The following is a preview of the introduction to an upcoming pamphlet,formatted for CHALLENGE. In this pamphlet, we will examine how capitalist/imperialist competition led to the creation of Israel; why the alliance between the U.S. bosses and Israel highlights the growing weakness of U.S. imperialism; and how nationalism has continuously proved deadly for the working class. The only solution to the dead-end of capitalist wars is communist revolution. This pamphlet will be available on our website and in print next month.
The ongoing horrendous, genocidal destruction of Gaza by the bosses of Israel continues to horrify workers all over the world. As indiscriminate bombing of residential areas, schools, hospitals, and refugee camps by the Israeli Defense Forces relentlessly drives the death toll far beyond 50,000 adults and children, workers across the world cry out in solidarity with the people of Gaza. In demonstrations large and small, signs and chants condemn the Israeli bosses and their U.S allies who refuse to cut off the supply of arms and bombs to Israel.
Even as Netanyahu unilaterally orders assassinations, terrorist explosions of cell phones and airstrikes on Lebanon, Syria, and across the Middle East, Trump and his new cabinet of horrors will continue the U.S. imperialist plan of enabling Israel’s right to “defend” itself and will continue to send billions in military aid. The unwavering patronage that Biden and Harris provided to Israel indict them in the history books as genocidal collaborators. Netanyahu – and the rest of the world – knows that Israel is key to the U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. But where a U.S./Israeli alliance used to project strength and power, it is quickly isolating the U.S in world opinion and threatening to pull the U.S. military into the quagmire of war.
Whenever and however World War III begins, capitalist bosses, large and small, will call on workers to line up behind one national flag or another to kill and be killed in battles to determine which capitalist bosses will control which lands and resources. In many of the demonstrations against the U.S.-backed Israeli genocide in Gaza, people wave Palestinian flags and chant for a free Palestine. There can be no freedom for workers in Palestine or any place in the world under capitalism. We support workers’ fightback against genocide, fascism, imperialism, and capitalism. But we reject nationalist misleaders like Hamas and Hezbollah who, like the Zionist bosses after WWII, cynically divert workers’ fury into nationalist fervor. Like the communists in Russia during World War I and the communists in China during World War II, the working class of the world today can and must turn imperialist war into revolution.
Imperialist competition creates Israel
For several hundred years before WW I, present day Palestine and many other Middle Eastern countries were part of the Turkish Ottoman empire. When oil, first discovered in the region in the early 1900s, became the world’s major industrial and military fuel, capitalists in Europe and in the U.S. took increasing interest in control of the area and its vast resources. During World War I, the most powerful Western imperialist, Great Britain, encouraged nationalism among various Arab groups previously exploited by the Ottoman empire and enlisted them to fight with Britain against Turkey and Germany. In exchange, Great Britain held out the promise of a Pan-Arab independent state after the war.
Before Palestine became a British Mandate, it was occupied by diverse groups of Arab and Jewish farmers and herders. Some of the Jews living in Palestine had emigrated from Russia and Europe to escape the brutal anti-Jewish racism of tsarist pogroms and intense marginalization of Jewish workers throughout Europe. Some were inspired by a nascent Zionist movement. During the 19th and early 20th century, capitalists encouraged nationalism to solidify the development of bourgeois nation-states and colonial and imperialist control of resources around the world.
Within this context, the Zionist movement grew. The leadership of the Zionist movement came from the petit bourgeoisie (small bosses) and the educated elite. The British bosses supported the Zionist leaders’ call for mass emigration of Jews to Palestine because they believed that a large group of middle-class Europeans could provide military and political support against the demands of Arab nationalism.
History is full of examples of heroic resistance on the part of the working class to capitalist oppression, displacement, and violence. But as a class, we must fight harder to gain the confidence we need to rely on each other rather than on a seemingly lesser-evil capitalist also doing battle with a bigger, more powerful capitalist. We must reject all forms of nationalism and fight now for communism – a society where the land and other resources are protected and cultivated for the survival of the world’s working class.
