As capitalist bosses move toward a hotter and broader global war, they are slaughtering thousands of workers in Gaza and Ukraine. Energy supplies are the short-term prize. But ultimately, control of the Middle East and all of Europe hangs in the balance.
Over the 400-year history of capitalism, war has been a constant. It is also a future inevitability. It’s the one way the bosses can settle their competition to dominate the world’s resources and to exploit the world’s workers, who create the rulers’ profits.
Imperialist war will end only when the international working class destroys capitalism with a communist revolution. We must create a society run by and for our class, without bosses and profits. We must eliminate the unemployment, racism, sexism, and mass poverty generated by the profit system. That is the goal of the revolutionary communist Progressive Labor Party.
Racist Israeli Rulers Scheme with Arab Bosses
Israel’s sadistic atrocities in Gaza are attacks on all workers. They stem in part from the nation’s perverse history, in particular the legacy of the Judenrat during World War II. These self-appointed Jewish “leaders” collaborated with the Nazi executioners, drawing up lists of Jews to be gassed in the concentration camps in order to save the Jewish elite. As Hannah Arendt wrote in Eichmann in Jerusalem, “this role of the Jewish leaders in the destruction of their own people is undoubtedly the darkest chapter of the whole dark story.” The Judenrat subsequently became some of Israel’s leading founders. (For more details read Perfidy, an exposé by Ben Hecht.)
Before and after the founding of Israel in 1948, the Israeli ruling class created a violently racist “master race” ideology directed at Arab workers among Jewish victims of the Nazi genocide. More than sixty years later, even as Israeli rulers stir anti-Arab racism among the masses, they are working hand-in-glove with the Arab bosses, especially in Egypt and oil-glutted Saudi Arabia (see box, page 2):
Former Israeli defense minister Shaul Mofaz surprised the presenter on Channel 10 [Israeli TV] by saying … that Saudi and Emirati funds should be used to rebuild Gaza after Hamas had been defanged (Huffington Post, 7/20/14).
According to Amos Gilad, director of the Israeli defense ministry’s political-military relations department, “Everything is underground, nothing is public. But our security cooperation with Egypt and the Gulf states is unique. This is the best period of security and diplomatic relations with the Arab.” The Huffington Post went on to note that Israeli and Saudi intelligence officials meet regularly:
Why do Saudi Arabia and Israel make such comfortable bedfellows?.... They have enemies or rivals in common — Iran, Turkey, Qatar, Hamas in Gaza, and the Muslim Brotherhood. And they have common allies, too — the US and British military industrial establishments (7/20/14).
Under capitalism, the rulers use the working class to fight their wars. At the same time, when it suits them, the capitalists will cooperate to guarantee long-range interests, much as German and U.S. bankers met in Switzerland during World War II to plot their post-war attacks on the Soviet Union.
Hamas, the Other Murderous Bosses
Israeli war crimes are spurred by the imperialists’ rivalry over the Middle East’s hydrocarbon riches. So is the cynical stance of Hamas, which throws Arab workers into the jaws of the murderous Israeli military. All along, the group’s corrupt leaders have brutalized and exploited the workers of Gaza.
After the fall of Morsi in Egypt, Hamas healed its 10-year rift with Iran, whose oil-rich ayatollahs are courted by Russia and China. While Israel continues to rake in the $3.15 billion annual U.S. military aid, its new alliance with Saudi Arabia and Egypt may well have Iran (and ISIS) as its next target. This would conflict with the U.S. policy of negotiating with Iran.
So the Gaza fight isn’t really over a blockaded, impoverished strip of land that Israel has turned into an open-air Arab prison, apartheid-style. It revolves around imperialism’s grand prize, the billions of barrels of oil lying beneath the Saudi peninsula. The U.S. bosses control that oil today. The China-Russia-Iran axis wants to control it tomorrow. It is also estimated that there is over $4 billion of natural gas under Gaza, enough to supply Israel for 40 years ( The Guardian, 7/9).
The liberal imperialist Brookings Institution think tank recently termed the Middle East conflict “a cold war in which Iran and Saudi Arabia play the leading roles.” Though Brookings skirted mention of the imperialist super-powers, the reference to the historic U.S.-Soviet rivalry was unmistakable. Gaza is a hot side to this cold war.
Ukraine, Another Imperialist Flashpoint
When Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 was shot down on July 17 over eastern Ukraine, killing 298 innocent civilians, the imperialist tug-of-war entered a more dangerous phase. (Regardless of who was responsible, this incident closely resembles the 1988 atrocity when a U.S. aircraft carrier destroyed an Iranian civilian flight with 290 aboard.)
Kremlin-supplied separatists in eastern Ukraine are showing a deadly ruthlessness worthy of the U.S. or Israeli war machines. Both the fascist Ukrainians and separatists are riding roughshod over hundreds of thousands of workers. Increasingly lethal tactics in Ukraine reflect the conflict’s rising geostrategic stakes.
A look at London-based Burisma Holdings, a little-known but highly well-connected gas company, helps explain U.S. and allied interest in Ukraine. On its website, Burisma notes that Ukraine currently gets “substantially all of its natural gas from Russia’s Gazprom.” The company aims to break this stranglehold: “All of Burisma’s production is sold to industrial customers in Ukraine.”
Burisma’s oil fields are in the Dnieper-Donets region of eastern Ukraine and the Carpathian and Crimean basins, from which it hopes to double its daily 10,000 barrels of production in two years. Doing so would require U.S.-backed Ukrainian military action to oust Russia from Crimea and stop its protégés firing their missiles from Donets.
Burisma has but three directors: Aleksander Kwasniewski, Devon Archer and Hunter Biden, the son of U.S. vice president Joe Biden. Kwasniewski served as president of Poland from 1995 to 2005, when he strongly supported NATO expansion and the various anti-Russian “color revolutions” funded by liberal U.S. ruling-class figure George Soros in Georgia, Ukraine, Kyrgyzstan and Belarus. Much like former German Chancellor Gerhardt Schroeder, recently the director of Gazprom (Russia’s government-controlled natural gas giant), Kwasniewski moved from commander-in-chief to gas baron.
Biden’s Son Knee-Deep in NATO Plots
One great fear for U.S. imperialists is that empire re-builder Putin might target other pro-U.S. NATO states bordering Russia. Hunter Biden also directs or advises two finance-capital-bankrolled, war-planning think tanks, the Center for National Policy and the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). On July 24, CSIS released “Responding to Putin’s Plan Post-Crimea,” which voiced concern that the end of the Cold War led NATO to fail to maintain conventional forces “or force deployments adequate to counter a Russian invasion.”
It’s in this context, according to CSIS, that Washington must strive to “send a powerful message that underscores the U.S. security commitment to NATO allies, most specifically, its commitment to extended nuclear deterrence.” So far, however, Putin’s conventional forces seem to be prevailing. The U.S. will need to mobilize domestically — and win a U.S. working class weary of war and opposed to a military draft — to match Russia’s boots on Europe’s soil. Otherwise, the U.S. bosses will be impelled to use nuclear arms to keep Russia and China at bay.
As trustee of the Heinz Family Office, Burisma’s Devon Archer protects the multi-millions of U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, who married into the H.J. Heinz Company family. With the company’s fortune strategically placed in Ukrainian gas fields, it is no wonder Kerry became so emotional in blaming the Malaysian jet shoot-down on Putin. Archer was senior adviser to Kerry’s 2004 White House campaign, which included a call for national service — a backdoor move toward reinstituting a draft.
Energy spoils, territorial conquest, and the sharpening imperialist struggle are all intertwined in Ukraine. General Martin Dempsey, the top U.S. military officer, used the New York Times (7/2/14) to make a not-so-veiled reference to the move toward World War III:
You’ve got a Russian government that has made a conscious decision to use its military force inside another sovereign nation to achieve its objectives. They clearly are on a path to assert themselves differently not just in Eastern Europe, but Europe in the main, and towards the United States.
Internationalism Will Trump Nationalism
Workers in Gaza, Palestine, Israel, Russia, U.S., and Ukraine have no stake in the bosses’ dogfight for oil and world domination. No matter which rulers win, they offer us only death and exploitation. Even today, without the foundation of a communist-led mass movement, there are pockets of resistance to the capitalist rulers. Thousands of Israelis have demonstrated against the Israeli invasion of Gaza and tens of thousands protested in other countries (see page 4). Over 50 Israeli soldiers have protested the war and have refused to fight.
This resistance is why the capitalist rulers need nationalism. It’s their primary weapon to divide and weaken our class and undermine our fightback. Nationalism incites workers to back different sets of bosses. It is a reactionary and deadly ideology.
In Israel-Palestine, they erect a phony dispute: One state or two? No matter which side wins, both workers in Israel and Palestine will be exploited by capitalism. Only a communist revolution can resolve this question. Under communism there will be only one state, the workers’ state. The bosses’ nationalism will be crushed by workers’ internationalism. Workers’ only loyalty will be to our class. We will send the hellish capitalist system and its ruling class to the dustbin of history.