A. N. C.
SAYS NO!!
PROPOSALS An interesting procession to Downing Street occurred on December 12th. A knot of Labour MPs and several younger followers carried a banner reading 'Action Committee for Arab Jewry' and protested against the treatment of the Jewish minorities in Syria and Irag by their Arab governments. This small demonstration came just less than two months after Israeli Foreign Minister Eban devoted a major speech to the Council of Europe on the same theme. These-and otherindications point to the commencement of a new propaganda campaign by the various Zionist authorities and federations in the West. Identifying with protests against repression and discrimination, socialists and humanitarians may welcome this new campaign. A duty therefore falls on revolutionaries to clarify the nature and aims of this movement and its predecessors.
MISLAID HISTORY Any serious attempt to expose and combat anti-Jewish discrimination within a given nation, would evidently first thoroughly examine the root cause of the problem. Why is it that the remaining 4,000 Jewish people in Syria are subjected to official restrictions on their activities and geographical movements? The reason is directly linked to the impact of Zionist expansion on the Arab world.
The natural pro-Palestinian and anti-Zionist sentiments of the Arab masses demand satisfaction, but the Arab governments know that to seriously challenge Zionism is to confront its master, American imperialism, which they cannot do by virtue of their own relationship to the world capitalist market and their military-bureaucratic nature, which necessarily excludes the arming and mobilisation of the worker-peasant masses.
A section of Arab leaders have instead resorted, over many years, to crude anti-Jewish racism and demagogy, as a substitute for anti-Zionist and anti-imperialist struggle and as a weapon of internal stabilisation. Thus the harassment and repression of the small Jewish communities in Syria and Irag, typified by the periodic 'unmasking" of Zionist agents". This activity is quite compatible with an abysmal showing on the Palestinian question. In these circumstances, it is vital for socialists to defend unreservedly the rights of Jews in the Arab states, against all forms of oppression. But this cannot be done in the company of the Zionist organisations, which "forget' the role and responsibilities of Zionism in opening the way for anti-Jewish racism in the Arab world.
NATIONALIST AIMS Forgetfulness also often prevails among Zionists as to the fate of other victims of the Arab regimes. The communists and left militants in Baathist jails are mentioned, now and again, in the Zionist press, to embarrass the Arab governments, but can expect no public campaign to be mounted for their rights by the "humanitarian' Zionists of London and elsewhere. The Zionist campaigns stress Jewish civil rights and, further, emphasise ultimately one right above allthe right of emigration to Israel. The demonstrations in recent years for the Jewish minority in the USSR at first demanded civil liberty and religious tolerance, but turned, before long, to the central slogan • Let my people go'. Socialists seek the overthrow of repressive regimes and antisemitic bureaucrats. They seek to achieve this by uniting the different oppressed and exploited layers of the population into a force to establish a better society. They must appreciate that Zionism does not share this aim. The Zionists seek to detach the Jewish minorities from their potential allies in other minorities and progressive movements, and recruit them for their Middle Eastern conflicts. The nationalist aims of their protests are indicated by the nature of the marches for Jews in Russia that have been held in London. The efforts to mobilise demonstrators were confined to the Jewish community and the resultant protests were community occasions, marked by religious ceremonies, designed to reinforce Jewish nationalism here, too.
SOCIALIST TASKS The angry protests against official discrimination by the Isreali authorities, made in recent months by Jewish immigrants to Israel from Arab countries-the Black Panther movement in Jerusalem and elsewhere-who claim that European-born Israelis receive better treatment place the whole issue into focus. No socialist with an awareness of recent history can support the propaganda drives of the Zionists in the West. It is painfully clear that the long-term interests of the Jewish inhabitants of the Arab world are best served by thorough and active opposition to Zionist colonialism in the Middle East. And, in the short term, the defence of the rights of Jewish minorities must be firmly linked to the defence of all victims of the existing regimes in the Arab states-and not subordinated to the aims and dictates of a narrow nationalism.
-Peter Landau For some time, the military junta in Greece has started a campaigh against the opponents of the dictatorship, the students abroad-an extension of its home policies: Assisted by the reactionary governments of W. Europe, it is trying to set up counter-unions in order to silence its Greek student opponents. It has succeeded in Italy and now is attempting the same in England.
Taking advantage of the favourable situation that the Tory attack on the English student and labour movement is creating, and after the activities of the Greek Student Union in London, it has started an operation to create pro-junta unions and proceed to a federation.
So, the so-called Hellenic Societies have been constructed in certain colleges and universities, after the initiative of the Greek Consulate in London. Circumventing the constitution of the Societies, they have gathered around them, under the pretext of being non-political only Greek and Greek Cypriot students. Their purpose is to put them under the direct control of the Greek Embassy. Lately, after having appointed an Organisational Committee, and set up the constitution in the Consulate itself-according to students who took part in the meeting without knowing its actual purpose-they called a 'conference to create the federation. In order to gain official recognition (always under the pretext of being non-political they asked for recognition and support from the NUS. The NUS refused to give them any support whatever after the intervention of the Greek Student Union in London which revealed their real nature. Thus, isolated even from some students who took part in the Hellenic Societies and who, in the process, had realised their actual purpose, they gathered for a meeting at Imperial College on 23 January 1972. There, the united and determined action of the student opponents of the dictatorship and the revelations of those who broke from the Hellenic Societies isolated the handful of the junta's followers and exposed them completely to the vast majority of the students who participated in the meeting Thus, the pro-juntaites were forced to dissolve. The Greek Student Union in London denounces the reactionary stand of the bourgeois press which, in order to slander the student movement, publicised a minor incident in which an apparently irresponsible personif not a conscious provocator-was involved. The Greek Student Union in London, being fully conscious of the fact that the junta will not abandon its efforts at the first failure, undertakes the obligation to fight for the construction of a strong anti-dictatorial student movement.
The Greek Student Union in London: -denounces the joint financing of the creation of pro-junta unions by the junta's Embassy and the Cyprus High Commission in London; -salutes the refusal of the NUS to grant any support whatsoever.
DOWN WITH THE JUNTA! -The Greek Student Union Executive London, 25.1.1972
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STATEMENT BY GREEK STUDENTS