Israeli elections: fight between fascists

With six weeks left in his re-election campaign, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is about to be indicted on charges of bribery and “breach of trust.” The embattled, U.S.-led liberal world order needs a change to sustain its control over Israel, its strategic bulwark against Iran, the pro-Iran regime in Syria, and the threat of expanding Russian influence in the oil-rich Middle East. Netanyahu’s open fascism and racism, on top of his petty corruption and divisive style, no longer serves the liberal racist bosses’ interests in the region.
The final straw may have been Netanyahu’s desperate bid to stay in power by forging an alliance with the Nazi-inspired Otzma Yehudit, or Jewish Power. The disciples of Meir Kahane’s outlawed, anti-Arab terrorist Kach Party, Jewish Power calls for the ethnic cleansing of Arabs from the state of Israel and its occupied territories, vigilante violence against Arab workers, and bans on marriages between Arabs and Jews. On top of that, Netanyahu brokered a merger between Jewish Power and two other extreme right-wing parties, Jewish Home and National Union. Netanyahu ‘‘‘splits the nation,’ said Yehuda Ben Meir, an expert in public opinion at the Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv. ‘His are the politics of polarization and exaggeration. If he got any more polarizing he’d fall off the planet’” (New York Times, 3/1).
This presents a problem for Israel’s capitalist rulers, who need more unity among Jewish workers even as they divide Jewish and Arab workers with anti-Arab racism. The self-serving Netanyahu makes it harder for Israel’s ruling class to justify its settlement land grabs, daily atrocities against workers and children in the occupied West Bank, indiscriminate killing of protesters, and, in collaboration with Egypt’s fascist bosses, the economic strangulation of Gaza. Israeli security forces have arrested and detained hundreds of Arab children “suspected of criminal offenses, usually stone-throwing, often using unnecessary force, questioned them without a family member present, and made them sign confessions in Hebrew, which most did not understand” (Human Rights Watch, World Report 2018).
U.S. rulers divided
The Donald Trump administration continues to back Netanyahu and his openly fascist allies. After moving the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem in December 2017, the U.S. State Department announced that the Palestinian Mission will now be housed in the Israeli embassy (NYT, 3/3). Palestinian workers see this as a step toward supporting a single Jewish state throughout Palestine-Israel, a permanent “one-state” solution designed to oppress and isolate Arab workers.
The main wing of the U.S. ruling class, representing finance capital, needs a more stable Israel to keep Russia and China from gaining a stronger foothold in the region. These bosses want to downplay calls for genocide of the Palestinian working class in favor of promoting unity against Iran.
Liberals are the main danger
“Centrist” candidates Benny Gantz and Yair Lapid have combined their campaigns into a single slate to unseat Netanyahu. Currently leading in the polls, Gantz is a war criminal (Haaretz, 2/1) who led  the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) in Operation Protective Edge, its 2014 massacre of thousands of workers and children in Gaza. According to the United Nations, two-thirds of those killed were civilians. More than a thousand children were left permanently disabled (Defence for Children International-Palestine, April 2015). Thousands of homes were destroyed.
Gantz took a strong stand against growing numbers of Iranian troops threatening Israel in Lebanon, Syria, and Gaza. His rabidly nationalist Blue and White Party—named after the colors of Israel’s flag—has vowed to pursue a military solution with help from the U.S. (Jerusalem Post, 3/4). Gantz has vowed “never” to withdraw from the Golan Heights, which Israel seized after the Six Day War in 1967. He is ready to form a “unity” government with Netanyahu’s Likud party and anyone else “who is Zionist and sane” (Haaretz, 3/4).The party’s platform pledges  to “deepen the processes of separation from the Palestinians, while uncompromisingly protecting the security interests of the country and the Israeli army’s freedom of action everywhere.” It also promises to “strengthen the [West Bank] settlement blocs and enable normal life anywhere Israelis live,” with no further settlement “disengagement” (Haaretz, 3/6).
In other words, Gantz is committed to legalized racism, institutional fascism, and state-sponsored terrorism against Arab workers and children. The difference between Netanyahu and Gantz is the difference between Trump and Hillary Clinton, or between Trump and Barack Obama. While they may serve different factions of their capitalist ruling class, and employ different racist or imperialist strategies, they are all murderous enemies of the international working class.
Jewish State = death of Palestinian Workers
A racist, fascist Jewish state is the ultimate outcome of identity politics and a massive loss for the international working class. The ultimate goal of identity politics is to divide the working class by ethnicity, nationality, or the mythology of “race.” It misleads workers into believing they have more in common with their identity group’s bosses than with the international working class. It is an especially dangerous trap for workers in Palestine-Israel. With the Arab population about to surpass the Jewish population in the whole of Israel and the occupied territories (Reuters, 3/26/18), the Jewish bosses will have only two ways to sustain a Jewish state: permanent apartheid, where Arab workers essentially live as powerless refugees in the land where they were born (the “centrist” solution), or mass expulsion or extermination of Arab workers (the Jewish Power solution). Last November’s demolition of 21 storefronts in the Shuafat Refugee Camp in East Jerusalem may be a sign of things to come.
Only communism can free workers
Capitalism inevitably leads to war over land, workers, and limited natural resources. The rulers use racism, sexism, nationalism, and fascism to divide workers to extract maximum profits and keep us from fighting back. Workers around the world have a material basis for unity. We create all the wealth, maintain all the infrastructure, and fight all the wars. We help each other in times of crisis. All workers must unite to fight for the only “one-state” solution that can meet their needs: a communist workers’ state. Progressive Labor Party must organize now to turn the bosses’ imperialist wars into revolutionary wars for communism. Join us!