War in Gaza. For the Rebirth of a Proletarian and Communist Movement in the Middle East
The air raids on Gaza over the last few days are just a continuation of the Israeli government’s same old policy against the Palestinian people, and especially the proletarian class. Once again the Israeli government is fighting “terrorism” in Gaza, but not with the aim of totally destroying Hamas, despite what they say. Rather they want to use Hamas to serve its own ends, to continue to police Gaza as Al Fatah and the PLO did in the past. They aren’t really out to destroy them because they know that a bourgeois movement like Hamas, cloaked in nationalism and religion, or even better, corrupt like Al Fatah, is the best defence against the development of a class movement. The two bourgeoisies, Israeli and Palestinian, have this interest in common. And the missiles launched from Gaza are certainly more useful to the Israeli, and global, bourgeoisie than to the “Palestinian cause”.
Palestinian and Israeli proletarians are thus kept like rats in a cage in a miniscule stony ghetto between Jordan and the sea, intoxicated with patriotic idolatry and bloodlust, and pawns in a cynical ruthless game between the big imperialisms.
Over time the various attacks, missions, and campaigns have been designated in various ways but nothing has changed. Two years ago we had “Operation Pillar of Defence”, before that “Operation Cast Lead”, before that “Operation Hot Winter”, always with the same result, because the same result was what was intended. The victims, like in all wars everywhere, belong to the class of proletarians. Proletarians die, the assassins derive the political advantages they were after, and then a ceasefire is declared. The bourgeois, with few exceptions, do not suffer the consequences of war. They give the orders, proletarians give their blood. As of today the death toll has mounted to 650, most of them proletarians, elderly proletarians, proletarian children who have no safe shelter to flee to. These victims are nothing to Hamas, Al Fatah or the Israeli government, they are just numbers. Meanwhile the occupation continues and extends.
In Israel, as is still the case in many other centres of capitalism, an unfavourable economic situation has rendered the proletariat prone to indifference and inactivity, threatened as it is, given a lack of class-based trade union organisations, with losing the work and privileges it enjoyed up to not so long ago. Only as the capitalist crisis deepens, with the Jewish proletariat of Israel losing their economic advantages and so-called social state, will we see a real development of a mass class struggle. The war serves to keep the proletariat divided and imprisoned by the counter-revolutionary ideology of the defence of the bourgeois fatherland and national interests.
Now we are seeing the rise of fascist groups in Israel who support a Greater Israel, and wear insignia and uniforms like the neo-nazi cells in the rest of the world, and – irony of historical irony – they are increasingly coming to resemble the original Nazis who wanted to exterminate them.
The groups of peace activists in Israel show clearly the impotence of their sterile movement, which invokes an impossible peace between nations whereas in fact the only way capitalist wars will be stopped is by the proletariat, when they cast off their chains and engage in the class war. In any case, these pacifists always seem to end up relapsing into warmongering in defence of democracy; the democracy which these small fascist groups, composed mainly of young dropouts, “want to destroy”.
Discontent has meanwhile exploded in Ramallah, with protests and demonstrations of young proletarians against the bourgeois Al Fatah, reacting to the killing of an Arab boy who had fallen into the hands of a fascist cell of young Jews, and there have also been illegal demonstrations in East Jerusalem.
But what Hamas, Al Fatah and the Israeli bourgeoisie fear most of all are new trade union organisations formed on a proletarian class basis, be they Palestinian or Israeli, which are opposed to the bourgeois forces of Israeli and Palestinian nationalism; and also the spreading into that crossroads of history of the one, reborn, world communist party.