More bloodshed in the Middle East

The assault by the Israeli army’s crack troops on a flotilla of cargo ships hired by pacifists of various nationalities, who wanted to force the naval blockade of the Gaza Strip and bring in essential goods for the people subjected to the embargo, is a new act of war in a region that hasn’t known peace for almost a century.

Whilst in the UNO’s sumptuous headquarters diplomatic talks between the States flounder in a mire of endless debates, providing further evidence of this institution’s inconclusiveness and hypocrisy, the bloodshed and suffering of war looms once again as the unique solution to the economic crisis which is presently strangling the bourgeois society of global capital.

The bourgeois state of Israel’s continual provocations against neighbouring states and peoples are nothing but an instrument of world capitalism’s imperialist policy, and in particular of the United States, which is interested in permanently stoking up tensions in this crucial region and keeping it politically and economically divided.

The bourgeois state of Israel, the same as, and maybe even more than, other industrialised states is also experiencing a profound domestic crisis, from the political and social as well as the economic point of view. The attack on Lebanon and the ‘molten lead’ offensive against Gaza has already shown that the Israeli government can see no other way of easing the crisis than war.

All these wars have had as their primary victim Palestinian civilians, and the proletariat in particular. But Jewish proletarians have also been its victims, forced into the army to act as jailers and tormentors, and at the same time to accept any sacrifice imposed in the name of ‘national defence’; the strategic interests of its own bourgeoisie in other words.

These continual wars have therefore not produced the security and peace promised over the course of three generations. On the contrary, they threaten to entangle the entire region in a new conflict, and one which would be disastrous for the proletariat as a whole, irrespective of religion, race or nationality.

What they fear most is that the proletariat in Israel, and in every other country for that matter, disorientated for decades by the warmongering propaganda of both the social democratic and the openly reactionary parties, will withdraw its solidarity from the dominant classes; classes which are increasingly corrupt, incompetent, and whose sole interest and abiding obsession is the maintenance of their privileges.

There is another road which the working class in all countries, Israel included, can follow, a road that goes in a very different direction to the one it’s been following up to now: that of the road to class solidarity and class struggle. In the Middle East this means the Israeli proletariat uniting and collaborating with the proletariat in Palestine and in the rest of the region in a joint struggle against the bourgeoisie, in order to defend its immediate and future class interests. For this to happen, the proletariat will need to rediscover its political independence, its own party, and internationalist and revolutionary communism.

And are the bourgeoisie’s solutions really ‘more realistic’? Is imprisonment within the Gaza Strip and the Left Bank, starvation wages with no prospect of a decent life, and thousands of young Palestinian proletarians putting their faith in the nationalist parties really the way forward? What can Palestinian micro-nationalism offer to the workers in a situation of crisis in which millions of unemployed, even in the big industrialised states, are going hungry?

Against war between states! For war between classes to achieve proletarian emancipation, real peace in a classless society and Communism! This prospect, which today seems a distant unrealisable Utopia is, in fact, the only realistic way of achieving proletarian emancipation.