The working class and the war Israel – Palestine

By Fredo Corvo and Aníbal

German, Dutch, French, Spanish, Italian and Portuguese (Brazil)

Terror of Hamas, terror of Israel, both capitalist and imperialist states, both directed against the proletariat in both Gaza and Israel, and worldwide.

In addition to the seemingly endless war in Ukraine and the increasing number of massacres around the world that barely appear in the media, yet another war has erupted in and around the state of Israel. The bourgeois and “social” media present the atrocities à la carte and garnish them in talk shows and tweets with bourgeois concepts that have long since lost their meaning: attack and defense, land and people, the law of war, peace, national self-determination, national unity, democracy, human rights, etc. The left (civil) organizations have all again sought their place in ideological participation on one side or the other of the front line. On the other hand, several publications invoking the historical Italian Communist Left have issued statements on the war between Israel and Hamas. [1] They take a proletarian internationalist position in the vast majority of cases. In brief, both in Israel and in the Gaza Strip

• Both sides of the war, Israel and Hamas, are bourgeois, capitalist, and imperialist.
• The working class, both in Israel and Gaza, has no stake in this inter-imperialist war whose price they are paying in human lives, injuries, war trauma, and increased exploitation and oppression.
• The working class can only defend its own interests through independent struggle against its own bourgeoisie; revolutionary defeatism.

The following text shares these views and extends them further to include issues on which there are differences within the groups of the Communist Left. To this end, this text builds on an earlier analysis of the war in Ukraine [2] . The text briefly refrains from all sorts of historical background details and current situation. For those who miss this, see some texts mentioned in the source under note 1.

The current war cannot be understood as merely a Palestinian-Israeli conflict. The attacks back and forth find their roots not only in history or current tensions in the Middle East but especially in the growing imperialist contradictions on a global scale. Nor is the solution in the Middle East, but on a global scale, in the struggle of the international proletariat against world imperialism, a struggle that begins at home when workers as a class massively defend their living conditions – their wages, benefits, healthcare, their education – against the attacks of capital.

The UNITED STATES, CHINA, and RUSSIA are also involved in this war, but in the background, and they hope to remain so. The current armed conflicts surrounding Israel differ significantly from the war in Ukraine in that Russia is not a direct war participant. It is so far a war by proxy, with Russia and China on the one hand and the US on the other playing an important role. However, these nuclear superpowers do not want to be directly involved in this war. Direct involvement could turn into a Third World War, and they are not yet fully prepared.

The local bourgeoisie

From its inception, the state of ISRAEL has been a major fulcrum of US imperialism in the Middle East. By exercising of control over oil and gas resources and Europe’s access to Asia, the US has traditionally controlled the European powers from which it took world power in two world wars. Without US support, Israel could not exist. Israel’s imperialist self-interest consists – as with any state or state-in-formation – in its desire to profit as much as possible in each war from the redistribution of spheres of influence of the world that results.[3] In doing so, Israel has chosen to fight its adversaries by aligning itself with the US.

However, the Israeli state also has its own maneuvering space, and within the Israeli bourgeoisie, there are serious disagreements about using this space in the service of the imperialist interests of their national capital and state. The Netanyahu faction seeks not only the dismissal of legal proceedings against its corrupt figurehead but also further development into a strong religious state, and settlement politics toward a Greater Israel. The Democratic, Liberal, and Social Democrat group also wants a strong state, but through strengthening democratic deception, the partial integration of its Palestinian citizens, and limited cooperation with the Palestinian National Authority (PNA) in the West Bank.

The factions of the Israeli bourgeoisie have different relationships with the US. While Trump supported Netanyahu’s Greater Israel policy, Biden’s policy is not entirely clear. The US has made efforts to bring Israel and various Arab countries within the US imperialist bloc, particularly SAOUDI-ARABIA, closer together. Hamas, with its death and destruction attacks by its most fanatical fighters from Gaza on Israeli settlements and rocket fire as far away as Tel Aviv, has sabotaged these U.S. attempts to strengthen its bloc for the time being. Besides TURKEY – always looking for allies to restore the Ottoman Empire – IRAN in particular, supports the Hamas regime in the Gaza Strip. Iran supplies parts to the Gaza Strip that Palestinian wage slaves assemble into rockets in underground factories. Iran further massively supports Hezbollah, which openly threatens to open a second front in northern Israel should Israel proceed with a large-scale ground offensive in Gaza. The US warned that such an offensive could last nine months, probably too long for Israel. It is no secret that China and Russia have good ties with Iran. For its part, China is concerned that the rapprochement of Saudi Arabia and Israel will impede the Middle East route of its New Silk Road to Europe and that China’s Saudi oil supplies are at risk.

Like the Israeli bourgeoisie, the PALESTIAN BOURGEOISY consists of multiple factions, which differ in preference for alliances with regional and world powers due to divergent bourgeois interests and assessments. HAMAS was initially given limited support by Israel against the rival and then stronger Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). Now, the relationship is reversed. As the ruling party in the Palestinian National Authority (PNA) in the West Bank, the PLO, has lost much of its credibility among the Palestinian people due to its rapport with Israel and corruption (around President Mahmoud Abbas, also called Abu Mazen). Israel and the Islamist HAMAS, which governs the Gaza Strip, now regard each other as main enemies.

Nor will there be independence for the Palestinian bourgeoisie in an unimaginable (but not impossible) future of a Palestinian state as in the present situation of aspirant statehood. For the Arabic-speaking proletariat who “enjoy” second-class civil rights in Israel and who live in the West Bank, in the refugee camps in various neighboring countries, and in the Gaza Strip, the pursuit of an “independent” Palestine means first and foremost submission to exploitation and oppression, terror and war. [4]

The working class in Israel

The proletariat in Israel – an immigration state – is traditionally divided by country of origin and language. The last groups to come generally get the worst working conditions forced upon them. In addition, there are the already mentioned Palestinians with limited civil rights and the Palestinian daily migrant workers from the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, strictly monitored by the state of Israel, its state trade union movement Histadrut, Hamas, the NPA, and the PLO. Orthodox Jews and kibbutz residents (long since turned into military outposts) are in the majority the supporters of Netanyahu’s push for a Greater Israel under a further strengthened religious state. Other sections of the population have opposed it, including mass demonstrations by male and female military reservists who form a large part of Israel’s conscript army. The army leadership and secret services are alarmed at this “division.”

What probably worries the Israeli bourgeoisie even more is the underlying war weariness hidden behind the democratic deceptions within which this movement was framed. The American warning of a nine-month ground offensive in Gaza and the possible opening of a second, northern front must also be understood in the context of the earlier war fatigue. Temporarily lost in indignation over Hamas’ brutal attacks on settlements and shelling of Israeli cities from Gaza and Lebanon, the history of revolutions at the end of World War I has shown that it is not impossible that “war weariness” could return in increasing desertions, especially of conscript soldiers to foreign countries, in strikes in companies, especially in the war industry, in mutinies of soldiers and finally mass demonstrations again. [5] The chances of uniting the struggles of Israeli and Palestinian workers or soldiers, however, are even more remote than those of forms of proletarian struggle against the war on both sides of the front line.

This assessment, of course, does not negate the need for proletarian internationalist minorities; however few, to alert the workers to the capitalist and imperialist causes of the war and the need for intensification of the workers’ struggle, both in Israel and the surrounding territories and worldwide. Should in spite of the mutual hatred sown by Hamas and Israel[6] the workers as a class move, these same minorities are also in a position to play their historical role in what could then be the beginning of a proletarian world revolution.

The working class in Gaza

The situation of the proletarians in the Gaza Strip is far more serious than that in Israel and even that in the West Bank. Largely unemployed and without the prospect of the 19th century “industrial reserve army” to eventually, after one or more generations, to gain employment, the unemployed here partially rot away as a lumpenproletariat. The Palestinian bourgeoisie that controls the Gaza Strip with terror and Islamic ideology carefully selects the most fanatical and brutal youth for the fighting groups and deploys less fanatical but more precise proletarians for slave labor in the underground assembly of rockets. Among the mass of unemployed, it was women in particular who – as in other wars[7] – began to protest against Hamas. The women are always the first to move despite terror because they see their children suffering from hunger, in this case even lack of water and failing facilities, growing up without a future. The eruption of hostilities and heavy bombing have ended these protests, covered under nationalism and hatred of Israel. But as in Israel, there is a small chance that they will flare up again and be followed by desertion, rocket assembly strikes, mutinies, and eventually uprisings against Hamas. The tasks of the internationalist revolutionaries are the same as those we described above. Here, too, the deceptive left bourgeois slogan will be invoked – first repel the enemy’s attack and then deal with the internal enemy. Here, too, the revolutionary slogan is the continuation and intensification of the proletarian struggle, even if it leads to the defeat of the “own” bourgeoisie in the imperialist war.

The working class in the region and worldwide

Because the proletariat in Gaza and other Palestinian areas, like that in Israel, is dominated by hatred, state terror, and nationalism, so we cannot expect this proletariat to rise against its “own” bourgeoisie. But if this does happen, we will fully support it. This support is also only possible if we already practically support the workers’ struggle all over the world.

More likely are proletarian uprisings in the region, for example, in Iran, and Turkey. And in China, Europe, and North America. Each national bourgeoisie prepares for World War III between China and the US with intensified exploitation and oppression. The revolutionary wave at the end of World War I began with street protests by women, then with arms industry strikes and mass desertions, moving on to mutinies and soldiers forming councils and sharing their weapons with the urban proletariat carrying out mass strikes. We cannot wait for the proletarian revolution. The proletarian world revolution is being prepared in daily defensive proletarian struggles for immediate class interests. The revolutionary minorities’ function in that struggle is to point the way forward based on their understanding of the whole movement that the proletariat is making toward a classless world society, toward the association of free and equal producers.

25-10-2023, Fredo Corvo, Aníbal

You can contact us at:

• interreva98@gmail.com (Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Galician, Basque)
• FredoCorvo@protonmail.com (English, French, German, Dutch)

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[1] For overviews, see the weekly news section New from internationalist sites with summaries and quotes from articles recommended for study and discussion: https://leftdis.wordpress.com/news-from-internationalist-sites/

[2] Fredo Corvo, Aníbal en materia, War, exploitation, and capitalist domination: how and why to fight them? https://leftdis.wordpress.com/2022/04/21/war-exploitation-and-capitalist-domination-how-and-why-confront-them/.

[3] In particular, this analysis goes back to Herman Gorter, Imperialism, World War and Social Democracy (1914):https://www.marxists.org/archive/gorter/1914/imperialism.htm. For differences with Lenin’s view of imperialism and an application to the war in Ukraine, see F.C., The Inter-imperialist War in Ukraine. From Luxemburg, Pannekoek, Gorter and Lenin to “Raden communism“: https://leftdis.wordpress.com/2022/05/01/the-inter-imperialist-war-in-ukraine/

[4] Anton Pannekoek warned in 1912 that national independence struggles serve only bourgeois interests and that “…national antagonisms are an exquisite means of dividing the proletariat, diverting its attention from the class struggle by ideological slogans, and preventing its class unity.” See Pannekoek, Class Struggle and Nation: https://www.marxists.org/archive/pannekoe/1912/nation.htm.

[5] See, for example, Ph. Bourrinet Le mouvement des conseils en Russie & Finlande, Allemagne, Autriche & Hongrie, 1917-1919.

[6] Henriette Roland Holst – Van der Schalk already pointed out in 1918 the division of the working class by violence in the class struggle, and in particular imperialist violence in both the inter-imperialist war and in the national liberation wars (which she supported). See Henriette Roland Holst, De strijdmiddelen van de sociale revolutie. As a book in Dutch: https://arbeidersstemmen.wordpress.com/2023/09/03/twee-boeken-rond-de-revolutie-in-rusland/. As as book in German: Die Kampfmittel der sozialen Revolution (1918): https://arbeiterstimmen.wordpress.com/2023/09/14/h-roland-holst-die-kampfmittel-der-sozialen-revolution-1918/. As a free PDF in Dutch: http://left-dis.nl/nl/RolandHolst_StrijdmiddelenDerSocialeRevolutie.pdf

[7] See Bourrinet and Roland Holst in notes 5 and 6.

Reading more in Spanish and English

• https://inter-rev.foroactivo.com/t12396-guerra-entre-hamas-y-el-estado-de-israel-mucho-mas-que-un-conflicto-regional-war-between-hamas-and-the-state-of-israel-much-more-than-a-regional-conflict