George W is going to solve the Palestinian problem

Israel indeed became the watch dog for US interests in the region. Its destabilising effect stopped the spread and ultimate "success" of radical opponents of the US - either secular nationalist or Stalinist, in the main. Ironically (and in part because of the flawed politics of the Left in the region) this has created the base for mass support for Islamists.

This Israeli watchdog role fits in neatly with Zionism’s call for an exclusivist Jewish state. Thus those who are Jewish have a right of return to a land they have never seen while those Palestinians who were born there (or their descendents) do not. In other words the state of Israel is one of the few countries in the world that is a racialist state.

How many Palestinian refugees are there? More than four million in the immediate area, according to the UN.

To allow the refugees the right of return would destroy Israel as a Jewish state. The present ruling regime in Israel will not and cannot (in its eyes) allow that.

Israel is a Jewish state despite the fact that 20 per cent of the present population of Israel (nearly 1.5 million) are Palestinian. They are second class citizens - like blacks under apartheid.

Any two-state solution would involve creating a Palestinian Bantustan with power concentrated in the hands of the Israelis. Any Palestinian Government would of necessity (as Fatah in the West Bank shows) be a puppet of Israel and the West.

Two states would do nothing to remove Israel’s apartheid wall or its settlements. It would not give any natural resources to the Palestinians. It would deny them control of water. It would be a hotchpotch country intertwined between Israeli land and checkpoints.

The PLO for a time had a one-state solution - a democratic and secular state for all who wanted to live in Palestine, irrespective of religion or culture. At the moment the possibility of such a state looks very slight indeed given the power of the Israeli military and state, and the support it receives from the US militarily, politically and economically.

But it may be that those very dictatorships the US supports in the Middle East hold the key - or rather the working class in those countries holds the hope of the future in its hands.

The road to Jerusalem may well run through Cairo. A successful democratic working class revolution in one of the puppet countries in the Middle East could provide the spark that inflames the region and leads to the establishment as a consequence not only of a democratic and secular Palestine, but a socialist one as well.

The US allies in the Middle East are very unstable, with little popular support. As Iran in 1978-79 shows, the working class has the power to quickly despatch these puppet regimes to the dustbin of history.

The question of the Left’s political approach in these countries then assumes paramount importance if the revolution can move forward and not sideways into Islamism.

There is hope. The Left is quietly rebuilding its support among workers in the puppet countries, waiting for and helping to build the mass upsurges that could send Bush’s allies to the gallows and liberate Palestine.