Israel Apartheid State, Workers’ Resistance

TEL-AVIV, October 27 — The working class in Israel-Palestine is once again in open rebellion against the racist Israeli apartsheid regime. Workers in the West Bank and Gaza have been unleashing fury at the escalating racist oppression here. Some respond with stabbing attacks on Israeli citizens—or, more often, on Israeli soldiers. The Israeli bosses are seizing this opportunity to brutally repress Arab and Muslim workers—a repression that enables the capitalists to further exploit all workers, including Jewish workers.
Out of Oppression, Resistance
Now Israeli cops have a ready-made excuse to shoot Arab and Muslim workers in cold blood, by claiming afterward “they had knives.” On October 18, at the Beersheba central bus station, a racist mob beat to death a Black refugee from Eritrea after the cops had shot the innocent man, claiming they thought he was a terrorist. The divisive, racist double standards of the police are more apparent every day. Last summer, a violent homophobe named Yishai Slisel murdered a woman in the Jerusalem Pride Parade. The cops arrested him without resorting to live fire, just as they have in recent criminal stabbings where the perpetrators were Israeli Jews. But Arab, Muslim and African immigrant workers are simply murdered in cold blood.
Israel is a crucial tool of U.S. imperialism to help control oil wealth in the Middle East. To solidify this role, the Israeli bosses use extreme repression to divide and control the working class. For example, while religious Jews can go to both the Wailing Wall and the Temple Mount, Muslim entry into the Temple Mount is restricted by age and sometimes completely forbidden. Racist pro-Israeli groups threaten to destroy the Al-Aqsa mosque. Arab and Muslim workers in the West Bank have their movements restricted by checkpoints and roadblocks, and their lands stolen by settlers. Since the West Bank is exempt from Israeli labor laws, many Arab and Muslim workers, including children, work for starvation wages in the settlements. In Gaza, both Israel and Egypt besiege the population, creating starvation and mass unemployment.
Transform Resistance to Revolution
This is not the first mass revolt. In the 1980s, Palestinian workers rose against the Zionist apartheid regime in the first Intifada. Fifteen years ago, they rose again against the regime once it became obvious that the Oslo “peace” treaty was garbage. In October 2000, Israeli cops murdered thirteen unarmed Arab demonstrators. After a subsequent government investigation let the killer cops off, there were years of mass butcherings of Arab and Muslim workers by Israeli “Defense” Force (IDF) stormtroopers in the West Bank and Gaza.
The vacuum left by the collapse of the old international communist movement allowed murderous Islamist movements like Hamas to rise to prominence. Hamas receives political support from the Russian and Chinese bosses. The fascist Israeli regime tries to paint the current uprising as a “religious insurrection,” and to link it to terrorists like ISIS. The wave of stabbing attacks is a pretext to launch a racist wave of nationalism among Jewish workers. Zionism promises Jewish workers nothing but endless war for the sake of the bosses’ profits. Meanwhile, the Palestinian bosses try to exploit the Arab and Muslim workers’ anger while making dirty backroom deals with the Israeli fascists they pretend to be fighting. Whatever new “peace” settlement they cook up could eventually lead to a separate capitalist state of Palestine, or to a single capitalist state that encompasses both Israel and Palestine. Either way, the working classs loses.
Workers need to ask themselves: Do we want two states ruled by rival gangs of bosses? Or should working-class Arab, Muslim, Jewish, immigrant and all other workers join the Progressive Labor Party and fight for a world without racism and capitalism? The only answer is to fight against fascism and build a mass PLP in Israel-Palestine! We must fight toward the only way forward for our class: communist revolution.
As long as the Zionist occupation continues, no worker in Israel-Palestine can be free. Workers only need one communist workers’ state—from the River to the Sea!