of the rest of the population—2,470 persons per 100,000 compared to an overall imprisonment rate of 206 per 100,000. In New South Wales alone, where Indigenous people make up slightly less than 4 percent of the population according to the state’s Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research, they accounted for a record 29.7 percent of the state’s adult prison population in February 2023. 
The situation is only getting worse. In Victoria, the Indigenous imprisonment rate soared by 42.1 percent between 2012 and 2022.
For Indigenous women, whom police routinely arrest when they are defending themselves in a domestic disturbance and who are at a distinct disadvantage in accessing legal support, the situation is even worse. By June 2023, the imprisonment rate for Indigenous women had surged to 15 times the rate for all women: 467 per 100,000 for Indigenous women, compared to 31 per 100,000 for all women.
Indigenous imprisonment, which is overwhelmingly for minor offences or long periods on remand awaiting a hearing, disrupts both the lives of the prisoner and that of their family. It compounds poverty and increases the risk of family breakdown, violence, homelessness and addiction. 
Poverty—the lack of money, jobs, inadequate housing and lack of proper health provisions—combined with the inter-generational trauma caused by dispossession and the attempted destruction of Indigenous culture—leads to the breakdown of personal and social relations, chronic mental health and addiction problems, domestic violence and high rates of incarceration. This is the “division on the basis of race” that plagues Australian society, not the proposal to increase token Indigenous representation to the parliament that is responsible for myriad policies that reinforce Indigenous disadvantage. 
This situation is not going to change, let alone be overcome, without a massive struggle by both Indigenous people and the mass of the rest of the working class. And while it is vital to fight for specific reforms to improve the lives of Indigenous people, such as improved job opportunities, an expansion of public housing, improved services and health provision in remote communities and basic measures to prevent deaths in custody, the lack of any significant progress in closing the gap over the past 25 years highlights the fact that a few changes around the edges are not going to be anywhere near enough.
Much more fundamental change in the way Australian society as a whole functions will be necessary to eliminate Indigenous oppression. This is not going to happen within the confines of the profit-driven capitalist system. The ruling class and their supporters in all the major parties are simply not going to invest the money and resources needed to improve a health system that fails to meet the needs of the mass of the working class, let alone those of Indigenous people, or engage in the massive expansion of public housing needed to resolve the housing crisis or pay workers adequate wages or boost the child care and aged care systems.
Nor are the bosses going to be prepared to seriously curb the police, let alone defund the prison system, as this repressive state apparatus is vital not just for persecuting Indigenous people but also for keeping the mass of the exploited in their place and protecting the rulers’ capital and investments.
The reality is that the whole existing order needs to be uprooted in a revolutionary struggle. What’s needed is a socialist society that puts human needs above corporate profits and allows Indigenous people to achieve genuine control over their lives. That makes it a vital task to build a movement that unites all of the exploited and oppressed in a class war against the rich and powerful.

Indigenous oppression is a product of poverty

Tom O’Lincoln, one of the key founders of the revolutionary socialist current from which Socialist Alternative originated, has sadly died in Melbourne after a long illness.
I first met Tom in 1974 when I joined the Socialist Workers Action Group (SWAG). Tom was the leading political figure in the group—doing everything from public speaking to running internal educationals, writing scores of articles for our soon-to-be re-launched paper, The Battler, and drawing up perspective documents. In a small group like SWAG, which only had 16 or 18 members when I joined, leaders like Tom had to be a jack-of-all-trades, combining political tasks with more “hum drum” ones, such as typing up newsletters and spending hour after hour, in the pre-photocopier age, running off interminable leaflets and documents on a Gestetner machine that was prone to repeatedly breaking down. Tom combined all this incredible activity with his work as a school teacher, through which he was a prominent activist in the militant rank-and-file group in the secondary teachers’ union at the time.
Tom had developed his Marxist politics in the US International Socialists (IS). The IS had a distinctive political orientation compared to the many other socialist groups that existed in the early 1970s. While resolutely hostile to Western capitalism, the IS also opposed the Stalinist tyrannies that paraded as socialist in countries like Russia and China. Its slogan was: “Neither Washington nor Moscow but International Socialism”.
The IS stood for workers’ power and the overthrow of the bosses and ruling bureaucrats in every country. It based itself on the core principle of Marxism: that the emancipation of the working class is the task of the working class itself.
There were going to be no liberators from on high, whether Labor politicians, union bureaucrats, Russian tanks or guerrilla bands; workers had to liberate themselves. Reflecting that perspective, the IS championed industrial militancy and direct action, the formation of rank-and-file groups in workplaces, and the building of a revolutionary party to challenge the reformist political leaders.
After moving to Australia in 1971 with Janey Stone, who had also been active in the IS (US), Tom joined the small Marxist Workers Group (MWG), a loose group whose politics were evolving. Over the following two years, Tom and Janey played a key role in winning the MWG to explicitly IS politics.
They also successfully argued that the MWG had to become a more coherent and disciplined Leninist organisation with a more interventionist and activist orientation. Reflecting this shift, the MWG changed its name to the Socialist Workers Action Group (SWAG) and put out the first edition of its paper, The Battler, for the December 1972 elections that brought the Whitlam Labor government to office.
Over the next few years, SWAG began to grow despite some setbacks. Then, in the wake of the mass working class revolt provoked by the Kerr Coup of 11 November 1975, SWAG set itself the task of breaking out of Melbourne and building a national revolutionary organisation.
Tom and a small group of comrades, including myself, moved to Sydney to establish a branch there. The group had been renamed the International Socialists following a regroupment conference at which we united with a small revolutionary group in Hobart and made stronger connections with a group of comrades in Canberra, who were soon to join.
As part of an attempt to break into the working class, Tom argued for a perspective of industrialisation—student members taking blue-collar factory jobs. He led by example, taking a job in the metal trades, the key centre of industrial militancy in those years.
With various shifts in orientation, the IS continued to grow in the course of the 1970s. Branches were established in Brisbane, where we played a leading role in the civil liberties campaign against the right-wing Bjelke Petersen government’s ban on street marches, as well as in Adelaide, Canberra and Sydney in addition to Melbourne.
In late 1979, Tom, Janey and I visited Lebanon and stayed with members of the Palestine Liberation Organisation. Tom could speak a wide variety of languages, including German, Franch, Russian and, later, Indonesian. We relied on his French to communicate with our hosts. Tom was a strong supporter of the Palestinian cause, and in Lebanon and Syria we saw the realities of life in refugee camps for Palestinian refugees and we also visited occupied Palestine and met up with revolutionary opponents of the Zionist regime.
<div class="column_width_image article_inline_image"><img alt="Tom O'Lincoln (right) on a visit to Lebanon in 1979" src="https://cms.redflag.org.au/sites/default/files/inline-images/Mick%20and%20Tom%20O.jpg" /></div>
<div class="article_inline_caption">Tom O'Lincoln (right) and Mick Armstrong (left) with Palestinian activists on a visit to the Middle East in 1979</div>
The 1980s were a much more difficult period for the revolutionary left. There was a sharp downturn in industrial militancy, a shift to the right in broader society, and an abandonment of revolutionary politics by large sections of those radicalised during the mass struggles of the late 1960s and early 1970s. A number of socialist groups collapsed.
This led to sharp debates and an eventual split in the IS, in which Tom and I were on opposite sides. However, by the end of the 1980s we had re-united as the International Socialist Organisation (ISO), in which Tom and I both served on the national leadership.
The ISO grew substantially in the early 1990s, but then went off the rails. Reflecting the ISO’s degeneration, a number of comrades in Melbourne were expelled in 1995 and went on to form Socialist Alternative. Tom took a principled stance opposing those expulsions but did not initially leave the ISO. He still hoped the organisation could be reformed. But despite writing some insightful documents, Tom was unable to convince the ISO leadership to change course. Impressed by the consolidation and growth of Socialist Alternative, he joined us more than 15 years ago.
He remained an active member of Socialist Alternative, until the deterioration of his illness made that impossible. Right up to the end he remained a committed revolutionary and a Socialist Alternative member and followed, to the best that he still could, developments in the organisation.
Tom leaves an important legacy in his writings, as well as numerous articles and pamphlets, and a series of important books. His books include Into the Mainstream, an important critique of the Stalinist politics and decline of the Communist Party of Australia; Years of Rage, an analysis of the social conflicts and debates on the left during the Fraser years; two studies of Australian imperialism The Neighbour from Hell and Australia’s Pacific War; a study of the early Australian working class movement, United We Stand; and a collection of his writings, The Expropriators are Expropriated. And as part of his contribution to developing socialist ideas about women’s liberation, he co-edited Rebel Women with Sandra Bloodworth.
Tom’s life and commitment is an inspiration for all of us fighting to overcome the horrors of capitalism. Without comrades like Tom Socialist Alternative would not have become the organisation it is today – with over 500 members the largest revolutionary socialist group in Australia since the 1920s with an active, committed and growing young membership.
His patience, insightfulness and generosity will be keenly missed. Tom never tired of helping people to learn about Marxist politics, and always encouraged others to speak and write.
It is our task to build on his legacy by putting all our energy into the vital task of establishing a socialist movement that is capable of tearing down the existing order and building a new society of genuine freedom in its place. Tom would have endorsed the famous words of Joe Hill: “Don’t mourn, organise”.

Tom O’Lincoln: a political life

Internal ALP opposition to the AUKUS pact, and to the Albanese government’s decision to announce hundreds of billions of dollars of spending on nuclear-powered submarines at a time of sharply falling working-class living standards, proved to be a damp squib at the recent ALP National Conference. The conference, dominated by union powerbrokers, overwhelmingly endorsed AUKUS and even wrote support for nuclear-powered submarines into the party platform.
This wholehearted backing for militarism and imperialism should come as no great shock. From its earliest years, the ALP has been a strong supporter of Australian imperialism. Labor Prime Minister John Curtin was typical when he told the 1943 NSW ALP conference: “This land may remain free only by Australia remaining the policeman in the Pacific.”
Labor has long supported increased military expenditure and has repeatedly criticised the conservative parties for not spending more on armaments. Labor pioneered the establishment of the Australian Navy and, under Andrew Fisher’s Labor government, military spending increased 300 percent between 1910 and 1913. 
As well, Labor has consistently backed the broad consensus among the capitalist class that Australia needs the support of a major imperialist power if it is to advance its strategic and commercial interests in its clashes with rival regional and imperialist powers. That orientation initially meant looking for support to Britain, the long dominant world power.
The quid quo pro for British backing of Australian capitalism in the Pacific region was Australian support for Britain in its imperial wars of conquest. Thus, in the lead-up to World War I, Fisher notoriously declared that Australia would defend the British Empire “to the last man and the last shilling”.
To fulfil that promise, living standards were slashed and the lives of tens of thousands of workers were needlessly sacrificed on the battlefields of France and Turkey. Meanwhile, capitalist war profiteers flourished without Labor lifting a finger to control prices, and Australian capitalists grabbed their share of the spoils of war: the former German colonies in the Pacific.
If it had not been for the enormous working-class rebellion that defeated Labor Prime Minister Billy Hughes’s attempt to impose conscription, the casualty toll would have been hugely higher. And it was only a wave of mass strikes that prevented a complete collapse of wages and working conditions.
Because of its roots in the trade unions, the working-class rebellion had profound ramifications inside the ALP. Hughes had gone too far in his pro-conscription stance, and the union leaders, under pressure from a radicalised rank-and-file, forced his expulsion from the party.
Nonetheless, the mainstream Labor anti-conscriptionists continued to emphasise their support for the war effort. They were for voluntary enlistment, not conscription.
By the time of World War II, Britain was a declining power and Australian capitalism needed another “powerful friend”. Accordingly, in 1942, newly installed Labor Prime Minister John Curtin proclaimed: “Australia looks to America, free of any pangs as to our traditional links or kinship with the United Kingdom”. Australia went on to play a pivotal role as a supply base for the US in its war with Japan.
Labor, as the traditional champion of Australian nationalism, arguably was better placed to make this shift than the conservatives, whose voting base identified as British. Liberal leader Bob Menzies, a strident monarchist, proclaimed that he was “British to his bootstraps”.
After World War II, Labor Foreign Minister Doc Evatt strove to establish a firm basis for US military support for Australia. Evatt wanted the US to maintain troops in the Pacific and lobbied the US administration to establish a military base on Manus Island in New Guinea, then an Australian colony.
Labor leaders were fervent supporters of Western imperialism in Asia. Australia was seen by Labor as a bearer of the supposed virtues of Western civilisation in this corner of the globe, with a vital interest in the preservation of European domination.
However, Labor ideologues, unlike the Liberals, eventually recognised that the Second World War had destroyed the old colonial system and that attempts to reimpose it were foolhardy. Thus, Labor supported formal decolonisation and limited reforms to avoid revolutionary upheavals while leaving the basic colonial relationships intact—the classic pattern of “neo-colonial” imperialism of the postwar period.
The postwar Labor government moved quickly to sign up for the US side in the emerging Cold War with Russia. Under the Chifley government in 1947, a secret agreement was reached between the USA, UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand to integrate their electronic surveillance, code breaking and security intelligence networks.
Nonetheless, the American spy agencies, coming from a country with no tradition of social democratic governments and under the sway of Cold War anti-communist hysteria, worried that Chifley, an old-fashioned right-wing Laborite, was soft on the Reds. They threatened to cut off the exchange of intelligence material if Labor did not establish a new security apparatus. In March 1949, Chifley, in response to this US pressure and at the urging of the UK, established the notorious Australian spy agency ASIO. 
Throughout the Cold War, leading union officials and key ALP powerbrokers—such as Jim Kenny, assistant secretary of the NSW Labor Council and ALP state secretary, Laurie Short of the ironworkers’ union, Australian Workers’ Union Secretary Tom Dougherty and ACTU Secretary Reginald Broadby—developed strong links with the CIA, the US State Department and Cold Warriors in the US trade union movement.
Bob Hawke trod a similar path, establishing close friendships with three US embassy labour attachés. Hawke was also a strident backer of the Israeli state—the US’s enforcer in the oil-rich Middle East.
Following the split with the right-wing Democratic Labor Party in the mid-1950s, for a brief period Labor expressed more concern about the threat of world war and flirted with a non-aligned foreign policy. However, in 1960, Labor criticised the Liberals for the lack of military spending, and by 1963 strong support for ANZUS and regional cooperation with the US were entrenched, with Labor strongly opposing isolationism and anti-Americanism.
Labor apologists like to make out that the ALP strongly opposed the war in Vietnam. That is very much exaggerated.
In 1964, Labor supported sending Australian military instructors to Vietnam and then, in February 1965, backed the US bombing of North Vietnam. However, Labor leader Arthur Calwell, though far from being a radical leftist, was a longstanding opponent of conscription.
Calwell stridently attacked Menzies’ November 1964 decision to introduce conscription and in May 1965 opposed sending troops, conscripts or regular soldiers, to Vietnam. Calwell declared that Labor would fight the 1966 elections on the issue of conscription for Vietnam and that he would “live or perish politically” on the issue. 
All of this was anathema to his deputy leader, Gough Whitlam, who shared the Australian establishment’s pro-war stance and was unswervingly devoted to the US alliance. Indeed, on the eve of the elections, Whitlam helped sabotage Labor’s campaign by declaring at a press conference that he disagreed with Calwell’s policy of withdrawing regular troops from Vietnam.
In the wake of Labor’s severe electoral defeat, Calwell was dumped as leader in favour of the more right-wing Whitlam, who then pushed through a watering down of Labor’s opposition to the war. Disgracefully, this right-wing retreat was backed by much of the Labor left, including Jim Cairns.
Labor’s two-faced stance is typified by Don Dunstan, the supposedly progressive South Australian Labor premier. Dunstan claimed to be a critic of the Vietnam War, but in September 1970 unleashed the state cops to smash up the mass anti-war Moratorium march. On the same day, Dunstan flew from Adelaide to Canberra for a dinner engagement at the US embassy.
The ALP has also strongly supported US military bases in Australia. In May 1962, the Menzies government announced the construction of the North West Cape base in Western Australia. Menzies made out that it was only a communications base, but it was used to direct the operations of US nuclear submarines, which would put Australia at the front line of any global nuclear war.
Jim Cairns, Tom Uren and other figures on the Labor left opposed the establishment of the base, appealing to Labor’s official policy of support for a nuclear-free southern hemisphere. However, Calwell and Whitlam backed the base, spuriously claiming that it would be subject to joint US and Australian control. Their position was narrowly upheld at a special federal ALP conference in March 1963.
Labor raised no criticisms of the establishment of other US bases, such as Pine Gap in 1968. Australia had become the largest single operational centre, outside the US itself, for US missile and outer space activities. 
The 1969 Labor platform stated: “The alliance with the United States is of crucial importance in the foreign policy of Australia and it should be an instrument for justice, peace, political and social development”.
With the ALP long out of government federally, the Labor left of the 1960s voiced criticisms of the US bases, but once back in government under Whitlam, they toed the party line. A classic case was that of the most prominent Labor leftist of the period, Jim Cairns.
Cairns had been a long-term critic of the US spy and military bases, but on becoming deputy prime minister in 1974, he shut up about them. He made no effort, despite being thoroughly entitled to do so, to obtain from the Defence Department information about the operation of the bases. Nor did he seek to tour them.
By the 1990s, there were more than a dozen US military bases or supposed joint facilities in Australia backed by the Hawke/Keating Labor government of 1983-96. The three most important—North West Cape, Nurrungar in South Australia and Pine Gap near Alice Springs—were vital elements of US strategic command, control, communications and satellite systems for launching a nuclear attack.
These were crucial facilities for command and target fixing for US missile launchers, submarines and bombers. The launch of any “first strike” US attack would come through Australia, which would also make Australia a nuclear target for any rival nuclear power.
In 1989, the Hawke government agreed to extend the lease of the Nurrungar base for at least another ten years, which provoked anti-war protesters to storm the isolated base in the South Australian desert. Labor Defence Minister Kim Beazley then sent in troops to secure the base. The police made 492 arrests.
Similarly, the Hawke government defied significant anti-war protests to allow nuclear-armed US warships to visit Australia—in sharp distinction to the New Zealand Labour government, which had banned them. Hawke had, on his first trip to the US as prime minister, fulsomely assured his hosts that Australia and America would be “together forever”. Hawke backed up his words by quickly jumping to support the US in its war on Iraq in 1989.
Hawke also played a central role in undermining opposition to uranium mining. Uranium is vital for the development of nuclear weaponry, and Australia has extensive deposits of this key strategic resource. As early as the 1950s, a uranium mine was established at Radium Hill in South Australia, largely as a US initiative.
In the late 1970s, a strong grassroots movement developed against uranium mining, which combined street protests with concerted working-class industrial action. Waterside workers banned the loading of uranium on ships, and railway workers staged a nationwide strike.
In the face of rank-and-file working-class pressure, Labor, which at that stage was out of government, adopted a policy banning uranium mining. But by 1982, with the prospect of forming government in sight, the ALP conference, at Hawke’s urging, overturned the ban in favour of a “one mine policy”.
This was just the thin end of the wedge. The 1984 the ALP Conference voted for a three mines policy and the right-wing powerbrokers in the party continued to agitate for even more mines. The uranium mining industry was given extremely generous government support in tax concessions and the provision of infrastructure such as roads, railways, energy and water supplies to serve the mines.
Unfortunately, the mass movement against uranium mining had been weakened by the fact that many activists had illusions in Labor. They put too much emphasis on lobbying Labor MPs and party conferences, rather than on building a powerful movement on the streets and in the workplaces to confront the nuclear industry. When Labor inevitably betrayed the movement by ditching its anti-uranium policy, many campaigners were disoriented and demoralised.
This simply underlines the point that we can’t rely on Labor to stand up to the current drive to war against China. Labor is thoroughly wedded to the strengthening of Australian capitalism and the US war alliance.
We have to build an alternative—a socialist party that is committed to breaking the US alliance and that stands for ending the imperialist system that threatens to engulf us in war after war and potentially nuclear destruction.

The terrible legacy of Stalinism in the Middle East

Israel’s history of aggression against Lebanon

The hidden history of Lebanon’s revolt

Jordan has long betrayed the Palestinians

The most nefarious spy networks in Australia are its own and its allies’

Hypocrisy about the Houthis

Two states not a solution

Indigenous oppression is a product of poverty

Tom O’Lincoln: a political life

The ALP and the US alliance

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