Since 7 October 2023, the Middle East has once again been embroiled in an escalation of barbaric violence that defies all comprehension. Following the raid by hundreds of Hamas terrorists who massacred and kidnapped as many people as they could on Israeli territory, and the salvos of thousands of missiles fired from Gaza, the Israeli army's response has been devastating, with the systematic bombardment and destruction of population centres, the death of tens of thousands of people, mainly women and children, and the further displacement of the entire population of the Gaza Strip, with whole families forced to sleep in the streets. The Palestinian population is being held hostage by both Hamas and the Israeli army, with the surrounding Arab states (Egypt, Jordan) doing everything they can to prevent the displaced Palestinians from fleeing to their territories. And from Hezbollah in the north to the Houthis in the Red Sea, a creeping extension of the war threatens the whole region.

In the face of all this carnage, indignation and anger are not enough. Above all, we need to analyse and understand the historical context that led to these massacres. Behind the claims of pro-Zionist democrats about the ‘sacred right of the Jews to found and defend their State’ or the slogans of the pro-Palestinian left advocating a ‘free Palestine, from the river to the sea’, lies a mobilisation of the population of the region, and in particular the working class, with a view to multiplying the carnage for the benefit of sinister imperialist manoeuvres and confrontations that have been going on for more than a century: “The geopolitical landscape of the contemporary Middle East is incomprehensible without knowing the last hundred years of imperialist manoeuvres” (W. Auerbach, “Zionism and Marxism”, Intransigence wesbite, 2018).

As capitalism passed into its decadent epoch, marked by the outbreak of World War 1, the formation of new nation states lost any progressive function and served only to justify brutal ethnic cleansing, mass exoduses of populations and systematic discrimination against minorities. We need only recall how, almost simultaneously with the formation of the Zionist state in the late 1940s - and also as a consequence of British imperialism's double-dealing - there was a forced mass exodus of Muslims from India and Hindus from Pakistan, provoked by horrific pogroms on both sides. More recently, the break-up of Yugoslavia led to bloody civil wars and massacres. So the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, with its massacres and refugees, while it has its specific aspects, is not an exceptional evil, but a classic product of the decadence of capitalism. In this context, the internationalist position defended by the Communist Left rejects any support for a capitalist state or proto-state and the imperialist forces which support them. Today, the destruction of all capitalist states is on the agenda by a single means: international proletarian revolution. Any other ‘strategic’ or ‘tactical’ objective is a support for the murderous logic of imperialist war.

The history of the confrontation between the Jewish and Arab bourgeoisies in Palestine illustrates how the ‘national’ movements of both Jews and Arabs, while engendered by the ordeal of oppression and persecution, are inextricably intertwined with the confrontation of rival imperialisms, and how these movements have both been used to eclipse the common class interests of Arab and Jewish proletarians, leading them to slaughter each other for the interests of their exploiters.

Palestine: narrow national ambitions and imperialist manoeuvring ground

From the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, once the globe had been divided between the main European powers, the nature of imperialist conflicts took on a qualitatively new character, with increasingly open and violent confrontation between these and other powers in different parts of the world: between France and Italy in North Africa, between France and Britain in Egypt and the Sudan, between  and Russia in Central Asia, between Russia and Japan in the Far East, between Japan and Britain in China, between the United States and Japan in the Pacific, between Germany and France over Morocco, etc. From this time onwards, various powers, such as Germany, Russia and Britain, also had their sights set on parts of the declining Ottoman Empire[1].

The collapse of the Ottoman Empire after World War 1 offered no opportunitý for the creation of a great industrial nation, either in the Balkans or in the Middle East, a nation that would have beeń capable of competing on the world market. On the contrary, the pressure of confrontation between imperialisms led to fragmentation and the emergence of embryonic states. Just as the mini-states in the Balkans have remained the object of imperialist scheming right up to the present day, the Asian part of the ruins of the Ottoman Empire, the Middle East, has been and remains the theatre of permanent imperialist conflict.

Already during World War 1, taking advantage of Germany's defeat and Russia's ousting from the imperialist scene (faced with the revolutionary movement), France and Great Britain divided up the supervision of the ‘abandoned’ Arab territories between them (Sykes-Picot agreement of 1916). As a result, in April 1920, Britain received a ‘mandate’ from the League of Nations over Palestine, Transjordan, Iran and Iraq, while France received one over Syria and Lebanon. Virtually all the persistent ethno-religious conflicts we hear about in the region today - between Jews and Arabs in Israel/Palestine, Sunnis and Shiites in Yemen and Iraq, Christians and Muslims in Lebanon, Christians, Sunnis and Shiites in Syria, the Kurds in Turkish, Iranian, Iraqi and Syrian Kurdistan - can be traced back to the way the Middle East was carved up around 1920. As far as Palestine is concerned, as long as the Ottoman Empire existed, it had always been considered part of Syria. But now, with the British Mandate over Palestine, the imperialist powers were creating a new ‘entity’ separate from Syria. Like all these new ‘entities’ created during the decadence of capitalism, it was destined to become a permanent theatre of conflict and intrigue between imperialist powers.

In none of the Arab countries or protectorates did the local bourgeoisie actually have the means to set up economically and politically solid states, free from the grip of the ‘protecting’ powers, and the call for ‘national liberation’ was in reality nothing more than a reactionary demand. While Marx and Engels in the 19th century had been able to support certain national movements - on the sole condition that the formation of nation states could accelerate the growth of the working class and strengthen it so that it could act as the gravedigger of capitalism - the economic and imperialist reality in the Middle East showed that there was no longer room for the formation of a new Arab or Palestinian nation. As elsewhere in the world, once capitalism entered its phase of decline, no national faction of capital could play a progressive role, thus confirming the analysis made by Rosa Luxemburg as early as the World War 1: “The nation state, national unity and independence, such were the ideological flags under which the great bourgeois states of the heart of Europe were constituted in the last century. [...] Before extending its network over the whole globe, the capitalist economy sought to create for itself a single territory within the national limits of a state [...]. Today, (the national phrase) serves only to mask imperialist aspirations, unless it is used as a war cry in imperialist conflicts, the only and ultimate ideological means of capturing the attention of the popular masses and making them play the role of cannon fodder in imperialist wars” (Junius Pamphlet).

Weak bourgeoisies, manipulated by British imperialism

During World War 1, the two Mandatory Powers had made promises to the subjugated peoples then under the thumb of the Sultan of Istanbul. Great Britain in particular had raised hopes of independence for the Arabs, and even the formation of a great Arab nation (see the McMahon-Hussein correspondence of 1915-1916) and had succeeded in fomenting a revolt by Arab tribes against the Ottomans (co-led by T.E. Lawrence, ‘Lawrence of Arabia’). But on the other hand, for Britain, Palestine represented a strategic position between the Suez Canal and the future British Mesopotamia, vital for defending its colonial empire which was coveted by other powers. From this point of view, British power was not unsympathetic to colonisation ‘imported’ from Europe, constituting a sort of control force for the region, following the example of the Boers in South Africa or the Protestants in Ireland. Hence the Balfour Declaration of 1917, which expressed the British government's commitment to a Jewish national home in Palestine (“The establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people”). Moreover, a Jewish legion, the Zion Mule Corps, fought as part of the British army in the Middle East during World War 1. In short, ‘perfidious Albion’ was playing both sides.

At the end of the war, the situation of the Palestinian ruling class was precarious. Separated from its historic links with Syria, it was even weaker than the Arab bourgeoisies in other regions. With neither a significant industrial base nor financial capital, due to its economic backwardness, it could only rely on politico-military mobilisation to defend its interests. As early as 1919, at the first Palestinian national congress in Jerusalem, Palestinian nationalists called for Palestine to be included as “an integral part... of the independent Arab government of Syria within an Arab Union, free from all foreign influence or protection”[2] . Palestine was envisaged as part of an independent Syrian state, governed by Faysal, appointed by the Syrian National Council in March 1920 as constitutional king of Syria-Palestine: “We consider Palestine to be part of Arab Syria and it has never been separated from it at any time. We are bound by national, religious, linguistic, moral, economic and geographical borders" [3]. Demonstrations were organised throughout Palestine from 1919 onwards, and in April 1920 riots in Jerusalem left around ten people dead and almost 250 injured. However, the nationalist movement was quickly put down by the British army in Palestine, while French forces crushed the forces of the Arab kingdom of Syria in July 1920, not hesitating to use their airforce to bomb the nationalists. Already in Egypt in March 1918, demonstrations by Egyptian nationalists, but also by workers and peasants demanding social reforms, were put down by both the British army and the Egyptian army, killing more than 3,000 demonstrators. In 1920, Britain bloodily crushed a protest movement in Mosul, Iraq.

At the same time, the Palestinian ruling class, despised by its Syrian, Egyptian and Lebanese counterparts and proclaiming its autonomy in a world where there was no longer any room for a new nation state, was faced with a fresh ‘rival’ from outside. As a result of England's support for the establishment of a Jewish home in Palestine, the number of Jewish immigrants increased sharply, and England initially used the Jewish nationalists both against its main rival, France, and against the Arab nationalists. It encouraged the Zionists to argue at the League of Nations that they wanted neither French protection in Palestine (as part of ‘Greater Syria’) nor international protection, but British protection. In Palestine itself, funding from the European and American Jewish bourgeoisie enabled the settlements to expand rapidly, leading to increasingly violent clashes with the original Palestinian populations on the ground. In 1922, at the start of the British Mandate over Palestine, 85,000 of the 650,000 inhabitants of Palestine were Jewish, i.e. 12% of the population, compared with 560,000 Muslims or Christians. Following massive immigration linked to growing anti-Semitism in Central Europe and Russia - a consequence of the defeat of the world revolutionary wave in these regions - the Jewish population had more than doubled by 1931 (175,000). It was to grow by a further 250,000 between 1931 and 1936, so that by 1939 it represented 30% of the population.

The considerable increase in Jewish immigration to Palestine and the multiplication of settlements buying up Arab land and Jewish districts in the towns were exploited by the two nationalisms to heighten tensions and encourage confrontations between communities. The Palestinian peasants and workers, as well as the Jewish workers, were faced with the false alternative of taking sides with one faction or another of the bourgeoisie (Palestinian or Jewish). This was already clearly highlighted in 1931 in the review Bilan, the organ of the Italian Fraction of the Communist Left: “The expropriation of land at derisory prices has plunged́ the Arab proletarians into the blackest misery and driven them into the arms of the Arab nationalists and the large landowners and the emerging bourgeoisie. The latter obviously takes advantage of this to extend its aims of exploiting the masses and directs the discontent of the fellahs and proletarians against the Jewish workers in the same way as the Zionist capitalists have directed́ the discontent of the Jewish workers against the Arabs. From this contrast between the Jewish and Arab exploited, British imperialism and the Arab and Jewish ruling classes can only emerge strengthened.” [4] In fact, this false alternative meant enlisting workers in armed intercommunal confrontations solely in the interests of the bourgeoisie. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, anti-Jewish riots broke out all over Palestine, causing many deaths and injuries: in 1921 in Jaffa, then during the ‘massacres of 1929’ in Jerusalem, Hebron and Safed, with looting and burning of isolated Jewish villages, often completely destroyed, and reprisal attacks on Arab neighbourhoods, causing the deaths of 133 Jews and 116 Arabs.

After these riots, in the early 1930s the British played the pacification card towards the Arabs by limiting the Jewish self-defence forces, but the persistent tensions and provocations between communities led at the end of 1936 to a widespread revolt by Palestinian nationalists against the British forces and the Jewish communities, which lasted for more than three years (until the end of the winter of 1939). Faced with this explosion of Arab revolt, the Jewish community authorities initially imposed a policy of non-retaliation and restraint on the Haganah, the Jewish self-defence militia, in order to prevent an outbreak of violence. But within these self-defence forces there was a growing call for reprisals in response to the increasing number of Arab attacks. As a result, the Irgun, an armed organisation linked to the Zionist right, V. Jabotinsky's ‘Revisionist’ party, decided to launch indiscriminate reprisal attacks against the Arabs, which ultimately turned into a campaign of terror that left hundreds of Arabs dead. The Arab revolt also led the British to strengthen the Zionist paramilitary forces (development of a Jewish police force and special Jewish units - the Haganah's ‘Special Night Squads’ and the Fosh Commando).

In 1939, the Irgun split into two groups and its most radical fringe founded the Lehi (also known as the ‘Stern group’ or ‘Stern gang’), which launched a wave of attacks that also targeted the British. From the 1930s onwards, Arab insurgents tended to use guerrilla methods in rural districts and terrorist methods, such as bombings and assassinations, in urban areas. Groups, often of the jihadist type, destroyed telephone and telegraph lines and then sabotaged the Kirkuk-Haifa oil pipeline, murdering soldiers, members of the British administration and Jews. The British reacted violently, especially to acts of Arab terrorism, and took counter-terrorist action, such as razing to the ground Arab villages and neighbourhoods (as in Jaffa in August 1936).

In the end, the Arab revolt was a military failure and led to the dismantling of the Arab paramilitary forces and the arrest or exile of its leaders (including the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Amin al-Husseini). More than 5,000 Arabs, 300 Jews and 262 British were killed in the fighting. The revolt also led to internal confrontations between factions of the Palestinian bourgeoisie, with Amin al-Husseini's faction attacking the more moderate elements - considered to be ‘traitors’ because they were not nationalist enough for the rebels' taste and because they sold land to the Jews - and assassinating the Arab policemen who remained loyal to the British. These actions in turn set off a cycle of revenge, leading to the creation of Arab village counter-terrorism militias and the killing of at least a thousand people. At the beginning of 1939, a widespread climate of inter-clan terror prevailed among the Arab population and continued after the end of the revolt.

However, despite being defeated militarily, the Palestinian Arabs obtained major political concessions (‘White Paper’ of 1939) from the British who feared that they would be supported by Germany. Britain imposed a limit on Jewish immigration and the transfer of Arab land to Jews and promised the creation of a unitary state within ten years, in which Jews and Arabs would share the government. This proposal was rejected by the Jewish community and its paramilitary forces, who in turn launched a general revolt, temporarily frozen by the outbreak of World War 2.

Seeking the support and involvement of the imperialist powers

Too weak to act independently to establish their own nation state, both the Jewish Zionist bourgeoisie and the Palestinian Arab bourgeoisie had to seek the support of imperialist sponsors, whose interference only fanned the flames of confrontation.

Faced with the crushing by the British (and French) of the nationalist movement for a greater Syria and the influx of Jewish settlers from Europe, the Palestinian ruling factions had no choice but to turn to other imperialist powers for support against their Zionist rival. So the Mufti of Jerusalem first sought support from Mussolini's Italy, before turning in the 1930s to Nazi Germany, Britain's great rival. As early as March 1933, German officials in Turkey informed the Nazi authorities of the Mufti's support for their ‘Jewish policy’. After the failure of the Arab revolt of 1936-39 and the split with the more moderate factions within the Arab bourgeoisie, the most radical nationalist leaders, including the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, went into exile and chose the camp of Nazi Germany on the eve of World War 2. After taking part in the 1941 Iraqi uprising, fomented by Germany against the British, the Mufti ended up taking refuge in Italy and Nazi Germany in the hope of obtaining from them the independence of the Arab states.

In the case of the Jewish ruling factions, the situation was more complex, insofar as policy differences emerged between the left and centre factions on the one hand and the ‘Revisionist’ right on the other. The World Zionist Organisation, dominated by the left in alliance with the centrists, chose to maintain fairly good relations with the British (at least until 1939) and to officially endorse the objective of a ‘Jewish National Home’ without expressing an opinion on the question of independence or autonomy under the British mandate[5]. The irredentist right, represented by the Revisionist Party and the Irgun, on the other hand, immediately demanded independence and therefore distanced itself from the British.

In line with this, the charismatic leader of the ultra-nationalist right, Vladimir Jabotinsky, maintained in the second half of the 1930s cordial relations with dictatorial and even anti-Semitic regimes such as the Polish and Italian fascist authorities, in order to put pressure on the British. In 1936, the Polish government launched a large-scale anti-Jewish campaign and encouraged Jewish emigration. When he officially stated in 1938 that he wanted ‘a substantial reduction in the number of Jews in Poland’[6], Vladimir Jabotinsky decided to commit the Revisionist Party to supporting the authoritarian Polish government, which made no secret of its virulent anti-Semitism. His aim was to try and convince the government to channel the Jews expelled from Poland to Palestine. The revisionists' collaboration with Poland also had a military dimension: arms and money were given to the Irgun and Irgun officers received military and sabotage training in Poland. The Revisionist faction also had an openly fascist wing, first embodied in the Birionim group (a Zionist fascist group founded in 1931 by radicals from the Revisionist party) which openly sympathised with Mussolini, and after the latter's demise in 1943, it continued to exist through certain militants, such as Avraham Stern, an Irgun leader in the second half of the 1930s and founder of Lehi, who was sympathetic to the European fascist regimes and made contact with Nazi Germany. For this fascist wing of Revisionism, Germany was undoubtedly an ‘adversary’ but the British occupier was the real ‘enemy’ preventing the establishment of a Jewish state!

The implacable logic of imperialism in decadent capitalism was bound to drive the various bourgeois factions in Palestine to seek the support of foreign powers and could only promote a multiplication of imperialist intrigues. Thus, the Zionist movement only became a realistic project after receiving the Machiavellian support of British imperialism, which hoped by this means to gain better control of the region. But Britain, while supporting the Zionist project, was also playing a double game: it had to take account of the very large Arab-Muslim component in its colonial empire and had therefore made all sorts of promises to the Arab population of Palestine and the rest of the region. As for the ‘Arab liberation’ movement, while it opposed Britain's support for Zionism, it was in no way anti-imperialist, any more than were the Zionist factions who were prepared to attack Britain, since they all sought the support of other imperialist powers, such as triumphant American imperialism, fascist Italy or Nazi Germany.

In a capitalism historically in decline and dominated by the growing barbarity of murderous imperialist confrontations, the only perspective to be defended by revolutionaries was the one already defended by Bilan in 1930-1931: “For the true revolutionary, naturally, there is no ‘Palestinian’ question, but only the struggle of all the exploited of the Near East, Arabs or Jews included, which is part of the more general struggle of all the exploited of the whole world for communist revolution” [7]. For the Arab and Jewish proletarians of Palestine, trapped in the nets of the ‘liberation of the nation’, the 1920s and 1930s were grim years of terror, massacres and permanent fear under riots, attacks, reprisals and counter-reprisals by barbaric bands and nationalist terrorists on both sides.

The founding of the State of Israel, a product of the new imperialist order after the Second World War

The Zionist organisations had categorically rejected the guidelines of the new British plan (‘White Paper’ of 1939), which involved limiting Jewish immigration and the transfer of Arab land to Jews, as well as the creation of a unitary state within ten years. After World War 2, this opposition led to a head-on confrontation with the Mandatory Power. The British introduced a naval blockade of Palestinian ports to prevent new Jewish immigrants from entering ‘Mandatory’ Palestine, hoping in this way to appease the Palestinian Arab bourgeoisie. For their part, the Zionists used the world's sympathy and compassion for the fate of the thousands of refugees who had escaped the Nazi concentration camps to put pressure on the British and force the doors of Palestine open to all immigrants.

By 1945, however, the balance of imperialist power had shifted: the United States had consolidated its position at the expense of Britain which, bled dry by the war and on the verge of bankruptcy, had become a debtor to the Americans. So, from 1942 onwards, the Zionist organisations turned to the United States to obtain support for their project to create a Jewish homeland in Palestine. In November, the Jewish Emergency Council, meeting in New York, rejected the British White Paper of 1939 and formulated as its primary demand the transformation of Palestine into an independent Zionist state, which ran directly counter to British interests. As the main beneficiaries of the fall of the Ottoman Empire after World War 1, France and Britain now found themselves overtaken by American and Soviet imperialism, both of which aimed to reduce the colonial influence of the former top dogs. The USSR offered its support to any movement inclined to weaken English domination and, as a result, supplied arms to the Zionist guerrillas via Czechoslovakia. The United States, the main victor of World War 2, was also keen to reduce the influence of the ‘proxy’ countries in the Middle East and gave arms and money to the Zionists as they fought their British war ally.

As soon as the UN voted on a plan to partition Palestine at the end of November 1947, clashes between Jewish Zionist organisations and Palestinian Arabs intensified, while the British, who were supposed to guarantee security, unilaterally organised their withdrawal and only intervened occasionally. In all the mixed areas where the two communities lived, in Jerusalem and Haifa in particular, attacks, reprisals and counter-reprisals became increasingly violent. Isolated shootings evolved into pitched battles; attacks on traffic turned into ambushes. There were increasingly bloody incidents, which were in turn met with riots, reprisals and other attacks.

The Jewish armed organisations launched a new, intensive and particularly deadly bombing campaign against the British and also the Arabs. On 12 December 1947, the Irgun detonated a car bomb in Jerusalem, killing 20 people. On 4 January 1948, the Lehi blew up a lorry outside Jaffa town hall, which housed the headquarters of an Arab paramilitary militia, killing 15 people and injuring 80, 20 of them seriously. On 18 February, an Irgun bomb exploded in Ramalah market, killing 7 people and injuring 45. On 22 February, in Jerusalem, Amin al-Husseini's men organised a triple car bomb attack with the help of British deserters, targeting the offices of The Palestine Post newspaper, the market on Ben Yehuda street and the backyard of the Jewish Agency offices, killing 22, 53 and 13 Jews respectively and injuring hundreds. Finally, the massacre of villagers at Deir Yassin on 9 April, committed by the Irgun and the Lehi, left between 100 and 120 dead. The campaign culminated on 17 September 1948 in Jerusalem, when a Lehi commando assassinated Count Folke Bernadotte, the United Nations mediator for Palestine, and the head of the UN military observers, French Colonel Sérot. Over the two months of December 1947 and January 1948, almost a thousand people were killed and two thousand wounded. At the end of March, a report put the figure at over two thousand dead and four thousand wounded.

From January onwards, under the indifferent eye of the British, the civil war between the communities led to operations that took an increasingly military turn. Armed Arab militias entered Palestine to support the Palestinian militias and attack Jewish settlements and villages. For its part, the Haganah mounted more and more offensive operations aimed at opening up Jewish areas by driving out Arab militias, destroying Arab villages, massacring inhabitants and causing hundreds of thousands of others to flee (in total, during this period and during the Arab-Israeli war that followed the declaration of the founding of the State of Israel, almost 750,000 Arab Palestinians fled their villages). The Arab countries were preparing to enter Palestine to supposedly ‘defend their Palestinian brothers’.

On 15 May 1948, the British Mandate over Palestine came to an end and the State of Israel was proclaimed on the same day in Tel Aviv. Less than 24 hours later, Egypt, Syria, Jordan and Iraq launched an invasion. The war, which lasted until March 1949, cost the lives of more than 6,000 Jewish soldiers and civilians, 10,000 Palestinian Arab soldiers and around 5,000 soldiers from the various Arab military contingents.

If the Palestinian bourgeoisie had been incapable of creating its own state at the time of the disappearance of the Ottoman Empire at the end of World War 1, the proclamation of the State of Israel by the Zionists necessarily implied that this new state could only survive by transforming its economy into a permanent war machine, by strangling its neighbours, by terrorising and displacing the majority of the Palestinian population and above all by seeking imperialist support. Faced with the former ‘protector’ power, Great Britain, which initially opposed the formation of an Israeli state so as not to damage its position towards the Arab world, the new state was able to rely on the United States, which immediately supported the creation of the State of Israel, and on the USSR, which hoped that the formation of an Israeli state would weaken British imperialism in the region.

The Palestinian nationalists, unable to stand alone against the newly-founded State of Israel, also had to seek support among the State's enemies, such as the bourgeoisies of neighbouring Jordan, Syria, Egypt and Iraq, who were sending their troops against Israel. This war, the first of half a dozen wars and numerous military operations against its neighbours in which Israel had participated since 1948, lasted from May 1948 to March 1949. Because of the poor equipment of the Arab troops, the Israeli forces managed to repel the offensive and not only retain but even expand the territories allocated to the Zionists by the British before 1947. Beyond the grand declarations of solidarity, the neighbouring Arab bourgeoisies above all played their own imperialist cards in ‘coming to the aid of their Palestinian brothers’. Not only did Jordan occupy the West Bank and Egypt the Gaza Strip after the first Arab-Israeli war in 1948, but the Arab states also tried in the following years to get their hands on the various wings of the Palestinian nationalists. Shortly after its creation in 1964, Saudi Arabia began to finance the PLO; Egypt also tried to get hold of Fatah (the PLO's political movement); Syria created the As-Saiqa group and Iraq supported the ALF (Arab Liberation Front created in 1969). Despite all the fine speeches about the ‘united Arab nation’, the bourgeoisies of the various Arab countries were and are in fierce competition with each other and do not hesitate to use and if necessary sacrifice the Palestinian population for their own sordid interests.

Palestine at the forefront of the confrontations between the imperialist blocs

Since the day it was founded, the State of Israel has not only been enmeshed in ongoing bilateral conflicts with Palestinian Arabs and its Arab neighbours, but these clashes have always been part of the dynamics of global imperialist confrontation: Israel’s strategic position places it at the centre of regional tensions in the Middle East, but also and above all at the heart of global confrontations between major imperialist sharks. From the end of the 1950s onwards, the State of Israel played the role of vanguard for the American bloc in the region.

The start of the Cold War between the American bloc and the Soviet bloc put the Middle East at the centre of imperialist rivalries. After the Korean War (1950-53), which was the first major confrontation between the two blocs, the Cold War intensified and Russian imperialism tried to increase its influence in the countries of the ‘Third World’, which gave the Middle East increasing importance for the leaders of the two blocs. Although initially the tensions in the region mainly enabled the United States to ‘discipline’ its European allies by preventing them from pursuing their own imperialist interests too intensively (the 1956 Franco-British operation in Suez and the Israeli-Egyptian war), the conflict in the Middle East then evolved over the next 35 years in the context of East-West confrontation, with Palestine as a central theatre of confrontation.

The 1948 war was only the beginning of an endless cycle of military conflicts. From the 1950s onwards, faced with the inability of the Arab League troops to defeat their much smaller but better organised and armed enemy, an arms race began, during which Israel received massive deliveries of weapons from the United States, and the Arab rivals turned to Soviet imperialism, which persistently tried to gain a foothold in the region by supporting Arab nationalism: Egypt, Syria and Iraq, which temporarily united to form the United Arab Republic, became for a time allies of the Eastern bloc, which also supported the Palestinian fedayeen and the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) in Palestine. In 1968, the various Palestinian resistance movements came together under the aegis of Arafat. In the context of the Cold War, with Israel a major ally of the United States, the PLO had to turn to the USSR and its ‘Arab brothers’. However, behind the grand speeches about the ‘unity of the Arab people’, the Arab states once again committed their troops not only against Israel, but also against the Palestinian nationalists, who often act as a disruptive force within these states. They have never hesitated to commit massacres similar to those committed by the Israeli bourgeoisie against Palestinian refugees. In 1970, during ‘Black September’, 30,000 Palestinians were killed in Jordan by the Jordanian army. In September 1982, Lebanese Christian militias, with Israel's tacit agreement, entered two Palestinian camps at Sabra and Shatila and massacred 10,000 civilians.

These attempts by the Eastern bloc to gain a foothold in the region met with strong opposition from the United States and the Western bloc, which made the State of Israel one of the spearheads of their policy. US support for Israel has been a permanent feature of all the conflicts in the region, as has Germany's financial support[8]. This support is not essentially due to the considerable weight of the Jewish electorate in the United States or to the influence of the ‘Zionist lobby’ on American political leaders. Although Israel does not have significant oil resources or other important raw materials, the country is of major strategic importance to the United States because of its geographical position. Moreover, in its confrontation with a series of local imperialist powers, Israel is financially and militarily totally dependent on the United States, so that Israel's imperialist interests have forced it to seek Uncle Sam’s protection. In short, until 1989, the United States could always count on Israel as its armed wing. Moreover, in the series of wars with its Arab rivals - most of whom were equipped with Russian weapons - the Israeli army was a testbed for American weapons.

At the end of the 1970s and during the 1980s, the American bloc gradually secured overall control of the Middle East, reducing the influence of the Soviet bloc, even though the fall of the Shah and the ‘Iranian revolution’ in 1979 not only deprived the American bloc of an important bastion but also heralded, through the coming to power of the retrograde mullah regime, the spread of the decomposition of capitalism. The aim of this offensive by the American bloc was “to complete the encirclement of the USSR, to strip that country of any positions it may have held outside its direct glacis. The priority of this offensive is the definitive expulsion of the USSR from the Middle East, the bringing to heel of Iran and the reintegration of this country into the American bloc as an important part of its strategic system"[9] In this offensive policy of the Western bloc, Israel played a key role in the Arab-Israeli wars of 1967 (‘Six-Day War’) and 1973 (‘Yom Kippur War’), the bombing and destruction of a nuclear reactor in Baghdad in 1981 and the invasion of Lebanon in 1982. Israel's military action, combined with economic and military pressure from the American bloc, led to the defeat of the Eastern bloc allies in the region, the shift of Egypt and then Iraq to the Western bloc, and a sharp reduction in Syria's control over Lebanon.

However, strengthened by the easing of tensions with Egypt, in July 1980 the Israeli bourgeoisie reaffirmed the transfer of its national capital from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem and the incorporation of the Old City of Jerusalem (formerly Jordan) into Israeli territory. Also from this time, the Israeli government decided to step up Jewish colonisation of the West Bank. This exacerbated tensions between the Israeli and Palestinian bourgeoisies and, from 1987 in particular, the spiral of violence escalated sharply. The signal was given by the first Intifada (or ‘uprising’) in 1987. In response to increasing repression by the Israeli army in the West Bank and Gaza, the Intifada led to a massive campaign of civil disobedience, strikes and demonstrations. Hailed by leftists as a model of revolutionary struggle, it was always entirely set within the national and imperialist framework of the Arab-Israeli conflict.

If the first half́ of the 20th century in the Middle East showed́ that national liberation had become impossible and that all factions of the local bourgeoisies were subservient in the global conflicts waged between them by the great imperialist sharks, the formation of the State of Israel in 1948 marked́ nearly forty years of another period of bloody confrontations, inscribed in the merciless confrontation between the Eastern and Western blocs. More than seventy years of conflict in the Middle East have illustrated irrefutably that the decaying capitalist system has nothing to offer but wars and massacres and that the proletariat cannot benefit from choosing one imperialist camp over another.

Palestine at the centre of the irrational dynamic of destruction and massacre in the Middle East

After the implosion of the Soviet bloc at the end of 1989, the 1990s were marked by the spectacular expansion of manifestations of the period of capitalism's rotting on its feet, its decomposition, and in this context, the ‘Report on imperialist tensions’ of the 20th Congress of the ICC noted in 2013: “The Middle East is a terrible confirmation of our analyses about the impasse of the system and the flight into ‘every man for himself’”. It is a striking illustration of the central characteristics of this period:
- The explosion of the imperialist ‘every man for himself’ is manifested in the all-out expression of the hegemonic appetites of a multitude of states. Iran has expressed its imperialist ambitions, first in Iraq by supporting the Shiite militias which dominate a fragmented state apparatus, then in Syria by supporting at arm's length the regime of Bashar al Assad when it was on the verge of being swept away by the revolt of the Sunni majority. Through its allies - from Lebanese Hezbollah to the Yemeni Houthis - Teheran has established itself as a formidable regional power. But Turkey - with its interventions in Iraq and Syria - Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, present in Yemen, Libya and Egypt, and even Qatar, the base camp of groups linked to the Muslim Brotherhood, are not hiding their imperialist ambitions.
- The murderous reactions of the American superpower to counter the decline of its domination led to two bloody wars in the Middle East (Operation Desert Storm by Bush senior in 1991 and Operation Iraqi Freedom by Bush junior in 2003), which in the end only resulted in more chaos and barbarism.
- The terrifying chaos resulting from bloody civil wars (Syria, Yemen, Libya, Sudan) has led to the collapse of state structures, fragmented and failed states (Iraq, Lebanon), traumatised populations and millions of refugees.

In this dynamic of growing confrontation in the Middle East, the State of Israel has played a key role. As the Americans' first lieutenant in the region, Tel Aviv was destined to be the keystone of a pacified region through the Oslo and Jericho-Gaza agreements of 1993, one of the greatest successes of American diplomacy in the region. These agreements granted the Palestinians the beginnings of autonomy and thus integrated them into the regional order conceived by Uncle Sam. However, in the second half of the 1990s, following the failure of the Israeli invasion of southern Lebanon, the ‘hard’ Israeli right came to power (the first Netanyahu government from 1996 to 1999) against the wishes of the American government, which had supported Shimon Peres. From then on, the Right did everything it could to sabotage the peace process with the Palestinians:
- through the extension of settlements on the West Bank and support for settlers who were becoming increasingly arrogant and violent: as early as February 1994, a Jewish terrorist, a settler belonging to the racist movement created by Rabbi Meir Kahane, massacred 29 Muslims in the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron; in November 1995, a young religious Zionist assassinated Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin;
- through secret support for Hamas and its terrorist attacks in order to undermine the authority of the PLO and pursue a policy of ‘divide and rule’, justifying increasing supervision of the Palestinian territories.

Opposition leader Ariel Sharon's provocative visit to the Temple Mount in September 2000 resulted in a second Intifada, which saw a sharp increase in suicide attacks against Israelis. By the same token, the unilateral dismantling of the settlements in Gaza by the Sharon government in 2004 was in no way a conciliatory gesture, as Israeli propaganda presented it, but on the contrary the product of a cynical calculation to freeze negotiations on a political settlement of the conflict: the withdrawal from Gaza “means freezing the political process. And when you freeze that process, you prevent the creation of a Palestinian state and any discussion about refugees, borders and Jerusalem” [10]. Moreover, since Islamists reject the existence of a Jewish state in Islamic lands, just as messianic Zionists reject the existence of a Palestinian state in the land of Israel, given by God to the Jews, these two factions are therefore objective allies in sabotaging the ‘two-state solution’. The right-wing sections of the Israeli bourgeoisie have also done everything in their power to strengthen the influence and resources of Hamas, insofar as this organisation was, like them, totally opposed to the Oslo Accords: in 2006, Prime Ministers Sharon and Olmert forbade the Palestinian Authority from deploying an additional police battalion to Gaza to oppose Hamas and authorised Hamas to present candidates in the 2006 elections. When Hamas staged a coup in Gaza in 2007 to ‘eliminate the Palestinian Authority’ and establish their absolute power, the Israeli government refused to support the Palestinian police. As for the Qatari financial funds that Hamas needed to be able to govern, the Hebrew state allowed them to be regularly transferred to Gaza under the protection of the Israeli police.

Israel's strategy was clear: Gaza given to Hamas, the Palestinian Authority weakened, with limited power in the West Bank. Netanyahu himself openly promoted this policy: “Anyone who wants to thwart the creation of a Palestinian state must support the strengthening of Hamas and transfer money to Hamas. This is part of our strategy”. [11] The State of Israel and Hamas, at different times and with different means, are sinking into the worst kind of totally irrational policy, which inevitably accelerated the cycle of violence and counter-violence that led to today's atrocious massacres. In fact, the current butchery in Gaza is the continuation of a whole series of attacks and counter-attacks carried out by Hamas and the Israeli army:
- June 2006: Hamas captures Gilad Shalit, an Israeli army conscript, during a cross-border raid from Gaza, which provokes Israeli air raids and incursions.
- December 2008: Israel launches a 22-day military offensive in Gaza after rockets are fired at the town of Sderot, in southern Israel. Around 1,400 Palestinians and 13 Israelis are killed before a ceasefire is agreed.
- November 2012: Israel kills Hamas chief of staff Ahmad Jabari, followed by eight days of Israeli air raids on Gaza.
- July/August 2014: The kidnapping and murder of three Israeli teenagers by Hamas triggers a seven-week war.

Deprived of a traditional state structure and the financial resources to build a structured army capable of competing with the Tsahal (the national military of the State of Israel), the Palestinian bourgeoisie has always had to resort to terrorist attacks, as did the Zionists before the proclamation of the State of Israel. From the outset, the PLO applied terrorist tactics which were bound to cause the greatest number of civilian casualties, such as kidnappings, liquidations, hijacking of aircraft and attacks on sports teams (massacre of the Israeli Olympic team at the Munich Olympics in 1972). Since then, suicide attacks have multiplied. Committed by desperate young Palestinians, they are not aimed at military targets, but simply at spreading terror among Israeli civilians in discotheques, supermarkets and buses. They are the expression of a total impasse, of despair and hatred. The massacres of 7 October 2023 are a continuation of this policy, but at an even higher level of brutality and destruction.

The current terrifying drift must also be seen as a continuation of the irresponsible policy pursued by the populist Trump in the region. In line with the priority given to containing Iran, Trump pushed a strategy of unconditional support for Israel’s right wing, providing the Hebrew state and its respective leaders with pledges of unwavering support on all fronts including the supply of the latest military equipment, recognition of East Jerusalem as the capital and of Israeli sovereignty over the Syrian Golan Heights. This orientation supported the abandoning the Oslo Accords and the ‘two-state’ (Israeli and Palestinian) solution in the ‘Holy Land’.

The cessation of American aid to the Palestinians and the PLO and the negotiation of the ‘Abraham Accords’ - a proposal for a ‘big deal’ involving the abandonment of any claim to create a Palestinian state and the annexation by Israel of large parts of Palestine in exchange for ‘giant’ American economic aid - were essentially aimed at facilitating the de facto rapprochement between the US’s Saudi and Israeli henchmen: “For the Gulf monarchies, Israel is no longer the enemy. This grand alliance started a long time ago behind the scenes, but has not yet been played out. The only way for the Americans to move in the desired direction is to obtain the green light from the Arab world, or rather from its new leaders, MBZ (Emirates) and MBS (Arabia), who share the same strategic vision for the Gulf, for whom Iran and political Islam are the main threats. In this vision, Israel is no longer an enemy, but a potential regional partner with whom it will be easier to counter Iranian expansion in the region. [...] For Israel, which for years has been seeking to normalise its relations with the Sunni Arab countries, the equation is simple: it is a question of seeking Israeli-Arab peace, without necessarily achieving peace with the Palestinians. For their part, the Gulf States have lowered their demands on the Palestinian issue. This ‘ultimate plan’ [...] seems to aspire to establish a new reality in the Middle East. A reality based on the Palestinians accepting their defeat, in exchange for a few billion dollars, and where Israelis and Arab countries, mainly from the Gulf, could finally form a new alliance, supported by the United States, to counter the threat of the expansion of a modern Persian empire”. [12]

However, as we pointed out back in 2019, these agreements, which were a pure provocation at both the international level (abandoning international agreements and UN resolutions) and regionally, could only reactivate the unresolved Palestinian issue, a situation seized upon by all the regional imperialists (Iran of course, but also Turkey and even Egypt) and used against the United States and its allies. What's more, they only emboldened Israel’s own annexationist appetites and intensified confrontations, for example with Iran: “Neither Israel, hostile to the strengthening of Hezbollah in Lebanon and Syria, nor Saudi Arabia can tolerate this Iranian advance” [13]. The Abraham Accords irrevocably sowed the seeds of the current tragedy in Gaza.

The headlong rush of the right-wing factions of the Israeli bourgeoisie in power - more specifically the successive Netanyahu governments from 2009 to the present day - to follow their own imperialist policy is more and more openly opposed to the interests of the most responsible factions in Washington and is a caricature of the gangrene of decomposition eating away at the political apparatus of the bourgeoisie. The opposition between the different political factions in Israel over the policy to be pursued - the clashes between Netanyahu and his Minister of Defence or the chiefs of the Tsahal, the open confrontation between Netanyahu and the current American administration over the conduct of the war - induce a significant dose of uncertainty and irrationality over the outcome of the current phase of the conflict, all the more so as the shadow of a possible return of Trump to the US presidency hangs over the Middle East, which would give carte blanche to Israeli war policies and thus put an end to any hope of the United States imposing some form of stability in the region.

Nationalism leads the Middle East working class to slaughter

Once again, it is the working class that has suffered most from the consequences of the imperialist policies of the ruling classes. Israeli and Palestinian workers are constantly faced with the daily terror of Palestinian terrorist attacks and Israeli army raids and air strikes. While the endless terror unleashed by their ruling classes has created deep distress among most workers, the nationalism of their rulers also poisons their spirits. The ruling classes on both sides do everything to stir up nationalism and hatred against each other.

In material terms, workers on both sides of the imperialist conflict suffer enormously from the crushing weight of militarisation. Israeli workers are conscripted for 30 months (men) and 24 months (women). The weight of the Israeli war economy has increased the misery of Israeli workers. Palestinian workers, if they are lucky enough to find a job, receive very low wages. Over 80% of the population lives in extreme poverty. The only prospect for most of their children is to fall victim to Israeli bullets and bulldozers. And if they protest against their fate, the Palestinian Authority and the Hamas police are ready to crack down on them.

A century of imperialist conflict around Israel has shown that neither Israeli nor Palestinian workers can gain anything by supporting their own bourgeoisie. While the Israeli state has survived only through terror and destruction, the creation of a Palestinian state proper would only mean a new graveyard for Israeli and Palestinian workers. So this call for a Palestinian state is a totally reactionary slogan which communists must reject.

It is absolutely vital for communists to be clear about the perspectives of the working class. While all the leftists presented the Intifada of 1987 and those that followed as social revolts that could lead to liberation, in reality these struggles were only expressions of despair, the flames being lit by the nationalists. In all these confrontations with the Israeli state, the Palestinian workers are not fighting for their class interests but serve only as cannon fodder for their nationalist Palestinian leaders.

On the other hand, there have been occasional combative reactions by Palestinian workers fighting for their class interests - in 2007 and again in 2015, public sector workers in Gaza went on strike against the Hamas administration over unpaid wages. The same is true in Israel, with a history of strikes against the rising cost of living, such as that of dockers in 2018 and nursery workers in 2021. In 2011, during the demonstrations and assemblies protesting the housing crisis in Israel, there were even tentative signs of Israeli and Palestinian workers coming together to discuss their common interests. But again and again, the return to military conflict has tended to stifle these elementary expressions of class struggle.

Communists need to be clear about the nature and effect of nationalism in stoking up daily violence. But in addition, we have seen how campaigns to support one side or the other in the recent conflict have created real divisions in the working class in the centres of capitalism. Precisely at a time when the working class is emerging from years of passivity and resignation, the streets of the cities in the countries central to the system have been taken over by demonstrations for a free Palestine or ‘against anti-Semitism’ which loudly call on workers to abandon their class interests and take sides in an imperialist war.

While the Jewish population of Europe was one of the main victims of the Nazi genocidal regime, the policy of the Israeli state shows that these barbaric crimes are not a question of race or ethnic or religious affiliation. No faction of the bourgeoisie has a monopoly on ethnic cleansing, population displacement, terror and the annihilation of entire ethnic groups. In reality, the ‘defence mechanisms’ of the Israeli state and the Palestinian methods of warfare are an integral part of the bloody barbarism practised by all regimes in rotting capitalism.

R. Havanais / 15.07.2024

 

[1] See ‘Notes on the history of imperialist conflicts in the Middle East, Part 1’, International Review 115, 2003.

[2] ‘ From Wars to Nakbeh: Developments in Bethlehem, Palestine, 1917-1949, Adnan A. Musallam [20] “ [archive of 19 July 2011] (accessed 29 May 2012)

[3] Meir Litvak, Palestinian Collective Memory and National Identity, Palgrave Macmillan [21], 2009

[4] Bilan 31 & 32, June-July 1936: See ‘Bilan and the Arab-Jewish Conflict in Palestine’ [5] International Review 110, 2002.

[5 ] Independence was not officially claimed until May 1942, at the Biltmore Conference.

[6] Political programme of OZON, the party in power in Poland, May 1938, reported in Marius Schatner, Histoire de la droite israélienne, Éditions Complexe, 1991, page 140.

[7] Bilan No. 31 (June-July 1936), ibid

[8] Shortly after the creation of Israel, Germany began to support it financially with an annual ‘compensation fund’ of DM 1 billion.

[9] ‘Resolution on the International Situation, 6th ICC Congress’, [22] International Review No. 44, 1986.

[10] Dov Weissglas, close adviser to Prime Minister Sharon, in the daily Haaretz, 8 October 2004. Quoted in Ch. Enderlin, ‘L'erreur stratégique d'Israël’, [23] Le Monde diplomatique, January 2024.

[11] Netanyahu told Likud MPs on 11 March 2019, as reported in the Israeli daily Haaretz on 9 October.

[12 ] Extract from the Lebanese daily L'Orient-Le Jour, 18 June 2019.

[13] ‘23rd International Congress the ICC, Resolution on the international situation (2019)’, [24] International Review 164, 2019.

 

Faced with the horrors of imperialist war, a genuine “socialist” and “workers’” organisation has one duty: to denounce both camps in every conflict, to stand with the exploited class against their exploiters and recruiting sergeants. The “Socialist Workers Party” in the UK has denounced the bloody assault on Gaza by Israel, but let's look at their position on the murderous rampage of Hamas in the south of Israel:

“Palestinians have struck a huge blow against Israeli settler colonialism.

In the face of escalating violence from the Israeli state, Palestinian fighters launched an unprecedented attack from the Gaza Strip on Saturday 7 October.

Read about why the Palestinian people have every right to respond in any way they choose to the violence that the Israeli state metes out to them every day”[1]

“To respond in any way they choose”? In other words, the SWP supports the cold-blooded murder of hundreds of unarmed Israeli men, women and children, the seizure of civilian hostages to be used as human shields or bargaining chips, all backed up by indiscriminate rocket fire at residential centres in Israel. In a whole series of articles that openly celebrate the Hamas incursion, there is no mention in the SWP press about these crimes.

In other words, the SWP shares the logic of imperialist war, which justifies the branding of whole populations as enemies. Israel’s retaliatory assault on Gaza, despite claims by its politicians and generals that they are going after Hamas and not civilians, is already indistinguishable from the Russian bombardment of cities in Ukraine, with whole residential areas being reduced to rubble, backed up by a total siege which is cutting off supplies of food, water, electricity and medicines to a population which had already suffered years of blockade. The impending ground invasion by Israeli forces will greatly increase the death toll. The inevitable consequence of all this is the piling up of civilian corpses in their thousands. This is collective punishment of an entire population. But the merciless, indiscriminate slaughter of Israeli Jews (and a number of Muslims and Christians) by Hamas obeys precisely the same sinister logic, even if the methods of killing differ.

SWP support for imperialism: a long history

This is not the first time the SWP has voiced its support for one camp against the other in the imperialist wars in the Middle East. In the “Yom Kippur War” of 1973, Socialist Worker (October 12 1973) wrote that “The Arab states have every right to resume the war against Israel”. Their International Socialism journal number 63 claimed that “the fight of the Arab armies is a fight against imperialism”.  

For the anarchists who held a meeting at the recent anarchist bookfair in London under the heading “Fighting Russian imperialism in Ukraine” and urged participants to help send military and other equipment to the Ukrainian army (via its anarchist fighting units…), there is only one imperialist side in Ukraine. Ukraine’s pivotal role in the decades-long offensive of US imperialism against its Russia rival counted for nothing - and internationalists at the meeting, both left communist and anarchist, who denounced both imperialisms were shouted down for “Westplaining” and “speechifying”.

For the SWP, countries like Egypt, Syria, Iran or Iraq (which they supported in 1991 and 2003 against the US) are or can be “anti-imperialist” when they oppose US imperialism’s aims. But like all other lesser powers, these states have their own imperialist needs and interests, which they invariably pursue by obtaining the backing of other, more powerful imperialisms. In 1973, Egypt was backed by Russian imperialism, just as Syria is today. The SWP’s support for Egypt in 1973 aligned them with the imperialist interests of the USSR, as did their backing for North Vietnam and the NLF in the Vietnam war[2]. These policies expose the emptiness of the “Neither Moscow nor Washington” slogan of the SWP’s predecessors, the International Socialism group. Despite “discovering” that the Stalinist USSR was state capitalist rather than a “degenerated workers’ state”, as other Trotskyists argued, this never prevented IS and later the SWP from supporting Russian imperialism against the imperialism of the USA.

In 1915, Rosa Luxemburg wrote in The Junius Pamphlet that “in the contemporary imperialist milieu there can be no wars of national defence”. This applies just as much to so-called “national liberation” or “resistance” movements as to fully formed states. Just as Zionism could only establish and maintain a state in Palestine through the backing of US and other imperialist powers, Palestinian nationalism, whether posing as “marxist”, “secular” or “Islamist”, has also placed itself at the service of contending imperialist forces: Germany and Italy in the 1930s, the USSR, China, Saudi Arabia, or Iraq in the post-war period. Today Hamas and Hezbollah are mainly agents of Iranian imperialism: one of the aims of the Hamas attack was no doubt to disrupt the impending alliance between Israel and Saudi against their common enemy Iran[3].

And we should not forget that Hamas is already a state formation – a faction of the Palestinian bourgeoisie – which exploits and oppresses the masses of the population in Gaza. They deal with “their” workers just like any other capitalist regime. In 2006 teachers in Gaza and the West Bank came out on strike in protest against unpaid wages and were met by threats and repression by the Hamas regime (and they have been out again in the West Bank in February/March 2023). And one of the greatest ironies in this whole nightmare is that Hamas to a large extent owes its existence to Israel, who initially encouraged its development as a counter-weight to the PLO[4].

The SWP’s portrayal of Hamas as identical to the “Palestinian people” once again puts them on the side of a faction of the bourgeoisie against the working class. And “rejoicing” at the Hamas murders hides the fact that they have wilfully exposed the entire Palestinian population to a gigantic military reaction by Israel which has already claimed hundreds of lives. We can even say that they have benefited the Netanyahu regime, which was tottering in the face of major divisions in Israeli society but can now present itself as the core of a new “national unity” government.

In 1973, we wrote in the first edition of World Revolution, in an article headed “The Arab-Israeli war and the social-barbarians of the ‘left’”: “It is quite clear that for all the rhetoric of the ‘Palestinian people’s war’, the Palestinian national movement’ could only ‘liberate Palestine’ by tail-ending the state armies of Egypt, Syria, Iraq and others, no doubt heavily backed up by Russian imperialism. Any regime set up by these forces would be a ghastly caricature of ‘liberation’. Of necessity it would be a puppet state of different, anti-Western imperialisms, exerting a ruthless dictatorship over the defeated Israeli population and exploiting the labour of both Jewish and Palestinian workers”. The Hamas attack shows that the “victory to the resistance” that the SWP and sundry other leftists shout about would, in the increasingly irrational wars of capitalism’s decomposition, most likely bring mass extermination and a further dive into chaos.

There is no solution to the endless bloodbaths in the Middle East and across the globe outside of the international class struggle and the world wide proletarian revolution. All forms of nationalism, and their “socialist worker” apologists, are deadly enemies of the working class and its revolutionary future.

Amos, 12.10.23

Organised violence in the Middle East has given rise to profound indignation throughout the whole world. First the terrorist attack of Hamas on 7 October, killing 1200 and injuring 2700 Israeli citizens, and then the ongoing, massive slaughter of the population in the Gaza strip by the Israel Defence Forces (IDF). Revolutionary organisations have the duty to denounce this imperialist barbarism as they have done throughout the history of the workers’ movement, starting with the “Manifesto to the Workmen of all Nations” by the Paris members of the International: "War for a question of preponderance or a dynasty can, in the eyes of workmen, be nothing but a criminal absurdity”[1].

In accordance with this responsibility, groups like the Internationalist Communist Tendency, Internationalist Voice, or Internationalist Communist Perspective in Korea, met this minimum requirement as they have in their articles defended a clear internationalist position on the war in the Middle East.

- “The working class must refuse to be recruited into the wars of the ruling class and fight against the exploiters on both sides. There is only one way for the Israeli and Palestinian working class (…) the struggle beyond nations and borders for common working-class interests. Only an international class struggle to overthrow the capitalist system can end the carnage and wars”[2].

- “Only the class struggle of the workers can offer an alternative to the brutality of capitalism, because the proletariat does not have a country to defend, and its fight must cross national borders and develop on an international scale”[3].

- “All capitalists are equally mortal enemies of the working class, who should not shed one drop of blood for those who exploit them, much less for their national-imperialist objectives. (…) The fundamental argument of class unity by all sectors of the working class - against the bourgeoisie, its states, its imperialist alignments - regardless of the ‘national’ origin of its constituent parts, is even more valid”[4].

In the case of the different Bordigist groups, the situation is more nuanced. As part of the revolutionary milieu, their position is fundamentally internationalist insofar as they denounce the imperialist massacre and reject any support for either of the opposing camps. However, despite loud proclamations of their internationalist commitment, their concrete defence of internationalism is not unequivocal. For some, by supporting the fight against the "national oppression" of the proletarians and the Palestinian masses, for others, by defending the idea that these massacres will generate a development of workers' struggles in the region and throughout the world, these groups reveal dangerous ambiguities regarding how to promote and defend proletarian internationalism in the current period of decomposing capitalism.

Ambiguities leaving the door ajar to opportunist slidings

Behind its declaration of solidarity with the Palestinian proletarians, the ICP/ Le Prolétaire-Programme Communiste hides a call for struggle against the national oppression of Palestinians: “Palestine: a proletariat and a people condemned to be massacred. Israel: a state born out of the oppression of the Palestinian people and a Jewish proletariat as prisoner of the immediate benefits of that oppression and accomplice of it”[5]. Thus, while internationalist revolutionaries should denounce the spiral of imperialist clashes between bourgeoisies, into which the different fractions of the proletariat of the Middle East are drawn, and promote the rejection by the workers of any "national liberation" movement because "the proletarians have no homeland", the ICP/ Le Prolétaire-Programme Communiste tends to call, first of all, for a struggle to put an end to “Israel’s oppression of the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank”, which secondly excludes any solidarity with the working class in Israel which “is prisoner of the immediate benefits of that oppression and accomplice of it”.

Another group, the ICP/ Il Partito Communista-The Communist Party, seems to defend convincing internationalist positions when it writes: “We must tell the Palestinian proletarians not to be deceived by their bourgeoisie (…) to immolate themselves as cannon fodder in wars contrary to their interests”. But in the next sentence, it adds: “We must tell the Israeli Jewish proletarians to fight against their bourgeoisie and against the national oppression of their Palestinian class brothers” [6]. So, it doesn’t call here for the international solidarity of all proletarians against the imperialist war, but it urges Israeli proletarians to support the Palestinian workers’ struggle against national oppression.

Finally, the ICP/ Il Programma Comunista-Cahiers Communistes recognises the exhaustion of the anti-colonial “national revolutionary” movements and thus puts forward the perspective that “in this terrible situation, the Middle Eastern proletariat (…) will be able to find the strength to escape the bonds of opportunism which imprison it. We hope that, as in the great battles of the past, it will be able to field the best fighters for its cause, that it will be able to turn today's unavoidable defeat into the starting point for a future rich in victories”[7]. In other words, they propagate the false perspective according to which the proletariat of the Middle East, on its own, mobilised as it is behind religious and nationalist mystifications and crushed by imperialist massacres, will be able to learn the lessons of defeats and be at the basis of the resurgence of struggles which are renewing "with the great battles of the past" (one wonders which ones; perhaps the so called "national-revolutionary movements" of the 1960s and 1970s where the working class of the Middle East was mobilised behind various national bourgeois factions?)

Even if these organisations do not openly support an imperialist camp – neither the Palestinian bourgeoisie in the West Bank nor that in the Gaza Strip – they leave the door ajar for supporting the struggle of the Palestinian “masses” and “people” against their “national oppression”, which could only exacerbate the gulf between the working class in Israel and the Arab countries. These slidings towards so called “nationalist-revolutionary” perspectives constitute a threat to the internationalist stance of these organisations.

Proletarian internationalism is a class frontier which, in the face of imperialist war, separates the working class from the bourgeoisie. It is a principle that we must defend with tooth and nail at every moment of our activities: in interventions in worker’s struggles, in public meetings, in correspondence, and in our press. In this sense we endorse the words of Lenin that “there is one, and only one, kind of real internationalism, and that is – working whole-heartedly for the development of the revolutionary movement and the revolutionary struggle in one’s own country, and supporting (by propaganda, sympathy, and material aid) this struggle, this, and only this, line, in every country without exception. Everything else is deception...”[8]. The Bolsheviks often stood alone in their criticism of opportunist positions on the question of war, but this was an indispensable part of their work to construct the world party. Such a theoretical fight was and is essential to deepen all the consequences of an internationalist position and to demarcate revolutionaries from the enemies of the working class, particularly the social chauvinists.

Obsolete theoretical framework leads to opportunist slidings

In the period of the decadence of capitalism, a period where the relations of production established by the capitalist mode of production have been transformed into an increasingly heavy obstacle to the development of the productive forces, the bourgeoisie no longer has a progressive role to play in the development of society. Today, the creation of a new nation, the legal constitution of a new country, does not allow any real step forward in a development that the oldest and most powerful countries are themselves incapable of assuming. In a world dominated by imperialist confrontations, any struggle for "national liberation", far from constituting any progressive dynamic, constitutes in reality a moment in imperialist confrontations, in which the proletarians and peasants enrolled, voluntarily or by force, only participate.as cannon fodder.

The “national liberation” movements, which marked the 1960s and 1970s in particular, clearly demonstrated that the replacement of the colonisers by a national bourgeoisie in no way represented a progress for the proletariat, but on the contrary led it into countless conflicts between imperialist interests, in which workers and peasants were massacred. But the obsolete framework of the Bordigist groups prevent them from understanding the real stakes the international proletariat, and its sections in Israel/Palestine, is confronted with in the imperialist inferno of Gaza.

The group Le Prolétaire-Programme Communiste continues to analyse the Palestinian question in the framework of “the spirit and the ‘national-revolutionary’ independence drive which characterised the struggles against national oppression in Algeria, Congo and, later, Angola and Mozambique, and which had long characterised the spontaneous revolt of the Palestinian proletariat”[9].The drama and the challenge of the Palestinian “liberation movement” is, for Le Prolétaire-Programme Communiste, that “the gigantic class potential represented by the Palestinian proletariat and proletarian masses, while manifesting itself through their armed and indomitable struggle in Palestine, Lebanon, Syria and Jordan, did not express an autonomous, class-based political programme capable of guiding the national movement"[10]. Thus, this group still calls for a Palestinian “liberation movement”, while revolutionaries on the contrary must defend the position that today all states, all bourgeoisies are imperialist and that proletarians should in no way support movements against national oppression.

Il Partito Communista-The Communist Party fundamentally shares the same framework, as it formulates the critique that this war is not a true “national liberation struggle” by the Palestinians, because such a struggle “would not have exposed the people of Gaza with such cynicism to Israel’s appalling vengeance “[11]. Whereas revolutionaries must call for a rejection of every support for nationalist aims, this group insists on winning support for the struggle against national oppression among the Israeli working class and cynically regrets that the massacre by Hamas made it impossible: “Moreover, the struggle against the odious national oppression imposed on the Palestinians might have won support even among Israelis, primarily among the working class, if it had not been placed on the plane of the massacre of civilians, in compliance with the deliberate program of killing Jews wherever they are, carried out by the obscurantist Hamas"[12].

For its part, Il Programma Comunista-Cahiers Communistes recognises the exhaustion of the anti-colonial movements since the mid-1970s and emphasises that “the unresolved ‘national questions’ [have] turned into counter-revolutionary cancers”[13]. However, the impossibility of national revolutionary movements today leads this group to argue that this context of total imperialist destruction and barbaric chaos constitutes a fertile ground for the development of a broad proletarian movement: “What will cause governments most alarm, if the bloodbath continues, will be the massive declarations of solidarity from the Arab capitals (…) and from the many capitalist strongholds (where the Arab and in particular Palestinian proletariat has lived for decades)”. Certainly, the local bourgeoisie in alliance with the various religious and nationalist leaders will exploit religious and nationalist divisions “to avoid class contagion. Bourgeois governments will do all they can to break the instinctive bond with far-off proletarians massacred by such powerful forces: this bond, too, has its material role in the struggle, while the storm of ‘cast lead’ strikes at homes and bodies. And so, we trust that this instinctive bond with the immigrant proletarian masses in the imperialist cities will manage to find the path towards unrelenting class warfare”[14].In short, as the title of their article already suggests[15], their perspective is  that the proletarian reaction will depart from the bloodbaths of the imperialist confrontations and from the very parts of the world proletariat that are trapped in the “counter-revolutionary cancers” of national liberation and massacred by the different imperialisms in the Middle East. But, in contrast to what happened during the First World War, in the present period of decomposing capitalism, it is the extension of the struggle of the world proletariat against attacks provoked by the economic crisis and the expansion of militarism that will offer a perspective to the proletarians in the Middle East.

Since the First World War, a “national-revolutionary” struggle has never constituted a perspective for the revolutionary struggle of the proletariat that could constitute the starting point for a genuine proletarian reaction. The obsolete framework of these Bordigist groups prevents them from understanding the current stakes in the Middle East and leads them to develop ambiguous positions, opening the doors to opportunist slidings.

This obsolete framework also leads to the trivialisation of war.

The war in Gaza is not, as Il Programma Comunista-Cahiers Communistes states, “the umpteenth wave of slaughter”, presumably followed by a new period of stability and peace. On the contrary, this war represents a significant new step in the acceleration of chaos in the region and beyond. “The sheer scale of the killings indicates that the barbarity has reached a new level. (…) Both sides are wallowing in the most appalling and irrational murderous fury!”[16]. We are faced with the utmost expression of barbarism, a bloody fight until nothing else is left but ruins in a region that has become completely uninhabitable. The war in Ukraine was already a new stage in the aggravation of imperialist confrontations. The war in Gaza takes it one step further. Even if this won’t lead to the outbreak of a world war, the cumulation and combined effects of all these wars may have a similar or even worse consequences for life on the planet. But the Bordigist groups express a strong tendency to underestimate the stakes of the present situation, leading to erroneous conclusions and orientations. Their inability to understand the real dangers contained in the present situation is clearly shown in the fact that these organisations trivialise the historical gravity and impact of the war in Gaza[17]. On the one hand the positions of Le Prolétaire-Programme Communiste hold the view that the present conditions still enable the Palestinian proletariat to fight for its own interests against the Israeli and Palestinian bourgeoisie. On the other hand, Il Partito Communista-The Communist Party has set its sight on the world war, which is “an ineluctable economic necessity”, since capitalism “can only survive by destroying. That’s why it needs the general war”[18].

What we have actually seen in the past three years is not a build up towards a world war, but a situation that has accelerated worldwide through an accumulation of crises: pandemic, ecological, food, refugee, and economic crises. Even if some of these groups have acknowledged this accumulation of crises, none of them understands that these crises are not separated cases, but part of the same process of the decomposition of the capitalist world, each one reinforcing each other’s effects. In this process of putrefaction, the war has become the central factor, the real catalyst, aggravating all other crises. It aggravates the global economic crisis, plunges whole sections of the world population into barbarism; it leads to unemployment and social misery in the strongest capitalist countries, and increases the destructive effects of the ecological peril. Therefore, it is mistaken to consider the present war in Gaza as an umpteenth massacre in the Middle East which can be followed again by a period of calm or reconstruction in whatever form[19].

In the face of this war the various ICPs show their complete incapacity to understand the stakes of the present imperialist confrontations. The absence of an adequate framework, that of the decadence and decomposition of capitalism, leads all the Bordigist organisations to cling to an outdated concept, incapable of explaining all the dynamics of the current situation and opening the door to serious opportunistic slidings.

D&R 22 February 2024

The intransigent defence of internationalism faced with imperialist war is a fundamental duty of a communist organisation. Revolutionaries have to be able to navigate against the stream of bourgeoise propaganda aimed at dragooning the proletariat behind one imperialist gang or another. This is particularly the case faced with the orgy of nationalist and militarist hysteria surrounding the war in the Middle East.

In the previous issue of WR, we warned of the danger of the Anarchist Communist Group’s concessions towards lining up behind the Palestinian bourgeoisie. Initially, we had welcomed the fact that the ACG  defended an internationalist position by denouncing both sides in this war[1].But subsequently, we pointed to its concessions to the idea of the “liberation” of Palestinian workers:  “the position defended by the ACG in this article is very dangerous because, at first glance, it seems indeed to be based on proletarian internationalism. But that is only in appearance. Because if you read it carefully, the opposite is the case. The article does not straightforwardly and openly defend Palestinian nationalism, but its logic, its whole reasoning points in that direction. It is a very sophisticated exposition of the national liberation ideology”[2].

This ‘sophisticated’ defence of nationalism has now become less subtle. In a recent article[3], unlike the previous article, the ACG makes no clear denunciation of the war as imperialist, of the links between the Palestinian “resistance” groups and various imperialist powers. Instead, the article presents the Israeli state as the only perpetrator of this war.  The ACG does say that it is:  “the already dispossessed and those who are always the greatest victims of inter-imperialist wars, of colonialism and exploitation: the working class”. But without a clear statement of the imperialist nature of both sides this statement remains at best ambiguous. It certainly does not warn the working class about the danger of lining up behind either side.

Hamas deliberately provoked Israeli imperialism through its massacre in southern Israel on the 7th October, in a suicidal scorched earth strategy to undermine the developing relations between the Israeli state and some other Middle East states. Hamas knew full well the bloodbath its attack would unleash. However, for the ACG (in this article at least), as with the left of capital, the Israeli state is the enemy. Hamas is silently relieved of its terrorist role in this nightmare!

There is no explanation of the contradiction between this article and the previous one.

This apparent abandoning of internationalism leads the radical anti-state, anti-authoritarian, anti-imperialist  ACG to making the bizarre demand that other imperialist states should ally themselves with ‘ordinary peoples’ anger  “.. Israel is able to do this (to wage war) because, for all the anger and opposition its genocidal actions are creating amongst ordinary people, there are not, so far, any allies amongst the nation states of the world, notwithstanding South Africa’s filing a case of genocide against Israel at the International Court of Justice, that might intervene meaningfully on their behalf”. What intervention does the ACG think these nations states should make?

A hint is given in the following sentence: “Iran and their Hezbollah allies have refrained from any full-blooded commitment, despite provocation from Israel, because they know the consequences of an escalation”. Does the ACG think that these two imperialist gangs should make a “full-blooded commitment” to war against Israel? What would such a commitment entail if not a military intervention ie the slaughter of workers in Israel, whether or not conscripted into the IDF? The comrades of the ACG really need to clarify what they mean.

The ACG appear to believe that the working class should look to “nation states” -ie imperialist states- as allies. Maybe the proletariat should support US imperialism, which has been trying to restrain Israel’s murderous offensive in Gaza?

In order to pursue its support for the liberation of the Palestinian proletariat from the Israeli oppression, the ACG also  advocates workers  participating in the campaign by the openly pro-Palestinian, leftist Workers’ for a Free Palestine, that calls for:  “an end to arms sales to Israel and for the UK government to support a permanent ceasefire”.  Does this mean that the capitalist state and its democratic facade is no longer the enemy of the proletariat? Should the proletariat fall on its knees and beg British imperialism to support a peace agreement? One can only assume the ACG is celebrating British imperialism’s current support for a ceasefire. A support determined of course by what British imperialism believes is in its best national interest.

 

Nationalist campaigns against the revival of class struggle

Another part of the national interest of the British state is to undermine the proletariat’s growing renewed confidence in itself. In 2022, in the midst of the war in Ukraine, the proletariat in Britain placed its class interests first by raising its class demands in a wave of strikes. This placed the class back on the social terrain, after decades of being mired in demoralisation, a loss of vision of itself as a class with the strength to defend its own interests. The ruling class had wanted to further demoralise the proletariat through making it feel helpless faced with the Ukraine war. This did not happen. The acceleration of the economic crisis, partially due to the war, brought a deep well of discontent bubbling to the surface.

The British bourgeoisie, along with the rest of the world ruling class, however, has used the Gaza war to generate important divisions in the class. Week after week the bourgeoisie has done all it can to promote and enable the pro-Palestinian nationalist demonstrations which mobilised hundreds of thousands. The constant media attacks about the anti-Semitism, pro-Hamas nature of these demonstrations have further served to increase the divisions in the class

Instead of warning the proletariat of the danger of these nationalist parades, the ACG presents them as something positive: “The demonstrations across the world continue with hundreds of thousands on the streets every weekend in cities and towns, big and small. They have, in many places, become angrier, more desperate as Israel’s armed forces continue to murder with immunity”.

Reading this article, one is left wondering whether the ACG still defends its own Aims and Principles, which include a rejection of nationalism: “We reject all forms of nationalism, as this only serves to redefine divisions in the international working class. The working class has no country and national boundaries must be eliminated”.

The workers have no country – but the ACG sees something positive in demonstrations against Israeli state terrorism and thus in favour of a “Free Palestine”. If the ACG was serious about the elimination of national boundaries it would oppose this slogan with all its might.

The ICC takes no pleasure in seeing its warnings about the ACG’s concessions to national liberation and leftism so starkly confirmed. This is precisely why we have sought to expose these concessions and warn the comrades of the ACG, and those influenced by it, of the dangers they face.

The ACG is at a crossroads. Either it begins to resist the growing influence of leftism on it, which means addressing its underlying source - its rejection of marxism and its contemporary vanguard, the tradition of the Communist Left. The alternative is to be increasingly swept up into leftism.

Phil

 

 

ICC Introduction

The ICC welcomes the rapid reaction by Internationalist Voice to the escalation of the war in the Middle East: analysing the attacks between Israel-Iran and putting forward an unswerving denunciation of the Israeli and Iranian bourgeoisies. IV also rejects the propaganda about the possibility of peace within decadent capitalism - the bourgeois press is talking of Iran and Israel stepping back from the brink when the threat of a wider war continues to grow.

The unconditional defence of internationalism and the rejection of all sides involved in this conflict is by far the first priority of any group claiming to defend internationalism. And IV rightly insists that only the working class struggle provides an answer to imperialism and its endless wars.

IV is also a co-signatory of the Joint Statement by the Communist Left on Ukraine and the Appeal concerning the war in Gaza, and on this occasion IV is again proving its internationalist credentials

The joint statement recognised that there would still be differences of analysis of the situation by groups of the Communist Left. These are being taken up in the Bulletins of the Communist Left where our readers can find discussion between the groups on these differences.

 

Against the Barbaric War of Israel and Iran. Capitalism Means War and Barbarism!

 

Once again, the brutality of capitalism has revealed itself in the form of military tensions. The states of Israel and Iran, widely regarded as war criminals, have turned the Middle East into a battleground for their contentious agendas and flames have engulfed the region. On 1 April 2024, Israel targeted the Iranian consulate in Damascus, resulting in the deaths of several Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) commanders and Iranian military advisers. Iran lodged a complaint with the Security Council of the den of thieves (United Nations, UN), which also refused to condemn Israel, instead urging all parties to exercise restraint.

There are speculations that Israel had intelligence on Iranian military commanders and could have killed them as soon as they arrived in Syria, but Israel needed to intensify the existing tensions, and deliberately targeted the Iranian consulate in order to force Iran to challenge Israel directly instead of acting through proxies in the region. Netanyahu’s political position both inside and outside of Israel was greatly weakened, Western countries’ support for Israel was diminished due to the unrestrained killing of civilians in Gaza and internal protests against Netanyahu again spread inside Israel. Its child-killing and civilian-butchering face emerged, and anti-Israeli demonstrations affected public opinion around the world. Israel’s Haaretz newspaper, which is one of the most influential Israeli publications, described the situation in Israel just two days before Iran’s attack as follows:

“The war’s aims won’t be achieved, the hostages won’t be returned through military pressure, security won’t be restored and Israel’s international ostracism won’t end. We’ve lost. Truth must be told. The inability to admit it encapsulates everything you need to know about Israel’s individual and mass psychology. There’s a clear, sharp, predictable reality that we should begin to fathom, to process, to understand and to draw conclusions from for the future. It’s no fun to admit that we’ve lost, so we lie to ourselves.”[1] [39]

With Iran’s attack, Israel appeared as the victim again, Netanyahu stabilized his position for the time being, Israel was able to regain the backing of Western countries and the issue of a possible ceasefire was side-lined. Most importantly, Israel was able to gain the unwavering support of America again, and America directly stood up to defend Israel. The US had previously emphasized that Israel did not inform the US of the attack on the Iranian consulate.

Iran informed its neighbours about the operation 72 hours before the military operation and emphasized that the operation would be limited and controlled and would not target Israel’s economic and civilian areas. Turkey had passed this information to America and most likely America had also transferred it to Israel. In addition, Iran had sent a message to America through the Swiss embassy that if America participated in Israel’s retaliatory attack against Iran, American bases in the region would not be safe.

First, on 13 April 2024, Iran seized a cargo ship belonging to an Israeli billionaire in the Strait of Hormuz. That evening, approximately 300 drones, ballistic missiles and cruise missiles were targeted at Israel, most of which were launched from Iran. According to the published information, all the drones were neutralized by Jordan, France, Britain and America before reaching Israel’s airspace in Jordan, Iraq and Syria. Some of the missiles were also stopped by the aforementioned countries before they entered the Israeli airspace, which made it easier for the remaining missiles to be intercepted by the planes or the Israeli interception system. Israel claims that 99 per cent of drones and missiles were blocked and eliminated by Israeli air defence systems and other Israeli partners. According to the British Guardian newspaper, the cost of interception and neutralization could amount to approximately 1.3 billion US dollars (1.1 billion British pounds).[2] [40]

Iran’s representative in the UN declared that Iran’s operations were not offensive but legitimate defence according to the UN Charter:

“Iran’s Permanent Mission to the United Nations said the country’s military action against Israel was based on Article 51 of the UN Charter regarding the legitimate right to self-defence and in response to the deadly Israeli attack against the Iranian consulate in Syria.”[3] [41]

Iran claimed that it targeted the Nevatim[4] [42] air base in the south and the Negev air base in the north of Israel, causing significant damage to the former and disabling it. On the other hand, Israel stated that only one air base in the south of Israel was “very superficially” damaged in the Iranian attack and that the base is operating normally, and it also published a video of a military plane landing at the same base. The states of Iran and Israel have a long history of lying and inverting facts, although Israel does it more subtly and effectively and has better war propaganda. According to the American ABC report, nine Iranian missiles hit two Israeli air bases, but did not cause major damage:

“Five ballistic missiles hit the southern Nevatim Air Base, the official said, damaging a C-130 transport plane, an unused runway and empty warehouses. Four additional ballistic missiles struck the Negev Air Base, but no significant damage was reported, he added.”[5] [43]

Certainly, such interception and neutralization would not have been possible without Israel’s partners, especially America, who had already prepared themselves for such a scenario. Through a statement, Joe Biden clearly explained how America was ready to help Israel:

“At my direction, to support the defence of Israel, the U.S. military moved aircraft and ballistic missile defence destroyers to the region over the course of the past week.  Thanks to these deployments and the extraordinary skill of our service members, we helped Israel take down nearly all of the incoming drones and missiles.”[6] [44]

The chief of general staff of Iran’s armed forces also announced that the operation carried out was the extent of punishing Israel. From Iran’s point of view, the operation has ended and Iran does not intend to target the population and economic centres of Israel. In other words, Iran’s operations were controlled and Iran has no intention of escalating tensions:

“According to Iran, the operation was considered a success and further attacks on its part were not necessary, but if the Zionist regime carries out an action against the Islamic Republic either on our soil or in the centres belonging to us in Syria and elsewhere, a bigger operation will be carried out. Will be done.”[7] [45]

As mentioned, Iran has warned of any possible attack by Israel, and in this context and in line with the propaganda war, billboards installed in the streets of Tehran read in both Persian and Hebrew: “The next attack will be the end of your fake country”. CNN also reflected the threat of the commander-in-chief of the IRGC:

“We have decided to create a new equation, which is that if from now on the Zionist regime attacks our interests, assets, personalities, and citizens, anywhere, and at any point we will retaliate against them.”[8] [46]

Another important fact is that both Iran and Israel and Israel’s partners obtained the chance to test their war equipment in real combat conditions during this attack and, consequently, during the interception and neutralization and to examine the strengths and weaknesses of their war equipment.[9] [47]

The tension between Iran and Israel following Israel’s attack on the Iranian consulate in Damascus and even before Iran’s attack on Israel has generated serious economic consequences for Iran. The Iranian stock market experienced a heavy drop of approximately 54 thousand units of the stock index, and the value of the national currency fell by approximately 22 percentage points . After Iran’s attack on Israel, we also saw a drop in stocks in Asian markets and an increase in the price of gold. In other words, the working class pays the price of these imperialist tensions with the fall in their living standards.

The war in the Middle East has increased instability in the region, and this issue is not only a blow to American influence, but also to China’s imperialist ambitions. It has already affected China’s Silk Road. Just as Russia attacked Ukraine without the advice of China and in accordance with its imperialist interests, Israel is busy razing Gaza to the ground for the same reason, to some extent outside the control of America. Israel’s policy undermines the interests of the US and its allies. However, the US and its European allies are in some way facing the situation and are forced to support Netanyahu’s policies, although they also pay a heavy price. America is trying to prevent the situation from getting out of hand and the war from spreading, and that’s why the New York Times, in an article entitled “Military Aid to Israel Cannot Be Unconditional”, demanded that the sending of American weapons to Israel be conditional. The New York Times editorials state that Israel has broken the bond of trust between the two countries, and until Israel restores this bond, the US should not provide weapons to Israel:

“The suffering of civilians in Gaza – tens of thousands dead, many of them children; hundreds of thousands homeless, many at risk of starvation — has become more than a growing number of Americans can abide. And yet Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel and his ultranationalist allies in government have defied American calls for more restraint and humanitarian help.”[10] [48]

Almost all Western countries condemned Iran’s operation against Israel and at the same time declared their support for Israel and advised Israel not to launch a retaliatory attack. Now the question of Israel’s retaliation has been raised. The US has asked Israel to inform the US of its plan before any possible response to Iran and has emphasized that it will not participate in any offensive action against Iran. CNN stated in this regard:

“President Joe Biden and senior members of his national security team, seeking to contain the risk of a wider regional war following a barrage of Iranian missiles and drones directed toward Israel, have told their counterparts the US will not participate in any offensive action against Iran, according to US officials familiar with the matter.”[11] [49]

Israel also called for an emergency meeting of the UN Security Council and requested that it should firmly condemn Iran’s aggression against Israel and declare the IRGC a terrorist organization, despite the fact that Israel had previously called the council’s decisions shameful. Of course, the Security Council meeting ended without a resolution. During the meeting, the representative for Iran called Israel the cause of instability in the region and emphasized that Iran seeks to avoid the spread of the conflict:

“Iran has no intention of conflict with America in the region. We demonstrated our commitment to peace by exercising restraint over the US military’s involvement in intercepting Iranian drones and missiles aimed at military targets in the occupied Palestinian territories. This reflects our commitment to de-escalation and avoid escalation of conflict. However, if the United States initiates military operations against Iran, its citizens, or its security and interests, the Islamic Republic will use its inherent right to respond proportionately.”[12] [50]

The fact is that the den of thieves (UN) is part of the war policy of different imperialist factions acting against each other. With the hypocrisy of the criminals, the demagoguery of the demagogues and the disgusting shows, the den of thieves, which once gave permission to carry out imperialist wars under the title of defending human rights, in the face of the massacre of approximately 37 thousand people, the majority of whom were children and women, states that nothing can be done, or silently authorizes the slaughter. Apparently, the mask of human rights has fallen and now not Israel itself, but its partners are accused of participating in genocide.

“Germany on Tuesday strongly rejected a case brought by Nicaragua at the United Nations’ top court accusing Berlin of facilitating breaches of the Geneva Convention and international humanitarian law by providing arms and other support to Israel in its deadly assault on Gaza.”[13] [51]

All states, whether they appear to be pacifists, or whether they are warmongers, democrats or dictators, use the working class as cannon fodder in imperialist wars and are war criminals. The fact is that if we leave aside the propaganda of the democrats, the two criminal states of Israel and Iran have many similarities. In each one religion plays a fundamental role, and they are both ideological nations, with a long history of massacres, that have or have had thousands of prisoners, and so on. This list can be extended.

Depending on where you live or which front you are in, you will be bombarded with propaganda and the crimes of the other party are considered “war crimes”, while those of your own front are considered “legitimate defence”.

Israel claimed that Hamas intends to take advantage of the tension between Israel and Iran, so Hamas has rejected Israel’s offer and Israel will “pursue its goals in Gaza with all its might”.

Unfortunately, compared to their brothers and sisters in Iran, the Israeli working class is much more influenced by nationalism and religion, and this issue has made the Israeli working class unable to remember past struggles in its historical memory, meaning that the Israeli bourgeoisie can easily mobilize them to war. One of the reasons why the Iranian bourgeoisie does not want tensions to spread is that it knows that it will not be able to mobilize the working class to fight like it did during the Iran-Iraq war. Although the working class has not been able to straighten its back from previous defeats, nevertheless, compared to its class brothers and sisters in Israel, it has much better fighting conditions. It is the most combative battalion of the proletariat of the Middle East, which has recorded glorious battles in its historical memory.

In Iran, apart from their ideologies, pro-Western currents consider the expansion of tensions a window of hope and they hope that the military attack will bring down the mullahs and pave the way for them to come to the field. These factions have good propaganda facilities and are supported by Westerners, Arab countries and Israel in line with their imperialist interests.

The war in the Middle East is not a conflict in only one corner of the globe, but it has affected the whole world. Although all the actors involved in these imperialist goals emphasize the necessity of not expanding tensions, there is a risk that they will get out of control and turn into a regional war. These strained relations are not the product of bellicose leaders, but the result of certain conditions of the history of capitalism, and will continue in the future. Therefore, it is the duty of internationalists to defend proletarian internationalism and expose the imperialist nature of such frictions and their material background to the public and shout loudly that these are against the working class.

History has shown that the only force capable of ending the bourgeois killing machine that is war is the working class. It was the danger of the German Revolution that forced the bourgeoisie to sign the armistice. The same thing is always true. War criminals only refrain from conflict when there is the danger of the proletariat preparing themselves for the class war. Although the global working class is not in such a position today, the evolution of the class struggle can create such a future for the proletariat.

War has become a way of life for capitalism in its decadent age. Capitalism cannot provide a future, as it only spreads brutality and barbarism to more areas. It is an illusion to ask the warmongers to stop the war. The peace of the warmongers can only be a smokescreen in war-seeking capitalism. From within the peace of capitalism, only the flames of war can spread. Only the class struggle of the workers can offer an alternative to the brutality of capitalism, because the proletariat does not have a country to defend and its fight must cross national borders and develop on an international scale. Only the working class, by overthrowing capitalism on a global scale, can destroy the material basis of imperialist tensions and bring permanent peace to humanity.

Workers have no country!

Down with the imperialist war!

Long live the war between the classes!

 Internationalist Voice

15 April 2024

Notes:

[1] Saying What Can’t Be Said: Israel Has Been Defeated – a Total Defeat [52]

[2] [53] The Guardian [54].

[3] [55] Iran says military action against Israel based on UN Charter’s Article 51 [56]

[4] [57] Iran claims that this is the base from which the Israeli planes took off and bombed the consulate.

[5] [58] U.S. officials told ABC News and the Wall Street Journal [59]

[6] [60] Statement from President Joe Biden on Iran’s Attacks against the State of Israel [61]

[7] [62] Financial Times [63]

[8] [64] CNN [65]

[9] [66] Some of the missiles fired did not have a warhead and were intended to engage the air defence systems so that other missiles would be able to hit the targets by bypassing the air defence systems. All the drones were also sent for the same purpose and apparently Iran did not use its latest-generation missiles in this attack.

[10] The New York Times [67]

[11] [68] Biden tells Netanyahu US will not participate in any counter-strike against Iran [69]

[12] [70] Amir Saeed Irvani, Ambassador and Permanent Representative of the Islamic Republic of Iran [71]

[13] [72] The Washington Post [73]

 

 

 

 

 

The war in Gaza - Hamas’s atrocious attack on civilians on October 7 and Israel’s scorched earth response to it - has mobilised groups of capitalism’s left, mainly Trotskyist, to offer their “solution” to this crisis of war and destruction. But their solutions, while coming from slightly different angles, are for more of the same: you fight nationalism and imperialism by supporting nationalism and imperialism. In this way the “critical” role that leftism plays for the ruling class is for it to mop up the genuine disgust that workers feel for the endless wars of capital (i.e. imperialist wars) and dragoon the workers into active support for them, via the pretext that they are expressing “solidarity with the oppressed”. While they try to garner support for this or that nationalism or this or that “movement of the oppressed” the fundamentals of their positions are an attack on the basic tenet of the workers’ movement: its internationalism, its watchword that workers have no country and no national interest to defend. The Communist Left has put a clear internationalist position on this war, denouncing all sides, while some elements of anarchism have tried, with difficulties, to do the same. But all varieties of leftism have sought to mobilise workers behind the military factions of the belligerents and against the intrinsic international unity of the working class.

The SWP: applauding capitalist terror

The ICC has already looked at the positions of the Socialist Workers Party and its open support for Hamas and its atrocities[1], but a bit more on this group given its size and its importance for the state: in an article entitled “Imperialist War and Violence” (Socialist Worker, 4.12.23) it actually says that “the solution to capitalist war isn’t to back one imperialist side or the other – it’s to tackle the system that produces war and competition head on”. This sounds very much like an internationalist position and one that puts the class struggle at centre stage, but what is the content of this task – how is capitalism to be confronted “head on”? Their answer from the SWP is that it “means solidarity and support for oppressed peoples that revolt against imperialism”; in this case the murderers of Hamas! This is by no means the first time that the SWP has backed a ruling class with imperialist ambitions; in the 60’s and 70’s onward it supported the murderous gangsters of Mandela’s African National Congress now running South Africa[2] where the vast majority of what the SWP call “the oppressed” remain in poverty and misery, or the Viet Cong, now running Vietnam with an iron rule of Stalinist terror and fully integrated into the imperialist machinations around South-East Asia between the USA and China. And in the decades in between then and now the SWP has supported and called for solidarity and support to any number of capitalist killing-machines that they say are fighting for their “oppressed people”, whereas these factions that call themselves – or are called by the SWP – “anti-imperialist” are nothing but cogs in the machinery of capitalist barbarism.

The SWP use or rather misuse V. I. Lenin’s Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism and the weaknesses and hesitations of the past workers’ movement on the question of national liberation in order to suggest that only a small number of countries are imperialist, whereas imperialism blankets the globe, “nestles everywhere” [3] and necessarily sucks up any form of nationalist or “oppressed peoples” movement into itself. The SWP, through its trickery, is not behind the movement – which can only be a proletarian movement – to confront and “tackle the system that produces war and competition head on”. Rather, it is one of capitalism’s important recruiting sergeants for imperialist war, which is clearly demonstrated in its support for the war-machine of Hamas and its “right” to murder civilians, including small children, and rape women. The military and political wings of Hamas – and the half-a-dozen or so Palestinian “anti-imperialist” groups that support them - are not “anti-oppressive” forces but forces of the capitalist state which like any national liberation “movement” is conjured up by the greater powers, using their ubiquitous secret services and military assets, and whose very existence is based upon the ruthless exploitation and repression of the working class that they supposedly represent. That is something which clearly defines their capitalist nature - and the capitalist nature of the Socialist Workers’ Party along with it. Rather than fighting capitalism “head on”, that is engaging in a class struggle against exploitation and war, the SWP is explicit over Gaza: “fighting for a free Palestine seeks to strike a blow against imperialism smashing Israel and backers”.

We can only add that, for the SWP, “smashing Israel” necessarily involves “smashing” the Israeli working class. In a recent article[4] the SWP carefully explain that “Israeli workers gain from the exclusion, repression and marginalisation of Palestinian workers. They secure some of the profits from the robbery of Palestinians… Individuals can and sometimes do make the break from Zionism, but not Israeli workers as a class. Socialists should look to a force that can lead to the end of Zionist terror. That’s Palestinian resistance, the working class across the region and a protest movement in countries which fund and arm Israel”. And so, by implication, Israeli workers are legitimate targets for “acts of resistance” like the massacre of October 7[5].

Applauding capitalist terror, but with nuances

 With its own particular nuances but generally going along the same lines as the SWP in supporting war with Israel, the International Marxist Tendency[6] is generally more cautiously critical of Hamas. seeing it as a pawn of Israel (which used it for a long time to divide and control the Gaza Strip) but supports the Palestinian people having “the right to... defend themselves”. In an article called “The Communist Party of Greece and the struggle for the liberation of Palestine: a necessary debate” the IMT take up the issue. There’s plenty of “comradeship” between these two groups, one Trotskyist, the other Stalinist – which is correct seeing that they both belong to the left of capital – and turgid verbal gymnastics that are supposed to show their genuine “marxism”, including quoting Lenin and the Third International, but the position of the IMT is exposed as equally supportive of aspects of imperialism as the SWP. After “comradely” criticism of the Greek CP (KKE) for supporting the “two-state” solution which “is not the struggle for socialism” and in order to give a “genuinely marxist position”, the IMT agrees with the KKE “that the struggle for national liberation is a crucial part of the programme of communists in Palestine”. While it spouts off endlessly about “socialism” and “Marxism”, it peddles the lie that “national liberation”, in this case “intifada until victory” which is the war of Palestinians against Israel, is a step towards socialism rather than the further descent into capitalist barbarity that it manifestly is. The IMT doesn’t stop here: “March with us” they say “and boldly fight for world intifada”. The idea that a world revolution could be achieved by of a series of nationalist uprisings shows how Trotskyism cannot but support the world of imperialism.

The Socialist Party, formerly Militant, is less gung-ho about the war in Gaza than the previous two groups above, obscuring its support for imperialism with various democratic snake-oil remedies. “How can we build a movement to stop the war in Gaza?” it asks given its involvement in the mobilisation against the first Gulf War twenty years ago. It takes a different tack from the SWP’s “unconditional support for Hamas” and criticises the latter for its October attack on Israel. It calls instead for “a socialist intifada” which is nothing but a more “left wing” form of war against Israel. And indeed, the SP go along with the SWP in that “we agree that it is essential to support the struggles for national liberation” - the difference being the language used in order to support nationalism and imperialism. The SP calls for the war against Israel to be run by “... democratically organised defence committees (fighting) for liberation” which according them will result in “an independent Palestinian state alongside a socialist Israel...” (SP website). We should not be fooled by painting support for nationalism in red.

The Alliance for Workers’ Liberty offers a “softer”, more pacifist tone in its response to the war. The AWL supports “workers’ control”, state ownership and “a fuller democracy”, and its pacifist, democratic approach is equally dangerous to proletarian consciousness as the bellicosity of the SWP. It’s another group going into verbal contortions in order to present its entirely capitalist programme as “socialist”. Supporting a cease-fire and the release of Israeli hostages, the AWL calls for an arms embargo and the withdrawal of military aid from Israel before realising that the latter is more than self-sufficient in weaponry apart from hosting one of the biggest arms dumps of US weaponry outside of America.  It supports what it calls the “growing peace movement” in an article on its website called “Full ceasefire, peace, two states!”, which if “democratically organised” will result in “an independent Palestinian state alongside a socialist Israel”. Such pacifism has always played into the hands of the ruling class and further undermines a real understanding of imperialism and its perspectives for humanity. And the AWL, with all its own nuances, is still very much putting forward the idea of Palestinian national liberation.

The various “solutions” to the war in Gaza from the menagerie of leftism above are entirely complementary, indeed part of the war fever now being generated by the bourgeoisie. “National liberation” and Palestinian nationalism are active factors in imperialism, part of the engine of the war machine of capitalism. Aside from the general confusions spread by the leftists about war, “socialism” and “marxism”, groups like the SWP and the IMT want to aim more specifically at the working class. The SWP, which is strong in the trade unions, wants to “take the struggle against war into the workplace” and for “workplace days of action”. The IMT suggest that workers should take strike action against the war in order “to bring down the war machine, hinder the flow of weapons to Israel”, and it says that with such action “the Zionist war effort would come crashing down”.

Against all these attempts to obscure the issue and dragoon workers behind the nationalist factions of the bourgeoisie, the working class needs clarity above all. Capitalist war, particularly on the scale it is spreading today, always brings inflation and greater attacks on the working class, where more and more sacrifices are demanded from them by the bourgeoisie. Therein lays the kernel of the class struggle against imperialism where the workers fight for their own interests against the ruling class and its national interest. All demands to support any kind of nationalism or nationalist movement contribute to undermining the fundamental aim of the class struggle – the destruction of the nation state.

Baboon 15.1.23

We publish here an exchange of views with T, a contact in Germany, focusing on the mobilisations in support of “Freedom for Palestine”.

Letter from T

Comrades,

Here is a contribution to the discussion from me:

One criticism I have is that the ICC portrays other political positions that do not correspond to the ICC's understanding of internationalism as anti-internationalist. Lenin had a different position on the anti-colonial/anti-imperialist struggle than Rosa Luxemburg - but was he not an internationalist?  A brief search on the subject reveals that Lenin clearly supported the anti-colonial struggle politically. Central to this is the "right of nations to self-determination". He wrote: "Socialists must not only demand the unconditional and immediate liberation of the colonies without compensation - and this demand in its political expression signifies nothing more nor less than the recognition of the right to self-determination - but must render determined support to the more revolutionary elements in the bourgeois-democratic movements for national liberation   in these countries and assist their rebellion - and if need be, their revolutionary war - against the imperialist powers that oppress them."[1] [74]

He also accuses those socialists who do not stand up for the right to self-determination of being lackeys of the imperialist bourgeoisie. With regard to these socialists, he writes that such socialists “are behaving like chauvinists, like lackeys of the blood-and-mud-stained imperialist monarchies and the imperialist bourgeoisie”[2] [75].

And Lenin also brings something important to the point: " As against this philistine, opportunist utopia, the programme of Social-Democracy must point out that under imperialism the division of nations into oppressing and oppressed ones is a fundamental, most important and inevitable fact.”[3] [76]

Even if imperialism is a world system, and I am also convinced that there can be no "progressive" national struggles, the following question nevertheless arises: is the nationalism of the Israeli state the SAME as the nationalism of the Palestinians? Is there no difference between the oppressing side and the oppressed side from the perspective of the ICC? So, to put it very clearly, in a nutshell: it is true that I can see that the nationalist-religious politics of parts of the Palestinian population do not offer an emancipatory, socialist perspective (but rather oppress). In this respect, criticising it is also essential. BUT: where does a policy lead that does not distinguish between oppressor and oppressed? This level of oppression is missing in the ICC analysis. In fact, oppression exists at the level of nationality - as Lenin says, this is an essential element of imperialism! This aspect is not addressed by the ICC, it is not explained, but rather ignored.

If there is no difference from the perspective of the ICC, this would at least explain why the murderous actions of the Israeli state are not the focus of agitation. It would also explain why the criticism of the German state and the imperialist West, with Israel as an ally, is so timid.

I do not arrive at a conclusive solution to the problem. Nor do I fully agree with Lenin's position, but I do think that he addresses important aspects.

The ICC's position appears to be a template, as exactly the same arguments are used for both the war in Ukraine and the war in Palestine. Both cases have similarities - which the ICC emphasises (thesis of decadence, example of a state of decomposition) - but also differ in important respects. For example: Ukraine is a state that is being heavily armed by NATO. Palestine is not a state. It is an occupied territory that was granted an "autonomous authority" by the occupying power. There are many other differences, this was just one example.

Furthermore: The question arises as to how the attack by the militant groups and the bloody massacre on 7 October came about in the first place. Some (or many?) people in Israel are asking themselves: where was Mossad and where was the army? Didn't they fail terribly? How could this happen? The ICC is simply adopting the official "facts" and the official explanation of what happened - which are being fed to us by interested parties.

Here I can even refer to an older ICC article which states: "All too often, when the ICC denounces the Machiavellianism of the bourgeoisie, our critics accuse of us of lapsing into a conspiratorial view of history. However their incomprehension in this regard is not just a misunderstanding of our analysis, but even worse falls prey to the ideological claptrap of bourgeois apologists in the media and academia whose job it is to denigrate as irrational conspiracy theorists those who try to ascertain the patterns and processes within bourgeois political, economic and social life. However, it is not even controversial to assert that lies, terror, coercion, double-dealing, corruption, plots and political assassination have been the stock in trade of exploitative ruling classes throughout history, whether in the ancient world, feudalism or modern capitalism."[4] [77]

You certainly don't now see any possible Machiavellianism with 7 October! Documents have already emerged that raise big questions, see: "Documents reveal Israeli conspiracy to promote 7 October attack"[5] [78]

In an English publication by the ICC, there is an important thought that illustrates the importance of the issue: "But there is something even worse: this Pandora's box will never close again. As in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria and Libya, there will be no going back, no ‘return to peace’."[6] [79]

In my opinion, this is completely true. The problem I wanted to present lies in the extent to which disgust with the ugly face of Western imperialism leads to collective resistance. A resistance that can rise up against the imperialist logic of war. Anyone who does not take the concrete manifestation of Western imperialism - as we are currently seeing in the indiscriminate murder of over 10,000 people in the Gaza Strip - as a starting point is failing to take a tactical approach.

For example, there have already been proletarian actions, such as the refusal of dock workers to load weapons and ammunition to be used in the Gaza war. Unfortunately, the ICC press does not report anything about this - although this could be a concrete, small step towards proletarian internationalism.

The following assessment is not correct in its generalised statement and is reminiscent of the announcements from German imperialist government circles: "Nevertheless, they [the demonstrators] are actually taking part in demonstrations that are pro-war in character, in which the leading slogan ‘Palestine will be free, from the river to the sea’ can only be achieved through the military destruction of Israel and the mass murder and expulsion of Israeli Jews - a reverse Nakba."[7] [80]

"In truth, [they are] taking part in demonstrations that are pro-war in character"? There are certainly many participants who are not aware of the problem of the nationalist-religious escalation and there are also openly reactionary forces. But to attribute a fundamentally pro-war character to the demonstrations is wrong. And, as already mentioned above, very compatible with the official statements of German and European imperialism. Because what they don't need now is opposition to the slaughter in Gaza. That is why critics are being massively attacked and demonstrations banned. And the ICC is of the opinion that these are "pro-war demonstrations"?

The multi-faith working class in Europe and the USA is raising its voice against the war - millions of times!  - and the ICC is of the opinion that they are taking part in "pro-war demonstrations"?

 

ICC reply

We welcome the contribution of the comrade. He has made a real effort to explain his position in the face of the war in the Middle East, mainly based on the positions developed by Lenin during the First World War. With his critique he participates in the clarification of the nature of the Gaza war, which has already posed serious problems to some political groups in their defence of the perspective of the world working class. For us this is all the more reason to respond carefully to this contribution

But we want to start with a methodological question.  Since the comrade makes no appreciation of the analytical framework used by the ICC to develop its position in face of this war, we don’t know if his criticism only concerns specific points in the analysis or the whole political approach of the ICC. It is for instance not completely clear if the comrade is 100 percent in agreement with the internationalism defended by the ICC, or only under certain conditions.

In any case it seems that the comrade is in agreement with the ICC that “this Pandora's box will never close again. As in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria and Libya, there will be no going back, no ‘return to peace’.” This is an important point because from this we infer that the comrade agrees with us on the concept of the irrationality of this war, in which there will be no winners, but only destruction and further chaos. But this position is not without consequences, because such a position makes it useless to support either camp in this war. Especially when the comrade also affirms that, in the epoch of imperialism, “progressive” national struggles are no longer possible[8] [81].

Oppressors and oppressed

That’s why we are all the more surprised that the comrade brings up the theory of the oppressor and oppressed nations, by following the words of Lenin, that “under imperialism the division of nations into oppressing and oppressed ones is a fundamental, most important and inevitable fact"[9] [82]. And in support of this position, he also adds that “Palestine is not a state”.

It is not exactly clear what the comrade is saying here , but he seems to say that the Palestinian nation is not equal to the Israeli nation, that the Palestinians are actually an oppressed national minority within the Israeli state, an idea which we can accept. This is a situation similar to the oppressed nations in the Czarist Russia before 1917. And it was Lenin who therefore defended the “rights of the nations to self-determination”. But this tactical position aimed at favouring the conditions for the world revolution, turned out disastrously when it was put into practice after the October Revolution. In 1918 Rosa Luxemburg rightly criticised this “tactic”, for instance in her pamphlet The Russian Revolution. 

In this pamphlet Rosa Luxemburg showed, on the basis of the empirical facts, that when nations were given “self-determination” after October 1917, they immediately became reactionary formations, and not only turned against each other but also against the revolution[10] [83].

This occurred because of the fact that capitalism had entered its period of decadence, a world completely divided, in a state of historical crisis and irreversible decline. Increased competition between the great powers for a share of the world market led to military tensions, culminating in the First World War. Following the First World War, and with the failure of economic "remedies" for the crisis of capitalism, the only way left for the bourgeoisie to break the deadlock was to rush headlong into militarism and war. But even the smaller nations could not escape this logic. If they wanted to survive they had to accept the flight into militarism and to conform to the global demands of the major imperialist powers.

Every national bourgeoisie must submit to the logic of the permanent war of capital, to its way of life, and to the chain of imperialist conflicts that follows from this. National liberation has become equal to imperialist war and the ideology of "national liberation" in the decadence of capitalism is reactionary.

The distinction of Lenin between oppressor and oppressed nations is not wrong, but it does not touch upon the roots of the capitalist mode of production. Oppression and oppressed are superstructural features that have no direct relation with the basis and an abolition of a particular form of oppression has no fundamental impact on the material conditions of capitalist society. The fight of the oppressed or even the elimination of oppression of Palestinians, Blacks or women – if this would ever be possible under capitalism - does not abolish this very system. On the contrary, as is the case with the Palestinians, we can even expect that their “liberation” from the oppressing Israeli regime, if it ever succeeded at all, would most certainly lead to an oppressive regime like the other Islamic states in the region and thus not to the undermining of capitalism – not to mention its abolition.

Lenin’s position that “division of nations into oppressor and oppressed (…) forms the essence of imperialism” [11] [84] leaves the window wide open for the view that all classes in the oppressed, non-imperialist nations have a common interest in fighting the oppressing nation. In other words: the distinction between "aggressors and aggressed", between "oppressor and oppressed nations" is not only invalid, but forms the ideological framework designed to draw the exploited class into wars in defence of interests which are not its own. Therefore it is widely used by the extreme left of capital to call upon workers to support the struggle of oppressed national populations in the framework of imperialist war. Distinct class interests are hidden and replaced by with the “people’s interests” and the general interests of the oppressed nation[12] [85].

In his theory Lenin did not only start from superstructural features, he also divided countries in the world into three main types and for each of these three types he developed different politics[13] [86]. But the working class is one  international class and every policy that seeks to define the best tactics for each part is in contradiction with the principle that the proletarian revolution has to take place on a world-wide level and not according to specific conditions in this or that part of the world. In this sense Rosa Luxemburg is right that “any socialist policy that disregards this defining historical[imperialistic] milieu, and wants to be guided only by the isolated viewpoints of one country in the midst of the world whirlpool, is built on sand from the outset”[14] [87].

The Palestinian regime also suppresses the working class

In contrast to the comrade, we are convinced that Gaza is not only a national entity but that the regime in Gaza has also several functions of a bourgeois state: it collects taxes and has an army, a juridical apparatus, detention facilities, intelligence and police personal, etc. It is the Hamas de-facto administration which exercises these state functions and has, since 2005, under the direction of a highly centralised command centre, been able to fire thousands rockets into Israeli territory. There is only one conclusion possible: the war in Gaza is a war between two imperialist states.

Therefore, we do not agree with the comrade when he draws the conclusion that revolutionaries should take as a starting point for their tactical position the “disgust with the ugly face of Western imperialism (…) as we are currently seeing in the indiscriminate murder of over 10,000 people [and more] in the Gaza Strip”. The ICC, in line with the positions defended by the tradition of the Communist Left, does not choose one of the imperialist camps, neither for tactical reasons nor because of the massacres and atrocities caused by one of the imperialist camps. But the comrade seems to have another view which, as a concrete expression of his theoretical approach, is clearly shown in the critique of the ICC’s position on the pro-Palestinian demonstrations.

In his critique the comrade draws the conclusion that these demonstrations, in contrast to the position defended in the article “The reality behind the bourgeois slogans”, were not pro-war demonstration. According to the comrade, they were pro-Palestine demonstrations, supported by workers, and that this is why the demonstrators’ criticisms of the policy of the western bourgeoisie were attacked by the mainstream media. By not adopting the right tactical stance, the ICC supposedly joins the chorus of the anti-Palestinian campaign. But the article is right when it says that the slogan “Palestine will be free, from the river to the sea” can only signify the ethnic cleansing of the Jewish population in the region between the Jordan and the Mediterranean Sea, “a Nakba in reverse”. And this has nothing to do with an anti-Palestinian or pro-Israeli position, but with a position that approaches and analyses the situation in the Middle East from the perspective of the proletariat, the only class capable of transcending capitalist relations and thus not determined by the antagonistic interests of imperialist states.

To conclude, we must say that war is not the result of certain particular policies, which are "more or less nationalist", "more or less aggressive", etc., but the product of the capitalist system as a whole, resulting from its nature and the historical tendencies of decadence, from which no part of the ruling class can escape. In this sense there is indeed no difference between the nationalism of Israel and the nationalism of Palestine: both ideologies are a cover for the drive to war and for the repression of the working class by the bourgeois state.

 

Dennis, February 2024

 

 

The present war in the Middle East is a catastrophe for the workers and the general population in Israel/Palestine, killing over a thousand in Israel, tens of thousands in Gaza and hundreds on the West Bank, creating almost insurmountable divisions between the workers in these territories by compelling them to choose their imperialist camp, between the barbarism of Hamas or the barbarism of the Israeli state, while intense propaganda campaigns pressurise workers either to support Israel in the name of fighting anti-Semitism or to join the pro-Palestinian “peace” protests against the massacres perpetrated by the Israel Defence Forces (IDF).

A number of anarchist groups unreservedly defend the “Palestinian Resistance” or maintain a complete silence about the issue. This is quite normal for bourgeois groups and the ideologies of the radical petty bourgeoisie, whose job is to make their small contribution to the war campaigns in order to weaken the proletariat’s class consciousness and push it into a trap. Only a few internationalist minorities claiming the anarchist title have refused to choose between the warring parties, often with important ambiguities.

The CNT in Paris and the KRAS in Moscow have published an article called “Stop the Barbarism ! [111]” that indeed does not call for the defence of the national interests of Palestine or Israel. But at the same time it doesn’t clearly defend an internationalist position: it does not explicitly say that the workers have no fatherland and that the answer to war is the struggle of the exploited in all countries. In fact it doesn’t talk about the working class at all. Fortunately, the KRAS has also published a translation of another article “Against Israeli and Palestinian Nationalism”. This article is clearer than the CNT article as the preface admits: “The published text expresses well the internationalist, anti-nationalist, anti-ethnicist and class position.”  

Other anarchist groups have published a more straightforward internationalist position, as have the organisations of the communist left. We have already referred to these statements in an article “Internationalist positions against the war [8]” in World Revolution no. 398. But among them the Anarchist Communist Group (ACG) while defending an internationalist position in its first article[1], makes important concessions to bourgeois nationalism in a second article, called “The situation in Gaza [112]”.

Anarchist Communist Group: a covert defence of national liberation

This second article by the ACG presents the war in Israel as a confrontation between a colonial and colonised nation in which Israel is “the dominant aggressor, due to its status as a settler-colonial state”. What, in the view of ACG, are the consequences of such an analysis?

*Whether a colonising or a colonised nation “both are entities that ultimately stand in the way of the liberation of the Palestinian working class and the class unity of all workers in the region”. Therefore the ACG is opposed to the Israeli state as well as to the Hamas regime.

*The Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) in the past, and Hamas today, cannot bring liberation to Palestinians. So this liberation must come from the Palestinian working class as “the most oppressed section of the working class” with “strong political awareness” whose struggle is “a prerequisite to a revolutionary movement in the region”.

*But the working class in Palestine cannot do this on its own, “the Palestinian people … can only be free as can all people, through internationalist class struggle”. So the ACG calls “upon the international working class to organise in support and defence of their Palestinian counterparts”.

In itself, we might be in agreement with certain affirmations in this article, especially with the call for “internationalist class struggle”. But here it is the tree that hides the forest, because behind all these radical words, “internationalist class struggle”, “liberation”, “international solidarity”, “revolutionary struggle”, hide some fundamental concession to nationalism. Why?

As the article puts it, Israel occupies a nation, Palestine. So it advocates that the Palestinian workers should fight the Israeli state and organise armed self-defence. It thus affirms “the right and necessity of the Palestinian working class to resist the Israeli state”. The fight against the Israeli occupation is thus aimed at ejecting Israel from Palestine. But what else is this than a struggle for national liberation, not headed by the bourgeoisie but by a section of the working class? The ACG says “we reject the idea of liberation under a national banner”, but in the article it has already opened wide the window to that same idea.

Furthermore, the article says nothing about the necessity of the working class in Palestine to fight against its own bourgeoisie. The article makes no mention of the existence of a Palestinian state or a Palestinian nation. This is a way of smudging over the real issue. This is the open window to the idea that the workers in Palestine should not struggle against the Palestinian bourgeoisie. It only talks about resisting “the Israeli state, including through the method of revolutionary struggle” which “can distinguish itself from the nationalist forces”. But on such a basis, the working class in Palestine can in no way wage a real autonomous struggle and will not be able to distinguish itself from the Palestinian nationalist forces.

The article not only calls Palestinian workers to liberate themselves from the Israeli occupation, but it even appeals to the workers of the world to support this struggle for “liberation”. Leaving aside the question of whether the Palestinian working class is currently capable of fighting on its own terrain, something that is highly doubtful, it is not the task of the world working class to support a certain sector of the class to get rid of the yoke of a colonial rule. And even if it is true that the Palestinian workers are generally poorer than their Israeli class brothers, and their living conditions much worse, this doesn’t change the fact that any idea of “liberating” a particular nation is nothing more than a product of the logic of global imperialism, and thus can only take place on a bourgeois terrain[2].

The article suggests that liberation from that colonial rule will also bring about the liberation of the Palestinian workers as a class. But nothing is further from the truth. The liberation of the working class in any country can only occur through the destruction of capitalism on a global scale. And while the article underlines that capitalism is the basis of colonial ideology, it says nothing about the need to destroy capitalism in order abolish all nation states.

In fact, the position defended by the ACG in this article is very dangerous because, at first glance, it seems indeed to be based on proletarian internationalism. But that is only in appearance. Because if you read it carefully, the opposite is the case. The article does not straightforwardly and openly defend Palestinian nationalism, but its logic, its whole reasoning points in that direction. It is a very sophisticated exposition of the national liberation ideology.

Under the conditions of decadence of capitalism any struggle for “national liberation” is by definition a dead-end, only leading to an uninterrupted chain of military confrontations, after which it’s not the working class that comes to power but a new bourgeois faction. In the history of capitalism there hasn’t been any struggle for national liberation in which the working class was able to autonomously liberate itself from occupation and repression by bourgeois factions. On the contrary, any attempt to be freed from foreign occupation depends on the positions adopted by other imperialist powers that use it in their own interests. The interests of the population that aims to “liberate” itself are completely subordinated to the imperialist appetites of these powers.

The absence of a solid basis to the proclamations of anarchist internationalists

As we recalled in a recent article, “Anarchism has thus always been divided into a whole series of tendencies, ranging from those who have become part of the left wing of capital, like those who joined the Republican government during the 1936-39 war in Spain, to those who clearly defended internationalist positions against imperialist war, such as Emma Goldman during World War One”[3].The internationalism of the anarchists who sincerely want to defend this principle is not based on the universal conditions imposed on the proletariat by capitalism on a world scale, i.e. the exploitation of their labour power in all countries and in all continents. Proletarian internationalism has its point of departure in the conditions for the emancipation of the proletariat: beyond frontiers and military fronts, beyond races and culture, the proletariat finds its unity in the common struggle against its conditions of exploitation and the community of interest in the abolition of wage labour, in communism. This is the foundation of its class nature.

It's precisely the absence, for anarchist internationalism, of a basis in the workers’ struggle against exploitation which explains why the ACG published this article. The reason is that the denunciation of war by anarchism is “more tied up with its abstract ‘principles' such as anti-authoritarianism, liberty, the rejection of any power, anti-statism, etc., than to a clear conception that this internationalism constitutes a class frontier that distinguishes the camp of capital from the camp of the proletariat” [4].

One of the consequences is that, within the same international anarchist federation, nationalist and internationalist positions can easily coexist without causing problems or provoking heated debates. This lack of a consistent internationalist position is also shown by the reference at the end of the article of the ACG to “Palestine Action”, a totally pro-Palestine leftist group which targets arms suppliers to Israel. During the recent Radical Bookfair in London they refused to discuss the ICC’s argument underlining the inter-imperialist context of the war, even calling it an “infantile” analysis, recalling the Stalinist rhetoric against the communist left.

The failure of organised anarchism to fight imperialist war on a proletarian basis was clearly demonstrated in Spain 1936, something that is not recognised today by groups like the ACG or the internationalist minorities within the CNT. Both still speak about the Spanish revolution instead of the imperialist war in Spain, a rehearsal for World War II. But drawing the lessons of anarchism’s failure in face of the war is only possible by breaking with its abstract approach and calling into question the absence of a solid, materialist basis for its internationalist proclamations.  

Faced with imperialist war, only one position rejects any identification with one of the camps in the conflict and at the same time outlines a perspective for ending all wars, and that is proletarian internationalism. This means that “capitalism can only be overthrown and communism established on a global scale” when “the working class is united across national boundaries”[5].This viewpoint represents the only perspective that can put an end to capitalist exploitation, to the barbarity of war which increasingly threatens the very existence of humanity.

 

Dennis, 2.1.24