Editorial: Palestinian holocaust in the name of imperialism

In the night, when the nazi Israeli military viciously bombed Gaza’s largest hospital-turned-shelter, they forced 60,000 displaced workers and children to flee. This is just one atrocity in what can only be described as a genocide of the working class in occupied Gaza.

Since declaring war on Hamas, the Palestinian nationalist bosses who massacred more than a thousand Jewish and Arab workers, the Israeli capitalist rulers have killed a child every ten minutes in Gaza (Reuters, 11/10). In an area smaller than the city of Detroit, Israel has rained 25,000 tons of bombs, 1.5 times the force of the atomic bomb the U.S. dropped on Hiroshima in World War II (Anadolu Agency, 1/11). Israel redoubled its murderous efforts by cutting off water, food, fuel, and electricity to 2.3 million people.

Genocide is the natural outgrowth of a system of vicious competition for profits. The global crisis of capitalism is driving the carnage of workers in Sudan, Ethiopia, Congo, and Armenia, as well as in the Gaza Strip. The bosses solve their contradictions with small wars that inevitably lead to world war. Progressive Labor Party calls for no war but class war! Let’s build an international movement from East to West, North to South, for communist revolution—our only solution.

U.S.’s entanglements amid decay
The instability in the world today reflects a dramatic shift in imperialist competition, with the U.S. in sharp decline and Chinese finance capital rapidly ascending to challenge for worldwide supremacy. The genocide now underway in Gaza was spurred by a move by Saudi Arabia and Israel to “normalize” their relations, a deal that threatened to further isolate Iran and Hamas (Egmont Institute, 10/11). It also reflects the fight to control Middle East oil and the U.S. “pivot” to Asia, a desperate attempt to contain China. This left traditional U.S. allies like Saudi Arabia feeling abandoned and the Middle East open for business with U.S. rivals—again, mainly China.

The U.S. may soon face a three-front war it can’t win: in the Middle East, against a Russia-backed Iran; in Eastern Europe via the Ukraine-Russia war; and in the South China Sea and Taiwan in a battle over shipping routes, naval dominance, and semiconductors. Tensions are growing between the U.S. and its NATO allies and the BRICS alliance of emerging economies, which includes Brazil, India, and South Africa as well as China and Russia.

Since its founding in 1948, Israel has played a big role as a junior partner of U.S. imperialism—first as a counterweight to Russian influence in the region, then to counter Iran. In return, the U.S. has armed the brutal Israeli bosses to the teeth and financed their fascist occupation of Palestinian territories in the West Bank and Gaza. Now, as children in Gaza are dismembered and premature babies in incubators die for lack of electricity, the U.S. is sending an additional $320 million in weapons to the Israeli killing machine (New York Times, 11/6).
Meanwhile, once-solid alliances seem more fragile by the day. Regional rulers make lukewarm calls for a cease-fire. Turkey and Colombia, formerly staunch U.S. allies, have pulled their ambassadors from Israel. Iran, the chief U.S. rival in the region, has exploited this volatility to its advantage. The chief funder of Hamas, Hezbollah in southern Lebanon, and the Houthis in Yemen (Vox, 10/14),  Iran has encouraged their attacks on U.S. installations. Iranian-backed militias recently attacked two U.S. bases in Iraq and Syria.

As a deterrent, the U.S. has shifted additional warships, missile systems, and 2,000 Marines to the Middle East (Reuters, 10/21). But now they’re worried they’ll be spread too thin to prepare for the coming war with China and Russia (NY Times, 11/9).

Despite the beginning of a global transition to renewable energy, oil will remain the lifeblood of capitalism for the foreseeable future. China gets half of its oil from the Middle East. Through its Belt and Road Initiative, it has gained a foothold in port cities that link the Persian Gulf to the Arabian, Red, and Mediterranean Seas. China’s real agenda is “increasing military cooperation and exporting…surveillance technologies to countries under BRI” (Arab Center DC, 1/13/21).

Between the Abraham Accords,  a 2020 peace deal between Israel and the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, and the proposed Saudi-Israeli peace agreement, Iran was confronted with the prospect of “U.S.-centered” alliances controlling “the maritime choke points of the Straits of Hormuz, the Suez Canal, and the Straits of Bab Al Mandab” ((Egmont Institute, 10/11). That was an existential threat to the Iranian bosses. To disrupt the deal between Israel and the Saudi bosses, Iran is widely speculated to have pushed Hamas to conduct its October 7 slaughter.

It’s important to note that workers shouldn’t be fooled by peace deals and promises of “normalization.” At best, these agreements only delay the eventual inter-imperialist war to determine which capitalists will reign supreme. Workers have only two choices: to accept war and fascism, or to build a revolutionary communist party.

Nationalism is deadly
Hamas, like all junior capitalists, is driven by profit, not the needs of workers and children of Gaza. The group’s nationalism undermines the essential unity of Arab and Jewish workers. To paraphrase a PLP document, “Nationalism Hurts the Palestinian Struggle” (1974), the task is not to determine who is the rightful owner of the land of Palestine/Israel. Rather, it is to fight for communism—for the collective ownership of all means of production by the working class.

No matter how militant they may seem, nationalist movements are counter-revolutionary. Consider Haiti, the world’s first “free” Black republic. Enslaved by debt to French bankers, occupied mercilessly by U.S. and UN forces, it has become a workers’ hell run by local capitalist gangsters. Or consider South Africa, where a courageous struggle wound up replacing white bosses with Black rulers who happily worked with the same white bosses—as long as they could steal their share of the spoils. Today South Africa is one of the most unequal countries in the world, with the wealth gap between white and Black workers unchanged since apartheid (Time Magazine, 8/5/21).

These national liberation movements, and too many more, show what happens when fights against imperialism fail to fight for international communist liberation. We must reject both Zionism and Palestinian nationalism, both anti-Muslim racism and anti-Jewish racism. The workers united will never be defeated!

Workers charge bosses with genocide
We can’t fall into the trap of backing any bosses–not the ruthless gangsters of Hamas, not the genocidal state terrorists of Israel. We must win workers, youth, and soldiers to the idea that an attack on one is an attack on all. When the capitalist system resorts to violence, to remain silent is to fall in line with the bosses’ war agenda.

What we choose to do matters. We need to look no further than the anti-Vietnam War movement started by Progressive Labor Party in the 1960s. Though it was later co-opted by the liberal bosses, the movement inspired millions of workers worldwide to fight back against U.S. imperialist genocide and support the heroic workers in Vietnam—who later were themselves betrayed by their own nationalist rulers.

Today, wherever we look, we see sparks of working-class rage against the Israeli bosses’ genocide. From Britain and Barcelona, Spain to Tacoma, Washington, and Oakland, California, antiracist dockworkers and protesters are blocking shipments of arms and Israel-bound warships.

No ruling class of the world can stop the international working class. If you agree, let’s make these small victories last by building an international communist party. We need to arm millions upon millions with the most powerful weapon in the world: communist ideas. Only then can the working class smash the capitalists’ borders and end their terror for all time. Join us!