The Drift, part 4.
On Thursday 29 October the student Palestine society at Manchester Metropolitan University brought the Tom Hurndall memorial lecture back onto campus. Tom was a volunteer with the International Solidarity Movement. In April 2003 an Israeli soldier shot him in Rafah while he was moving children out of the line of fire, and he died in January 2004. The university had pushed the lecture off site in 2024. This year it came home, and the room was full of passion, solidarity and energy.
Tom’s mother, Jocelyn Hurndall, could not be there and sent a message. Solidarity, she wrote, “is vital, but it’s only the first essential step.” Then she asked for “tangible decisions, real actions, firm government-led policies.” The lecturer, Hala Marshood, a Palestinian student who helps organise the weekly Manchester demonstrations, came at it from the other side. Solidarity does not mean becoming like the Palestinians, she said. It means fighting whatever enables their suffering where you are: Elbit’s factories on British soil, BAE’s parts for the F-35, the banks behind them, the universities tied to Israeli military research. The bare minimum, she said, is boycotting and going to demonstrations.
That is a fair yardstick for the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty. For the past week AWL members have been in the West Bank for “Protect the Harvest”, standing with Palestinian farmers against settler attacks, and posting short videos from there as Workers’ Liberty. At home the same organisation spends much of its Palestine work arguing against the boycott, divestment and sanctions campaign.
1. The harvest is solidarity, and we should say so
Start with what is right. Protective presence works. Settlers attack farmers at harvest time because they expect no witnesses and no consequences, and a group of foreigners and Israeli Jews in the groves changes that calculation. It is also dangerous. In November 2025 settlers fired live rounds at Standing Together and Rabbis for Human Rights volunteers at Qarawat Bani Hassan. This year a British student, Finn Joughin, was seized by settlers, detained and deported. The AWL members there report that Clive Lewis and Sam Tarry were held for eight hours and deported before they could reach the groves. Tom Hurndall’s name is on the lecture because the risk is real.
So the critics who call this “philanthropic colonialism”, as a UNISON rep did at a Friends of Standing Together meeting in September, are wrong. Palestinian farmers ask for people to come. The ISM was built on the same idea, and it is Palestinian-led. Nobody who goes should be sneered at.
The question is not whether the harvest delegation is solidarity. It is what the AWL does with the rest of the year, in Britain, where its members actually have some power.
2. Solidarity is fought where you stand
Hala Marshood’s definition is the oldest rule the workers’ movement has on international questions. London dockers refused to load the Jolly George in 1920 because its cargo was for use against the Russian revolution. Rolls-Royce engineers in East Kilbride refused to service Chilean air force engines after the 1973 coup. The dockers did not go to Russia and the engineers did not go to Chile. They found the part of the war machine that ran through their own workplace and they stopped it.
The Palestine movement since 2023 has worked the same way. Barclays sold its Elbit holdings, and so did HSBC. Arms factories have been shut by direct action. Dockers in several countries have refused Israeli military cargo, and the lecture closed by announcing a dockers’ day of action the next day. None of this asks anyone to agree first about one state or two. It asks that the British end of the supply chain be cut.
3. Socialist Organiser once said exactly this
The AWL descends from Sean Matgamna’s International-Communist League. In 1981 that group fused with Alan Thornett’s Workers Socialist League, and the fused WSL produced Socialist Organiser. Its pages from 1982 show that it knew the rule well.
On 23 September 1982, a week after the massacre at Sabra and Shatila, Socialist Organiser led its international page with “BOYCOTT ISRAEL’S WAR MACHINE!” The article was by Harry Sloan, the pen name of John Lister. It called on the labour movement to fight through the transport and other unions “for a full-scale boycott” of trade with the Begin regime, and it noted that the Scottish TUC and Greek and Australian dockers had already taken up the demand. It said too that the Palestinians’ right to return to their homeland “is incompatible with the Zionist state.” A fortnight later, on 7 October, Lister repeated the call: union action “to boycott all trade” with the regime.
The paper had thought about boycotts. On 15 July 1982 it covered the Rowntree strike in South Africa, and criticised the Anti-Apartheid Movement for putting an “ineffective” consumer boycott of Rowntree sweets in place of working-class solidarity. But the criticism came from the left. Its “Our policy” box demanded that the Transport and General Workers’ Union refuse to handle Rowntree goods across the food industry, road haulage and the docks. The man in that report who opposed the boycott was the GMWU senior steward at the York plant, who feared it would cost British jobs. Socialist Organiser printed his interview because, it said, it showed why the officials had done nothing. It wanted direct links between the unions and industrial action. The links were never a substitute for the action.
And on 14 April 1983, under his own name, Sean Matgamna answered Gerry Healy’s News Line, which had smeared the paper as a “Zionist connection”. His reply set out what the paper stood for. It opposed Zionism, it supported the national rights of the Palestinians, and it advocated “a secular democratic state in Palestine within which Jewish and Arab Palestinians could live as equals.”
The right of return, union action against trade with Israel’s war machine, a democratic secular state: that was the AWL’s own tradition, in its own paper, under its founder’s byline.
4. What changed
The secular state went first. On 8 September 1985 the paper’s National Editorial Board voted for two states, and the next part of this series tells how that happened, using the AWL’s own reprints of the debate.
The boycott took longer, and it has not gone completely. Read fairly, the AWL’s current position is this. It backs an arms embargo. It welcomed the government’s sanctions on the settlements in September, and asks for more targeted measures against the people building them. It says “workers’ sanctions”, such as dockers refusing to load munitions, are “a better starting point” than general economic sanctions. It now acknowledges the Nakba and calls for redress. What it opposes is BDS as a movement, the “cut-all-ties” approach in its words, and above all the boycott of Standing Together. Its reasons are that blanket boycotts can slide into antisemitism, push Israeli Jews to the right, and cut off the Israeli and Palestinian workers who might overturn the occupation from inside.
The delegation put the alternative in a phrase last week. In a video from the West Bank, one of them says that “practical solidarity between people, like what we’re doing here”, is what will set things on the right path.
Some of that is serious, and we should answer it seriously. A boycott that refused to share a platform with Jewish and Arab workers organising against the occupation inside Israel would be a mistake, other things being equal. Nobody on the left should have to pass an anti-normalisation test before they speak at a union meeting.
But a boycott of Elbit does not punish an Israeli bus driver, any more than the 1982 call to stop trade with the Begin regime did, and nobody in Socialist Organiser said then that it did. Pressure from outside is aimed at the state and the firms that arm it, and its purpose is to break the consensus inside. The delegation’s own election report shows why that consensus needs breaking. On polling day Tyrone, a Workers’ Liberty member doing protective presence, said the mainstream Israeli parties, “including the nominally left ones”, are “almost indistinguishable” in their policies for the Palestinians. The only parties calling for an end to the occupation, he said, are the ones with a Palestinian base. If that is the state of Jewish Israeli politics, then waiting for an Israeli workers’ movement to end the occupation, with no pressure from outside, is a long wait. In South Africa the boycott and the black workers’ movement were not alternatives. Each made the other stronger.
But look at where the weight falls. The arms embargo, in the AWL’s own words, is largely a “symbol”, because Britain sells Israel relatively little. A letter in Solidarity this February complained that the campaign against Elbit is closer to BDS than to stopping arms sales. When Lambeth Green Party debated divesting some £52 million of council pension money, the AWL’s member argued against the motion. Outside the Green conference in October AWL supporters ran a stall against the “Zionism is racism” motion. And the “workers’ sanctions” it calls a better starting point are exactly what Socialist Organiser demanded in 1982, except that in 1982 the demand was for workers to stop all trade, not only munitions, and the paper went out and campaigned for it. Today the AWL names the method and then spends its energy on the people who are trying to use it.
5. Links without leverage
Much of the AWL’s practical Palestine work since 2023 runs through UK Friends of Standing Together. A search of its website turns up 57 items on the group. Its members sit on the steering group. Its student comrades answer campus BDS motions by founding FoST chapters. The harvest delegation is a FoST delegation. The template union motion FoST circulates asks branches to donate, to circulate material and to invite a speaker. And when the delegation was asked what socialists should do whatever the election result, its answer was to make links with binational movements like Standing Together.
Direct links between workers’ organisations are a good thing, and Socialist Organiser said so in 1982. But in 1982 the links came with the workers’ boycott. Now they have replaced it. A union branch that passes the FoST motion has raised some money and booked a speaker. It has done nothing about the Elbit plant on its doorstep, the pension fund invested in arms firms, or the cargo going through its port.
There is also the question of who sets the terms. The South African boycott was called by the ANC and SACTU, and the left followed the call of the oppressed. The 2005 BDS call was signed by the main Palestinian unions and over 170 Palestinian organisations, deliberately on the South African model. The AWL takes its lead on tactics from an Israeli organisation, Standing Together, and argues against the call made by Palestinian civil society. However much one respects Standing Together’s courage, that is the wrong way round.
6. Five questions for the delegation
Short videos simplify, and nobody should judge a tradition by a caption. But the posts from the West Bank set out a programme, and it raises five questions the AWL should answer.
Who is responsible? “The crimes of the Israeli state are not the crimes of the Israeli working class,” says the caption to the two-states video, and Israeli workers “do not deserve to be punished via a denial of nationhood.” Half of that is right. Nobody should be punished for who they were born, and no socialist proposes it. But political responsibility is not guilt by birth. The Jewish Israeli majority votes, and it serves in the army that is carrying out the war. By the delegation’s own account, it has no mainstream party that offers the Palestinians anything different. Israeli socialists explained why half a century ago. The Israeli Socialist Organisation, Matzpen, argued that Jewish Israeli workers had a material stake in the system: land and jobs taken from the Palestinians, and an economy kept going by money from abroad. Its conclusion to The Other Israel (1972), signed by Arie Bober, Eli Aminov and M. Varshevsky, put it plainly: “The concrete political form of the contradictions of capitalism in Israel is Zionism.” That is why the Jewish working class has to break with Zionism before it can be the force the AWL hopes for. Pressure from outside helps make that break thinkable. It does not punish anyone.
Nor is a single democratic state a “denial of nationhood”. Moshé Machover argued that Israeli Jews form a Hebrew nation long before the AWL took up the idea, and he drew the opposite conclusion from it. In The Other Israel he quoted the ISO’s 1967 statement, “Self-determination does not necessarily mean separation”, and wrote that its idea of Hebrew self-determination “actually assumes the overthrow of Zionism.” The Fourth International’s 2025 World Congress calls for a free, democratic, secular Palestine to which the refugees can return and where everyone lives as equals, whatever their religion. Equal citizenship takes nobody’s nationhood away. It ends a privilege.
How is a Palestinian state won? The two-states video wants a Palestinian state “with the abolition of all settlements”, equal rights in both states, and a binational movement “with international backing” to bring down the Israeli government. The AWL’s election-day post says even ousting Likud would leave “the politics of occupation and annexation” in place. Removing the settlements, and the army that protects them, is the defeat of Zionism in all but name. In 1982 Socialist Organiser said the right of return “is incompatible with the Zionist state.” So what is the “international backing”? If it is not boycott, sanctions and workers’ action, the only backing left is Western governments: recognition, the Trump plan, the settlement sanctions Hala Marshood called too little and too late. In 1985 Socialist Organiser called the socialist revolution “much nearer” than a common secular state. If so, it is the backing any Palestinian state worth having will need. Machover said “a socialist revolution is extremely unlikely to occur within the framework of Palestine alone”, and the Matzpen conclusion said the Israeli revolution “can be conceived only as an aspect of the Arab revolution.” Backing worth the name comes from the Arab masses and the international workers’ movement, and it takes the form of pressure on the Israeli state, not only friendship with its dissidents.
What happens to the Palestinians inside Israel? Hala Marshood spent much of her lecture on what she called 48 Palestine: the so-called mixed cities of Lydd and Akka, the home demolitions in the Naqab, the organised crime the police let run. Oslo, she argued, turned the struggle into one for a state in the West Bank, and left the Palestinians inside Israel to fight on alone as citizens. They are about a fifth of Israel’s people. The AWL itself counts them at 20%. Nobody in the AWL proposes to move them, and it is right not to. Its 2019 conference policy promises them “equal rights, and national minority rights”. But two states means a state for the Jewish nation, and Israel already defines itself that way: the 2018 Nation-State Law reserves the right to national self-determination in Israel to the Jewish people. So the settlers beyond the 1967 lines are to leave, and a fifth of Israel’s own people are to stay on as a minority in a state that is not theirs. In 1985 Socialist Organiser at least saw the problem. Its two-states resolution said the Arabs in Israel were “not a separate ‘minority question’”, and backed the right of the Arab-majority areas to secede to the Palestinian state. That clause has gone too. A Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza answers neither the refugees nor 48 Palestine. Equal citizenship in one state answers both.
Where is socialism? The posts call for two states, equal rights, workers’ unity and the fall of the government, and one of them says Israeli workers do not share the interests of the “billionaires and capitalists”. That is the nearest they come. There is no socialist programme in them: no workers’ government, no Arab revolution, no socialist federation of the Middle East. In Manchester in October the AWL’s leaflet to the Together Alliance summits ended with a Workers’ Government. For Palestine it offers two capitalist states. That is the cost of the 1985 turn. When Socialist Organiser adopted two states, the socialist federation of the Middle East survived only as a subordinate clause. In 2024 the AWL still called it its “long-range programme”, with two states as the immediate one. The last time we have found it calling for the federation in its own name was in February 2025. In the delegation’s posts it has gone.
Who should socialists vote for? On polling day the AWL said the mainstream parties are “almost indistinguishable” on the Palestinians. The only parties calling for an end to the occupation and equal rights, Tyrone said, were Hadash, Ta’al and Balad, the lists with a Palestinian base. Yet the posts call an Eisenkot-led government “better for Palestinians” and the fall of Likud “a positive step”. The AWL did not tell anyone to vote for Gadi Eisenkot, and in what we have seen it gave no voting advice at all. But that is the question it ducks. Eisenkot is a former chief of the general staff. A socialist in Israel votes for the Palestinian lists, and for Hadash, the one party in the Knesset where Jewish and Arab workers organise together, which is what “workers’ unity” means at the ballot box. The AWL also credits the record Palestinian turnout to the binational movement Standing Together represents. Those votes went to the Palestinian parties. They show Palestinian citizens organising themselves, and the job of socialists is to back that independence, not to count the Arab parties as tiebreakers for a general.
7. What we should ask of them
The AWL says it wants a movement on the ground, and it says workers’ sanctions are the place to start. Then let’s hold it to that, here. We should ask its members, and the union branches and Green and Labour parties where they are active, to back:
union action to refuse military and dual-use cargo to Israel, in the ports and at the airports, in support of the dockers who are already doing it;
divestment of council, university and union pension funds from firms that arm the occupation, starting with Elbit and its suppliers;
the closure of Elbit’s British sites, and the release of the activists jailed for trying to close them;
a full arms embargo, both ways, and sanctions on Israel and not only on the settlements;
links with the Palestinian trade unions that signed the 2005 call, as well as with Standing Together.
On Saturday 14 November the Palestine Solidarity Campaign’s trade union conference, Workers Organising for Palestine, meets in central London to plan exactly this kind of workplace campaign. Its speakers include Jamal Juma of the New Unions in Palestine and the BDS National Committee, the committee’s coordinator for the maritime and energy embargo, and Hameda Deedat of South Africa’s transport workers’ union, SATAWU. AWL members in the unions should be there, and should help build those campaigns rather than argue against them.
None of that requires the AWL to give up two states, or to boycott a single Israeli worker. It only requires it to do in Britain what Socialist Organiser told the labour movement to do in 1982. Hala Marshood set the test last Thursday. Solidarity means fighting the powers that enable occupation where you are. If the AWL can send its members to stand in the olive groves, it can send them to the gates at Elbit.