‘Left Renewal’ Against Anti-Zionism
Postscript: Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions, because solidarity starts from what the oppressed are asking for
TL;DRThe December 2023 statement ‘For a consistently democratic and internationalist left’ was authored by an Alliance for Workers’ Liberty member and attracted over 240 signatures, including Fourth International comrades Pierre Rousset, Janette Habel, Patrick Le Trehondat, and Patrick Silberstein.Over thirty months, seven critical responses were published. None came from a Palestinian or Arab writer. The editors meanwhile published soft-Zionist demographic revisionism without correction.Taken together, the responses expose what the signatures underwrite: a qualified rejection of the Palestinian Right of Return, active opposition to BDS, two-nations symmetry that evacuates settler colonialism, and a ‘consistent democracy’ framework that treats Israeli anti-occupation liberals as the proper agents of Palestinian transformation.The operational fruit of the framework, in November 2025, was a public event at the Highbury Roundhouse where an AWL-platformed Palestinian told his own people their resistance caused their genocide.Asked about this piece before publication, Pierre Rousset confirmed: he had understood the original statement as ‘a list of discussion’ aimed at broadening unity, but became aware that ‘pro-Zionists were manipulating this framework’ and got out of it. His name still appears on the signatories list. He has asked for it to be removed. The remaining FI signatories should follow him.Updates: 26 April 2026 This article has become the opening case study of a Red Mole series, The Drift, tracing the Shachtmanite reframing of Trotskyist categories in British far-left politics from the 1939–40 split in the American Socialist Workers Party to the contemporary apparatus of the Alliance for Workers' Liberty. What this article documents — the operational politics produced by the AWL's analytical framework, the ways its 'consistent democracy' framing structured the December 2023 statement and the November 2025 Ideas for Freedom event — is the contemporary test case for the genealogical argument the series develops. Part Two engages the genealogy itself: how the phrase 'consistent democracy' came to mean what the AWL has made it mean, and why the Fourth International tradition has its own resources for the anti-campist work the AWL apparatus claims as its own. 24 April 2026 in response to substantive correspondence with Ben Gidley. Corrections made to attribution of authorship and characterisation of Hamas; analytical argument unchanged.
In November I sat in the Highbury Roundhouse and watched a British-Palestinian activist, on stage at the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty’s annual Ideas for Freedom event, tell a mostly London audience that Hamas bore responsibility for ‘triggering’ the genocide in Gaza, and that Palestinians, being too weak to defend themselves, had a responsibility not to ‘provoke’ Israel. I wrote about that event at the time. What I did not write about, because it needs its own treatment, is the document that sits behind it.
‘For a consistently democratic and internationalist left’ appeared in December 2023 under the signatures of Ben Gidley, Daniel Mang, and Daniel Randall. Randall is an AWL member and the author of Confronting Antisemitism on the Left (2021). Gidley is an academic sociologist who writes on antisemitism. Mang is a Sweden-based writer and organiser, active in Friends of Standing Together Sweden, and a regular contributor to the Left Renewal blog. The text presents itself as a left-internal critique of Palestine solidarity politics after October 7th, written in sorrow rather than anger. It is not formally an AWL document. Its analytical furniture is entirely AWL: the ‘consistent democracy’ framework, the two-nations-two-rights symmetry, the characterisation of Hamas as "fundamentally reactionary" in terms Dale shows are indistinguishable from Netanyahu's justification for the war on Gaza, the extension of ‘campism’ to cover positions the Fourth International has always held against actual campists, the theoretical references to Postone alongside Krishnan, Hensman and Afary. Two of the three co-authors are organisationally committed to Standing Together solidarity: Randall in the UK, Mang in Sweden. That organisational commitment is not incidental to the statement's framework; it is the framework's operational expression
Over two hundred and forty names followed. Among them, comrades from the FI tradition: Pierre Rousset, Patrick Le Trehondat, Janette Habel, Patrick Silberstein. This matters and should not be glossed. Rousset and his co-signers are serious people who have been right on Syria, on Ukraine, on the critique of campism for decades. The signatures mean the document cannot be read as an AWL manoeuvre alone. It is an AWL text that attracted signatures across a broader anti-campist diaspora: a portion of the Fourth International, sections of the Israeli anti-occupation left, Jewish revolutionary collectives in France, Sweden and Brazil, a number of Syrian exile and Russian anti-war voices. What they signed, and what the signing has done since, is the question Red Mole readers should want answered.
What the responses expose
Two years on, the statement’s website maintains a ‘Responses’ page with eight entries dated between December 2023 and June 2024. Read them not in the order they arrived but by what each reveals about the statement, and they form a sequence of indictments. Any one of them should give an FI comrade pause. Taken together they make the signatures untenable.
Editorial standards: what the Moscovitz case reveals
Guillaume Moscovitz is a signatory. His contribution, published 21 December 2023, revives the Joan Peters thesis: that modern Palestinians are largely descendants of nineteenth-century Arab migrants drawn to a Palestine modernising under Ottoman and Zionist stimulus. Peters’s From Time Immemorial (1984) was demolished by Yehoshua Porath in the New York Review of Books, by Norman Finkelstein, and by Benny Morris’s own later work. Moscovitz cites none of them. The Left Renewal editors published him without a corrective note, without editorial introduction, without any indication that the thesis he reproduces is a discredited Zionist historiographical claim whose function is to relocate Palestinian indigeneity to a span roughly coextensive with Jewish settler indigeneity.
This was, for the editors, a legitimate contribution to ‘further discussion.’ The editorial judgement matters beyond the individual piece. It tells us what the editors thought belonged in their correspondence. It sits adjacent, on the same page of the website, to Rousset’s signature on the originating text. Anyone signing the statement in 2023 signed onto an editorial operation that would, four days later, welcome soft-Zionist demographic revisionism without demur. What else is in-bounds for these editors? The Moscovitz piece is the answer, and the answer has stood unchallenged on the site for over two years.
The foundational problem: what Kahn-Harris exposes
Keith Kahn-Harris is a serious Jewish sociologist and the author of Strange Hate (2019), a book worth knowing on left antisemitism. His 31 December 2023 response is the most intellectually generative piece in the whole correspondence, and it is devastating to the statement’s core move.
Kahn-Harris does not reject the statement’s ‘fetishisation’ critique. He reframes it. Palestine, he argues, has come to occupy the foundationalist place that class once held on the left. It is doing the structural work of tying struggles together that materialist analysis used to do. Black liberation, queer liberation, climate, feminist struggle: these are being connected through Palestine because materialist foundationalism no longer has the political grip to connect them. This is not a deviation from class politics, he writes, but a functional replacement for it. Then he asks the honest question the statement does not ask: how might it be possible to act politically on an important issue without implying foundational importance? He admits he has no answer.
What this reframing does to the statement is precise. If Kahn-Harris is right, the ‘fetishisation’ critique is asking the left to abandon its last remaining materialist anchor, at a moment when the statement’s authors have nothing to offer in its place. Randall’s rejoinder does not engage Kahn-Harris, which is its own acknowledgement. The statement demands the left give up the foundationalist work Palestine is doing without telling the left what to put in its place. That is not renewal. That is disarmament.
Rights-talk as cover: what Zalloua and Kapoor expose
Zahi Zalloua (Whitman College) and Ilan Kapoor (York University) are postcolonial theorists. Their 7 January 2024 response is polite, under-argued, and carries one substantive charge the statement cannot answer. The ‘rights and democracy’ language the statement repeatedly invokes, they argue, functions as ideological cover for apartheid capitalism. A bourgeois-democratic frame, deployed inside a settler-colonial context, works to preserve rather than challenge the structure. The parliamentary and rights-based architecture of late capitalism has become ‘an increasingly ideological cloak for covering and justifying domination and exploitation.’
This is the point at which Randall’s rejoinder doubles down rather than engages. He argues in reply that ‘bourgeois democracy provides a higher platform, and better conditions, for socialist struggle than authoritarianism.’ This is true in the general case and beside the point in the particular case. The issue is not whether democratic rights are preferable to their absence. The issue is whether, inside a state structured around the systematic dispossession of a native population, the language of ‘equal rights’ and ‘consistent democracy’ functions operationally to equalise the claims of the dispossessor and the dispossessed. Zalloua and Kapoor identify the problem; Randall confirms it with his answer. The symmetry is the point of the framework, not its flaw.
The AWL on the record: Randall’s rejoinder
Three weeks after Zalloua and Kapoor, Randall published a rejoinder. It is the single most articulate statement of AWL politics in the whole correspondence, and it is where we can see what the statement’s framework permits one of its three authors to say in its name. Four formulations carry the weight.
First: ‘I am not a Zionist; I am also not an anti-Zionist.’ This is the move that detaches Randall from the Zionist camp for left respectability while refusing the anti-Zionist label that would commit him to opposing the Israeli state as a Jewish state. In the FI tradition, this is not a principled third position. It is the evacuation of the question.
Second: he writes, without qualification, that he is ‘actively involved in UK Friends of Standing Together.’ He wrote this in January 2024, by which time PACBI had formally called on solidarity activists to boycott Standing Together for normalisation work. Randall mentions PACBI’s call, dismisses it as ‘calumnious,’ and carries on. The AWL’s two-nations framework requires a Palestinian civil-society partner who will accept the framework’s terms. PACBI declines to be that partner. Randall carries on anyway. Randall's disclosure is the explicit version of a pattern visible in the authorship: Daniel Mang is an active member of Friends of Standing Together Sweden. The statement's Standing Together orientation is not a later development imported by one author; it is present in the co-authorship from the outset.
Third, on boycotts generally: Randall argues that ‘consumer boycotts’ sow illusions in ‘ethical consumption’ and that he opposes boycott campaigns against Russia and China as well as against Israel. This is a general principle against boycotts whose operational effect arrives precisely on BDS. The AWL’s ‘working-class unity’ opposition to the one sanctions campaign the Palestinian civil society has asked the international left to build turns out to be dressed in a broader anti-boycott position that is not applied with equal rigour to other cases. The general principle does the work.
Fourth, on settler colonialism: Randall cites Barnett Rubin approvingly. ‘What is objectionable about colonialism is not the immigration or settlement of a population of a different ethnic or national origin, or of people that are in some sense non-indigenous, but the domination of one group over another.’ This separates the wrong of domination from the wrong of settlement, then attends only to the first. The settler-colonial project is exculpated as such. Only its current coercive dimension can be criticised. The Nakba, as founding event, becomes analytically separable from the structure it founded.
None of these four positions is stated in the signed text. The signed text is silent on anti-Zionism, silent on Standing Together, silent on BDS, and qualified to evaporation on settler colonialism. What Randall does in the rejoinder is translate those silences into explicit positions, published on the statement’s own website, under its editorial auspices, without pushback from any co-author. He uses the framework he co-authored to legitimate positions the framework does not openly state but does not exclude either. That is the specific charge, and it does not require the signed text to say what Randall says. It requires only that the signed text leaves the door open, and that the rejoinder walks through it.
This matters for how signatories should read their own position. Habel and Silberstein did not sign an AWL programme on Palestine. They signed a text whose silences Randall has filled in two months later, in their name and with their signatures underneath his argument. The four points above are incompatible with the FI tradition on Palestine. The signed text is not, strictly, incompatible with the FI tradition; but its silences made Randall’s rejoinder possible without formal disagreement from any co-author, and the rejoinder is what now sits beneath the signatures on the same website.
The Ukraine diagnostic: what Dale exposes
Tom Dale’s 17 February 2024 response is the sharpest external critique in the correspondence. It should be read by every FI comrade considering whether their signature still holds.
Dale opens with the asymmetry that reveals the framework’s actual commitments. The same left currents that opposed arms to Ukraine, effectively opposing the one measure that averted genocide there, then demanded unconditional solidarity with Palestinian armed actions they would never have allowed themselves to criticise as they criticised Ukrainian ones. The Bucha massacre produced meticulous left concern about Ukrainian conduct; October 7th produced a discursive prohibition on any criticism. Ukrainian resistance including Azov elements: fully endorsed. Palestinian resistance: fundamentally reactionary.
Dale names this asymmetry from inside broad sympathy with Ukrainian resistance. He is not writing from the campist position the statement attacks. He is writing from the position the statement claims to occupy, and finding the statement’s Palestine politics incompatible with the position it claims. His target is the same statement Red Mole readers are being asked to evaluate.
Further in, Dale documents three structural failures of the document. It never calls for a ceasefire. It never registers the risk of genocide. It presents Hamas as ‘fundamentally reactionary’ in terms indistinguishable from Netanyahu’s justification for the war on Gaza. These are not marginal omissions. They are the necessary conditions for the statement’s internal coherence. To call for a ceasefire would require treating the Israeli state response as the immediate political emergency, which the statement is structured to avoid. To register the genocide risk would require analytical weight on Israeli state violence that the framework’s symmetry cannot permit. To treat Hamas as the product of Palestinian political history rather than as its negation would destabilise the fundamentally reactionary’ frame that licenses the whole operation.
Dale is what serious internal critique of the left’s Palestine politics looks like, and he demonstrates by contrast that the statement is not that. The statement is the AWL’s framework looking for signatures.
The road not taken: the Anti-War Committees
Of the seven critical responses, one came from a formation with ex-campist credibility and actual organisational continuity with the anti-war left. The Anti-War Committees in Solidarity with the Struggles for Self-Determination is a US formation founded in 2014 in explicit opposition to the campism of ANSWER, UNAC, and Code Pink on Syria. Their 3 March 2024 response is the road the project could have taken.
What they did that the statement did not. They named the missing programmatic demand: a secular democratic Palestine. They distinguished the right of armed resistance from the mass murder of non-combatants without collapsing the two under either ‘resistance’ or ‘reactionary massacre.’ They treated the Right of Return as part of what any just settlement would have to honour, not as a threat to be deflected. They called unequivocally for a ceasefire, which the statement did not. They specified Hamas’s reactionary character in political terms the statement does not attempt: reactionary on Palestinian women’s rights, reactionary on LGBTQ Palestinians, and reactionary, in their formulation, in the anti-Jewish ideology they named ‘reactionary poison for the struggle against Zionism.’
A note on that last category. The ‘antisemitism’ framing carries its own analytical limits, and reading the anti-Jewish register of a besieged population’s ideology through the category that produced Auschwitz conflates histories that require distinction. What the Committees are doing with the category cuts against the statement regardless. The AWL framework treats Hamas as a reactionary cipher, a gloss that licenses treating Palestinian political forms as beneath analysis. The Committees treat Hamas as a political force with specific reactionary features that damage the cause Hamas claims to pursue. That is what a materialist political critique of Hamas looks like. It is what the statement does not attempt.
They rejected both campist apologism and the Israeli state’s self-presentation as victim of Palestinian violence. They closed with a proposal for practical collaboration.
The statement’s editors engaged them once, politely, and the project drifted back toward its AWL centre. The Committees had taken the trouble to write a serious document and were filed alongside Moscovitz’s demographic revisionism and Astrike’s Rojava-sympathetic meditation. A response from comrades who had walked out of campism for the same reasons the statement claimed to oppose it was not followed up with a collaborative project or even a systematic engagement.
Vera Astrike’s 12 April 2024 response belongs alongside the Committees’ piece in one specific respect. She writes from a Kurdish-solidarity perspective and names what the Western left has been unwilling to name: the systematic abandonment of Middle Eastern democratic revolutionaries, from Rojava to the Women, Life, Freedom movement in Iran. This critique overlaps with the Committees’ critique and points toward a serious anti-campist internationalism the statement does not reach. Astrike's handling of Hamas is weaker than the Committees'. She leans harder on "Islamist fascist" framings that the Committees treated with more political specificity, and lets contested characterisations arrive as settled facts. But her diagnosis of Western left indifference to actual Middle Eastern democratic movements is one the statement’s Arab absence confirms.
The signatory who said otherwise: Feinberg
Joe Grim Feinberg’s 15 June 2024 response is the final entry on the page, and it is a signatory speaking. His piece is the closest anyone on the signatory list comes to the structural-imperialist position the project exists to avoid.
Feinberg reframes Israel as typical rather than unique. Israel is not an aberration. It is the sharp local expression of a global system of apartheid produced by the carving of the earth into nation-states without giving states to all nations. Its local end will not end the system. ‘Settler colonialism is not absolute evil. It is the tragic condition of our contemporary world.’ This is a philosopher’s formulation, and philosophically contestable, but it does the analytical work the statement does not: it situates Israel inside a structural account of the international order rather than suspending it in a field of bilateral rights claims.
Feinberg is one signatory. The position he articulates is not the position of the text he signed. His response is the internal evidence that at least one person who signed did so with reservations about where the document was pointing. The question his contribution raises is why more signatories did not.
The empty chair
Seven critical responses, plus one Moscovitz. No Palestinian voice. No Arab voice. No Adam Hanieh, Gilbert Achcar, Joseph Daher. Nobody from rs21, Salvage, Historical Materialism, New Left Review. Nobody from the Socialist Workers Party the statement names and criticises at length. Nobody from the Anticapitalistas or the PTB/PVDA orbits. Nobody from the Palestinian diaspora writers shaping the Anglophone conversation.
One qualification owed. The signatory list does include Israeli anti-occupation leftists, among them Haggai Matar of +972, Dahlia Scheindlin, Adriana Kemp, Hadar Cohen, Joshua Leifer, Uri Ben-Eliezer. It includes Nedjib Sidi Moussa, an Algerian writer formed by a different regional history. These are serious people, and their presence on the list is not nothing. Israeli leftists are, geographically, Middle Eastern; their courage inside a militarised settler-colonial society deserves its own recognition. But two facts remain. First: they signed the original text and then went silent. No Israeli signatory wrote a response during the thirty months the correspondence was active. Second: Israeli anti-occupation voices cannot substitute for Palestinian and Arab voices in a conversation whose explicit premise is that the left has failed to listen to Palestinian and Arab voices. The AWL framework would have them substitute, through Standing Together and the two-nations symmetry. The Fourth International tradition does not permit that substitution.
The statement opens by telling the left it has failed to listen to leftists in South West Asia and North Africa: SWANA, in the statement’s own formulation. Tom Dale saw the absence in February 2024 and named it: ‘there are no Arab co-authors, let alone Palestinian ones.’ The editors made no move to fill the chair. Two years later it is still empty.
It is tempting to read the empty chair as editorial exclusion. The honest reading is more complicated. It may be that the editors received no submissions from Palestinian or Arab writers and published what they received. It may be that the writers who would have responded concluded the statement was not worth engaging on its own terms. It may be some combination. The result is the same either way, which is the point.
A document cannot call for the left to listen and then run a two-year public correspondence without listeners. Either the editors chose the interlocutors they could work with, or the interlocutors chose not to arrive, or both. What remains on the page is an argument among ex-campists, AWL sympathisers, sympathetic Jewish sociologists, Rojava solidarity people, and the signatories themselves. It is not a renewal. It is a corridor conversation in a building the Palestinians are not in.
So how does a politics that wants to speak about Palestinians without speaking with them function once it becomes operational? Ideas for Freedom 2025 answered the question. The AWL did not go looking for a Palestinian voice and come back empty-handed. It found Jasr Kawkby, who stood on the Highbury Roundhouse stage and told the audience that Palestinian armed resistance ‘weakens the peace camp within Israel’ and ‘strengthens the nationalist factions,’ and that Hamas bore ‘responsibility for triggering’ the genocide. When I challenged him in the Q&A, reading the lines back, he confirmed: yes, I meant every word.
The statement gave itself permission in December 2023 to discuss Palestinians without them. The forum in November 2025 produced the Palestinian the framework required.
What the FI comrades signed
When the list of signatories came into view in December 2023, it included names carrying weight inside the Fourth International tradition: Pierre Rousset, Janette Habel, and Julien Salingue. It also included names often read as part of that tradition from outside, whose actual affiliation lies elsewhere: Patrick Le Trehondat and Patrick Silberstein came out of the Pabloist international tendency, not the FI proper. Habel’s active involvement in the FI ended years ago, and her position on Zionism was always a minority one within it. Salingue is no longer a member.
The presence of Rousset’s name invited the question this article posed on first draft: what did he think he was signing? The honest answer, which I did not have when the piece was first drafted and now do, is that he made an error, and corrected it on being asked. The statement he remembers signing was for broadening unity and was not presented as an AWL document. When it became clear the framework was being used to do work he did not intend to underwrite, he withdrew. At time of writing his name is on the list; he has asked for it to be removed and intends to explain publicly why. That is the right course and it is how the tradition handles error: name it, correct it, say why.
This is the standard the piece has to apply to itself too. A polemic against other currents cannot be softer on FI-affiliated signatories than on anyone else. What Rousset has done, other signatories from the tradition could do, should do, and should be asked to do. The question is not whether the signatures were made in good faith. The question is what the document has become, and whether the signatures are the work the signatories want to be seen doing two and a half years on. The answer, once the framework is operationally visible, is no. The only honest response is withdrawal with a stated reason.
The point of this piece is not that every signatory from a left lineage should be held to the same account. It is that the document now stands in a definite place in British left politics, and the signatures operate inside that place, whether their authors meant them to or not.
The record: Rousset’s reply
Before publishing this piece, I shared a draft with Pierre Rousset for comment. His reply, dated 19 April 2026, is the evidentiary ground for the previous section.
‘I am no more in FI leadership bodies, but I am not aware of a collaboration between the FI and AWL. Originally, the statement I signed, it was, if I remember well, to fight for broadening unity and was not done in the name of the AWL. It was a list of discussion. It became clear that pro-Zionists were manipulating this framework, and I got out of it.’
Two observations that flow from this. First, the senior FI signatory on the list has independently arrived at the judgement this piece argues for, through his own political experience, without needing a polemic to push him. The substantive charge is confirmed from inside the FI’s own leadership tradition before publication. Second, the fact that Rousset’s name remained on the signatories page more than a year after he ‘got out’ of the framework is evidence about how the project operates. Left Renewal does not maintain its signatory list as a live record of current endorsement. It maintains it as a legitimacy archive. The signatures accumulate credibility for the framework regardless of whether the signatories still hold the positions the framework now publicly advances.
This is the systemic function Cristian Parrino has been writing about in a different register: how legitimacy gets constructed and maintained through institutional forms that are themselves defensible in isolation but operate together to make the indefensible sustainable. The symmetry framework is defensible in isolation as a commitment to universal rights. The ‘consistent democracy’ language is defensible in isolation as principled internationalism. The antisemitism critique is defensible in isolation as a response to a real problem on the left. The signatory list is defensible in isolation as a record of a 2023 moment. Each element, taken alone, is arguable. Taken together they produce the operation that, in November 2025, platformed a Palestinian to tell his own people their resistance caused their genocide.
The same architecture shows up across political systems, media, academia, legal institutions. The AWL framework is not unique in its operation; it is a left expression of a wider pattern in how genocide becomes defensible and sustainable. Intellectual symmetry, procedural legitimacy, carefully curated representation: these function as the machinery through which the indefensible is held above the waterline. What Rousset identified and withdrew from was one node in that wider machinery.
The position worth holding
The Anti-War Committees showed what a serious alternative response could look like, and it went nowhere inside Left Renewal. The AWL framework is not marginal. It has captured a portion of the FI diaspora on the antisemitism question. The signatures are the evidence of its reach. And the operational politics it has produced, whose November 2025 peak was a Palestinian speaker telling Palestinians to wait for Israeli permission to resist, is not going to correct itself.
The position this piece argues for is not one Red Mole needs to reconstruct from scratch. The current FI leadership generation has been publishing it, in International Viewpoint and elsewhere, throughout the period Left Renewal has run its signatory list. Löwy, Achcar, Daher, and the Bureau statements and Congress resolutions themselves: the FI’s current public voice on Palestine is not silent, not hedging, not confused, and not symmetrical. The XVIII World Congress resolutions are on record. International Viewpoint‘s editorial line since October 2023 is on record. Statements from the FI Bureau are on record. Sign-ons from FI sections to Palestinian civil society calls, including BDS calls, are on record. None of this reads the conflict through the AWL’s two-nations symmetry. None of it treats Standing Together as the key force for change. None of it evacuates settler colonialism or qualifies the Right of Return. None of it a dismissal of Hamas as reactionary cipher, nor the kind of "clerical-fascist" framing the Left Renewal blog has developed in pieces such as Paria Rahimi's January 2026 "Why the Left Is Failing Iranians"'.
The tradition is alive and the tradition is coherent. What is visible on the Left Renewal signatories page is a detachment of named FI comrades whose public profile has drifted from where the current leadership generation has been publishing. Rousset’s response makes this legible from the inside. Signing in 2023 was one political act. Staying on the list in 2026, after the framework has become what it has become and after the current FI public voice has published extensively in a different direction, is another political act.
Critique of Hamas as a political force: the current FI leadership does this. Opposition to campist apologism for Hamas and Assad and Putin: the current FI leadership does this. Attention to antisemitism as a real left problem: the current FI leadership does this. And alongside these commitments, the settler-colonial framework as structural analysis, the Right of Return as a constitutive demand, active solidarity with the BDS movement whose founding call comes from Palestinian civil society: the current FI leadership does all of these, publicly, in the same pages.
This is the position International Viewpoint has maintained. It is the position the FI of 1947 committed to, and codifed in its 1948 World Congress rejection of the UN partition plan, and that subsequent Congress resolutions and official statements have built on without interruption. Pierre Frank's 1948 article in Quatrième Internationale is one articulation of that analysis, not its foundation. Gilbert Achcar and Joseph Daher articulate the contemporary version of the same structural framework. Most Palestinian and Arab comrades assume it as baseline without needing it defended at length.
It is also the position Ideas for Freedom 2025 exists to displace.
The renewal Left Renewal called for has not arrived. What has arrived is the operational framework it enabled, and a response page two and a half years empty of the voices the statement said the left was failing to hear.
Whatever the signatories thought they were doing in December 2023, this is the work the signatures have done. Pierre Rousset has recognised this and is withdrawing his signature; that is the right response and it is the standard every other signatory from a left tradition can be held to. The document as it now stands, read through what it enabled, is against the Right of Return, against BDS, against the settler-colonial analysis that has been the baseline of the FI's position since the 1947 rejection of partition. For signatories who do not recognise their politics in that outcome, the course is the one Rousset has taken: ask for the name to be removed, and say why.
Duncan Chapel’s earlier report on the AWL’s November 2025 Ideas for Freedom event, where Jasr Kawkby articulated the position discussed above, was published on Red Mole on 15 December 2025.
Postscript: Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions, because solidarity starts from what the oppressed are asking for
The Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign was launched in July 2005 by 170 Palestinian civil society organisations, six months after the International Court of Justice ruled the separation wall illegal and while settlement construction accelerated under international silence. The call is specific. It asks for three things: an end to the occupation and colonisation of Arab lands and the dismantling of the wall; full equality for Palestinian citizens of Israel; and recognition of the right of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes under UN Resolution 194. Not three maximal goals for a distant future. Three operative demands, asked of the international movement, now.
The point of restating this is that left Zionists regularly misrepresent what BDS actually says. Omar Barghouti and the BDS National Committee have issued position papers for twenty years distinguishing the movement from personal boycotts of individual Israelis, from academic boycotts of named scholars, from anything resembling ethnic targeting. The movement targets institutions that materially sustain the occupation: Elbit Systems, HP, Puma while it sponsored the Israel Football Association, universities running joint programmes with the IDF. It is a call for political pressure on the state and its complicit institutional infrastructure. It is not a call for the destruction of anybody.
Red Mole supports BDS because solidarity starts from what the oppressed are asking for, not from what makes Western socialists comfortable. This is the ABC of internationalism and it is the position the Fourth International has held, through its majority tendency, since the 1947 rejection of the UN partition plan and the Congress resolutions that built on it. The contemporary articulation runs through Achcar, Daher, and the Bureau's own post-October-2023 statements; Adam Hanieh's scholarship on the political economy of the region is a resource the tradition draws on without claiming him. The settler-colonial character of the Zionist project is not a slogan. It is the material analysis of what happened in Palestine in 1948 and what has continued to happen since.
And the AWL’s response? A seventy-year polemic against the proposition that the people being colonised have the right to demand solidarity on their own terms.
The AWL argument runs like this. Israeli Jews constitute a distinct national group with a right to self-determination; BDS, by demanding the right of return for 1948 refugees, threatens that national right; therefore BDS is a ‘demographic weapon’ aimed at the destruction of the Israeli nation. Each step of the argument collapses on contact with the material. The claim that the Israeli Jewish population constitutes a ‘nation’ in the sense that Palestinians do treats the settler-colonial relationship as two symmetrical national projects. No, worse than symmetrical: it treats the project of displacement as equivalent in legitimacy to the project of return. The ‘demographic’ anxiety on which the argument rests is the anxiety of a colonising state about the demographic consequences of colonisation being reversed. That is not a right any socialist tradition has defended, and treating it as one is the bankruptcy of left Zionism made theoretical.
The ‘Joint Struggle’ model that the AWL has built its Ideas for Freedom operation around fails on the same ground. Standing Together does work worth respecting inside Israel. It is a project of the Israeli Jewish left, with some Palestinian citizens of Israel involved, building coalitions against the occupation from within the 1967 borders. Fine. It does not substitute for Palestinian political agency, for the popular committees in the West Bank, for the unions in Gaza before they were reduced to rubble, for the diaspora organising that produced BDS in the first place. The AWL framework inverts the hierarchy. It treats the Israeli left partners as the political subject and the Palestinian movement as something to be filtered through that partnership for acceptability. Which is precisely the inversion that 2005 was designed to refuse.
On the right of return the AWL’s position is clearest and hardest to defend. UN Resolution 194 was passed in December 1948 by the same General Assembly that had voted for partition a year earlier. The right of return is not a maximalist invention of the BDS movement. It is the founding international-legal framework of the question, adopted by the same body whose partition plan the Zionist movement accepted, and reaffirmed annually for seventy-seven years. To oppose it while claiming ‘consistent democratic’ credentials is to say that one particular group of refugees, uniquely, should not be allowed home because allowing them home would alter the ethnic composition of the state that expelled them. Compared with any other refugee population in international law, the position is indefensible.
There is a real question about what happens the day after the occupation ends, about what institutional forms secure the rights of both populations, about whether a single democratic state, a confederal arrangement, or some form not yet conceived carries the weight of the settlement. These are questions for a movement to work out in the process of winning. They are not questions that determine whether BDS is supportable now. The Palestinian movement has asked. The answer is yes, or it is a refusal dressed in left vocabulary.
I do hope they take notice of what you have said. Particularly given the time gap......
Excuse my ignorance, but what's BDS? (One should never use an abbreviation without first stating what it is.)