Israel-Palestine: A War on Behalf of Bourgeois States

The violence of bourgeois war is unfolding once again in Palestine, and is creating suffering and grief. The Israeli bourgeoisie sees a new crackdown based on national oppression and ethnic segregation as a means to quell the effects of the economic crisis.

Evictions of Palestinian homes in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of East Jerusalem lit the fuse. The Israeli state legally justified the evictions as the recovery of property titles dating back to the long dead Ottoman Empire. The plan is to tear down those houses to construct new buildings for Jews. This project has the objective of strengthening the ethnic segregation of Palestinians and promoting Israeli nationalism.

In Jerusalem, tensions have grown in recent weeks. There have been protests by Palestinians opposing ethnic cleansing by the Israeli State, as well as demonstrations by the Jewish extreme right through the Old City, shouting “death to Arabs”.

Police provocations on the Esplanade of the Mosques/Temple Mount in Jerusalem corresponded with the final days of the holy month of Ramadan. These were followed by Palestinian riots, which soon extended to the whole West Bank and, in a largely unprecedented development, to Israeli cities where Arab citizens of Israel have been living among Jews since 1948.

For centuries, a ruse has been used by dying regimes to shore up decay in the face of social discontent. For its effectiveness, the ruling classes endorse the pogrom.

Groups from both ethnic communities carried out raids of the neighborhoods inhabited by the other, set fire to religious buildings, looted businesses, and even beat up individuals. These are the expected fruits of the nationalist policy pursued both by the government of Israeli capital and by the neighboring states, and also by all the imperialist powers. This is the crescendo of all their incessant provocations.

Hamas, the bourgeois party that dresses up in religious extremism, has dominated the Gaza Strip for 15 years and, for its part, controls the political movement of the dispossessed Palestinians in order to orient them towards nationalism and to gain influence in the West Bank against its rival Fatah.

The launching of thousands of rockets against Israeli cities from Gaza, which has been subjected to an Israeli siege for many years, have caused deaths and injuries among the Jewish civilian population and killed two Arabs. Israeli reacted predictably, starting the raids on against Gaza which caused so many casualties among the civilian population, this time Palestinian. In the meantime, Israeli troops claimed many victims among those in the West Bank who demonstrated against the worsening of the occupation regime, while in Jerusalem there were also protests by the Palestinian community, intolerant of the apartheid regime imposed by the State of Israel and rebelling against the hateful national and class oppression to which it is subjected.

But the war between the State of Israel and Hamas, while “asymmetrical”, is a war between bourgeois states, fighting as proxies of larger states and imperialist world powers.

The rockets fired on Israeli cities are also part of this war. How did Hamas obtain these weapons, since everything that enters the Gaza Strip is subject to the strict control of the Israeli authorities?

Palestinian proletarians would be wrong to trust an “anti-colonial” national war of liberation. They could never win because the large world powers would prevent it, but also because the Palestinian bourgeoisie will never be willing to dissolve its coupling with the Israeli one. That impossible national war has already failed decades ago, with betrayal by all the other Arab bourgeoisies, who are inextricably tied to imperialism.

This is not an anti-colonial struggle. Israel is not the continuator of the colonial domination that manifested itself in Palestine at the time of the British mandate. Israel is a country in the imperialist chain where capital and world finance dominate.

Today capitalist domination inside the State of Israel, as well as the occupied territories, is based on effective collaboration between the Israeli bourgeoisie and its Palestinian younger sister. The Palestinian side is weaker, and therefore more servile towards the former, but no less greedy, cynical and ruthless. These united Bourgeoisies support each to other and, through the bourgeois war, like the two jaws of a vice, tighten their grip on the proletarian class, both Jewish and Arab.

The maintenance and escalation of this bourgeois war, in which almost exclusively proletarians die, serves to throw both the Israeli workers and their Palestinian comrades into the arms of their respective Bourgeoisies.

As the economic crisis advances, attacking the living conditions of all proletarians, economic attacks will take the form of diminishing wages and increasing precariousness. The Israeli ruling class offers Jewish workers the meager consolation of a fictitious unity of the nation. It will demand to be paid for at an ever increasing price of misery and blood

We internationalist communists know how difficult it is for the proletariat to return to the path of class struggle. When the bourgeoisie is at war, counter-revolution manifests itself more strongly. But we also know that the bourgeoisie will not be able to preserve social peace between classes for long.

The road to the class struggle requires the camaraderie of the Israeli proletariat with the Palestinian proletariat. The workers of both these sections of the world working class will then break all solidarity with the bourgeoisie.

To the Jewish proletarians we give the mandate to sabotage the infamous national oppression that the bourgeoisie of Israel imposes on the Palestinians. To the Palestinian proletarians, to break with the nationalist leadership that drags them to the slaughterhouse of bourgeois armed conflict and then consigns the survivors to the market of wage slavery, a labor force to be sold out.

Our call to the Palestinian and Israeli proletarians is for class unity, for the overthrow of every national bourgeoisie and the establishment of a dictatorship of the proletariat. The perspective must be of proletarian revolution throughout the entire region and the world, overcoming all national boundaries for a future humanity liberated from capitalism and its infamous national homelands.

Only the proletariat can break the infernal chain of wars, as well as the no less infamous bourgeois “peace”. Only the proletariat can put an end today to the national oppression of the Palestinians and of all the oppressed peoples. Only the proletariat can put an end to racism, an evil of capitalism of every climate. Only the international proletariat, organized in its class unions and directed by its party, can support the struggle of its comrades in Palestine, sabotaging the bourgeois war and resuming the path of the class war for the world revolution, which alone can put an end to the miseries of the present.