 Now, on the question of Israel-Palestine, this question poses serious problems for the labour movement and the left in general. As you can see, how the question of anti-Semitism is being used in Britain, in the Labour Party, but not just in Britain, it's being used around the world. There is an attempt to define anti-Semitism as being the same as anti-Zionism. We as Marxists would disagree with that because they are two very different things. Anti-Semitism is racism, i.e., it's being against an individual for the religion he or she belongs to, the language they speak, the culture they belong to, and you discriminate against them on that basis. Anti-Zionism is not that. It's not anti-Jewish. It's against the policies of the state of Israel today, as we see carried out against the Palestinian people, who are also being terribly discriminated against simply because they are Palestinians. And it's become so bad that if I know that if I say some of the things I'm going to say here, in certain meetings, in certain places in the labour movement, I will be attacked as being anti-Semitic because it's an attempt to cover up completely what the state of Israel has done and is doing to the Palestinian people. What they're doing is racism against a people. I will explain later on how they've even embedded it into the laws of the state of Israel. Now, there are two extreme views on Israel. One is the old slogan, which the PLO leaders used to have in the 60s, 70s, which was from the river to the sea, which implied destroying Israel as a nation and expelling the Jews. The other extreme, of course, is the extreme right-wing Zionists who today are in favour of actually expelling the citizens of Israel who are Arabs, i.e. the Palestinians who were able to stay inside the borders of Israel after its creation. They are the two extreme views, both of which we believe are reactionary. We oppose both and we are for the right of both peoples to live in Israel-Palestine with the right of return to a homeland for the millions of Palestinians living in the refugee camps. The question is, how do we achieve such an aim, which can seem quite utopian, quite distant, quite abstract, given the decades of animosity which is built up between the two peoples? We actually believe that on a capitalist basis, there is no solution. The capitalist solution was the Palestinian Authority. That's as far as they went under capitalism. The Jewish, not the Jewish, the Israeli ruling class, the Zionist Israeli ruling class, will not tolerate an independent Palestinian state in any form because for the Palestinian people, statehood is not simply achieving a homeland which they can call their own country. It is combined with a whole series of demands such as jobs, housing, health care, the development of their economy and that would mean coming into conflict with the interests of Israeli capitalism. So we exclude the idea that it's possible on a capitalist basis. It can only be achieved on a socialist basis. The question is, how do we get to such a scenario? Now, before going on to that, I wanted to go through some historical background to how we got to the present situation because throughout history, Jews have been discriminated against, harassed, persecuted and killed in large numbers, not just during the Holocaust, which was of course the biggest such event, but throughout the centuries, in different periods for different reasons, they blamed them even for the Black Death at times, whatever happened. They blamed them for poisoning the wells in different cities. Whenever anything happened, they would blame the Jews because they were an easy scapegoat, a different people, that you can unload all the ills of society onto. The classic, which we've seen many times. Today in Britain, an attempt is being carried out to do that with Muslims. They're to blame for everything. In Italy, everything is due to the immigrants who are arriving, i.e., somebody who's different. Somebody who can be identified as being different within society and that can be blamed for the ills of society. What it's called is divide and rule. You divide the poor people according to religion, language, colour of their skin, etc. and thereby maintain the domination of the ruling class. It's interesting to note that the French Revolution achieved something for the Jews, at least in the early days in France. They were granted equality and citizenship. The ghettos were put an end to. And it was the revolutionary French people that achieved that. Subsequently, with the reaction on Napoleon, they started pulling back on that and started attacking the Jews again. Another event, the Russian Revolution of 1917, put an end to antisemitism in Russia and the Soviet Union. I'll read a speech by Lenin later on. Of course, as with Napoleon, Stalin later on found antisemitism a useful tool in order to attack dissidents within the Soviet Union. Now, it's used, as I said, as an attempt to distract attention away from the real culprits, who is really to blame. In the Tsarist Empire, we see, I mean, today we have all this propaganda about the Tsar as a tragic figure, what a poor individual he was. Well, in actual fact, he was a bloodthirsty callous dictator. And the Tsarist Empire promoted antisemitism. And there were several pogroms, I mean, massacres of hundreds and thousands of Jews in the 1800s in the territories within the Tsarist Empire. But it became big in the latter part of the 1800s, in the last 20 years, pogroms in places like Kiev, Warsaw or Dessa. The assassination of Alexander II in 1881 was a trigger which unleashed a wave of antisemitic feelings. One of the conspirators apparently was Jewish. The rest of them were atheists, but they didn't go for the atheists, probably because they weren't enough of them to blame for the ills of Russian society. They just blamed the Jews. But they spread the rumor that it was a Jewish plot. And in 1882, anti-Jewish laws were passed by Alexander III. And another wave of pogroms in 1903-06, something like 2000 Jews were killed, a bloody massacre in Odessa, and the harassment and the persecution continued. As I said, October 1917 put an end to that. And it's not by chance that many Jews in the Tsarist Empire did not think of the creation of a homeland in Israel as the solution to their problems. They joined the socialist movement in big numbers. In fact, you could probably say that within the Jewish population there was a higher level of left-wing radicalization than the rest of society. Not by chance, leading Bolsheviks, many of them were Jewish or of Jewish extraction. Like Trotsky said, I'm not a Jew, I'm an internationalist. But he was of Jewish extraction. There's a speech by Lenin in 1919 in which he says, it is not the Jews who are the enemies of the toilers. The enemies of the workers are the capitalists of all land. I'm not going to read the whole thing because I don't have time. Those who foment anti-Semitism. And he did this in a speech which is actually recorded. There's a gramophone recording of it from 1919. I have an article here from the New York Times just in case anybody thinks that I'm only quoting Lenin and its Bolshevik propaganda, where you have an article which points out precisely this point that Lenin and the Bolsheviks did put an end to anti-Semitism. Now, that was the Russian Revolution, a revolution which freed all the peoples of what was to become the Soviet Union. It's a separate discussion, the degeneration and Stalinism. With Stalinism, all the filth of the past came back. The scum, as Marx used to refer to it. But far worse was to come for the Jewish people. The defeat of the German working class in the period 1918 to 1933. And if you haven't read it, Rob Sewell's book on this is an excellent account of that. Led to the rise of the Nazis. So you could say the reformists, the leaders of the German labour movement, who led the German working class to defeat who would not be necessarily anti-Semitic themselves. They would claim to be social democratic and in favour of democratic rights, etc. But objectively speaking, they prepared the conditions for the rise of Hitler and with it the terrible Holocaust and the massacre of millions of Jews. The Nazis came to power, set up their concentration camps. The first one in Dachau, March 1933 was actually filled with communists, social democrats, trade unionists. They were political dissidents and they were the first to be eliminated. The chief of police of Munich announced in 1933. He actually said, all communists, social democratic functionaries who endanger state security are to be concentrated there. Later on, the concentration camps were used in a massive campaign and something like 6 million Jews were killed. Which was about a third of the then world Jewish population. And about two thirds of the Jews in the territories controlled by the Nazis. They also killed Roma, Gypsies, Gays, Poles, Soviet citizens. Even people with physical defects were eliminated by the Nazis, up to 11 million. But of course, the big chunk of this was the Jewish population. Now this is what gave a huge impetus to the Zionist idea of recreating Israel as a homeland for the Jews. But before this, Zionism had in reality little attraction for Jews. If you go back to that period, as I said, many were radicalized. I have a book, I'm not going to open it for lack of time. It's called Comrades and Enemies. It's an account of the different workers' struggles in the early days before the creation of Israel which saw Arabs and Jewish workers coming together in trade unions and organizing strikes, etc. But the book points out that, as I said before, they tended to look to the left, the Bolshevik party, to socialism, etc. But Zionism had begun as an idea in the 1880s and there was a small trickle of Jews to Palestine. But if we look at what the Jews were actually doing, where were they going to find a solution to their problems? Between 1881 and 1914, millions of Jews left the Tsarist Russia and Eastern Europe. Something like 2.4 million Jews left this part of the world. Where did they go? 85% went to the United States. To this day, there are more Jews in the United States than there are in Israel. They obviously think it's a better place to live than to be surrounded by countries which are in a constant state of war with you. 12% went to Canada, Argentina, Western Europe, South Africa and a few other countries. Less than 3% went to Palestine. And of these, many saw it as a temporary stopover as they tried to get elsewhere. This meant that there weren't enough Jews to carry out the Zionist project of recreating Israel within the land of the Palestinians. If we look at the makeup of the population, there was a myth which was created at the time to justify, of course, the colonization that Palestine was a sparsely inhabited area of the world and therefore could be colonized. The Boers, the Dutch who went to South Africa, said the same thing about South Africa when they landed, trying to claim there were no blacks until they met them, of course. In 1800, there were 7,000 Jews in Palestine, 246,000 Muslims. By 1931, there were 175,000 Jews and 760,000 Muslims. Even in 1947, on the eve of the creation of Israel, there were 630,000 Jews and 1,181,000 Palestinians. That means that still two-thirds of the population was Muslim, Palestinians, and there was also a significant Christian population. In 1948, Israel declares independence and this is followed immediately afterwards by a war in which the surrounding Arab countries attack Israel. In the process, Israel wins more territory than had been granted to it by the United Nations and through a policy of attacking the Palestinians, bombings, killings, terrorism. Israel was built on the back of terrorist methods and what you can call ethnic cleansing. As a result of this, they bombed a village, for instance, they attacked a village called Deir Yassim, the massacre in April 1948. 120 Jewish fighters killed 100 Palestinians in this village, the rest fled. As a result of this kind of policy, 700,000 Palestinians fled their homes and villages and became refugees. The other side, of course, is men Jews were expelled or fled from the Arab countries that were at war with Israel and something like 600,000 Jews shifted to Israel. You see how very quickly, therefore, the balance, the ethnic balance was very quickly changed at least within what was to become Israel in favour of a Jewish majority and it was, in effect, ethnic cleansing. The British were not in favour of creating Israel. That's one of the myths and the other myth is that the Soviet Union was against. The Soviet Union was in favour of the creation of Israel. The British were against, but why? Not because they had any kind of progressive thinking. The British have this nice habit of leaving nice presence to people around the world. As they left their colonies, they made sure that the local people were divided, linguistically, ethnically, religious, etc. For instance, Cyprus was a nice little present they left, which led to the Civil War in the 70s. Nigeria to this day is driven with internal conflicts and divisions. They created the divinely rule, which is you create states which are ethnically balanced with nobody having an absolute majority with the idea that if we have to leave, we will leave them in a situation where we can dominate them from outside. That's what they did in Northern Ireland. It's not too far away. You can see to this day the problems that that has created. And their idea for Israel was, in fact, if you remember 1916 and 1917, two different deals, the British promised Palestine to the Palestinians and then to the Jews. They promised it to both people and in reality they had no intention of keeping those promises but playing this balancing game. That explains why, for example, in 1946, Jewish militias, terrorist groups, bombed the King David Hotel in Jerusalem. Why did they do that? Well, it just happened to be the headquarters of the British army because they were adamant in not permitting the British to carry out their plans. They had the idea that they were going to create a Jewish state within the territory that was formerly the Palestinians. The organization that carried out a lot of these acts was called the Irgun, which was a Jewish paramilitary organization which was later absorbed into the IDF, the Israeli army. As I said, they carried out the massacre of Dayar Yassin. The irony of history, of course, is that Israel now, for decades, condemned the Palestinians and the PLO as terrorists, the Irgun was considered a terrorist organization by the United Nations, by Britain, and by the United States. And Irgun was the political predecessor of a right-wing, the Herot Party, the Freedom Party, which later became the Likud. So you can see Netanyahu's roots go right back to that kind of activity. There was also the Haganah, the main military force. Begin, the founder of Likud, was a leader of Irgun, and he fought the British. The irony of history is that he was given a Nobel Peace Prize at one point. It tells you how much that peace prize is worth. I'm moving fast-forwarding. Once Israel was created, you had millions of refugees outside the borders of Israel, but you still had Gaza and the West Bank, which were not occupied by Israel. But you had the refugee camps all around the region. In 1964, the PLO was created, promoted by Arab states. Fatah, which existed prior to that under the leadership of Yasser Arafat, comes to dominate in the late 60s the PLO. And this organization promoted guerrilla tactics, i.e. individual terrorist attacks. We would argue that this actually played into the hands of the Zionists in creating the idea that all Arabs wanted to destroy Israel and the people who lived there. Instead of weakening the state of Israel, instead of weakening the Zionists, it actually strengthened them, because all they had to do was point to the killings, bombings in Jewish cities, et cetera, to whip up Jewish nationalism, anti-Arab nationalism. They're all out to destroy us. We've got to unite. So it strengthened the state of Israel. It didn't weaken it. They were based in Jordan in the late 60s. In 1970, we see the Black September event, which happened in Jordan, where, after 1967, when the West Bank had been occupied, a large number of Palestinians were living in Jordan. To this day, 2.2 million Palestinians live in Jordan out of a population of something like 9 million, although some people speculate it could be up to a half of the population. They were involved in plane hijackings, guerrilla attacks on Jordanian Army, an attempt to assassinate the king of Jordan, and then this led to the war in which the Jordanian army massacred probably more Palestinians than have ever been killed by anybody else. Now, if the PLO had had a socialist and an internationalist perspective, instead of using individual terrorist methods, they could have linked up with the Jordanian workers and peasants and led a socialist revolution in Jordan. The conditions were there. They could have done that. They could have overthrown Hussein through class struggle, not through terrorist or military means, and they could, from a Jordanian base, launch the Revolutionary War, in our opinion, to take back the West Bank. But we, as Marxists would argue, this would have required a class approach to Israel. You must look at Israel not as one reactionary bloc, but as a class society with capitalists, with workers, and that there is a section of Israeli population, the workers in particular, the youth, who can be won over on a class basis. The problem is, decades of terrorist activity had created a huge barrier between the Palestinian people and the Israeli masses. So when they were crushed in Jordan, they reallocated to South Lebanon, which then later led to a civil war in Lebanon, and the PLO was expelled, and the headquarters had to shift to Tunisia. Now, decades of this kind of terrorist activity achieved nothing. It didn't move the Palestinian people one centimeter closer to having any kind of homeland or statehood, because you cannot defeat Israel purely on military grounds. It's actually one of the most powerful military machines in the Middle East. And to think that you can defeat it purely on military terms is utopian, especially as the people of that country fear destruction, and the propaganda is the Arabs that want to destroy us. This cuts across the class division. They unite around the Zionist ruling class. How to break this down? That's the question we have to ask ourselves. Now, I'm going to quote from a militant international review of 1988. We trace our roots back to the militant, and we said then, a bridge can be built between Jewish and Arab workers by a movement which fought under the banner of a socialist federation of the Middle East. Such a movement would fight for democratic rights and a national homeland for Palestinians while directing class appeals to Jewish workers and troops. It would defend the class interests of Israeli workers and support the right of the Israeli nation to its own self-determination within a socialist federation. Marxists opposed the creation of Israel. It was carried out through ethnic cleansing and a historical crime against the Palestinian people. But now, a nation has come into existence within the borders of Israel. The Jews globally, we do not consider it as a nation, but the Jews within Israel have achieved that. Common borders, language, et cetera, identity, they exist. We are for both people's rights to exist within the borders of historical Palestine. That means an end to the Israeli state as it is, but not the end of the Israeli nation as it is. Now, decades of individual terrorism achieved nothing. What really pushed Israel and their imperialist backers to push for conceding some kind of self-government to the Palestinians was the Intifada of 1987. This was a mass insurrection of the workers and youth in particular. It started in 1986, in fact, with mass youth protests, not promoted by the PLO, whose leaders did not believe in that kind of mass struggle, but local community councils arose and it had a far bigger impact on the consciousness of people in Israel than all the years of individual terrorism. We started to see a shift within Israel itself. You have the phenomenon, for example, of the so-called refuseniks, i.e. young Israelis who refused to serve in the army beyond its borders, observing the oppression and the brutal treatment of Palestinians, seeing young people just with sticks and stones trying to fight the Israeli army shook the Israeli population, it shook even the army. Not all of them, obviously. I'm not creating an idyllic situation here, but it had an effect. We have the example of what happened, for instance, after 1982. There was the Sabra and Shatila massacre in southern Lebanon, near Beirut. The Israeli army was using the right-wing Christian Lebanese phalange, they were a reactionary outfit who were in alliance with the Israeli army, and a massacre of Palestinians took place in that camp. Up to 2000 and possibly more were killed, women, men, children. That massacre took place on the 18th of September 1982. On the 26th of September 1982, in Israel, you have a massive demonstration of Israeli people, some calculate up to 400,000 in Tel Aviv, against the Israeli government's handling of that massacre, and the slogans were for the resignation of the government. This shows you how the potential to shake Israeli society was there. And the Intifada in 1986-1987 showed the Palestinians were prepared to mobilize and began to have an impact. It showed also the Israeli ruling class, they could not hold down the Palestinian people purely with military means. That's why they moved in the direction of granting the Palestinian authority, i.e. to give a semblance of statehood, but not real statehood, because the borders were still controlled by Israel. The economy was controlled by Israel. Now the PLO had shifted by now from its old slogan of drive the Jews into the sea. In 1993, the PLO recognized the right of Israel to exist. This led to the creation of the Palestinian authority in 1994. What was the aim of that? In effect, it was to get the Palestinian leaders, the PLO and Fatah, to police the Palestinians for Israel. It's easier to envisage a Palestinian policeman controlling the Palestinians than an Israeli soldier who is seen as the enemy. This was combined with another policy, literally buying the leaders of the Palestinians, corrupting them. This is being done many times. Shin Fain, from being terrorists that you would not talk to or shake the hands, became people you could negotiate with. The ANC, which Thatcher defined as terrorists, later became an instrument of preserving capitalism in South Africa. The Sandinistas who led a guerrilla war in Nicaragua were later brought on board. It's an international policy of the imperialists to use the very leaders of the opposition movements to pacify and stabilize situations like this. In this case, they corrupted the leaders of the PLO itself, to the point where now, in a recent opinion poll, 91% of Palestinians say they do not trust the people running the Palestinian authority. It explains what happened later in Gaza in 2006, 2007. Because of the corrupt nature of the PLO in part, call it power, administering the West Bank and Gaza, Hamas emerged as the alternative to the PLO and Fatah. They won the elections and took over Gaza. Just a little thing, if you want to go back and see Hamas's origins, they're like all Islamic fundamentalist outfits financed and promoted by the US imperialists, even by the Israeli state itself. Because in those days, the threat was considered the left Palestinians, i.e. the Fatah, the PLO. Hamas was raised as a tool to counter that. Once the Palestinian authority under Fatah had exposed itself, Hamas emerged and took over Gaza. So now Gaza is being policed by Hamas and the West Bank is being policed by Fatah. How do they behave? Well, recently a Palestinian journalist from Gaza, a female journalist who was exposing a corruption in Gaza, is facing prison. In the West Bank, similar things happen. Journalists get picked up for exposing such matters. And it explains also why earlier this year, in March, there were big protests in Gaza, the biggest since 2007. And they are protests against the high cost of living and the disastrous economic situation. Now, Gaza is an absolute disaster socially and economically. Unemployment stands at something like 50%. Half the population lives in poverty and Israel is responsible for imposing a blockade. It controls everything that goes in, out, who can come in, who can go out. Medicines, telecommunications, everything is controlled by Israel and they are strangling the gardens. Now, Hamas has an interest in whipping up Palestinian nationalism and anti-Israeli feelings because there is the beginnings of a seething anger amongst the Palestinians which will eventually turn against Hamas itself. Therefore, they have an interest in making it into a national conflict and not a class conflict. But this leaves the Palestinians divided between Gaza run, administered by Hamas but suffocated by Israel and Egypt, by the way, on the other side. And the West Bank, which is corrupt but at the same time slowly being, what you could say, Bantustan eyes, the IAE, they are breaking up the territory of the West Bank with the settlers. There are 400,000 now in the West Bank, Jewish settlers. 350,000 in East Jerusalem as well. The Jewish population in the settlements is growing at a faster pace than the overall population of Israel. Since the 90s, it has grown by 270,000. In 1980, there were only 5,000 Jewish settlers on the West Bank. Now, as you see, 400,000. If you look at the maps, I've got them here. I don't pretend that you'd be able to see them, but you can look them up. They're easily available. They show you how they've broken up. Basically, the Palestinian Authority, as one unified geographic expression, no longer exists. It's broken up. This is the graph from 1982 to today of the Jewish colonizers in the West Bank and then the breakup of the West Bank itself. Not only that, they are de facto annexing whole chunks of the West Bank. They've built a wall, but it doesn't go along the historical border between Israel proper and the West Bank. It has taken in whole chunks of Palestinian territory. Now they're building another one moving further in. Netanyahu has been carrying out a policy of gradual annexation and trying to create a de facto situation where the Palestinians will have no unified territory in the West Bank. Now, Israel, what's happening inside Israel? Of course, we know 20% of the population is actually Arab. The Palestinians, they have citizenship. Although recently, this state, which is presented to us as the only true democracy in the Middle East, has just passed the Jewish nation-state law, which de facto transforms non-Jews, Palestinians, into second-class citizens. The Arabic language is also being demoted from an official language. This is a racist state. I say it and you can put it on the internet and you can broadcast it. It is a racist state which applies an apartheid policy. These are the facts. And yet, if you say this today in Britain, you get accused of being anti-Semitic. We are not anti-Semitic. We are not against the Jewish people who live in Israel. There is a growing number of poor people in Israel. 1.8 million of the 9 million residents live below the poverty line. There's the growing phenomenon of the working poor. 1.8 million is in fact one of the most unequal societies in the OECD 34 top countries. It is one of the most unequal. 60% of the poor are actually working. And a 2016 OECD report shows that 21% are living below the poverty line. The average in the OECD is 11%. Now this explains something that happened back in 2011. In the middle of the Arab Spring, when people say you're utopian because you say that class struggle is possible inside Israel and that a class approach could divide Israeli society along class lines. In 2011, in the middle of the Arab Spring, in August, 400,000 people protested in the streets across Israel. And it was over things like social housing, cost of living, i.e. things that affect the working class. They were calling for the creation of a better welfare state among their demands, affordable housing, etc. That shows you the potential for class struggle within Israel. And if you look at its history, there have been many struggles, many strikes. But as often happens, very often it gets cut across by the national question, i.e. in the middle of this you'll have a bomb goes off, you'll have some Jews killed at a supermarket or a bus station and then the regime highlights that to say we have to unite and it cuts across the class struggle. Now I've discussed in the past with some people who refuse to acknowledge that there is such a thing as a working class in Israel. As Marxists I would say, is it not good for class differentiation to emerge within Israel? Is it not a positive thing that you have the beginnings of a working class opposition inside Israel which a genuine socialist leadership of the Palestinians could tap into on a class basis and explain we're fighting for a homeland for the Palestinians but our war is not against you Jewish workers our war is against the people who exploit you, Netanyahu and all the others. They exploit you and they oppress us and we remind them of what Marx said any people that oppresses another people will never be free itself and so long as the Jews of Israel unite behind the Zionist project in oppressing the Palestinians they will remain oppressed as the people themselves. They won't get the better welfare state, they won't get the social housing it'll be the opposite in fact in Israel, same policies everywhere else, austerity, etc. Israel is actually very unstable at the moment, you can see that in the elections they're going to call what they seem to be the third election in a year they can't get the result they want because the ruling class of Israel is in effect divided that explains why Netanyahu can't get the majority that he wants Netanyahu I suppose is the Israeli Boris Johnson or the Israeli Farage or the Israeli Trump or the Israeli Bolsonaro as you see there's quite a lot of them around the world and they have a problem with these kind of people because although they're very reactionary very keen on attacking the workers sometimes they overstep the mark and provoke and create bigger problems than they can solve there's a section of the Israeli ruling class which is clearly seeking to curb Netanyahu and force him to govern with other people who they think they can control better now to sum up what do we as the international Marxist tendency say about Israel what is the way forward? we do not think that on a capitalist basis you can have genuine self-determination for either of the two people what we require is one state for all the peoples with the right of the Palestinians to return that state would have to recognize both languages Hebrew and Arabic it would have to recognize the right of all peoples to practice whatever religion they wish and to educate their children in whatever language they wish how is that going to be achieved? now there was a time when we would say well it's within the general global class struggle the solution can be found it's in a socialist federation of the Middle East it's through the revolution in Turkey, the revolution in Egypt, the revolution in Iran, etc and I can remember it wasn't so long ago we would be laughed at as utopians for raising the idea that you can have an eruption of class struggle and movements all at the same time are you telling me that's what they would say the answer to that is switch your TV on and look at the news what do we see? Iraq a huge movement of peoples taking place against the regime a class based movement just to the north of Israel, Lebanon I put on Facebook some pictures of the soldiers fraternizing with people protesting on the streets in every ethnic group in Lebanon the people have been rising up against their own leaders all of them, they're all corrupt go, all of you gotta go a revolution is possible in Lebanon a revolution is possible in Iraq we saw the potential for a Middle Eastern and North African revolution in 2011 I haven't got time to go into the details here how that was cut across of course but go further, Ecuador, Chile, Haiti, Indonesia everywhere it's erupting Liberia it's moving we are discussing our next year's World Perspectives document and events keep catching up because you make a prediction and it comes true within about 10 days it's no longer long-term perspectives it's by the time we get to next summer where we will finally elaborate the final draft I don't know how many revolutions we are going to have to describe and explain in this context it is possible to envisage the working class coming to power in Egypt in Jordan, in Lebanon, in Turkey 2013 gave us a glimpse of what's possible in Turkey since then it's gone a bit reactionary but that's not the end of the story, Iraq, etc with that perspective in mind with the correct leadership of the Palestinians with the correct program and approach it would be possible to break down Israeli society along class lines and make an appeal to the working people of Israel with a clear message we offer a socialist federation of the region within which you will have the right to exist as a people all your rights will be defended but it has to be a socialist federation which will grant rights to the Palestinians to the Druzes of Lebanon to the Kurds the Kurdish state will come into being through such a process and we're having a global view you can see the outlines of the solution to this festering wound which is Israel-Palestine now the, sorry I was going to say something and I forgot when you get old the Marxist present things in class terms and we try and always raise the class perspective we look for anything which promotes the class struggle which promotes class consciousness that is the criteria in determining whether a demand is correct or not in a given situation because think about it socialism is not automatic when we say socialism or barbarism it's not that socialism is the inevitable outcome of this situation barbarism is also a possibility Syria and Libya show you that the potential for revolution in 2011 in these countries was very quickly shifted playing one the ethnic card and two the local militias, the mafias, etc and we have counter-revolution with the barbaric situation that we are seeing in both of these countries imperialists have no qualms about promoting barbaric conflict between peoples if it saves their system if it keeps it on its feet the other option is one ethnic conflict after another one war after another and a disaster for all the peoples of this region therefore we emphasise the need to apply a Marxist method, a Marxist approach a Marxist perspective which is based on the understanding of class society and struggle for the socialist transformation of the whole region within which the Palestinians would finally achieve statehood and a homeland which they deserve