In yet another blow to the crumbling U.S.-led imperialist world order, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu‘s hard-right coalition passed a bill to strip the Supreme Court of much of its power to check the country’s moves toward open fascism. The U.S.—home of genocide, slavery, Jim Crow, and lynchings to this day by the capitalists’ kkkops—is sounding the alarm that its longtime ally is being “degraded” into “a corrupt and racist dictatorship.” Although workers in Israel erupted in protests, most are drinking the poison of liberal democracy and nationalism.
Israel serves as the latest evidence that the U.S. imperialists’ once ironclad grip is weakening amid an international crisis of capitalism. The dominant U.S. Big Fascists of finance capital are fending off enemies from without and within. After freely bullying the world since World War II, the finance capitalists are struggling to compete with rising superpower China while fending off a challenge from more domestically oriented capitalists, the Small Fascists fronted by Donald Trump. At the same time, smaller capitalist countries are being destabilized by this sharpening inter-imperialist rivalry as it propels the world toward fascism and world war.
The only antidote to this capitalist disaster is communist revolution by an international, multiracial working class. Progressive Labor Party fights for workers everywhere to break the chains of the bosses’ dictatorship.
From the river to the sea, smash capitalist democracy!
No nation, no exploitation—only workers’ liberation!
At the heart of Israel’s current controversy is a reform that eliminates the “reasonableness doctrine,” the Supreme Court’s power to override officials’ decisions as “unreasonable.” After the bill was passed despite a stern warning from U.S. President Joe Biden, tens of thousands of workers walked off the job, called for a general strike, and blocked highways and airports. Thousands of military reservists have resigned. Even active members of the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF), infamous for their partnership with U.S. police and their mutual love of mass surveillance, torture, and racist terror, are threatening to abandon ship.
The spectacle of protesters wrapping themselves in the apartheid Israeli flag is a reminder that these mass protests, no matter how militant, amount to dead-end reformism and toxic nationalism. Since Israel’s birth as a “Jewish state” in 1948, the Supreme Court has never called out the deportation, terrorizing, or murder of Palestineans as “unreasonable.” In 2018, the Israeli parliament passed the gutter racist Jewish Nation-State Law, which declared that only Jewish people had a right to “self-determination” in Israel and the West Bank and Gaza. It promoted Jewish settlements in the occupied territories and abolished Arabic as an official language.
And all of this was perfectly “reasonable,” according to the Supreme Court, which sat on its hands.
Liberal democracy is designed to mislead workers into embracing the capitalist rulers’ dictatorship. All forms of nationalism, including the Israeli and Palestinian varieties, lead to capitalist oppression by different sets of bosses. Workers in every historically colonized country can attest to that.
No honor among thieves: Israel plays both sides
In the bad old days of the liberal world order, the U.S. exerted unchecked control over most of the world, with Israel as their bought-and-paid-for watchdog in the Middle East. Even as Israel displaced nearly a million Palestinians (middleeastmonitor.com, 6/21/17) in 1948 and then kept expanding its illegal Zionist settlements across the West Bank, its apartheid regime received more U.S. aid than any other country since World War II (Congressional Research Service, 11/16/20).
But the era of unchecked U.S. supremacy is over. This year alone, China has made trade deals with Russia, strengthened ties with Brazil, and brokered a pact between U.S. nemesis Iran and Saudi Arabia, the lynchpin of the oil-rich Arabian Peninsula. In June, President Xi Jinping issued a thinly veiled threat to impose “countermeasures” to anything perceived as “endanger[ing] China’s sovereignty, security and development interests” (Bloomberg News, 6/28).
U.S. allies are caught in a high-risk balancing act, and Israel is no exception. Netanyahu has described the China-Israel alliance as a “marriage made in heaven” (Kehila News Israel, 3/20/17). Nearly $4 billion per year in U.S. blood money couldn’t stop Netanyahu from tweeting, “...Israel is no longer another star in the American flag” (The Times of Israel, 7/10). The brazenly corrupt prime minister gave China access to Israel’s advanced AI technology while dragging his feet in sending arms to Ukraine in its war with Russia, despite Biden’s repeated requests (New York Times, 1/17).
These acts represent a threat to the U.S. and a net gain for China. They spell war for workers everywhere.
U.S. mouthpieces voice imperialists’ dilemma
The U.S. Big Fascists are agonizing over how best to deal with their racist friend. While New York Times columnists Thomas L. Friedman (7/18) and Nicholas Kristoff (7/22) toyed with proposing that the U.S. cut off military aid to Israel, the Brookings Institute’s Natan Sachs argued that the U.S. should act with “a vision based on promoting regional stability and integration, and shaped by the U.S. competition with China and Russia” (Foreign Affairs, 7/28). The bosses’ mouthpieces have no shame, do they?
In fact, the U.S. has of late expanded its military exercises with Israel. In early 2023, as Sachs notes, an exercise called Juniper Oak, the largest ever, sent a message that “local partners” such as Israel remain “a cornerstone” of the U.S. strategy for “future crises,” even as U.S. resources are stretched thin in Ukraine and East Asia.
The U.S. imperialists are caught in a bind. To allow Israel’s lurch toward open fascism, with no pushback, would be to lose even more credibility as a “rules-based” power (as if!), and drive nation “swing states” closer to China. By giving a green light to even more ruthless oppression of the Palestinians, it could jeopardize U.S. dreams of a Saudi-Israeli normalization, a pact that might limit future China inroads. On the other hand, publicly defunding Israel would risk losing the U.S. bosses’ regional partner in crime and give China more maneuverability in the Middle East. It’s a contradiction they can’t solve without war.
Given the volatility of U.S. imperialism and the bosses’ state of chaos and disunity, it’s hard to say exactly what will happen next. But two things are for certain. First, the capitalists are always driven by profit and power. Second, to secure that profit, they will inevitably go to war. Our class will pay the price with our lives.
What is to be done? We must build a mass working-class movement, calling on all workers—Jewish, Palestinian, Muslim, Christian, Black refugees from Sudan and Eritrea— to reject capitalist oppression and racist divison. PLP fights for one communist world where we rule for the entire working class. That is liberation. Workers must smash capitalism and break away from the clutches of rising fascism.
Democracy soaked in Palestinian workers’ blood
When hypocrites bemoan the erosion of democracy in Israel, they’re talking about the same democracy that expelled and massacred Palestinian families. The same rule that birthed and bred Zionist apartheid in Israel-Palestine. The same system that bars 5.5 million Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip from voting in their phony elections . Instead, they are murdered by starvation wages, mass unemployment, and bullets.
We cannot be fooled by the bosses’ deceptive framing of “democracy” vs “dictatorship.” What pathetic theater! Liberal democracy and fascism are two sides of the same murderous capitalist coin.
Every Israeli raid, demolition, and killing of Palestinian workers has been enabled by the U.S. bosses. Israel pulls the triggers. The U.S. pays for the guns.
That’s why the greater danger in Israel-Palestine is not Netanyahu’s band of openly vile fascists, but the friendly, liberal “lesser-evil” fascists who will lead our class to slaughter.