“One solution: Intifada revolution”?

It is 1st of May. People are shouting: “One solution: Intifada revolution”. Every radical, revolutionary leftist should be insulted by these claims. The slogan “one solution: revolution” is typically used by anarchists or other left-radicalists to indicate that only a total rebuilding of economic, political and social relations is the adequate response to our most urgent problems, i.e. some kind of national liberation is certainly not enough. Let us assume you are a leftist and you are truly convinced that an “intifada revolution” (Palestinian national liberation by all means …) is what is most needed right now, e.g. you are adhering to some stagist concept of the Third International supposing that in colonial and semi-colonial countries national liberation has to precede the preparation for a social revolution. Then your slogan should rather be “two solutions: intifada first, social revolution second”. Even if you are some kind of a Maoist adhering to the idea that it is the same spirit of revolutionary struggle entailed by both national and social revolutions and in that sense you want to call revolution the “one solution” while still adovcating for national liberation as the most pressing issue, still the “one solution” is not about the “intifada” part of the revolution. Especially if you are an intersectionalist leftist, of course you have to reject all of these “one single solution” rhetorics. And yet these slogans are warmly received by many leftists.

Of course this is nitpicking. However, when these slogans are welcomed by leftists, it is one more example for the willingness of Trotskyites, who fancy themselves some imaginary proletarian class basis of national liberation movements and claim to agitate this class basis to shake off their nationalist delusions, to fall prey to these very nationalist illusions. It is one more example of the disastrous consequences of stagist models tending to forget the second stage—after many decades of experiences with the results of anticolonial struggles leftists should understand this danger very well. By the way the stagism of the Third International at least demanded some kind of bourgeois democracy as the result of the first stage, the national liberation of the colonies—something which would be hard to achieve with Hamas as the leading force.

For my part I reject the whole idea behind the slogan “one solution: revolution”. Whatever your notion of revolution might be: The slogan neglects both the importance of reform within a revolutionary strategy, and the problems and dangers within a (post-)revolutionary society. And whatever the precise semantics of “intifada”, whether you are thinking more of the first or the second intifada for example, it is certainly not a viable framework to end the irreconcilable confrontation of the Zionist and the Palestinian national project, and to build a basis for peace and coexistence of Jews and Arabs in Israel and Palestine.