The Gazan Proletariat – Crushed in a war between world imperialisms

Yet another chapter in the Middle East war sees the concentration of the bulk of military operations in the Gaza Strip. Intense bombardments are hitting population centers already reduced to rubble and furious ground clashes pitting Hamas militias and smaller formations of the so-called “Palestinian resistance” against Israel’s armed forces.

Casualties on the Palestinian side of the bombings now number in the tens of thousands, and by the time we are about to send this issue of our newspaper to press, the Gaza authorities report 24,000 confirmed dead from the bombings and clashes, plus several thousand missing whose lifeless bodies lie under the rubble.

These are the atrocious costs of an asymmetrical war, characterized by a considerable disparity in the weapons and means available to the two sides.

But the ground fighting is not cost-free even for the Israeli army, which has lost more than 180 soldiers in Gaza, which, added to the casualties of the Oct. 7, 2023 attack conducted deep inside Israel’s territory, add up to 1,400 dead, including 500 military personnel and 900 civilians.

This gruesome accounting confirms our initial assessments of this frightening wave of violence: this is not a people’s war but a war between bourgeois States. This is in no way mitigated by the disparity of losses in the two camps and the asymmetrical nature of the conflict. This is evidenced by the fact that both sides, gripped by blind nationalistic fury, declared from the beginning that they wanted to annihilate the enemy. From the outset, the manner in which the war operations were conducted and the further development of the conflict confirmed this: just as Hamas did not spare Israeli civilians and migrant workers in its fierce and unexpected October 7 attack, likewise the fury of the Israeli air force made no distinction between Hamas militiamen and unarmed Palestinian civilians. Blessing this nefarious assimilation of the entire civilian population to Hamas militias came the words of Israel’s President Herzog who declared in mid-October, “An entire nation is responsible; the rhetoric about civilians not aware and not involved is absolutely false”.

In this war, as much as the balance of power is very unbalanced in favor of the State of Israel, there is one element that makes the two sides very similar in the way the fighting is conducted: the lack of any scruples in slaughtering a very high number of civilians. Indeed, it seems increasingly evident that the orders given to the men-at-arms on both sides are precisely to reap the highest number of civilian casualties in the opposing camp, exacerbating nationalist sentiment, belligerent impulses and the desire for revenge.

This is the case even as the mid-term goals of the two sides differ in relation to the disparity of forces at their disposal, an aspect that propaganda on both sides uses to mystify the genuine exterminating character of the ongoing war. The bourgeois leadership of the “Palestinian resistance” insists on proposing a nonexistent national liberation struggle, but if it did, it would not have exposed the people of Gaza with such cynicism to Israel’s appalling vengeance.

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.

For its part, the current Israeli government harbors a confessional conception of the “Jewish State”, which would belong to Jews and not to all its citizens. The Israeli bourgeoisie attempts to use the anti-Semitism entrenched in Muslim countries by about a century of nationalist propaganda, first pan-Arabist and then pan-Islamist, in order to tighten the ranks of the home front. Thus, if it succeeds in convincing the people of Israel that in the Middle East and the world, outside the confines of their little ghetto, everyone wants Jews dead, Israeli workers will also instinctively seek protection in the military might of “their” nation and “their” State. In this the Netanyahu government knows how to wisely use the nightmare, in truth not entirely without foundation, that the State of Israel may see its survival challenged.

The bourgeois leadership of Hamas is housed in Qatar, a monarchy whose wealth rests on gas and oil mining and which, to complete the overall picture of capitalist rot, hosts on its territory, the most powerful U.S. military base in the Middle East. This is despite the fact that the United States has declared Hamas a “terrorist organization” for several years.

The government of Israel does not seem to rule out the possibility that the outlet for the ongoing military operations may be to force at least part of the Palestinian population out of the Strip, which has been rendered uninhabitable.

Today about 90 percent of the population of the Gaza Strip have left their homes and are wandering under the bombs in search of shelter, if more than 1 percent of the area’s inhabitants have already met their deaths in the war events, if several tens of thousands of wounded cannot receive adequate health care while the rest of the population is forced into hunger and thirst, deprived of a roof under which to face the winter, it seems clear that what the institutions of the capitalist regime label a “humanitarian catastrophe” will impose drastic decisions among which the evacuation of a large part of the population from the Strip cannot be excluded.

By now, even the UN Secretary General says that a famine looms over Gaza and that the Strip has become uninhabitable. All of these statements could set the stage for a “humanitarian operation” aimed at concealing the reality of ethnic cleansing. It is hard to suppose that such an outcome was not in the vows of Israel’s rulers from the outset when among those in that State’s government there were those who went so far as to argue that one should literally “destroy Gaza” the favorite abode of “absolute evil”. The promise of the “Delenda Chartago” was fulfilled.

But the military operations conducted by Israel’s forces are not limited to Gaza. In the West Bank, too, Tsahal carries out police actions aimed at terrorizing, flaunting contempt for that subjugated population with attitudes of occupation troops that have long become habitual. In the West Bank since Oct. 7, more than 300 Palestinians have been killed in raids and air raids carried out by Tsahal and in shootings engaged in by Israeli settlers. Another 200 are Palestinian casualties from the previous months of 2023.

In the opposite camp, after the Israeli ground invasion it appears more difficult for Hamas and its political satellites to strike inside Israeli territory and sow death and destruction among the civilian population. Qassam missiles take off increasingly rarely from the Strip. Yet the sense of fear among the Israeli population persists, and in the hundreds of thousands are displaced in areas near the Strip and the borders of Lebanon.

Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, after skirmishes on the border with Lebanon and missile launches by Hezbollah militias, threatened to teach those Shiite militias a harsh lesson and repeat in Beirut what he did in Gaza. In an Israeli airstrike conducted in a Beirut suburb on Jan. 2, Hamas military leader Saleh al-Arouri was killed, along with other members of his party. Indeed, the Israeli government had proclaimed from the beginning of the war that all Hamas military leaders should be considered “dead men”.

This attack is a challenge to Hezbollah, the Lebanese militia organically linked to Iran, and in the ongoing conflict a lukewarm ally of Hamas. On Jan. 8, a new message was openly addressed to Hezbollah with the killing by Israeli drone of Jawwad al-Tawil, the commander of Hezbollah’s elite militia, demonstrating by this Israel’s readiness to open a new front with Lebanon.

By means of Hezbollah and the pro-Iranian militias stationed in Syria, it has been said that Iran borders Israel, but Israel does not border Iran, a fact that places the regime in Tehran in a condition of strategic superiority over the “Zionist Entity”, as the State of Israel is called by the media of Iranian obscurantism (and by Iran’s leftist followers, who have become partisans of political Islam).

This explains the military pressure on Syria, with hundreds of Israeli air raids targeting pro-Iranian militias as well as military installations of the Syrian armed forces.

Moreover, Russia has never sought to defend the airspace of the Syrian State, which has always been its iron ally in the Middle East region. Russia had to offer something in terms of “security” to Israel, with which it maintains good trade relations. In contrast, the Israeli government never adopted the economic sanctions against Moscow for its invasion of Ukraine. This understanding, already in the shadows but surfacing in the sunlight for about a decade, allows Israel to push provocations against Iran, such as when in late December it killed in an air raid Seyyed Reza Mousavi, the top leader of the Iranian Pasdaran in Syria. The fact that the site of Mousavi’s elimination was the town of Sayyidah Zainab, a Shiite pilgrimage destination not far from Damascus, implies a double threatening signal to Iran.

Embedded in the rivalry between Israel and Iran is the Red Sea side, where the Houthis, Yemeni Shiites allied with Iran, have come to threaten naval traffic in one of the major arteries of world trade.

Exacerbating the threat of missile attacks and Houthi raids is the treaty, which seals an understanding from the agreement reached between the Iran and Saudi governments in Beijing last March. Saudi Arabia, a rival of the Yemeni rebels, has lifted its blockade of the Houthi-controlled Yemeni port of Hudaiyda and has not joined the U.S.-sponsored international coalition to counter disruptive actions in the Red Sea. These elements would suggest Riyadh’s choice of ground, but things are not so linear now; any shift in the balance in the Middle East context seems destined for some backlash. If the Oct. 7 attack succeeded in its objective of preventing rapprochement between Saudi Arabia, Israel and other Arab States in the immediate term, this cannot fail to generate further backlash upon fragile regional balances.

Among these contradictions is the action of those who, without being partisans of Israel or the United States, would like to prevent the strengthening of relations between Iran and Saudi Arabia. One example is the Jan. 3 bombing in Kerman, Iran during the memorial services for Iranian General Qasem Soleimani. Solemani, was killed during a U.S. operation in Iraq 4 years ago. The attack was claimed by ISIS, confirming the determination of a significant faction of the Middle Eastern bourgeoisie to oppose the growing regional influence of the Islamic Republic. Iran, in turn, does everything to appear the great promoter of the cause of the “Palestinian resistance”.

The bourgeois war game of our time is as irrational, monstrous and twisted as one can imagine. Including, among its “side effects”, for Palestinians and Jews, new decisive “final solutions”.

Behind the veil of the mystifying self-representation that the contending forces offer of themselves, amidst unexpected agreements, sudden turns and betrayals, lies a very simple explanation: the bewitched world of capital carries on a permanent war of aggression against a proletariat still slumbering and whose awakening is feared, while rival bourgeoisies pull their hair out and at the same time hold hands so as not to dissolve in the vortex of the general catastrophe of the capitalist mode of production.