114. The creation of the state of Israel in 1948 on the basis of the dispossession, expulsion and exclusion of the Palestinians was socially and politically reactionary. The establishment of Israel, which later became the outpost of US imperialism in the region and its main ally in its drive for total domination of the Middle East, was approved by the USSR under Stalin. Before this betrayal, Stalinism’s destructive policies in Germany in 1933 had paved the way for the Nazis’ rise to power, the Second World War and the Holocaust. Otherwise, there would have been no mass support for Zionism, an extremely reactionary nationalist ideology, and no Jewish immigration to Palestine. Moreover, the Palestinian Communist Party, which had challenged Zionism in the 1920s by advocating the unification of Jews and Arabs in Palestine in a united struggle for international socialism, was split along ethnic lines before the end of World War II as a result of the divisive policies of the Stalinist bureaucracy and its maneuvering with the imperialist powers. The Fourth International, on the other hand, developed an internationalist position based on the unity of the working class. In 1948, it declared that

The Fourth International rejects as utopian and reactionary the “Zionist solution” of the Jewish question. It declares that total renunciation of Zionism is the sine qua non condition for the merging of Jewish workers’ struggles with the social, national and liberationist struggles of the Arab toilers. It declares that to demand Jewish immigration into Palestine is thoroughly reactionary just as it is reactionary to call for immigration of any oppressor people into colonial countries in general. It holds that the question of immigration as well as the relations between Jews and Arabs can be decided adequately only after imperialism has been ousted by a freely elected Constituent Assembly with full rights for the Jews as a national minority.^[1]

115. The decades of ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians, culminating in the Gaza genocide that began in October 2023, have proven that the so-called “two-state solution” can only bring disaster. The only way forward in Palestine is through the unification of the Arab and Jewish working classes on the basis of the program of socialist revolution. A socialist Palestine can only be realized as part of the Socialist Federation of the Middle East.

116. Turkey became the first Muslim-majority country to recognize the establishment of the Zionist state. This step was taken in March 1949 during the rule of the CHP. This was followed in 1958 by a secret agreement between Prime Minister Adnan Menderes of the Democrat Party and Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion. Whatever the ups and downs in relations between the governments, the military-strategic alliance between these two critical allies of US imperialism in the Middle East has always been decisive.