A Police operation against the proletariat trapped in the Gaza Strip

On 27 December, a fiery hail of bombs and missiles, dropped by F16 aeroplanes and Apache helicopters, the pride of the United States ‘defence industry’, rained down on the Gaza Strip. The bombardment continued without interruption for 8 days. On the night of 4 January, after intense shelling, land operations commenced in which large numbers of armoured vehicles and motorised artillery were deployed.

The Le Monde editorial of 30 December described the brutal attack on the Gaza ghetto as a ‘useless bloodbath’. ‘We will only stop after the work is done’ declared the minister of Defence and head of the Labour Party, Ehmud Barak, whose views are entirely aligned with those of his colleague in foreign affairs, Tzipi Ivni, and Ehoud Olmert the head of government.

Despite endless Israeli propaganda to the contrary, it wasn’t Hamas breaking the truce by launching Kassam missiles that prompted this action.

The launching of missiles against Israeli territory, provoking much fear and some casualties, was already happening when the Strip was under the direct control of the Israeli army. The Israeli government is therefore well aware that occupation isn’t the best way of preventing them.

Another reason for the attack can be found in the coming elections in Israel: everyone knows that to get votes it’s always a good idea to terrorise the electorate, and then step forward as the righteous avenger. Ehmud Barak gained 4 points in the opinion polls after his criminal bombing of Gaza; that’s one point for every hundred dead.

Gaza is a city, with buildings and dwellings in close proximity. The missiles and bombs massacre militiaman and policemen but also, of course, civilians. It is similar to Lebanon two and half years ago, but in a situation which is even more tragic for the civilian population because there is no way it can escape the bombardment, imprisoned as they are within an area which is little more than 350 square kilometres.

For years this little territory has been under siege and its borders closed. Electricity is supplied from Israel, along with fuel, food and medicine. 50% of the population are unemployed; there is no economy worth speaking of; even the few small industries there were have been wiped out; even fishing isn’t possible after the blockade by the Israeli navy prevented fishing boats taking to the water.

Actively participating in maintaining the stranglehold on Gaza is the Egyptian state, which controls the Strip’s southern border and will neither allow anyone to leave nor allow the besieged to receive any kind of help, not even food or medicine. The Egyptian state, badly affected by the economic crisis and with a social situation at the point of exploding, fears the Gaza proletariat could spark off a revolt in its own country, which is the most populous one in the area with a strong proletariat not lacking in class tradition, as the recent strikes against starvation wages have shown. The regime therefore emphasises its links with United States imperialism which provides it generous subsidies, and collaborates in the massacre of the Palestinian people.

The Arab League, on the other hand, hasn’t even managed to meet whilst Europe yet again demonstrates its lack of interest and impotence. The UNO confirms its total complicity: at the emergency meeting of the Security Council on the night of January 4th the USA blocked a timid declaration, presented by Libya, which called for an immediate ceasefire and expressed concern about the ‘mounting violence in Gaza’.

Apart from the personal ‘electoral’ motivations of its rotten political personnel, the State of Israel has opted for war because it is the only way of resolving its crisis. It isn’t in order to put an end to rocket and suicide attacks, but because it will help it survive in the current economic and social impasse. The capitalist regime is bolstered by war. In Israel the war strengthens the class collaboration required by the bourgeoisie to continue as imperialism’s guard dog in the Middle East. That is why the Israeli proletariat has to be terrorized and subdued and why it continues to serve as cannon fodder: not in order to defend ‘the Jews’ from the menace of ‘Arab hatred’, but to defend United States interests in the area.

The war means that the economic crisis, the sackings and the poverty, that are increasingly the common lot of both the Israeli and the pariah Palestinian proletariat, can be concealed; the war enables the Israeli proletariat to forget that after 40 years in a continuous state of war and collaboration with its bourgeoisie, it has its back to the wall and is impoverished both economically and morally, as is shown by its trade unions and political parties, in thrall to the interests of the most odious militarism.

The war against Gaza is a godsend for the arms industry, which is the only one not in crisis. Modern bombs and missiles, fired off thousands at a time, represent a highly lucrative business worth millions of dollars; the war also allows the technology to be refined by testing weapons in corpore vili. The war finds its rationale in war itself.

Like the war in Beirut in 1982, when the Israeli and Lebanese bourgeoisie organised the massacre in the Sabra and Chatila refugee camps, this war is above all a social war, against the proletariat. It is against the civilian population, and targets proletarians just as much, if not more, than the militiamen and Hamas troops. To terrorize, to annihilate, to destroy commodities and men is the only ‘political plan’ that lies behind this umpteenth massacre.

The land invasion will not fulfil its declared aims. Israel may win, maybe, precariously, on the strictly military level by occupying the Strip, but it cannot control such a densely populated area; that in fact was the reason it withdrew in 2005, trying to close Gaza behind a cordon sanitaire.

The fact that Hamas forces alone are opposing the Israeli army’s war machine could make of that party a reference point for the lifeless, corrupt and reactionary Palestinian nationalism, but both the party – Hamas – and the cause – Palestinian nationalism – should not obtain the solidarity and support of the communist proletariat, either in Palestine or the rest of the world.

The Hamas leaders do not fear the war because they know that war reinforces their movement, and they hope it will lead to their definitive supremacy over Al Fatah and the Palestinian National Authority, as happened in Lebanon where war resulted in the Hezbollah movement managing to prevail over the country’s various communities, Christians included, as the standard bearer of Lebanese nationalism.

The Gaza proletariat will probably be propelled by the massacres into rallying around the green banners of Islam, which poses as one party which wishes to resist the aggressors. But the Hamas regime is a bourgeois dictatorship, like that of the Palestinian National Authority in the West Bank, a government that not only uses every means at its disposal to combat the prospect of revolutionary communism, but which also ruthlessly suppresses class organisations of a trade union nature.

The Gaza proletariat mustn’t forget its own war, which is against hunger, poverty and illness. Like the Paris Comune, its war is a war on two fronts, against the Israeli tanks and against the Hamas government, with the latter not hesitating to draw the proletarian masses into a pointless suicidal struggle in order to impose its hegemony over Palestinian territory.

The demonstrations which are taking place throughout the world, in protest against the massacre and in support of Palestinian nationalism against Israeli and American imperialism, have seen the participation of immigrant workers from the Arab countries, but far from making a contribution by clarifying what the proletariat should do, such an objective is not even addressed. What is being fought is not a war between nations, races or religions, but a war between classes. It is not in the interests of the class of workers in Palestine, in Israel or anywhere else in the world to line up on either of the imperialist fronts, not even to fight for a miserable lost cause like the Palestinian bourgeoisie’s. To do so would mean getting drawn in to the bourgeoisie’s warmongering propaganda and its diplomatic games – in fact part of the preparations for a wider global armed conflict – and contributing to keeping the workers tied to nationalism and inter-classism.

The directive of the revolutionary Communist Party is clear: no to solidarity with the reactionary national Palestinian movement; no to allying with bourgeois movements and parties in the name of a generic anti-imperialism.

The proletariat in the Arab countries and in Israel must start by rebuilding defense and struggle organisations of its own; organisations which are separate from the bourgeois and opportunist parties; without these, without its own class trade unions and its own party it is destined to remain cannon fodder in the service of a bourgeois politics which is becoming ever more militarist, cynical and criminal.